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The Iran hostage thriller Argo was a surprise best-drama winner at Sunday's Golden Globes, beating out the Civil War epic Lincoln, which had emerged as an awards-season favorite.

Argo also claimed the directing prize for Ben Affleck, a prize that normally bodes well for an Academy Award win — except he missed out on an Oscar nomination this time.

Affleck's now in an unusual position during Hollywood's long awards season, taking home the top filmmaking trophy at the second-highest film honors knowing he does not have a shot at an Oscar.

And the night left Argo taking home the top prize at the Globes but standing as a longshot for best picture at the Feb. 24 Oscars, where films almost never win if their directors are not nominated.

In a breathless, rapid-fire speech, Affleck gushed over the names of other nominees presenter Halle Berry had read off: Steven Spielberg for Lincoln, Ang Lee for Life of Pi, Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained.

"Look, I don't care what the award is. When they put your name next to the names she just read off, it's an extraordinary thing in your life," Affleck said.

Les Miserables was named best musical or comedy, while Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway claimed acting prizes.

Besides the three wins for Les Miserables and two for Argo, the show was a mixed bag, with awards spreads around a number of films. Lincoln came in leading with seven nominations but lost all but one, for Daniel Day-Lewis as best actor in the title role of Lincoln.

"If I had this on a timeshare basis with my wonderful gifted colleagues, I might just hope to keep it for one day of the year, and I'd be happy with that," said Day-Lewis, who previously won a Globe for There Will Be Blood and is a two-time Oscar winner with a strong shot at a third.

Zero Dark Thirty star Jessica Chastain won the Globe for dramatic actress as a CIA agent obsessively pursuing Bin Laden.

Other acting prizes went to Jennifer Lawrence as best musical or comedy actress for the oddball romance Silver Linings Playbook and Christoph Waltz as supporting actor for the slave-revenge tale Django Unchained.

Les Miserables, the musical based on Victor Hugo's classic novel earned Jackman the Globe for musical or comedy actor as tragic hero Jean Valjean. Hathaway won supporting actress as a single mom forced into prostitution.

"Thank you for this lovely blunt object that I will forevermore use as a weapon against self-doubt," Hathaway said.

Jackman was a bit hoarse from the flu, but his Globe win seemed to be the right antidote.

"I was kicking myself for not getting the flu shot, but it appears that you don't need one. I feel great," Jackman said.

But when it comes to Hollywood's highest honors, Les Miserables already has a big obstacle, also failing to earn a best-director slot for filmmaker Tom Hooper at the Feb. 24 Oscars.

Last Thursday's Oscar nominations held some shockers, including the omission of Affleck from the directing lineup, along with fellow Globe nominee Bigelow. Bigelow and Affleck also were nominated for top honors by the Directors Guild of America, whose contenders usually match up closely with the Oscar field.

Former President Bill Clinton upstaged Hollywood's elite with a surprise appearance to introduce Spielberg's Civil War epic Lincoln, which was up for best drama. The film chronicles Abraham Lincoln's final months as he tries to end the war and find common ground in a divided Congress to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.

Lincoln's effort was "forged in a cauldron of both principle and compromise," Clinton said. "This brilliant film shows us how he did it and gives us hope that we can do it again."

Amy Poehler, co-host of the Globes with Tina Fey, gushed afterward, "Wow, what an exciting special guest! That was Hillary Clinton's husband!"

Lawrence won as best actress in a musical or comedy for her role as a troubled widow in a shaky new relationship. The Globe winners in musical or comedy categories often aren't factors at the Oscars, which tend to favor heavier dramatic roles.

But Silver Linings Playbook is a crowd-pleasing comic drama with deeper themes than the usual comedy. And Lawrence — a 2010 Oscar nominee for her breakout film Winter's Bone who shot to superstardom with The Hunger Games — delivers a nice mix of humor and melancholy.

"What does this say? I beat Meryl," Lawrence joked as she looked at her award, referring to fellow nominee and multiple Globe winner Meryl Streep. Lawrence went on to thank her mother for believing in her and her father for making her maintain a sense of humor.

Waltz won supporting actor for his role as a genteel bounty hunter who takes on an ex-slave as apprentice.

The win was Waltz's second supporting-actor prize at the Globes, both of them coming in Tarantino films. Waltz's violent but paternal and polite character in Django Unchained is a sharp contrast to the wickedly bloodthirsty Nazi he played in his Globe and Oscar-winning role in Tarantino's 2009 tale Inglourious Basterds.

"Let me gasp," said Waltz, whose competition included Django co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. "Quentin, you know that my indebtedness to you and my gratitude knows no words."

Tarantino won the screenplay prize for Django Unchained. He thanked his cast and also the group of friends to whom he reads work-in-progress for reaction.

"You guys don't know how important you are to my process. I don't want input. I don't want you to tell me if I'm doing anything wrong. Heavens forbid," Tarantino said. "When I read it to you, I hear it through your ears, and it lets me know I'm on the right track."

