Arnold Schwarzenegger - Conan the Destroyer of California

After two terms as the Governor of California, Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger probably finished his political career. While he will be remembered in California for the debts that he left, the rest of the world will probably link Schwarzenegger’s political career with his proposal to ban the use of words "Mom", "Daddy", "husband" and "wife" in California public schools, because these words "offend feelings of children from gay marriages".

He became the Governor of California in 2003, and thus, he became the second actor, after Ronald Reagan, who got hold of high political positions. That he will run for Governor, on the Republican side, he revealed in a Comedy show. To be even able to participate in general elections he first needed to obtain permission from his wife, because his wife, Maria Shriver, is niece of Edward Kennedy, one of the members of the Kennedy clan, who belong to the Democrats.

With a little help of media and 25 million dollars that he invested in his two election campaigns, but mostly thanks to his acting career, Schwarzenegger won a landslide victory in both elections, in 2003 and 2006. His victories were not endangered even with charges that he used drugs, speculation that his father Gustav committed war crimes in World War II, or insinuation that he had sexually harassed 13 women.

Back in the early nineties, George H.W. Bush cast an eye on him and appointed him as the president of a smaller committee, calling him "Conan the Republican". 

Because of the skepticism about the strength of the U.S. economy, he called the Democrats "economic girlie men”. During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he said that he will make him "do squats" to "do something about those skinny legs”, and later that he will make him "do some biceps curls to beef up those scrawny little arms ".

“If he could only do something about putting some meat on his ideas”, Schwarzenegger said.

None of that what he said didn’t bothered him to recently publicly recommend himself to Obama - Schwarz said that he would like to get a job in the Obama administration, something regarding ecology. True, Americans admit that he achieved maximum on that field during the seven years he served as the Governor of California. Everything else was a complete fiasco.

During his term, the budget deficit has tripled, reaching 28 billion dollars. Unemployment rate is 13%. This is followed with speculations about a possible economic fiasco of California. At one point, California had no money for payment of regular monthly infrastructural obligations.

Schwarzenegger explained that the state wouldn’t have borrowed that much money if he knew that the global economic crisis will occur. He also said that his political opponents sabotaged his efforts to bring the house in order and improve the state of California's economy. It remains unknown what happened to his ambitious pre-election plan to make each of 36 and a half million residents of California eligible for health insurance, rather than one in five as it was.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger had no idea what it was like to govern. Sacramento isn't Hollywood. I also believe that he gave too big promises because probably he did not realize that he will not be able to fulfill them, which somewhat resembles Obama’s failure in fulfilling great promises. Residents of California expected too much. We did not giggle the way the rest of the world did at the Governator assuming office”, said Dr Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior fellow at the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California.

It turned out that Schwarzenegger was far from behaving as a terminator when it comes to economic problems, which is why California citizens completely lost confidence in him.

Schwarzenegger’s new political engagement doesn’t seem too likely: he often worked and operated in contrary to California's Congress, and Republicans went against him when he invited them to cooperate with Obama in order to jointly find a solution for economic recovery and deficit control. The Republicans were not happy and with his proposition of budget deficit of California which he agreed with Washington's administration. The support of his family is also unlikely: although she never prevented her husband to be involved in politics, Maria Shriver was never thrilled with his new job.

But, Schwarzenegger doesn’t have to worry about his future, even if he gives up from the announced intention to write biographical books. In his 30’s he was already a millionaire, and that was before he achieved great success with his movies. He earned his first millions with postal sale of bodybuilding equipment and real estate investments. With Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Demi Moore he invested money in the restaurant chain Planet Hollywood. And despite all costs that he had as a politician, Schwarzenegger’s wealth is now estimated at 800 to 900 million dollars. This amount includes income from bodybuilding, real estate, earnings in the financial market and, of course, earnings from his films.

Nevertheless, the films were the ones that had influence on the magazine TIME and their decision to place him among the 100 people who shaped the world in 2004 and 2007.

The crucial year in Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood career was 1982, when he appeared in "Conan the Barbarian". Until the appearance of "Conan", Schwarzenegger made eight films. He won his first role (lead role) in 1970, in the comedy "Hercules in New York". He even today speaks English with a strong German accent, but at a time of making “Hercules”, he was saying it so badly that the producers were worried about whether the public will understand him at all. The fear was unjustified - the movie itself was terrible, but because of the accent, Arnold is even today called Ahnold.

