Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/02/09

Nervous Eaters, Monsters + Angels (Wicked Cool Records)

If you’re old enough to have been part of the Boston rock scene when the success of The Cars lured in all the drugged-out saps, um, I mean record company reps to check out every band in the city, or even if you just listened to a lot of WBCN FM back then, there was no way to avoid this local band’s most popular hit, “Loretta” (you know, the one that went “when I talk to Loretta, cool slacks and sweater”). This Steve Cataldo-led roots-punk quartet nailed down a major label deal with Elektra Records in 1980, and that was about it; the LP was widely dissed as “not very punk for a punk record,” but in retrospect, the New York Dolls’ vibe was roughly in the same ballpark. Anyhow, this album is their first record since a 1986 EP, and the push single seems to be “Hop Sing Said,” a mellow-ish mid-tempo tune that’s kind of Dinosaur Jr.-ish. “Wild Eyes” recalls early Stones, “Superman’s Hands” is oldschool jangle-pop; “Last Chance” is pure ’80s radio-bubblegum. At worst, the songs are good and it sounds like they had fun doing this. A

ASCO, “Lacrimosa” (CAOS Records)

You know, it’s a wonder these Beatport-begging techno DJs get any press outside of 5 Magazine, Traxsource and whatnot. I say that because there’s always very little information to be found about them, which would be fine with me if all the artists wanted to remain anonymous or semi-anonymous, but I don’t think they all do. That goes double for this guy, the search for whose biography wore me out after 10 minutes and now I don’t care anymore: Ooh, you’re such an edgelord, whoever you are! But that’s not to detract from this guy’s music, don’t get me wrong. He’s been cruising along quite well over the last few months with a couple of neo-disco tracks (“Born Slippy” and “Fortuna”), and now this, a future-rave-style rendition of one of the most famous classical choir pieces in history, a part of the Dies Irae sequence in the Roman Catholic requiem mass. A real orchestra and choir help out here; it’s half orchestral and half buzzy-beetle-noise-electro, with no recognizable drop. Not my kind of jam but times have, unfortunately, changed. A

Playlist

• We’ll see a whole bunch of hot new rock ’n’ roll albums hit the streets on Feb. 10, as we draw ever closer to kissing this winter goodbye, can you even believe how fast it’s gone? And look, bonus, it’s a new album from acid-dropping loons Brian Jonestown Massacre, called The Future Is Your Past. I’m actually pretty happy about that. I think the last music I heard from these guys was either 2016’s Third World Pyramid or more probably 2010’s Who Killed Sgt Pepper, but it’s all good. The band is still led by Anton Newcombe, whose hobbies include hiring/firing every musician he meets and making the Dandy Warhols feel uncomfortable, and this is his, um, I mean the band’s, 20th album, a milestone no one would ever have predicted. You never know what you’ll hear from this band; usually it’s noisy neo-psychedelica, and a quick run-through of the album’s title track is pretty much what you’d expect: slow, dank, jangly early-’60s acid-rock, sort of like Donovan, that kind of thing. At least there’s normal-ish singing on this tune, and there you go, that’s about it for the 411 on this one, because Anton couldn’t care less if he made any money from his music, and that’s why he’s rich.

• Hey, man, what is this, an aughts-indie revival? Look there, gang, it’s New Jersey-based indie rockers Yo La Tengo, with their new album This Stupid World! I’ve owned a few Yo La Tengo albums over the years and have never really listened to any of them more than once; there’s synergy going on right now in this column, because this band uses roughly the same basic ingredients as Brian Jonestown Massacre — noise-pop, shoegaze, etc. — but the output is usually boring. At this writing the latest teaser tune is “Aselestine,” a lazy, sort-of-folk-ish song that’s sort of like Wilco meets Guster. I know, I probably should have posted a trigger warning before saying such a thing, but anyway, there you have it.

• Dutch dream-pop lady Annelotte de Graaf goes by the stage name Amber Arcades, and she’ll be releasing her fourth album, Barefoot On Diamond Road, in just a few hours! Interestingly, she holds a master’s degree in law, and worked as an assistant for war crimes tribunals at the United Nations; as of 2016 she held a position “assessing the claims of refugees granted asylum in the Netherlands who are seeking to have their families brought over.” The single, “Just Like Me,” is a weird little minimal techno joint that sounds like Aimee Mann after listening to way too much Aphex Twin.