The Scottish tale Brave won for best animated film. It was the sixth win for Disney's Pixar Animation unit in the seven years since the Globes added the category.

Austrian director Michael Haneke's old-age love story Amour, a surprise best-picture nominee for the Oscars, won the Globe for foreign-language film. The top prize winner at last May's Cannes Film Festival, Amour is a grim yet moving portrait of an elderly woman tended by her husband as she is incapacitated by age.

Pop star Adele and co-writer Paul Epworth won for best song for their theme tune to the James Bond adventure Skyfall.

"Oh, my God!" Adele gushed repeatedly, before offering gratitude to the group that presents the Globes. "I'd like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press. I never thought I'd say that."

The prize for musical score went to Mychael Danna for the lost-at-sea tale Life of Pi.

Show hosts Fey and Poehler, who co-starred in the 2008 big-screen comedy Baby Mama, had a friendly rivalry at the Globes. Both were nominated for best actress in a TV comedy series, Fey for 30 Rock and Poehler for Parks and Recreation.

"Tina, I just want to say that I very much hope that I win," Poehler told Fey at the start of the show.

"Thank you. You're my nemesis. Thank you," Fey replied.

Neither won. Lena Dunham claimed the comedy series Globe for Girls.

After that, Fey and Poehler showed up on stage with cocktail glasses, Fey joking that it was time to start drinking.

"Everyone's getting a little loose now that we're all losers," Poehler said.

Among other TV winners, Julianne Moore won a best-actress Globe for her role as Sarah Palin in "Game Change," which also was picked as best TV miniseries or movie and earned Ed Harris a supporting-actor prize. Best actor in a miniseries or movie went to Kevin Costner for "Hatfields & McCoys." "Homeland" was named best TV drama series, and its stars Claire Danes and Damian Lewis received the dramatic acting awards. Maggie Smith won as supporting actress for Downton Abbey.

There are those who say "just because you can doesn't mean you should," and there are those who try to respond to that, but they can't, because their mouths are full of deep-fried bacon.

Robert, his daughter Talia, and I went to Weiner And Still Champion, a restaurant just north of Chicago, to try some.

Talia: It's like they asked themselves "how do you make bacon more unhealthy?" and then they did it.

Ian: It was this, or sharpen it into little bacon blades and start stabbin'.

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Maybe some readers recall Immanuel Velikovsky's 1950 mega bestseller Worlds in Collision. The book, which caused a real sensation at the time, was an attempt to "explain" many of the big cataclysms and "miracles" recorded in mythic and folkloric narratives of ancient cultures as real astrophysical events. Velikovsky's thesis was that narratives of floods and mass destructions were not just allegorical or metaphorical but records of events that did take place. Mythic and biblical catastrophism had a historical and a scientific value to them.

In Velikovsky's theory, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a kind of comet sometime around the 15th century BCE. Its periodic passage by Earth caused all sorts of havoc. His mythic inspiration came from Greek mythology, in particular the fable where Athena (Venus) was ejected from the head of Zeus (Jupiter). In spite of its popular appeal, the astronomical community summarily dismissed Velikovsky's ideas, a key player having been none other than Carl Sagan, who knew a lot about Venus and its atmosphere. In any case, Velikovsky's celestial catastrophism follows on the footsteps of many claims of apocalyptic endings due to upheavals in the skies. And even if his thesis was unfounded, bad things can and do happen from time to time due to collisions between "worlds." Think, for example, of the demise of the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago due a collision with a seven-mile wide asteroid.

Still, Velikovsky's doomsday imaginings are a child's play compared to some catastrophic ideas that modern cosmologists have been putting forward. I don't mean the devastation caused by a collision with an asteroid or comet, but of whole universes colliding with one another, including with our own.

Welcome to cosmic catastrophism.

The universe began its existence 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. However, current observations indicate that this expansion wasn't always at the same rate. Right at the beginning of time, the cosmos underwent a short period of hyper-accelerated expansion called inflation. According to this theory, proposed by MIT cosmologist Alan Guth in 1981, our whole universe could have emerged from a tiny patch of space that was stretched like a rubber band by the enormous factor of one hundred trillion trillion times (1026) in a fraction of a second. The universe we observe today fits within this stretched region, like an island in an ocean.

Now imagine that other portions of space, neighbors to that tiny patch that gave rise to our universe, also got stretched at different rates and at different times. We would have a universe filled with island-universes, each with its own history and possibly even types of matter, etc. This ocean of island-universes is called the multiverse.

Since physics is an empirical science, any hypothesis needs to be tested before being accepted by the community. This is as true for a ball rolling down a hill as for Guth's inflating universe or the multiverse. For the ball, we know how to apply Newton's laws of motion to describe its rolling and the results come out in excellent agreement with observations. Cosmic inflation predicts that our universe is geometrically flat (or almost) like the surface of a table but in three dimensions; it also predicts that space should be filled with radiation with a uniform temperature, as bathwater fills a bathtub. These two predictions have been confirmed, although a skeptic could argue that inflation was designed to accommodate these two observational facts about the universe. To its merit, inflation also offers an explanation as to how galaxies were first born and then grouped together in clusters, something that no other theory can do satisfactorily. Cosmologists like inflation a lot for its simplicity and range of explanation.

