Quite Random

Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.

Scientists working on the world’s biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and emails from people who fear the world will end next Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up.

Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”

The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

“They phone me and say: “I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe,” said Gillies.

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider - Telegraph.

How many people who phoned the CERN scientists in tears, or making death threats, or sending abusive emails, or even resorting to legal action to try and stop the experiment, even bothered to look at the information on the LHC? That miniscule particles will be collided in a space less than the width of a human hair? That the whole test environment is chilled to cooler than the ambient temperature of space, 100 meters underground, surrounded by an awe-inspiring arsenal of instruments that will be able to study the experiment at the atomic level? That what CERN is doing next Wednesday has happened several hundred thousand times already with the bombardment of Earth by high energy particles from space, without any black holes appearing?

No. Looking at the information is too much to expect. These idiots have seen a video of the Earth imploding into itself on YouTube, maybe just watched Bruce Willis in Armageddon, and decided that the LHC is some kind of Doomsday machine. It’s not. It’s a bold, expensive, fascinating piece of research, the result of the collaboration of hundreds of scientists from over 80 countries over the last 20 years, and it could, just could, give humanity new information on the very beginnings of our existence, our creation – not unlike having a genetic blue print for the universe.

I should be sympathetic towards these people and their fears, but no. These fears are the product of deliberate, cultivated ignorance.

Humans have been wiped out in their millions for years by wars, religions, diseases and natural disasters, and most of these were the result of human ignorance, not human curiosity, and sure as hell not cosmic rays. Galileo was kept under house arrest by the Inquisition for the last years of his life by the Catholic church for suggesting that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around, and you can bet that the CERN scientists would experience a worse fate at the hands of a band of lunatics who possibly believe the Earth is six thousand years old, and really believe that the LHC will destroy us all.

Get a grip.

More broken news

A BBC News journalist this morning commented on how, during John McCain’s speech at the Republican Convention, the crowd started shouting “USA! USA! USA!” in a seemingly spontaneous fit of patriotic fervour. It made me laugh to then read Michael Tomasky’s article in the Guardian where he explained that the reason the chanting started was less to do with McCain firing up the crowd (which he failed to do) and more to do with the crown trying to drown out a protester who got onto the floor and started shouting. Always worth getting your news from more than one place, and one more example of how, just of late, I’m not entirely trusting the news from the BBC.

The news is broken.

Can someone please ban the phrase ‘credit crunch’? I’m thoroughly sick of hearing it. The news these days seems to get marketed and dumbed down to the extent that it seems we can’t be told anything unless it is phrased using catchy alliteration or less syllables that the title of a Steven Seagal film. Credit crunch! Rip off Britain! You’re too fick to read proper news!

This is how screwed up everything is - the news bombards us with the credit crunch (which sounds like some of snack bar anyway), mortgage misery, knife nightmares, terror tactics and racist rants, while TV adverts talk about cosmetic products containing demattifying microspheres and pentapolypeptides. The closest mainstream media is getting to including science in daily life is when it sells us shampoo, and when it is supposed to be informing us about important stuff, it’s talking to us like we’re four.

Take today’s thesun.co.uk homepage - alliteration used in the following headlines:

• Dramatic First Pics of Massacre Mansion Blaze
• Megan Fox Gets Wet and Wild
• Whose saggy skin is this?
• Sugar fears for future of footy
• Brad is Burning hot in new role
• Cheryl chops Charlotte chapter (no, really)

And precisely one headline of any relevance to anyone. The Sun also has a headline, Lily Allen’s Kidnap Terror. I didn’t realise someone had kidnapped her so took a look. Oh. No one has kidnapped her. The story begins like this:

LILY ALLEN has revealed how she feared for her best friend’s life after he was kidnapped for almost a week.

The singer, who went out without her bra on again yesterday, was worried sick for her pal.

The story is accompanied by a photo of Allen, not wearing a bra, with the caption ‘Bit nippy out here… braless Lily Allen’. Nippy? Oh, clever. Nipples. Let’s try rewriting the article the way the Sun might as well be putting it:

LILY ALLEN’S TITS! WHAHEY!!! EH? EH? WHAHEY!!! TITS!!!! WE LOVE IT!! TITS!! WHAHEY!!!

Oh yeah and sumfink abaaat kidnapping… TIIIIIIIITS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What does Lily Allen’s lack of underwear have to do with anything? Nothing. Other than the cretins that write this stuff seem to think everyone wants to know about the contents of Lily Allen’s shirt. Sat on the tube today I looked down the carriage to see dozens, dozens of people, all reading either London Lite (sic) or The London Paper. Headlines included something about… Lily Allen. For pity’s sake, this rubbish is given out free every day, nearly two million copies worth of it.

It’s not snobbish to expect better, because I’m pretty sure that people can understand more sophisticated language than you’d find on the side of a crisp packet. Can’t they?

London 2012 - The Comedy Games

I find myself torn between patriotic pride at the crapness of the London 2012 performance at the Beijing Olympics handover ceremony, and shame at the crapness of the English performance at the Beijing Olympics handover ceremony. But I actually feel more pride, and it’s the Chinese I have to thank.