"Conan the Barbarian", and two years later "Conan the Destroyer", were his first major commercial successes, in which his physical appearance was fully exploited. Neither before nor after these films, no one was counting on a some great acting performance from him. He became mega-star with action movies "Terminator" (1984, 1991, 2003), "Predator" (1987), "Red Sonja", "Commando", "Red Heat", "Total Recall", "Eraser ", "Collateral Damage" and many others.

Besides action movies, among total of 38 movies that he made, he made and a few comedies, like, for example, “Kindergarten Cop".

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Silly Nobel Leads to Real Nobel!

Every year in the U.S. anti-Nobel prizes are awarded for meaningless scientific discoveries that make us laugh. However, it appears that the discovery of false Nobel winner can finally lead to the "original" Nobel Prize.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize, announced that this year's winners in physics are Russians Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for "revolutionary experiments with two-dimensional material, graphene." Awareness of the importance of their achievement lives in a small number of people who do have the idea what it is graphene, but this news has  intrigued connoisseurs of science, mainly because the scientist Andre Geim was until now known as laureate of another Nobel...  The one for the funniest inventions, which is awarded since 1991 in the United States, few days before the announcement of the winners in Stockholm, and which carries a variety of nicknames, from  anti - to silly Nobel. The Russian scientist, in 2000, received a parody of the most significant prize for science because he performed an experiment in which, with the help of magnetic fields, was able to raise a frog into a state of levitation.

The award is officially known as Ig Nobel, and it is given by satiric-scientific magazine “Annals of Improbable Research”. The prize is awarded each year in Sanders Theatre at Harvard. When the "team" from the magazine, in 1991, awarded the first series of prizes, winners have been scientists whose findings were meaningless, but soon this choice grew into award for discoveries that first make people laugh, and then make them think. 

- Our goal is to make people laugh, but then to make them to think. We encourage curiosity in people, but we also raise a question, how do we decide what is it that is important for humanity, both in science and in other areas - say the organizers of the false Nobel .

That is why anti-Nobel is awarded, just as the real one, in all social areas. In physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, but also, for peace. As the organizers say, the rewards are sometimes a social critic, sometimes pure satire, and sometimes are intended only to make people laugh. This year’s prize for medicine was for the discovery that toboggans ride reduces symptoms of asthma, for peace that swearing increases resistance to pain, for physics that wearing socks over shoes reduces skating on ice, and for the economy, prize was given to all banks for their role in economic crisis. Prize for biology, in 1992, won a certain doctor Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple, single-handed method of quality control. A year later, among others, for mathematics was awarded Robert Faid because he exactly calculated the possibility that Mikhail Gorbachev was, in fact, the Antichrist. According to his calculations, the chances of this are 1:710.609.175.188.282.000. Anti-Nobel for peace has received and The Taiwan National Parliament, for demonstrating that politicians gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by waging war against other nations. George Goble, in 1996, received the prize for chemistry, since he found a way to ignite a barbeque grill for just three seconds, and former French President Jacques Chirac won the prize for peace for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific.

Later, awards received and Dr. Bosland for biology, for breeding a spiceless jalapeno chili pepper, and The British Standards Institution for literature,  for its six-page specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup of tea. Chris Niswander invented software that detects a cat walking on the keyboard, which earned him an Ig Nobel Prize for computer science in 2000. Anti-Nobel for public health received a report of Scottish scientists on "the collapse of toilets in Glasgow." Without reward did not remain and Yoshiro  Nakamats for his research in which he photographed and retrospectively analyzed every meal he had consumed during a period of 34 years, as well as mathematicians Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.  And doctor Dan Meyer has become a laureate for medicine because he explored the side effects of swallowing swords.

Robert May, Baron of Oxford, who was science adviser to the British government, has asked the organizers not to award Ig Nobel awards to British scientists, since this kind of award includes a risk that some real achievements may become public ridicule. However, many British scientists did not support this request. On several occasions, it was shown that scientific discoveries that were candidates for the Ig Nobel, after a while, turned out to be a significant contribution to humankind.  That was the case in 2006, when the award was given to the discovery that mosquitoes are equally attracted to the smell of “Limburger” cheese and human foot odor.  It is this discovery that has contributed to the creation of special traps for mosquitoes, which are used in the fight against malaria in Africa. 

Certainly, the most interesting Ig Nobels went to the Australian John Keogh and the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation of, believe it or not – wheel, in 2001. Then, the biology prize for the discovery that herrings apparently communicate by farting, and medicine prize for the scientific report on "the effect of country music on suicide." Also, according to organizers of false Nobel, a significant contribution to world peace gave Daisuke Inoue from Japan, the man who invented karaoke, because he “found an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other."

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