Since we can't receive information from outside our universe (or better, from outside our "horizon", the sphere that delimits how far light travelled in 13.7 billion years), how can we possibly test the existence of other universes "out there"? This has been a sticky point with the multiverse and indeed, the notion that the multiverse extends perhaps to spatial infinity is untestable. Infinity makes sense mathematically and may even be realized in Nature; but we will never know for sure.

However, we can do the next best thing, and see if at least neighboring universes exist. Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping, if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision. These perturbations would be registered in the cosmic radiation and could, in principle, be observed. Matthew Kleban from New York University and his collaborators, and Anthony Aguirre from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his have been studying what kinds of signals would be left over from these dramatic events. Kleban found a unique signature, concentric rings where the radiation temperature would show a characteristic fluctuation. On top of the rings the radiation itself would be polarized, that is, it would oscillate in tandem in a specific direction of the sky. At least for now, no telltale rings have been found in the cosmic radiation, although the European satellite Planck promises to deliver more accurate polarization data that may shed light on the issue.

The bad news is that the probability of a collision with another universe increases with time: we could disappear at any instant: live life to the fullest!

The good news is that, although the multiverse as a whole may not be a testable scientific hypothesis, with some luck we may at least know if one or a few other universes exist. An observational test distinguishes science from idle speculation.

I will not spoil the reader's pleasure in watching the relationship between mother and daughter unfold, including a confrontation between 9-year-old Sonia and her mother, who locked herself in a dark room for months after her husband's death. But this is a story of human triumph, not just for the future justice, but for her mother, for her doctor brother and, though it may be a cliche, for the American dream.

It is a story too of Latin life in America, rich with descriptions of food and parties at her grandmother's house, complete with dancing, recitations of poetry and even forbidden seances, calling forth the spirits.

Sotomayor's tale of moving from the poverty of the projects to life at Princeton and Yale is entertaining and informative, reminding us that especially in the pre-Internet era, but probably now too, children whose parents live meager paycheck-to-paycheck lives can be amazingly isolated. Sotomayor didn't know what "the Ivies" were when a friend told her she should apply to them. The nuns at Cardinal Spellman High School suggested she apply to Fordham. But she initially lusted for Harvard after seeing Love Story, and she disdained Fordham, admitting ruefully in the book that she might have been more willing to apply there if she had known that many of the campus scenes in the movie were actually filmed at Fordham. In the end though, Harvard terrified her when she visited the school for an interview. It was so alien that she literally fled.

Later, her naivete leads to some hilarious scenes at Princeton, as when she throws away an invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa, believing it to be a "scam." Only the intervention of an eagle-eyed friend, who saw the letter in the trash, saved the day.

Sotomayor goes to considerable lengths to say she is not "self-made." She candidly describes her struggles and failures, starting with how she learned to study in middle school: She asked the girl who got the most gold stars. But it soon becomes clear that while she needed help from lots of people to succeed, her own devotion to work and discipline have been the mainstays of her life.

At Princeton, she quickly realized she was deficient in English and in writing skills, prompting her to design for herself a crash course in writing and reading the classics. It was not the first time she would fall on her face but pick herself up and work like a demon to improve. In her first legal job, as a summer associate in a big New York firm, she failed miserably. After law school she describes her beginning panics as a "duckling" handling misdemeanors in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and how she transformed herself into a top felony prosecutor. After four years, though, she decided to leave, fearing she was losing her humanity. "I could see the signs that I too was hardening, and I didn't like what I saw. Even my sympathy for the victims, once such an inexhaustible driver of my efforts, was being depleted by the daily spectacle of misdeeds and misery."

She is similarly candid in describing her marriage and divorce.

Sotomayor writes with a sense of humor. Describing her post-divorce life, she observes wryly, "Probably nothing constrained my dating life as much as living at home with my mother. To hear her screaming from the bedroom, 'Sonia, it's midnight. You have to work tomorrow!' did not exactly make me feel like Mary Tyler Moore. "

For the reader, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Sotomayor personality turns out to be the way she confronts her fears and failures. She doesn't do well in a course, so she enrolls in a harder one on the same subject. She is afraid of swimming, so she takes swimming lessons and becomes a regular in the pool. She is a clumsy klutz, so she decides to soothe the heartache of a failed romance by taking Salsa lessons and learns to dance. Even her looks and clothes — something she always claimed to have no interest in because she couldn't compete with her stylish mother — she eventually learns to deal with. She takes shopping lessons from a friend and gets her own style.

In the forward to her book, Sotomayor writes: "I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability. I will be judged as a human being by what readers find here. There are hazards to openness, but they seem minor compared with the possibility that some readers may find comfort, perhaps even inspiration, from a close examination of how an ordinary person, with strengths and weaknesses like anyone else, has managed an extraordinary journey."

It is an apt observation, except that after reading the book, few will think she is ordinary.