End Times

This is a picture of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and France (it's really big). It's a particle accelerator which will begin smashing particles together on October the 21st of this year. You might want to pencil that date into your calendar since that will surely be the day we rip a hole in time/space or at least open the Hell Mouth.


Above is the CMS Detector which... detects CMS's, duh. (Actually it's a 7 story tall machine that detects the particles.) The ring the particles are shot through is 27 kilometres long or... how many miles for my American friends? Um, it's this big:

Ok, it's kinda hard to see the ring. Squint. Oh, 17 miles. To keep those particles moving it uses 1600 superconducting magnets each of which weigh over 27 tonnes. Like I said, it's really big. And all those big magnets need to be kept cool to work properly so the whole thing is flooded with 96 tonnes of liquid helium which will drop the temperature to -271 degrees Celsius (-456 F).
Why am I telling you all of this? Because I'm a geek for this shit. I don't even know what it does aside from crashing particles together at high speeds and seeing what they do. Obviously this is very important to somebody since it must of cost a bajillion dollars to build. Whatever, I'm a boy and we dig this stuff. Go to the Big Picture to see some more pics, they are impressive. And if you're not impressed with Justice League style super weapons (it's not a weapon, but totally looks like one, right?) you should check out the Big Picture anyway if you've never heard of it.

Sunday and Inevitability

I love it when I'm trying to upload photos to Blogger and it takes so long I can't even remember what the fuck I was going to blog about in the first place. And what the hell is with the first picture? It looks great on my computer but like ass here? Whatever, it took so long to upload I'm not going to delete it now.



And speaking of frustration... This is what yesterday started out like. It was a sunny pink and blue flowery kinda morning. Or a Siberian something or other (not Forget Me Nots so shut up with that) and Virginia something something should-have-kept-those-tags kinda morning. Full of promise and hope.



Full of cute children doing cute things. Cute children who were apparently possessed by aliens this week because they were so well behaved and nice their parents did not know what to do with them. Parents who just decided to go with it and enjoy because inevitably it would end.



So then it was off for a pleasant lunch. Mmm, ginger sauce. What would I not eat with a little ginger sauce? Road kill? Nope, I'd eat that too. Plum sauce, meh.



Then inevitability caught up with us and it all went to hell. If you happened to be on Main Street in Vancouver yesterday and were passed by a light blue Caravan full of screaming banshees, we apologize. You probably thought the Hell Mouth had just opened, and you were right. Luckily for you though it was inside a mini-van heading south as fast as the law would permit... and then some. I'd like to say all was well once we reached home, but it wasn't. Some solitary confinement was dealt out, a hand full of Advil was taken and screaming carried on until it just got boring.

Ah, Sunday.