Are our dreams of a Rudy Giuliani-Chris Christie presidential ticket doomed to failure? The two politicians are now sniping at one another. Last week Giuliani criticized Christie’s absence during the December’s big snowstorm — Christie was at Disney World — and today the New Jersey governor responded, saying, “Well, he’s wrong. I mean, he’s wrong. It’s easy when you are out of office to be shooting from the peanut gallery when you no longer have any responsibility, but I have a responsibility to my family.” Added Christie, “Mmmm, peanuts.”

by Patrick Hipp

I have always been an amateur cosmologist at heart; the mathematical rigors of real physics have always bored and vexed me, but the conceptual ideas surrounding our universe are, well, more interesting than anything we could ever possibly invent ourselves. The trouble with storytelling is, I suppose, that all stories are like many other stories, and even the most extraordinary ones are so familiar that, by all rights, we shouldn’t ever be in awe of them. Still, what seems the most pedestrian, the most quotidien, the most mundane has, somewhere in it, the threads of the fantastic. No matter how dull a life and its story seem, it is, after all, the result of the wildest and most unlikely circumstances: that this person — of all possible people — was ever born, that the Earth existed to allow that birth, that the universe ever burst into existence to accommodate this one, very small, planet.

No one knew this better than Carl Sagan, and certainly no one ever has — and perhaps ever will — be able to relate it better than him. Anyone who’s seen his series Cosmos has felt his voice under their skin, tugging at the most fantastic phantoms of possibility within their minds. Sagan was a sorcerer, and like all good magicians, the real trick was that there was no trick: he just moved his hands in the way any human being can and pulled the most brilliant, glimmering quarter from behind your ear. Whether it had been behind your ear the whole time or cradled in his dexterous hands is besides the point — it was there, somewhere, all along.

This video, cobbled together from NASA footage by an ardent fan of the agency’s scientific aims and underwhelmed by their translation of it to the (tax-paying) layman, does exactly the same thing: it brings images you’ve seen together with words you may or may not have heard, and shows you something that was there all along, just beyond your periphery but completely within your field of vision. You just never looked in the right direction. It’s stunning to watch this video and think of the small salary we Americans give one of the greatest scientific institutions the world has ever spawned in comparison to our humongous — and ultimately fruitless, economically — expenditures on figuring out just how to collect enough weaponry to shatter the planet into pieces. It’s the kind of video that Carl Sagan himself would have loved.

The video ends with this passage — which is, like the entire narration, from Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot:

“Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system — and beyond — will be unified: by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was; how perilous our infancy; how humble our beginnings; how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.”

Patrick Hipp writes about New York City for a living and is finishing the novel he started during National Novel Writing Month 2007.

Missed this one earlier in the week, but I feel pretty obligated to share it around: Are blowjobs sex? All I know is that they’re AWESOME.

Some people don’t seem to know that the Jay Chou, the Taiwanese person who plays Kato in the new Green Hornet movie is actually somewhat of an Asian megastar! This might be why on the Korean version of the posters (which is the same version that’s being used in other Asian markets), Chou is featured front and center, with Seth Rogen’s big face hiding in the shadows (compared to the new US poster released today, which is just a car). Cameron Diaz, also pretty famous with Koreans, gets a more prominent placement in comparison to the American poster, where she’s not featured at all.

Here’s a nice chat with director Paul Mazursky, whose Down and Out in Beverly Hills is terrifically underrated. Personal anecdote: A couple of years ago Mazursky wrote a piece for a publication I was editing. Not wishing to be presumptuous about selecting from his body of work, I got him on the phone and asked him which particular movies he wanted us to list in his credit line. “Eh,” he responded, “go to IMDB and pick four. They’re all there.”

Here, the five most terrifying bits from the must-read article “The Terminator Scenario: Are We Giving Our Military Machines Too Much Power?”

• “If we make smart machines without equally smart control systems, we face a scenario in which some day, by way of a thousand well-intentioned decisions, each one seemingly sound, the machines do in fact take over all the “key functions” that once were our domain. Then ‘we blink’ and find that the world is one we no longer are able to comprehend or control.”

• “A soldier back from duty in 2006 told Singer that a ground robot he operated in Iraq would sometimes ‘drive off the road, come back at you, spin around, stuff like that.’ That same year, Singer says, a SWORDS inexplicably began whirling around during a demonstration for executives; a scene out of the movie Robocop was avoided because the robot’s machine gun wasn’t loaded.”

• “Air Force scientists say they can stay ahead of countries that cut corners simply by stepping up their own verification and validation efforts. But such efforts will do little to prevent the proliferation of unreliable robots elsewhere, and may simply inspire some countries, in their attempts to win the robot arms race, to cut even more corners.”

• “’What’s easy to do is create a dumb autonomous robot that kills everything,’ says Patrick Lin, the head of the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.”

• “The Air Force is also looking into how humans can become more machinelike, through the use of drugs and various devices, in order to more smoothly interact with machines. “

“The act of nail-clipping at least once a week is a pleasing task to undertake for its strange mercenariness, and also incredibly satisfying once the results are seen.”

In this episode of Cooking the Books: Doogie Horner, the author of Everything Explained Through Flowcharts, teaches Emily Gould how to make “Gettin’ Laid Lemonade.” And then they get wasted. Cooking the Books is directed by Valerie Temple and shot and edited by Andrew Gauthier. You can see all the Cooking the Books episodes here or even subscribe via iTunes. Previously: Marcy Dermansky literally reinvents pudding; Tao Lin makes raw salad; Jennifer Egan makes macaroons. Plus! Veggie Burgers Every Which Way.

Here’s a brief history of the Glock brand, with an important note: “Glock sales in Arizona have surged following [the Tucson shootings]… along with sales of all handgun brands. Glock was one of the best selling brands before the incident, so a surge in sales overalls means a comparatively larger surge in Glock sales.”

“Residents of Constanta in eastern Romania found dozens of dead starlings on the outskirts of the city on Saturday. They alerted authorities, fearing the birds had died from avian flu. But local veterinary officials decided the starlings had died after eating grape ‘marc’ — the leftovers from the wine-making process. The head of the local sanitary and veterinary authority, Dvsva, told news agency Agerpres that analysis of the starlings’ gizzards showed they had died from alcohol poisoning.”
 — Killing birds: fireworks, car crashes, alcohol. It’s not divine retribution. The birds are just American teenagers.