Looking at it, it was never going to be possible to match the spectacle of the Chinese presentation, with thousands of performers moving in perfect unison, amazing costumes, towering towers, fireworks bigger than exploding Death Stars and everything else. It looked every billion of the however many billion dollars the Chinese spent on it. But it was weird. The CGI fireworks. The little girl who mimed the song because the girl that actually sang wasn’t pretty enough. The great big huge, cheesy, completely artificial grins on the faces of many of the performers. It was somewhere beyond stage-managed perfection and into Stepford Wives territory. It occasionally felt they like they should have done it all in CGI for the amount of ‘heart’ you felt in it.

Then the red double decker bus came trundling on when the flag was handed to Boris Johnson. Never mind that Boris looked like the head boy being given the flag to wave for his house at a swimming competition.

The girl who was selected by Blue Peter viewers to appear walked over the backs of, presumeably, some illegal immigrants. Why? Leona Lewis, perched like a budgie on a tiny plinth like David Blaine started singing ‘Gonna give you my love’. Eh? Someone was playing a violin next to David Beckham when he booted the football into the crowd. Whaaat? All this confused the hell out of the Chinese. And me. And then the Chinese press wrote about it as reported in the Independent, and it all made sense.

The Titan Sports Daily contrasted the “neatness” of the Chinese performers with the “outrageous outfits” worn by the Britons. Unlike the Chinese custom which tends not to reveal their weakness to the outsiders, “the British seem to like to laugh about their stupidity in a funny way”, it said.

Yep. Got us there.

“During the performance, when the London bus pulled over, all the passengers waiting for the bus rushed into the door at the same time, which truly damaged the British image,” it added.

I thought there were so many worse things damaging the British image, but this made me giggle.

It also complained that Lewis and Page were not A-list celebrities. “Unfortunately, the singer and Jimmy Page are absolutely not famous enough to be known or recognised by millions of the Chinese audiences. As for David Beckham, he was supposed to kick the football towards the red circle in the centre of the ‘Bird’s Nest’. In the end, just like any of his penalties at a football match, he totally missed it. He kicked the ball to the left and dropped in the crowd, then was picked up by a lucky Chinese volunteer who would not let go of the ball.”

I was under the impression that David Beckham’s penalty kicks were quite good. The Chinese may have been watching an imposter with a similarly uncharismatic wife.

And this is it. Someone organising the London 2012 presentation must have said at some point “We aren’t going to top anything the Chinese have done, so let’s embrace the crapness. Do you think we’d get away with a bus that’s a Transformer except it transforms into a privet hedge?”.

So I really hope the theme for London 2012 is comedy. One of the best suggestions I have heard so far is from my mother who reckons a winning number would be Boris Johnson tapdancing at the opening ceremony. Charlie Brooker’s got some great ideas including Bernie Clifton on his ostrich. Peter Kay could be hired to shout ‘wha-hey!’ every time a hurdler goes over a hurdle. Chas and Dave could sit in the middle of the stadium singing ‘yack yack rabbit rabbit yack yack rabbit rabbit’ while Will Young dodges javelins. The marathon should be a fun run. Let’s see how fast that Kenyan fellow moves dressed as a gigantic pirate.

London 2012 could be the greatest, richest vein yet of comedy gold. Gold I tells you.

Bitch bitch bitch ah I’ll be home again then

[This blog entry deleted. It contained a lot of complaining, not much humour. I read it again and bored myself half to death.]

Shopkeepers of the world unite

I drove mum to Weeley today to do a funeral. Weeley is a village in Essex. There’s a crematorium, and a pub, and nothing else but houses. Well, there was an old guy wandering around wearing only shorts. In that respect, it was like Cambodia, but only in the old-guy-wearing-only-shorts respect, because I came to the conclusion that Cambodia is better than Weeley.

I only wanted something to eat. A year in Siem Reap and I’m accustomed to walking a short way and seeing a shop with a big orange ice box out the front and bags of things you can eat hanging from the ceiling. Weeley has conversely got bugger all except the smell of old beer drifting from the pub over the head of a lone man with a black Harley Davidson. And an old guy wandering around in his shorts. The people in Weeley, and practically everywhere else in this country, have totally failed to open a shop in the front of their house so I can snack when I want to and I’m stuck in a strange village with nothing to do for forty minutes. Most people obviously think they’re too bloody special to be shopkeepers, they’d rather sit inside watching TV.

My landlady in Cambodia opened a shop out the front of the house and ran it with a few of the other ladies from nearby houses, and they didn’t even give a monkeys if they sold anything, it just let them sit on the street where they could pass the time nattering and observing everything and everyone that went past. This was a creche for biddies and neighbourhood watch nerve center as much as a retail establishment.

So I salute the small shopkeepers that are there when you need them, and am going to start looking for a big orange ice box to put outside the front of my house.

Don’t screw it up, brain

I had a job interview yesterday for a job I really, really want, and as has been the case on several occasions before, thinking back, I can hardly remember a word I said. What does however worry me is that I think I might have come across as an eight-year old with ADD who just sucked a triple espresso through a whole packet of Tim Tams. I’m really hoping I didn’t arse it up but I really have no idea. I’m mainly just wishing I had a hard drive in my brain so I could wind back and check my answers because on vague recollection some of them might have been cobblers. I can do this job, I know I can, but I’m like Homer Simpson asking my brain not to screw it up for me.

Don’t screw it up, brain.