Tom Hanks: a tale of typewriters and anti-matter!

Two delicious items just popped up a little while ago -- Tom Hanks is in the news again, which makes sense when you remember his new movie, Angels and Demons, will be opening soon, and the publicity campaign has to get into high gear.

Turns out, Tom Hanks has an "obsession" for collecting stuff -- but not any kind of stuff. He has a passion for typewriters!

This snippet is running on One India: "Tom Hank's obsession costs him a fortune. The Hollywood superstar has revealed that he has a weakness for typewriters and ends up paying a fortunes for the shipping charges of his goods from all across the globe. The Oscar winner has more than a 100 manual, portable typewriters. "(I collect them) from the 1930s until they stopped making them," Contactmusic quoted him as saying. "I bought a $5 typewriter from Australia that cost me $85 to ship," he said The actor confesses that his hobby some times burns his pockets badly." (http://living.oneindia.in/insync/2009/tom-hanks-typewriter-190209.html)

Good golly, I remember my first four or five typewriters. As much as I love computers, I wish still had my portable word-basher-outer. Nobody makes them these days -- and I guess the big problem is, even if you did have one, you couldn't get the ribbons for them. Rats.

From one end of the tech spectrum to the other, lets leapfrom from India to Europe ... where Tom has been signed to (get this) restart the Large Hadron Collider!

This is actually pretty darned cool, if you like your high-tech stuff: "Tom Hanks, he of Forrest Gump fame, has been signed up to restart the Large Hadron Collider. The announcement is sure to finally garner some positive press for the presumably highly stressed scientists at Cern, who are busy trying to get the LHC fully functional. As bizarre as the link-up sounds, there's some method in the madness behind getting Mr Hanks on board. The Hollywood star is about to embark on a tour-de-force PR campaign for his latest film Angels And Demons. The movie, based on the book by Dan Brown, features Cern as part of the plot that involves the stealing of some anti-matter from the particle physics laboratory. Speaking about his involvement with the LHC, Hanks told journalists: "I found out today that if I stuck my hand into the particle accelerator, it would disappear, and antimatter would be created." (http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/tom-hanks-roped-in-to-restart-hadron-collider-533467)

Please don't, Tom! Shove something else in there -- like, your lunch, or the pencil sharpener, or someone's mobile phone that won't stop going off!

Eye candy? What's that you say? Eye candy, please?! Okay, gimme a reason why not...