• We’ll bag it for the week with the latest from Kelela! She is a former telemarketer from Washington, D.C., who got a spiffy record contract from the ever-trippy Warp Records, so she is now an alternative-R&B singer with a second album, Raven, out this week! She first hit the sort-of-big-time with 2005’s Hallucinogen, an EP that goes over all the disturby nonsense that happens during the beginning, middle and end stages of a relationship, except it’s all in reverse chronological order. Anyhow, this new album, which I’m required by law to take seriously because it’s on Warp Records, of course, is, artistically, intended as “a reaction to feeling alone as a black femme working within dance music,” which, granted, is probably pretty difficult, I mean, just look at what Steve Aoki gets away with just because he’s a white male. Whatever, she might get more love for this album if the rest of the songs aren’t like the title track, which is basically afterparty glitch-tech improv that makes no sense, but no one likes good music anymore, so who knows.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams

The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (268 pages, William Morrow)

In the windswept snow-packed emptiness of a place so remote it can only be accessed by helicopter is the Northern Institute, an abandoned research facility. Its staff has suddenly left under mysterious circumstances, requiring the employment of three caretakers tasked with keeping the six-story building functional.

Sound like your job? No? Keep reading. It will.

The light-hearted novel is a satirical take on the modern workplace, from the mind-numbing and largely unimportant tasks that can disproportionately consume a workweek, to the multitiered and often useless health plans offered by large employers, to mediocre supervisors obsessed with maintaining control.

The supervisor here goes by one name, presumably his surname, Hart. Like his two-person team, Gibbs and Cline, he seems to have come to his job with little information; he doesn’t even have a good sense of where he is, having fallen asleep during the helicopter ride.

All Hart knows is that provisions and instructions will be delivered once a week by helicopter, and that while the work is simple, he has a protocol to follow, and follow it he will, even though he often feels disrespected by underlings who aren’t appreciative enough that he provides them coffee and the opportunity for “light socializing” each morning before getting down to work.

Calling their tasks “work,” however, is a stretch. It is more like busy work — things given a person to do only so they have something to do. One week, for example, they are tasked with sitting in all the chairs in the building, ostensibly to test their structural integrity; another week, they measure the flatness of the tables by seeing if golf balls roll across them. The work is so boring, as are the surroundings, that Hart has trouble keeping up with the passage of time; he doesn’t know how long he has been there or what holidays have passed. The only remotely interesting thing that happens is when one morning Cline looks outside the window on a particularly windy day and spots it: “the thing in the snow.”

It’s unclear what the thing is as, like everything else, it’s covered with snow. But Hart, Gibbes and Cline all agree that it hadn’t been there before. And because of some mysterious “snow sickness” that had befallen former employees at the facility, they have been instructed not to go outside. So they have no way to check it out.

There is only one other person on the premises: Gilroy, a researcher who was part of the previous team and for reasons unknown got left behind to continue working on some project regarding “the cold.”

“Condescending, pretentious, and often outright batty, he’s the kind of person who eschews empathy with such vigor that distaste is not just warranted, it is the correct evolutionary response,” is how Hart, the narrator, describes him. Gilroy knows nothing about the thing in the snow, either.

Nor does the “health specialist” who arrives to administer the team’s regularly scheduled checkups (and haircuts) later. In one of the more hilarious sequences of the books, the health specialist informs them that they are all on the “basic” health care plan, as opposed to the premium or platinum. The eye chart, therefore, only contains five letters, whereas the premium plan has 15 and the platinum plan the whole alphabet. Also, “The thermometer’s readings come only in multiples of three, but we have the option to upgrade to the premium option of whole numbers or the platinum level, which includes decimals.”

But that is just a comic aside. The mystery before our caretakers, of course, is what the thing in the snow is, and how they can find out.

