"This is how liberty dies - to thunderous applause"

Benjamin Franklin told people that America was "to be a Republic, if you can keep it."

So you want to know how to unravel a Republic? Well, the first thing is that the best predictor - I'm afraid to say - of future behaviour, is past behaviour. Hence, if you're considering getting married and you haven't been faithful to girlfriends, if you don't have that track record, odds are, you will remain a letch. In the same way, if you're not yet a Big Time politician and you're already being prosecuted for corruption, chances are, when you (think you) can get away it, being in a position of greater power, you'll go for it again.

For a while there I had given Zuma the benefit of the doubt. Now I am back to thinking it is craziness to elect someone who has already proved himself to be, well, unacceptable as a leader. The same can be said for members of SARU. Nonetheless, in South Africa, we seem incapable of facing the obvious, and not only that, doing something about the obvious.

A great everyday example is this: In Johannesburg I fairly often find myself driving by the scenes of car accidents. Without fail, within seconds of this glaringly obvious public demonstration of the consequence of recklessness, a driver will do some daring (and unnecessary) manuoevre to get ahead. I rest me case. We get the leaders we deserve, because at the moment we don't deserve better than we are getting, or giving.

For the movie version of what I am saying - and I am very serious - watch Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith. People are highly susceptible to being stirred by their own passion. It is how we drown reason, and deliver ourselves unto evil. You have been warned. The race is now on to see who gets there - to a state of Empire - first, us or the USA.

Pret With Portman

Natalie Portman moved with her family from Israel to America when she was three and grew up in New York. She began dancing lessons at four and by 10 was acting in an off-Broadway show as an understudy with a young Britney Spears. She was cast in her first film two years later. A committed vegetarian, she lives alone in New York and is reportedly dating Nathan Bogle, a male model

by Gill Pringle

You have to feel for Natalie Portman. Here is an actress, 26 years old, already nominated for an Oscar, winner of a Golden Globe and with a psychology degree from Harvard. But what made the headlines recently at the release of a short film? Her bottom. “Natalie Portman gets naked”, shrieked one; “Portman goes nude”, yelled another. The internet went into turbo drive: 500,000 people downloaded the video free from iTunes, and it then found its way onto YouTube and other websites. The film was a 13-minute short directed by Wes Anderson called Hotel Chevalier and was released on the internet as a prequel to the director’s big budget feature The Darjeeling Limited, out last month.

Audiences shunned the main event, but the distributor of The Darjeeling Limited quickly picked up on the public’s appetite for Portman in the buff and promptly started screening the Hotel Chevalier at cinemas before the film in the hope of drawing more crowds.

Portman sighs when asked if she regrets stripping off. “I don’t really have regrets,” she says, from her suite at New York’s glamorous Loews Regency hotel. “It’s more that I don’t like misappropriation of stuff and when you create something – like I’m part of a story, doing a dramatic scene – and then a piece of it ends up on a porn site, it really makes me angry. It’s inevitable and I should have known better.”

Natalie Portman in V For Vendetta - Watch the best video clips here
Portman is used to such controversy. Her first film, Léon, cast her as a Lolita-esque 12-year-old girl who befriends a hitman. The relationship between the two, although ambiguous, is unsettling and prompted an angry response from children’s charities. Meanwhile, rumours that she had appeared nude in the 2006 film Goya’s Ghosts prompted a rebuttal from her agent, who said Portman used a body double.

Her latest role is less contentious. She has just finished My Blueberry Nights, a road movie to be released in the new year. It was that film’s subject matter, a young woman driving across America in search of love, that attracted her to it, she says, and it brought back memories of her own road trip just after she learnt to drive.
“I was with my boyfriend at the time and we decided to drive from California to New York,” she says. “We were driving his not very environmentally friendly car and we did it in about 10 days.
“I remember early in the trip we had decided to go down to Mexico first and it was late at night, and we were driving and driving, looking for a place to sleep, and we couldn’t find a motel. So finally we found this parking lot outside of a motel. They were like, ‘We don’t have room for you but if you want to camp here . . .’ We used the car lights to light us pitching the tent.”

The episode wasn’t quite as romantic as it sounds. “We woke up in the morning and the car battery was dead. Also, we’d woken up expecting to be in this beautiful Mexican town with the ocean and whatever – but it was like a trash dump. Literally, it was a dump. I remember thinking, ‘How did we not smell it?’ So that was kind of a funny experience. And we had to wait till the afternoon until they got someone who could take us to town to get the battery replaced.”
Portman is probably best known for her role as Queen Amidala in the first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace. She agreed to take the role on the understanding that she would film only during the summer holidays while she studied psychology at Harvard.

