Discovering the Higgs Boson in Four Oaks

Great excitement this week on Tuesday as scientists at the Large Hadron Collidor in Switzerland announced they were one step nearer discovering the elusive Higgs Boson.

To find it researchers sift through showers of sub atomic particles in the hope that Higgs will turn up and hey presto we will understand at last why things like quarks leptons photons and the like do what they do.

I can save them the bother. This week the Higgs Boson was discovered in Four Oaks right here in the Tardis.  Like all great scientific discoveries (you know the kind of thing, Archimedes and his bath and Newton and his apple) it sort of happened by chance.

 I walked into the front room and saw Teapot with a strange instrument in her hand which I now know to be a duster. I cannot remember seeing one here before. There was a sort of shaking before my eyes and a host of particles appeared. It was plain they had settled here for light years and perhaps even from shortly after the Big Bang itself. In the midst of this mass there was one with its own unique trail or signature. The Higgs Boson beyond doubt.

But there is no point rushing round here to see for yourself. Sadly there is no knowing when this phenomenon will be repeated. Even Einstein at his best could not write an equation which would predict when the duster might reappear.

So until then we will have to make do with the efforts of the LHC in Switzerland. Unless they find a duster.

There is an unexpected item in the bagging area

There is something rather 1984 let alone 2011 about being spoken to by a machine. All that deluge of techno babble from the Fat Controller at New Street Station about extinguishing smoking materials and not riding my bike on the platform or leaving baggage unattended which waits for me tomorrow morning like the dawn chorus.

So I must say I felt rather like an initiate into the resistance when I went to Sainsburys yesterday with Curly Al and he rather nonchalantly showed me the off button on the self service console. The store commandant was reduced to silence. No more unexpected items in the bagging area for me!!

The sense of power was tangible.

Sadly peace was shattered when Teapot announced she wanted Father Christmas to bring her a satnav this year. Aaagh. The thought of verbal violence in the car between Teapot and the sultry tones of the machine navigator is too much to bear.

After all as I have said to her if Father Christmas has managed all these years without one surely she can do the same.

You have clocks.....

.....and we have time. So goes the old African proverb. But for Timelords we have time but also need clocks and the odd calendar to remind us of the day of the week (this week last week next week) as well as the hour of the day! And especially this Timelord who finds a bike ride in Sutton Park a challenge to his direction finder!

The swankiest lawyers offices have several clocks in the reception area telling the time in London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing and so on. A Timelord's paradise!

Not to be outdone we now have clocks in the Tardis set to Dubai time and Brazil time (Brasilia). My Dubai clock sits next to the photo of my friends Bill and Diana and my Brazil clock is in the office and reminds me of our friends Mike and Daveen in Trapiah.

Of course for Teapot every time is cup of tea time!

Vingt et Vin

Ever felt like M Sarkozy looks? Did someone ask when the Greek takeaway was coming? Or is it true that M. Obama said it was a good thing daughter Guilia had inherited his mother's and not his father's looks?

Fitting though that the group of 20 nations met at Cannes as our friends across the water have a peculiar love for numero vingt. Teachers grade their students out of 20 and not 10. And Paris has 20 boroughs or arrondissements. No such thing as a marathon or half marathon in the capital but the annual race is the 20 kilometres de Paris. We have a free newspaper called the Metro but the Gallic equivalent is called "vingt minutes". Why is the main TV news the "Journal de 20 heures"? What do they do with the other 4?

There is something deeply amiss about a nation which needs to take its shoes and socks off to count in 20s when reaching quatre-vingt? I am told it is not that long ago that deux-vingts and trois-vingts was still in use.

Or maybe the answer is incredibly simple. Vingt is just another way of saying vin and les francais can never have enough of it: vingt deux, vin rouge, vin trois, vingt quatre vin blanc......

Closing St Pauls

Teapot has almost finished the French translation of the godfather's diary of his experience in the blitz. The importance of St Paul's Cathedral to Londoners at that time comes through loud and clear.

Defiant above the flames this photograph was taken from the roof of the Daily Mail building in Tudor Street by Herbert Mason. It is one of the iconic pictures of the blitz. Churchill insisted that every available fire fighting resource should be deployed to save it. There was the  unexploded bomb that struck the cathedral on 12 September 1940 and caused a 100 foot crater when later exploded in a remote location.

So today's news that the Cathedral has been closed for "health and safety" reasons because of the Occupy London Stock Exchange encampent shows how far we have progressed over the last 70 years. Sunday services have been suspended for only the first time since 1941 when Adolf and his henchmen managed it for 4 days.

Whatever the merits of the protesters' cause that seems to me like one spectacular own goal .

Granddad Ste'en tells a story

Fireman Sam was looking forward to his new home.

 It wasn't his fault his lodgings had caught fire on Wednesday morning. It was very embarrassing nonetheless. There he was having some well deserved shut eye after the night shift and before you could say Naughty Norman he was rescued by Station Officer Steele from an upstairs window in his birthday suit. Very comfortable too those lodgings had been these past nine months.

Still Fireman Sam had heard all sorts of good things about his new des res. No one had mentioned rent. There were lots of new clothes. He had lost everything in that fire.  His new landlady was known throughout Pontypandy as a whiz with the sewing machine if any of them needed altering: a nip here or a tuck there. Plenty of  marmite sandwiches too, and cider cake at last once a week. His name already on the door of his room. And he'd been told visitors always take their shoes off so as not to disturb an off duty fireman having a kip.

What more could he want.

A tale of two cities

In which city was a man executed last week for the murder of a policeman in 1989, protesting his innocence after most of the witnesses changed their testimony? All appeals were rejected as far as the Supreme Court and back.In which city was a woman sentenced to 10 lashes for driving a car but with her sentence overturned by the King who has just decided that women can have the vote?

Makes you think.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/us-usa-georgia-execution-idUSTRE78K2O620110922

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15102190