The limitations of the characters and their surroundings necessarily immerse the reader into the blandness of their days; we’re redeemed only by Hart’s occasional dry wit and sardonic observations. But then there are small, strange mysteries that unfold, like cryptic messages Hart and Cline find written under tables. It’s as if the most trivial dialogue from the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was inserted into the TV series Lost.

Meanwhile, because the Northern Institute was a thriving research facility at one time, surely it’s possible that the caretakers are themselves being studied as they numbly perform the assigned rituals this week. Maybe the thing in the snow is a test of their compliance? Or is it something more sinister?

It would be wrong to classify The Thing in the Snow as a mystery or a thriller; it’s much too sly for that, and the author, unlike his narrator, doesn’t seem to be taking any of this too seriously, even when he’s skewering the modern workplace.

What he does take seriously is the cold. A resident of Des Moines, Adams is as acquainted with the miseries of cold as New Englanders are. When at one point the characters are asked if they’d rather have a pay raise or the temperature in the building elevated a few degrees, they opt for the warmth, which is entirely plausible this time of year. The book is droll like that and doesn’t ask much of the reader but to come along for the ride — under a blanket, of course. It’s a pleasant distraction for a couple of winter evenings. B

At the Sofaplex 23/02/02

All Quiet on the Western Front (R)

A group of very eager, very naive school boys sign up to join the German army a few years into World War I in this most recent, German-language adaptation of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Paul (Felix Kammerer) and his buddies sport goofy grins as they listen to a local official charge them up, all fatherland this and manhood that. When Paul finds another man’s name on the uniform he’s handed, he accepts the army official’s story that it probably just didn’t fit that guy — even though we’ve seen, in one of the movie’s best sequences, that uniform go being worn by a young German soldier when he’s sent over the top of the trench to the laundry where his blood is cleaned out and the factory where bullet holes are patched up.

It’s telling to watch all the older soldiers just sort of “yep” with their eyes as these eager new soldiers get to the Western front, cheering and ready to shoot their French enemies. After about 24 hours — of mud, of shelling, of collecting the dog tags of freshly killed comrades — Paul seems to let go of his childhood ideas of military glory and adventure.

We catch up with him 18 months later as he and the friends he has left are just surviving in roughly the same spot where they’ve been dug in for years. Intercut with this are scenes of German officials (including one played by Daniel Brühl) trying to negotiate an armistice over the objections of the military.

This movie — nominated for Oscars for Best Picture as well as extremely well-deserved cinematography and score nods, International Feature Film, Makeup & Hairstyling, Adapted Screenplay, Visual Effects, Sound and Production Design — really does wow with its visuals. The trench warfare is an impressive blend of absolute horror and surprising beauty, particularly in the long shots of the forests and fields around the battlefield. The score is impressive too — there’s a kind of machine-like quality that helps underline the idea of the soldiers as just raw materials for industrial-scale killing.

I think the movie’s greatest strength — that it takes the time to show us the nature and the small details surrounding these men at war — can also be a weakness in that it leads the movie to underline and repeat itself on the futility of what’s happening. At two hours and 27 minutes, this movie could have afforded to slice some scenes and still get its message across. B+ Available on Netflix, where you can watch it in German with subtitles or with English dubbing.

Triangle of Sadness (R)

Woody Harrelson, Harris Dickinson.

Director and writer Ruben Ostlund, also known for The Square and Force Majeure, presents this satire of wealth, class and status with just a bit of gender roles and colonialism thrown in. It’s a lot. It’s a whole college freshmen discussion about “the system.” It can charm in moments but also wear on you. And there’s an extended puke and poo situation that is — well “on the nose” feels like a very “ew” way to describe it.

The movie takes a while to get going as we see models Carl (Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and their relationship, which is at least 50 percent about building their social media presence. They go on a cruise — influencer perks — where all of their fellow guests are fabulously wealthy, sorta nuts and some kind of a caricature, such as the polite British couple named Winston (Oliver Ford Davies) and Clementine (Amanda Walker) who used to manufacture land mines but now focus on hand grenades. The crew, managed by Paula (Vicki Berlin), has been told to smile through all the insanity in hope of a big tip. But perhaps they should have “no, ma’am-ed” a request by Vera (Sunnyi Melles), wife of Russian fertilizer magnate Dimitry (Zlatko Buric), for all of the crew members, including the kitchen staff preparing the raw seafood, to go for a swim.