It was not the happiest of times. “I think the most difficult time personally was probably my senior college year. Everyone hated my performances in Star Wars; everyone thought I was a terrible actress, and I wasn’t getting work – or not getting work that I wanted to do – and was just feeling bad about myself in general. I took time off and wasn’t sure if maybe I shouldn’t be there or whatever.”

The daughter of an Israeli fertility specialist and an American artist, Portman grew up in New York and was spotted when she was 12 at a pizza parlour and cast in Léon. A vegetarian since she was nine, she says: “I stopped eating meat after I saw a film about chickens. It was tough because I loved my mom’s brisket but I’ve not eaten meat or fish since. Giving up Gummi Worms and Jell-O was the worst part.”

Today she lives in New York, drives a Toyota Prius and eschews the glamour of showbiz in favour of quiet nights in and seeing friends from university. (“I’ve had a few drunken nights in my life. I’m not a puritan. I simply haven’t made a lifestyle out of it. Maybe I am kind of boring? I hope not.”) Does she feel she missed out on a normal childhood? “When I was a kid I was always pretending to be an adult,” she says cautiously. “And I still sort of feel the same way. I still feel like I’m pretending.” And she admits to sometimes wanting to quit acting all together. “I think about it [quitting] every day, and then, you know, a few more days pass and then I sort of want it again. It’s like an addiction.”
From: On the move: Natalie Portman

I am Legend (VIDEO)

While a swarm of problems infest "I Am Legend," I must admit I was quite taken with the film's sensation of misery and isolation. Typically, a Will Smith genre film is a noisy monster, equipped with endless one-liners and explosions. However, "Legend" is introspective and paranoid. It's almost worth a ticket just to witness a wildly marketed, blockbuster film remain so still and mannered.

When a cure for cancer mutates, killing off 90 percent of the planet, Robert Neville (Will Smith), a military scientist, is left alone in New York City with his dog, hoping with every passing year that he can reverse the mutation. Slowly drained of his sanity and growing weary of battling the vampire-like creatures that attack during the night, Neville is losing hope that his nightmare will end. When other survivors start to surface, the revelation stuns Neville, who finds his struggle to remain optimistic is in constant battle with his knowledge that humanity has likely been snuffed out for good.

"I Am Legend" is the third attempt to bring Richard Matheson's 1954 novel to the big screen, coming after the 1964 Vincent Price production "The Last Man on Earth," and the 1971 Charlton Heston curiosity, "The Omega Man." "Legend" is perhaps the first film to be blessed with a budget large enough to render the extensive isolation Neville is facing, the absence of community that slowly eats away at his soul.

Director Francis Lawrence ("Constantine") is a skilled enough stylist to pull off the visual majesty of "Legend," and the finest moments of the picture are easily the sequences of Neville and dog Sam driving around the city streets, interacting with a world frozen in 2009. Hunting deer or shooting golf balls into buildings, Neville has the world to himself in the daytime, employing careful street choreography honed over three years of seclusion. It's a game of boredom and survival, and the balance between the two is where "Legend" finds the strongest dramatic flavor, carefully studying Neville's brittle sanity while upping the tension with the menacing "Dark Seekers" and their escalating aggression toward the viral survivors.

I Am Legend - Watch more funny videos here
For the rest of this Review by Brian Ormdorf, go here.

`I Am Legend' Has Record $77 Million December Sales



Weekend Ranking: US Movie Houses
1. I Am Legend
2. Alvin and Chipmunks
3. Golden Compass

NVDL: I am very excited about this film, not least of all because it stimulates and inspires along the lines of another post-Apoc story I've recently embarked upon. Titled Fire, Ice and the Whole Wide World, I intend to explore and render the isolation and dismantling of community in a gritty, austere story. So far I have cave-dwelling Luc van Lierde (based on the real Ironman Wiorld champion) pitting his triathlon skills into a new game: kill or be killed by roaming survivors. Fellow human beings turn out to be the most dangerous predators in the world, and he is forced to become his most dangerous self. Is it worth it? Meanwhile, against this war within and without, the world paints itself in blindingly white sun, a light that cools and is dimmed by almost permanent rain. The rain turns to snow, and the snow to ice. It is in this bleak world that van Lierde finds himself completely, utterly, miserably alone. It is then that he stumbles upon a small tribe of female survivors, and their pregnant patriarch...

This weekend I watched Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith and it really must be the best sci-fi movie ever made, in terms of the feast of visuals. The plot is not great, but not bad. It is a pity Lucas has quit (or has he?). It would be great if he re-rendered the next 3 movies, starting with A New Hope, which while some see as classics, could obviously be jazzed up a lot with today's technology. And then the final 3 Star Wars films?

