A weak smile, the persistence of the Moon

• OFF TO POKEY. A miserable closing chapter to the Nielsen case: Sex-Abuse Victim Confronts Ex-Rohrabacher Aide Jeffrey Ray Nielsen at His Sentencing (R. Scott Moxley in the OC Weekly)

...This façade had served the 37-year-old Ladera Ranch man well, helping him get a job as a Washington, D.C., congressional aide to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, win close friendships with political heavyweights such as Orange County Republican Party bosses Scott Baugh and Tom Fuentes—oh, and lure impressionable seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade boys into sexual relationships....

• From this afternoon's What's New: ASSHOLE FEARS BLACK HOLE

Technology has changed in the 400 years since Cervantes first told the story of Don Quixote. Windmills are now particle accelerators and the knight’s lance is a federal court injunction, but the plot is the same. It begins with a befuddled lawyer in Hawaii named Walter Wagner. Having read far too much science fiction as a youth, Wagner fantasizes that he is a physicist by virtue of an undergraduate biology degree with a minor in physics. Accompanied by Sancho, his loyal TA, Wagner embarks on an adventure to slay the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a doomsday machine that he believes is poised to destroy the world by creating a black hole. He seems to have forgotten the last time he tried this. In 1999 Wagner warned that RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, must be slain lest it create a black hole. The then BNL director, Jack Marburger, named a distinguished panel of physicists to investigate. Their report noted that nature has been conducting the relevant safety test for billions of years by colliding heavy-ion cosmic rays with the moon. It concluded that creation of a black hole is "effectively ruled out by the persistence of the Moon."