Stranglet Than Paradise (or Pair o' dice)

And I quote, from The New York Times of June 27, 2008:

"Calling its claims 'overly speculative and not credible' and saying it is too late anyway [emphasis added], lawyers for the federal government argued this week that a so-called doomsday suit intended to prevent the startup of the world's most powerful particle accelerator should be thrown out.

In the lawsuit filed in March in Federal District Court in Honolulu, Walter L. Wagner, a retired radiation safety expert, and Luis Sancho, a Spanish science writer, contended that the Large Hadron Collider could create microscopic black holes that could wind up eating Earth [emphasis mine, but can you blame me?], or other dangerous particles known as strangelets -- a sort of contagious dead matter -- or so-called magnetic momopoles that could catalyze the destruction of ordinary matter."

The collider is being built outside Geneva, Switzerland, by the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, with American collaboration.

Let's all just take a breath here and pause, shall we?

Oh. The story was on page A17. Either it was too hot for page A1 or too unimportant. After all, what's the Big Deal anyway? What's a little apocalyptic angst compared to, say, the importance of Britney Spears's latest custody battle? Or Cindy McCain's hair?

Where was I?

This is either a topic you want to Google like crazy, or else simply log off your computer, say your prayers, and kiss your sorry ass goodbye.

And what would you Google anyway? "Large Hadron Collider"? Or "Instant Acts of Contrition"?

In the face of a doomsday scenario, leave it to me, The Laughorist, a.k.a. Pawlie Kokonuts, to seize on semantics. Don't you just love the term strangelets? I do. (No, it's not what I call my kids.)

There's a movie script here somewhere for, yes, of course, Dr. Strangelet.

Anyway, pleasant dreams. Carry on. Don't mind me; just blogging.

p.s. It's a good thing dyslexia didn't kick in; then we'd have the Large Hardon Collider. Now that would be truly dangerous!