Higgs Boson "Had Phone Hacked"

In the sort of collision of realities that can only happen at the quantum level, James Murdoch today told the Leveson Enquiry how he missed the discovery of the Higgs Boson by one of his own newspapers.

Mr Murdoch explained how he missed the explosive information that not only had the Higgs Boson been found, but that News of the World reporters had hacked its phone. The news was buried at the bottom of a very long chain of emails, which he had not read all the way through as he had only read the bit about paying a "Mr Boson" £700,000.

"Naturally, if I had read the whole email," said Mr Murdoch, "I could have saved the countries behind the Large Hadron Collider a lot of money. After all, what's the good of a load of physicists looking for the God Particle when your private detective can give you its phone number in the morning?"

However this explains how the News of the World came up with a series of unexpected scientific scoops over the last couple of years, especially the story about the Higg's Boson's "high-energy romps" with a number of quarks. The quarks, who were unidentified, were described as having "a certain charm".

Small Drayton Collider

Inspired  by today's possible success of the Large Hadron Collider we've been doing our own experiments with high-energy particles this afternoon.

Drayton Parslow always likes to to leave his cottage windows wide open. At this time of the year he reckons that the chilliness is next to godliness, and the discomfort reminds him that he should wear two vests, thermal T-shirt, shirt, cardie, jacket and rain coat at all times. He says this keeps him warm and also - through the sheer number of layers involved - keeps temptation at bay. Although I don't reckon anyone's gonna be lining up to tear his thermal T-shirt off no matter how warm it is, frankly.

But the open windows gave us the chance to try our experiment. We all lined up outside his front window, and threw tennis balls into his living room as fast as we could.

We had a mixed bag of results. Some traces we got at high frequencies suggested we'd hit several vases, and possibly also Marjorie. But four or five of the balls came back out through the side window - and one came straight back out at the front.

Our belief is that the large deviations of these tennis balls are proof that Drayton was standing in the living room at the time, and they ricocheted off him. However at the moment we're giving it no more than a three sigma level of confidence. We're going to go back tomorrow, in the best scientific tradition, to see if we can repeat the result.

Global Warming Fraud Exposed

I'm sure there's nothing in it.

The claim that there exists the following footage  of Sir David Attenborough's new series:

"And we can see how global warming results in this kind of tragedy. This polar bear has been swimming across open water for three days, looking for food."

The camera pans out to show Sir David, on a boat, hanging a fish on a string six inches above the nose of a polar bear. The boat is slowing circling round in a large pool in a zoo. Some baffled penguins keep well out of the way, aware that their presence in-shot would be anatopistic.

As I say, I'm sure there's nothing in it. But I'm keeping my eye on YouTube, just in case.

Nativity of Edvard Munch

Archdruid: Born in the gathering bleakness of midwinter, as you might expect, we gather here tonight to celebrate the nativity of Edvard Munch. It's gonna be a Scream.

All: Edvard? You sure you mean Edvard?


Archdruid: Yes. I reckon so. It's Norwegian, innit? You mean you're gonna let me get away with that lousy "Scream" joke and pick me up on authentic Norwegian spelling?

All: Right you are, Eileen. Edvard it is.


Reading


Hnaef:  "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature."

All: That's a bit bleak, innit?


Archdruid: It's Munch. The "Scream" bloke. What did you expect?

All: Some nice water lilies?


Archdruid: Nope. That was Monet.

All: Then show us the Monet. We're fed up with Munch. He's just too.... 


Archdruid: Too Munch?


The Beaker Folk may throw pebbles at the Archdruid.

RefleXions....