At one point, the ship’s oft-drunk captain (Harrelson) and Dimitry trade quotes about communism — the captain presenting himself as sort of a half-hearted Marxist and Dimitry as a capitalist. It’s cute, they have a chummy conversation as the guests puke and the ship is cast about on the waves; it’s also, you know, “yeah, OK, movie.”

And that for me was the movie — cute moments, some fun performances and a whole lot of “OK, calm down.” I get how this can be a better-than-OK viewing experience (except for the puking) but for me this wouldn’t have added up to Best Picture, Best Director and Original Screenplay Oscar nominations. BAvailable for rent or purchase.

Album Reviews 23/02/02

Meg Baird, Furling (Drag City Records)

This singer and drummer is well-known in the indie/retro-folk scene, having helped to form the psychedelic rock supergroup Heron Oblivion after a several-album stint with Espers. The New Jersey-born, San Francisco-based hipster has other projects on her resumé, too, including three albums with her sister Laura as the Baird Sisters, and one with harpist Mary Lattimore, titled Ghost Forests, that reached No. 3 on the Billboard New Age chart. This one starts with “Ashes, Ashes,” an appropriately titled tune recalling Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd in its somber, piano-driven, slow-march-to-oblivion po-facedness; thankfully layered with cool things, it’s made quanta more fascinating through Baird’s use of ghostly, wordless warbling. “Star Hill Song” carries on similarly but on a more folk-pop bent; it’s here we first encounter her Joan Baez-ish soprano, a thing that’s about as folkie as it gets. This stuff is great Coachella bait, but it’s a lot more compelling that what one usually gets from that crowd. A+

Scott Crow, Of Everything and Nothing (Emergency Hearts Records)

This Texan is becoming something of a Hunter S. Thompson of the alternative politics scene. A long-time anarchist author and activist in the anti-fascist, environmental and mutual aid movements, Crow presents here a mishmash some of his first musical recordings since 1992, a collection of recent collaborations, some of which feature guest appearances from other artists and producers recorded in 2016 and up through the present. He’s had several projects over the years, ranging from darkwave to noise rock, but this one opens with a surprisingly melodic New Wave/art-rock tune, “Stardust Supernova,” that recalls New Order’s late-’80s recipe. “Crown Slow 2.0” is a dirgey drone-a-thon that’s more in a Swans vein; the very pretty “R34L Falling Into Sleep” is super-refined krautrock if you ask me. Really impressive, nearly all of this, save for several remixes tabled by Portland, Oregon-based producer Televangel, whose technique is a bit messy-muddy for my tastes, even if many would probably hear a lot of Throbbing Lobster in them. A

Playlist

• It’s your boy here, takin’ a jaundiced look at the stinky batch of music CDs coming out on Feb. 3, regardless of whether or not they should! Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante is releasing two albums, but it’s complicated, ready? The albums are different versions of the same album, one for vinyl and the other for CD and digital. The former, . I : (pronounced ‘one’), spans seven tracks, while : II . (pronounced ‘two’) spans 10. OK, did you get all that? He wrote the music while he was listening to experimental artists like Oren Ambarchi, Klara Lewis and Ryoji Ikeda, and the melodic parts take inspiration from John Lennon, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jimi Hendrix and Brian Eno. I say all this only for the interest of RHCP fans, who wouldn’t care if the tunes were all inspired by the background music to Pac Man Cereal commercials (did you know that one of the Batmans, Christian Bale, was in one of those?), because as long as it’s RHCP, with the real Flea actually playing bass and the music is sort of like Frank Zappa but not actually funny at all, forget it, it’ll be a huge album for RHCP completists to buy and put away carefully without ever listening to. Just my luck, of course, there are no advance singles to listen to, but it’ll be ambient stuff, according to what I’m reading on the internet, and it’s likely there’ll be some jungle rinseouts, because he’s into that kind of thing these days, literally for no reason whatsoever.