I also found the political undertones in Revenge of the Sith very intelligent: 'if you're not with me you're my enemy' (eliciting George Bush), the law of absolutes (Bush again), and the simple use of passion to sway the masses astray. And what does Natalie Portman say: Padme: So this is how liberty dies - with thunderous applause. It ends though in a frigid wasteland.

Best Meteor Shower of 2007 Peaks Dec. 13

What could be the best meteor display of the year will reach its peak on the night of Dec.13-14.

Here is what astronomers David Levy and Stephen Edberg have written of the annual Geminid Meteor Shower: "If you have not seen a mighty Geminid fireball arcing gracefully across an expanse of sky, then you have not seen a meteor."

The Geminids get their name from the constellation of Gemini, the Twins, because the meteors appear to emanate from a spot in the sky near the bright star Castor in Gemini.

Also in Gemini this month is the planet Mars, nearing a close approach to the Earth later this month, and shining brilliantly with yellow-orange hue. To be sure, Mars is certain to attract the attention of prospective Geminid watchers this upcoming week.

Reliable shower

The Geminid Meteors are usually the most satisfying of all the annual showers, even surpassing the famous Perseids of August.

Studies of past find the "Gems" have a reputation for being rich both in slow, bright, graceful meteors and fireballs as well as faint meteors, with relatively fewer objects of medium brightness.

They are of medium speed, encountering Earth at 22 miles per second (35 kps). They are bright and white, but unlike the Perseids, they leave few visible trails or streaks. They are four times denser than most other meteors, and have been observed to form jagged or divided paths.

Geminids also stand apart from the other meteor showers in that they seem to have been spawned not by a comet, but by 3200 Phaethon, an Earth-crossing asteroid. Then again, the Geminids may be comet debris after all, for some astronomers consider Phaethon to really be the dead nucleus of a burned-out comet that somehow got trapped into an unusually tight orbit. Interestingly, on December 10, Phaethon will be passing about 11 million miles (18 million kilometers) from Earth, its closest approach since its discovery in 1983.

The prospects for this year

The Geminids perform excellently in any year, but British meteor astronomer, Alastair McBeath, has categorized 2007 as a "great year."

Last year's display was hindered somewhat by the moon, two days past last quarter phase. But this year, the moon will be at new phase on Dec. 9. On the peak night, the moon will be a fat crescent, in the south-southwest at dusk and setting soon after 8 p.m. That means that the sky will be dark and moonless for the balance of the night, making for perfect viewing conditions for the shower.

According to McBeath, the Geminids are predicted to reach peak activity on Dec. 14 at 16:45 GMT. That means those places from central Asia eastwards across the Pacific Ocean to Alaska are in the best position to catch the very crest of the shower, when the rates conceivably could exceed 120 per hour.

"But," he adds, "maximum rates persist at only marginally reduced levels for some 6 to 10 hours around the biggest ones, so other places (such as North America) should enjoy some fine Geminid activity as well.

Indeed, under normal conditions on the night of maximum activity, with ideal dark-sky conditions, at least 60 to 120 Geminid meteors can be expected to burst across the sky every hour on the average (Light pollution greatly cuts the numbers).

The Earth moves quickly through this meteor stream producing a somewhat broad, lopsided activity profile. Rates increase steadily for two or three days before maximum, reaching roughly above a quarter of its peak strength, then drop off more sharply afterward. Late Geminids, however, tend to be especially bright. Renegade forerunners and late stragglers might be seen for a week or more before and after maximum.

What to do

Generally speaking, depending on your location, Gemini begins to come up above the east-northeast horizon right around the time evening twilight is coming to an end. So you might catch sight of a few early Geminids as soon as the sky gets dark.

There is a fair chance of perhaps catching sight of some "Earth-grazing" meteors. Earth grazers are long, bright shooting stars that streak overhead from a point near to even just below the horizon. Such meteors are so distinctive because they follow long paths nearly parallel to our atmosphere.

The Geminids begin to appear noticeably more numerous in the hours after 10 p.m. local time, because the shower's radiant is already fairly high in the eastern sky by then. The best views, however, come around 2 a.m., when their radiant point will be passing very nearly overhead.

The higher a shower's radiant, the more meteors it produces all over the sky.

But keep this in mind: At this time of year, meteor watching can be a long, cold business. You wait and you wait for meteors to appear. When they don't appear right away, and if you're cold and uncomfortable, you're not going to be looking for meteors for very long! The late Henry Neely (1878-1963), who for many years served as a lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium, once had this to say about watching for the Geminids: "Take the advice of a man whose teeth have chattered on many a winter's night – wrap up much more warmly than you think is necessary!"
By Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist

NVDL: Unfortunately for us in South Africa, the far North West and Central and North Eastern Hemisphere (around Alaska and Asia) are likely to get the best views of this.