So the results are in and you - the Great British Public (minus we, who didn't) have spoken.
"Girls Who Can Sing a Bit" beat "Boy Who Can Sing a Bit". Which is the historic first time that a girl-group has won X-Factor. Which is good, because that's historic. "Girl Who Shouldn't Be in It" went home yesterday, while "Brittle Girl" got knocked out a couple of weeks back and "Over-sexed Jack the Lad" was thrown out for living up to his name.
We've come on a journey here. We'd previously met "Nice Camp Bloke" and "Black Soul Diva". And if we think back, there some others - do you remember "Chubby Deluded Chav" and "Person Whose Appearance was an Abdication" of the Duty to Care? And "Old Sweet Bloke with Grand-daughter"? Or was that a different programme?
No matter. Next year they'll all be back, no doubt. Their faces will have changed slightly but they'll still be recognizable. The ones who get through to Round 2 will still be the ones whose back-stories you heard before they sung. And the ones who don't go through will still have been parachuted through with no context from Planet People-We-Laugh-At.
The panel of judges will have been pruned, culled reshuffled or swept away as the case may be, with sinister Machiavellian rumours of "what really happened between Gary and Louis" carefully leaked to newspapers desperate for news stories people can understand.
And we, the Great British Public, can go on passing judgements - often quite vicious - on innocent, sometimes deluded, sometimes ambitious and talented though sometimes just plain lazy people.  Sure, if these people were animals we'd be prosecuted for cruelty. Still, it keeps us going through to Panto season. But I'm not sure it makes us better people. We've not really been on a journey - we've been sat on the couch with a pizza, a phone and a judgemental attitude. And our stereotypes have been fed to us with our pizza.

Tie-Dye Ceremony

It was indeed a wondrous Festival of Tie-Dye today. I like to think we were getting back to our roots.

I'd been feeling that with so many Christmassy themes we were starting to lose the essential heart of the Beaker ethos - that we don't particularly own any doctrines or theology at all. So we needed to do something touchy-feely and completely devoid of doctrine. In which case what could be better than tie-dye?

The Worship Focus Table was a delight - covered in nine metres of purple cloth with a beautiful yellow sunburst in the middle - the cloth was long enough to stretch to the South Door, so we could dance towards the Worship Focus along it in bare feet. It's been a bit muddy today so we left our shoes in the Great Hall, and laid out some Astroturf to get that authentic "barefoot on the wet grass" experience.

The walls were decorated with beautiful tie-dyed hangings, each resolutely abstract to avoid any doctrinal resonances. We just wanted to allow people to worship, without cluttering things up with any doctrine or presuppositions about the divine. We let the Beaker Quire have the afternoon off in case they did anything with a  dangerously high theological content, like play a hymn. Instead we programmed a PC to play notes of random lengths, in random voices, at random pitches and random intervals. It left many people with the space to develop their own thoughts and devotions. Although I did get slightly unnerved by the number of times it seemed to be playing Am6, which as we all know is the "slightly edgy chord" and also leaves me a little off-balance.

The "Ministry of the Word" part of the ceremony likewise was stripped from anything explicitly theological - like a reading from the Bible, for example. Instead Morgwn was instructed to shout random spiritual-sounding words out of a thesaurus, together with their alternative meanings. Faced with liturgical expostulations like "Dream! Vision, Imagine, Aspire, Idle" we were able to stretch into our inner beings, freed from an external framework and able to let our minds connect. Young Keith's right and left hemispheres became so connected that he was unable to remain standing and toppled over onto the carpet, but I suspect this was down to his Sunday lunchtime trip to the White Horse.

Finally, the Tibetan gong was struck, to signal the end of our Dream-time. After a reading from a Ted Hughes poem, we danced out again to the accompaniment of the nose flutes and kazoos playing "The Lazy Song." I was glad we closed with something contemporary, but now I feel spiritual yet vaguely unfulfilled. I think I may have to go and find some chocolate.

Christmas Service Stats - Unveiled

Dear Readers, every year the mainstream churches announce their Christmas service attendance. Now as you know I am no cynic. Buy my suspicion is that they are hiding a lot of the detail that people want to know.

So after much crunching of numbers from various groups over many years, I am glad to let you have this first glimpse of my research.

John the X-factor Baptist

This is the testimony John gave when they sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem. He replied and said,
"I really believe I'm going the whole way here. You've got to keep me in because this is my dream."

They said to him, "Are you Elijah?", he said "No".

They said to him, "One of the Prophets, then?" He said "No."

Then they said to him "who are you?"

He said to them, "I'm the one whose sandals you're not fit to tie.This is my destiny. I'm gonna make it as big as Moses. I'm gonna be King of the World. As long as I win the Final phone-in."

And so they put John in an advert along with the other Fore-runners, and they all recorded the Christmas single knowing that, if they won, they'd be Number 1 for Christmas.

Twelve months later, nobody could remember John the Baptist.

The Flagellants

Don't know what made me think of this, but I've just remembered the Mediaeval group known as the Flagellants.