• So you thought Shania Twain had given up singing goopy Top 40 songs and retired to some 50-acre horse farm to grow petunias and count hundred-dollar bills, did you? Well you’re wrong, those petunias and horsies cost a lot of hundred-dollar bills, so she’s putting out a new album this Friday, called Queen Of Me! Her 1990s heyday is over, so she’s been playing at Caesar’s Palace for mobsters and all those kinds of people, then she went through a horrible divorce with her producer, Mutt Lange, so the producer for this album is not Mutt Lange. But before I run out of room, let’s go take a listen to “Waking Up Dreaming,” since it’s probably the push single, given that it already has 2.5 million YouTube views from bots and people who accidentally landed on the video while searching for “We Will Rock You” or whatnot. The song starts off with a “Footloose”-style drumbeat, and then Shania starts singing, sounding kind of bored, for which I wouldn’t blame her, because as feisty and catchy she wants this song to be, it isn’t, it’s just kind of phoned-in and limp, which means she’ll probably sing it on some daytime TV show, causing IQ levels to drop worldwide, and that’s the only time you’ll ever hear it again, not that the song is completely worthless. OK, it is, but where would we be with hilariously disposable pop art, you tell me.

• British six-piece indie-rock band The Go! Team are releasing their newest full-length, Get Up Sequences Part Two, this week. The entire album is available to listen to on YouTube right now in one big lump without separation between song titles, and the first song is kind of dumb, like Flaming Lips but with a full brass band. I hate it, but your mileage may vary, lord help us.

• We’ll call it a column by checking out British pop songstress Ellie Goulding, whose new LP, Higher Than Heaven, has a single, called “Let It Die.” It’s an OK tune, like Avril Lavigne for soccer parents, not too energetic or listenable, just right for cranking in the minivan while you drop the kid off for practice, where the other kids will give you funny looks for being cringe.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

At the Sofaplex 23/01/26

Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl (TV-G)

Stephanie Beatriz, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

I know, I know, do you really need to hear the Encanto songs again? Yes! This filmed concert of the songs of Encanto as presented at the Hollywood Bowl is a delightful celebration featuring the original vocal talents from the animated movie as well as some beautiful staging with sets, light projections and dancers as everything from townsfolk to animals. It’s fun, a nice introduction for kids who have seen more movies than live theater and a nice reminder that the Encanto songbook is stuffed with dancy gems. AAvailable on Disney+.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (PG)

Lashana Lynch, Emma Thompson.

Roald Dahl works through more childhood terrors — a bleak school, a sadistic headmistress, awful parents — in this charming if occasionally PG-ily violent and mean musical starring Alisha Weir as the titular heroine. Matilda is smart, a lover of stories and only occasionally naughty with vengeful acts against her negligent parents (Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough). When she is sent to a grim day school run by tyrannical, joy-hating headmistress Agatha Trunchbull (Thompson, having the most fun), Matilda can’t stand for the bullying of her fellow students and begins a revolution against Trunchbull, which even extends to the kind Miss Honey (Lynch), Matilda’s teacher. Miss Honey has her own difficult past with Trunchbull but tries to teach her children with respect and kindness nevertheless, cheering them on, if quietly at first, in their rebellion.

I think because of the cruelty of Trunchbull and the indifference and abuse by Matilda’s parents, I’d peg this one at somewhere in the 11-year-old-and-up viewership range. For kids old enough not to be scared, the story involves some lovely set pieces with songs (“When I Grow Up” is nicely done) and a sweet tale about the vindication of a bookish girl. And, as mentioned, Thompson, a sort of fairy tale witch-as-dictator, seems to be having an absolute ball. B+ Available on Netflix

The Matter of Everything, by Suzie Sheehy

The Matter of Everything, by Suzie Sheehy (Knopf, 320 pages)

If you’ve been on this planet for more than two decades and have decent health insurance, you’ve probably had an X-ray at some time. However, you may not have given any thought as to how the technology came about unless it was required on a test.

Suzie Sheehy, an Australian physicist, is here to forgive and redeem the incurious with a surprisingly engaging book that delves into 12 experiments that radically upended the world. While “read a science book by a particle accelerator physicist” might not be on your bucket list, The Matter of Everything is an easily digestible dive into advances in physics that will be especially useful for anyone who struggles to define a quark.

