"right at the boundary of where you might get a vague hint of something."

Okay, this isn't going to be a 100% comedy or humor related blog.  I'm going to just write about random crap.  Sometimes people will ask me where all this random crap that I puke out comes from, either in day-to-day conversation, or after watching my tangent-out on the stage.  And the truth is, I have a LOT of voices in my head muttering crap all the time.  If you've ever seen the Harry Potter movies, the last 3 or 4, and there's the house elves that wander around cleaning while muttering crap to itself - picture about 30 of those bad boys rumbling around in your head... Like Einstein said - give an unlimited number of monkeys an unlimited number of typewriters and an unlimited number of bananas and an unlimited amount of time and eventually they'll produce Shakespeare.  And a lot of poo.

I read random crap a lot, on the internet, on the toilet, on my phone.  Usually all at the same time.  Today, I read a story, and I was amazed by a quote from Joe Incandela, a top physicist at CERN, the great physics think tank Europe.  These guys at CERN are clearly smart.  Like Rainman smart.  And our pal Joe is no exception.  He is a top pointy-hat at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which, despite it's name and location, is actually a darned good school for physicists to come from.  He spent his college years chasing tail in Chicago and said, screw it, it's not cold enough, so he then got himself appointed to CERN.  Having chased significant French Alps and Swiss tail, he got himself smarter, and is currently the Spokesman for the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider.  For those of you not in the know, the LHC is the 'shit' in the world of atom smashers.  For those of you still not in the know, atom smashers are cool geeky things, the kind of which Lex Luthor or Wile E. Coyote would employ to do harm to Superman or the Road Runner.  The LHC is by far cooler than the Medium Hadron Collider, and totally destroys the coolness factor of the Small Hadron Collider.  Not to be left out, the original, Hadron Collider (Or OHC) is still considered cool, but is now only used by Junior College physicists.

The smart people are trying to 'smash atoms' at each other at super high-speed to see what happens when atoms mate outside of mating season.  Anyone with a limp grasp on history and WWII knows that the Japanese are very familiar with what happens, but hey, these guys need proof.  Actually, they're looking for something called the Higgs bosun. 

The what?  The Higgs bosun (not to be confused with Higg's Bosun, a naval support officer for Admiral Higgs in the Royal British Navy), a particle of subatomic size that is theorized to be the building blocks of our physical universe.  Named after Peter Higgs, an Edinburgh University physicist, the Higgs boson is crucial to understanding the origin of mass. Shortly after the big bang, it is thought that many particles had no mass, but became heavy later on thanks to the Higgs field. Any particles that interact with this field are given mass.  If you watch movies, it is essentially the "God Particle" that caused Tom Hanks all that trouble in  "Angels and Demons."

Follow all that?  Good.  So you'd think that all these braniacs would be good for quotes, right?  Give us some fantastic explanation of what all this means, and what they've spent 18 BILLION Euros searching for over the past 10 years.  Sure, they could be curing cancer, ending world hunger, or even kicking butt on Jeopardy, but no, they're pointing flashlights at each other in the dark making 'voimng voimgn' sounds when the beams strike.  Maybe more than that, I don't really know, I haven't been invited.  All I know about physics is that according to Wikipedia.org it's a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force.   More broadly, it's the general analysis of nature, conducted to better understand how the universe behaves.

All heady stuff, which if cool, especially when you're job is researching things that may or may not exist.  It's even more cool when nobody knows what exactly it is you do, or how to grade the quality of your work.  In Academia they rely on what you publish, what you share with others, and the occasional "E=MC squared"
to prove you're not just chasing tail. 

Today, in a widely published story from CERN, our pal Joe Incandela told the world that they hadn't quite found the Higgs bosun, but they've seen signs that it exists.  Or they've seen signs that it doesn't exist.  Or they've seen signs that it might exist.  Or it might not exists.  They've seen hints that there are signs they might or might not have seen that would imply to suggest maybe it is possible it is not imaginary.  Actually, what he said was they were "right at the boundary of where you might get a vague hint of something."

To me, he's describing what I call the Fart bosun.  It's when you walk into an area that someone else had farted in, but you're not quite sure.  It MIGHT be a fart, it might be something someone stepped in.  The air is just not right.  You're pretty sure if you keep walking in the same direction you're going to be certain, but right now, you're not.  Or you walk into a room and there's seven or eight people, and one of them might have farted based on the looks the others have, but nobody's called him on it yet.  By observing how the others in the room are reacting to that which you can't detect tells you that something has occurred, a 'small bang' of sorts, but still, YOU don't KNOW.  You can do more research, perhaps get a grant to determine once and for all the range of a fart, but at this point, you know someone let one rip.

I'm no physicist, nor have I ever played one on TV, but I can make up bullshit quotes that are far better than what my buddy Joe did.  And heck, I'd even give some salty details.  Take this:

"After years of hard research, we know we're going to be announcing something in the near future that will reflect that effort, and will reward everyone involved in this endeavor, and forever shape the future of research like this moving forward.  In the meantime, enjoy the punch and pie."