The Flagellants seem to have arisen as a form of self-mortification, normally in response to some kind of natural disaster. In Perugia, they started whipping themselves in response to famine, while generally they seem to have become popular when the Plague broke out.

Although they thought that their self-punishment would bring God's favour, the irony was that, by wandering around the continent in the way they did, they could actually spread the very disease they thought that they were curing through their flagellation.
You could say they united Europe in its suffering.

Although the problem originated in the Mediterranean countries, Flagellants became a very popular movement across Europe. Especially in Germany, it seems, where strong punishments for national misdeeds were particulalrly popular. The countries of the British Isles, wisely, stayed out of the whole thing.

As I say, I've no idea why this occurs to me today. Just capturing the passing thought.

World's oldest mattresses found

The History Blog notes that the world's oldest mattresses have been found in South Africa, dating from c 77 thousand years ago.

I'm afraid they've missed one of the key findings. At about halfway down the archaeologists found the remains of the world's oldest teenager - those remains being a pizza box and a can of cola. When the scientists reached this layer, the teenager himself mumbled "yes, all right - I'll get up in a minute", and went back to sleep.

An Ancient Race of Priests

It is said that, back in olden days, a strange and mystic religion dominated the southern half of Britain. The shadowy priests of that religion, it is claimed, knew prayers for asking their god to change the weather, to end famine, to prevent plagues or to curse religious offenders. Today we have only the remains of their stone houses of worship. Yet their beliefs influence the names of many of our towns and villages to this day.

The Church of England.

It is said that their "vicars" had to undergo various special rituals to be fit for their tasks. Their houses were specially designed to be freezing cold, to instil discipline. They had to get up specially early on Sunday mornings - probably in the hope that the degree of sleep deprivation they suffered encouraged them to experience religious hallucinations. They had to learn to speak an ancient language which nobody understood, but everyone liked to hear. Both of their holiest books were written in this language. These days we have forgotten the names of those two books - only the letters "BCP" remain. We believe this may have been a technical term - "Basic Common Parlance", perhaps.

The "vicars" were expected to lead their religious rituals in their "churches". Churches were also a kind of memory-house of the community as, when  the followers of the religion found that their furniture was wearing out, or they were putting new pieces of carpet into their houses, the old items would be taken to the church and "laid up" in one of the back-rooms as a remembrance.

As far as we can tell from tradition, the priests were expected to be telepathic. However we only have this from a degree of anecdotal evidence, on those occasions when they failed to discern by magic what their followers were feeling. Certainly when this happened the priest was deemed to have failed, and the follower would often move to follow another priest who might be more capable of spiritual discernment. And this tension was further repeated in the repeated jokes that their followers played on the priests. As far as we can understand, their followers would request that the priests held rituals every day in the morning and evening, but then never turned up themselves. This must have been some kind of "holy joke" as surely the priests would have spotted that the laugh was on them in the end.

We are also aware that the Church of England held a kind of Saturnalian festival every midwinter.  In a kind of debauched ritual of the "Lord of Misrule" kind, round about the 27th of December, the religious communities were left in the care of the lay people.  Meanwhile the priests went to the seaside for a fortnight.

From those priests whose bodies were conveniently preserved through the over-application of incense or port, we have an idea of the kind of special clothing that they were expected to wear. In the case of men, these were tweedy jackets of a kind that had died out among the rest of the population in the 1950s; while the  women seem to have been expected to wear clothes that were mostly made of paisley. The highest-ranking male priests appear to have worn purple shirts, but so far we have been unable to find any evidence of what their female equivalents may have worn.

The last priests were wiped out from these islands by the invasion of the "New Atheists". Facing the unaccustomed new weapons of satire, scorn and the terrifying "straw men", there was no way the priests could resist. 500 years ago their ancestors had stood firm despite the fires of Oxford and Smithfield - but now the weakened race could not resist. Tradition has it that the last priests tried to turn the weapons of the New Atheists against them, arguing that "deep down all paths lead to the same place, and in a very real sense I think you'll find we're violently agreeing."

These days, of course, some cutting-edge Archaeologists argue that the "Church of England" never really existed. But I like to think there is something in the old legends. I know we find it hard to understand what their beliefs were. But then so, I suspect, did they.