Sheehy didn’t plan on a career in physics; she was studying civil engineering in college when she was invited to an overnight astronomy event at the Leon Mow Dark Sky Site not far from Melbourne. (Dark sky preserves are places where you can see much more of the galaxy because of the absence of artificial light.)

There Sheehy saw Saturn’s rings and the arc of the Milky Way and experienced a recalibration of what she thought about the universe. She writes, “I wanted to know how it was all connected and how I was connected with it. I wanted to know if there really was a theory of everything. I felt deeply that all this mattered, that it mattered to me as a human, that understanding this was a goal big enough that if I managed it even a little bit, I’d not have wasted my blip of time as a conscious being.”

She changed course and began studying particle physics — how particles form, transform and behave. And her interest in connectivity eventually helped to shape this book, as she connects historical dots to show how some of the most ground-breaking advances have come about not from the “lone genius theorizing at a desk” but by stubborn and curious scientists who were determined to figure out something that stumped them.

Take, for example, the X-ray.

A German scientist named Wilhelm Rontgen was working with cathode rays (observable streams of electrons) when he noticed a green-colored glow coming from the other side of his lab. The light disappeared when he turned the cathode ray tube off, but remained when he covered the tube with black paper. He became obsessed with figuring out what was happening, and discovered that the strange light would leave shadows of what it passed through.

Rontgen had dark hair that protruded from his forehead “as if he were permanently electrified by his own enthusiasm” and was a shy loner ill-prepared for the fame that would find him when he began telling the world about the discovery of this new kind of ray, to which he assigned the letter “X,” to denote “unknown.”

While conducting experiments, “He spent seven intense weeks in his lab, occasionally being reminded to eat by his wife, Anna Bertha.” He used his wife’s hand to test what happened when the ray passed over a human limb and an image of her bones and wedding ring showed up.

Writes Sheehy: “According to legend, when Bertha saw the bones in her hand, she exclaimed, ‘I have seen my death!’ and never set foot in her husband’s lab again.”

Rontgen soon realized how transformative his discovery would be in medicine, and he made the first public presentation of his findings to a medical society. It marked the first time that doctors would be able to see inside the human body without cutting it; within a year, X-rays would be used to find shrapnel in wounded soldiers on battlefields.

Of course, with one being born every minute, as P.T. Barnum would say, X-rays quickly seized the public imagination in non-medical ways. “X-ray-proof” underwear and “X-ray glasses” would soon be for sale by unscrupulous entrepreneurs.

Sheehy (or her editors) was smart to begin with the X-ray experiment, since that is something to which most people can easily relate. She has to work a bit harder to get us to care about the origins of, say, cloud chambers or the linear accelerators that led to the discovery of quarks. But she is a good storyteller despite her formidable intellect and weaves in the sort of detail that humanizes her subjects and holds our attention.

We might not, for example, be as intrigued by the origin of the nuclear theory of the atom until we learn that it was developed by a man who believed that “swearing at an experiment made it work better” and thus cussed his way into changing what we previously believed about the composition of atoms.

Or that technology that dates historical artifacts was developed, in part, because contemporary physicist Charles Bennett bought an $80 violin at a New York flea market and was determined to find out if it was a famed Stradivarius instrument made in Italy.

This is not to say that the entire book is riveting to people who aren’t conversant in physics. For the science-impaired, it can go from fascinating to bewildering in the span of 10 seconds. I have lived many decades on this planet without once using “muon” in a conversation and don’t expect that to change even though I now know that muography is a thing and muons are apparently going to assure the structural integrity of our bridges in the future.

And while I understand in principle the importance of the Large Hadron Collider, which in 2012 confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson particle, I take it on faith, much like I take on faith that my air fryer will not explode no matter how loud it gets.

Disappointingly, Sheehy did not help me to wax eloquent on these subjects, nor did she convince me that with just a little more study I, too, could explain the Standard Model of particle physics to an innocent bystander.

That said, I am a little bit smarter for having read this book, my eyes having been opened to many more things that I know embarrassingly little about. There are about 13,000 particle physicists in the world, and they are just like you and me except that they spend their time using ion traps to mimic particle accelerators. Whatever that means. B

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