Trends of the week

#Noynoyparin lingers on Twitter like a neglected piece of furniture

MANILA, Philippines - After calls for Pres. Noynoy Aquino’s resignation were given Catholic cred last week with statements from Cardinal Vidal and other bishops, Brother Eli Soriano of Members of Church of God International dropped a bomb on Twitter called “#Noynoyparin,” a hashtag that illustrates once again how powerful his organization is on Twitter, because I’m pretty sure that’s not an accurate representation of the zeitgeist. It’s hard to overlook the hashtag’s similarity to Ferdinand Marcos’ last-stand campaign slogan against P-Noy’s mother. “Marcos Pa Rin” was also a refrain commonly heard all over the country pre-EDSA, but it, too, had the air of organizational compliance that ran counter to the guttural reactions to the realities of the time. Irony is often tragic, sometimes funny, and never kind.

19-year-old basketball phenom breaks the Internet

The NBA All Star Game is a complete waste of time. It’s where NBA stars, bent on saving their energy for the playoff push, begrudgingly show up and play a generally-sloppy exhibition game that no one even remembers ever because the stakes are non-existent. The NBA All Star Weekend, in contrast, is appointment TV. Specifically the Slam Dunk Contest, which easily has the highest stakes of the NBA midseason: will these dunks suck or will they blow our minds? There is no middle ground when it comes to the dunk contest; it always falls at either extreme. Lucky for us, this year’s edition fell on the latter category.

Rookie Zach LaVine of the Minnesota Timberwolves blew the world’s collective mind this week after pulling off dunks that washed over the amazement-starved contest like a bucket of ice water. It is important to note that Zach LaVine is only 19 years old, because my finest achievement at that age was finishing two burgers simultaneously in under five minutes. So clearly he has a head start in life.

#SNL40 turns dreams into reality

Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary special was a cross between a fantasy sports version of comedy and comedy heaven. Such is the depth of talent this long-running sketch show has produced over the past four decades. Name any random five alumni that participated in the marathon special and you’ll come up with a dream team: Fallon-Sandler-Akroyd-Hader-Poehler, Murphy-Wiig-MacDonald-Carvey-Myers, Murray-Fey-Rock-Chase-Ferrell, the list goes on and on. It was a surreal viewing experience, akin to joyriding through time, picking up comedic geniuses from different generations, and asking them to perform together in the present day. Not even an awkwardly brief appearance from Eddie Murphy and a sketch-murdering appearance by Taylor Swift could ruin the spectacle.

Depressing new theory says that ‘Big Bang’ never happened

According to The Daily Dot, a couple of dudes have posited that the Big Bang probably didn’t happen, that the universe didn’t have a beginning, that it’s just always been there, kinda like God. And this is huge because these dudes happen to be astrophysicists.

I’m not, but from what I’ve read and understood over the years (which isn’t much), The Big Bang represents the perennial stumbling block in the path towards a Quantum Theory of Gravity, more popularly known as The Theory of Everything, which is more popularly known as an Oscar-nominated film. The universe supposedly began, the Big Bang Theory goes, inside the singularity of a black hole. This singularity is where the theory — and all calculations, and all science, for that matter — breaks down. Inside this singularity, gravity becomes infinite, which is why nothing can escape it, not even light. This is also why it’s literally the dead end: when your calculations lead you to infinity, it means you’re doing something mathematically wrong.

This new “theory” sounds suspiciously like scientists throwing up their hands and going:

“F**k it, there’s no Big Bang. I give up.”

“So…how did the universe begin?”

“I don’t know. It exploded from a chicken’s asshole. Who cares?”

“Wait…what if the universe has no beginning.”

“Yeah. That’s right! Let’s run with that.”

“That’s it? That’s our theory?”

“Sure. People are idiots. They have no idea what we’re talking about anyway.”

But here’s why I think they’re right: if the problem heretofore is infinity, doesn’t it make sense that the solution is, in fact, infinity? To concede that, yes, infinity exists and it is the actual state of the universe, that which has no beginning and no end? Or maybe I’m misinterpreting the science. Yeah, that’s probably it.

I don’t know. Infinity is just a wild concept to think about. And a very disturbing one. The very foundation of postmodern defeatism — that nothing matters because we’re all going to die and the universe is bound to implode anyway — crumbles if this theory is right. I mean, we’re all still going to die, but the part about the universe no longer imploding: isn’t that depressing as hell? The end of the universe, to the most pessimistic curmudgeon, at least provided comfort in finality. Everything ends. Nothing lasts forever. Nope, it does last forever. It’s not that nothing lasts forever; it’s that “Nothing” lasts forever.

I mean, people have long used the vastness of the cosmos as the great perspective anesthesia to all our problems, to make them look small in comparison. This is kinda like that, only the anesthesia becomes sadder and sadder as it takes over your body. You’re having a quarter-life crisis? Well, you’re 20s is like a nanosecond compared to the eons the universe spent just sitting there, waiting for our sun to take shape through random collisions that happen probably once a decade, then another couple of trillion years to see cosmic shards accumulate into one gigantic garbage ball called Earth, then another eternity before life shows up only to see it go extinct, and “hey dinosaurs!”, then a stupid asteroid kills all of them, so the universe sulks because dinosaurs are cool and waits a few million years before ugly primates show up, and then a few million years more before the evolution of the first living things to ever complain about a “quarter-life crisis” like it’s an actual thing. The universe is probably like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you just made that all up because I’ve been here literally forever and I’ve never heard of that shit before.”

It must be a bummer, being the universe. It’s like being The Highlander, minus the sword, or a vampire, minus the blood orgies. Sisyphus is all like, “Dude, I would not want to be you.”

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What are your top trends this week? Tweet us @PhilStarSUPREME.