peace, love, and particle physic(ist)s

Midnight, two days ago: Kenny and I jump CERN's Meyrin campus, out on Bikes into the warm French night. My head lamp (the one on my head, not on the bike) lights up the eyes of animals in the fields. Investigating the nearby industrial park we're creeped out to discover that an uncanny fraction of the parked cars have people sitting in them, loitering around sketchily. We leave the industrial park, head up into the grape fields and some kind of little village just outside CERN, debating whether some muggers are professionals while others are just hobbyists. Drink the potable water in this village, then come up upon those chateaus visible beyond the sunflower fields behind CERN. Ride through the fortifications, eventually come to a small road leading to an abandoned customs post. Sneak into France. Return CERN 01:30.

Tuesday. It's the Robin-Michelle-Kenny-Tobin (but mostly Robin-Michelle) NEU/UMICH mixer mexique (that's to rhyme with barbecue), our burrito picnic outside thirty-eight. I set up my tent for the novelty but also the full intention of sleeping in it to test out the CERN-sans-hostel experience. Wednesday 03:00. CERN Security shows up. Sous vouz plez! Parlez vouz Frances? They are quick to send me inside ("It is forbidden," they say, to sleep outside of the hostel). So much for that plan. Maybe Prevessin campus is friendlier.

In the whole vein of this MTV/TLC experience ("Real World: Switzerland") I announced the formation of "Junkyard Wars: CERN," (either "Renegade Particle Physicists" or maybe "Nuclear Physicists Without Borders" to avoid angering the media giant) a project to adopt the refuse of the world's foremost nuclear physics laboratory to our own devices. I have a bounty out on the first makeshift hot tub and disco-ball. But the crew also aims to reimplement the history of physics, and we boldly set out to have a cloud-chamber-construction festivity. We have an isopropanol task force, a shock-and-awe dry ice aquisition committee, a fishtank search crew. But we were just upstaged, I think. The High School Teachers program (a complement of this one, designed for confusion with the Hubble Space Telescope and Hunter S. Thompson) is sponsoring their own Cloud Chamber Day. And they probably even have nifty radioactive sources. Anyway, onward to the synchrotron!

Last night was Kitchen Parade I. It's a guerrila Summer Student festivity held at the dark and abandoned (at that hour) Restaurant Two, on the French side of the Meyrin campus. ``The name is historical, it's neither in the kitchen nor will there be any parading,'' Atila explains. It's a toga party and Atila continues, ``Don't walk about Rest 1 or close to the hostel with a toga on. Avoid problems and do it close to Rest 2. The hostel peeps can be real anal bastards and they get info from the Rest 1 staff.'' Why all this toga nonsense? Atila has an answer to that, too: ``It sounds stupid but is a lot of fun. Ppl enjoy themselves more when they look silly.'' The thing was a hoot -- even sans toga and I only stayed for ten minutes.

Chris Perkins showed up here a few days ago as well, on his way from London to Italy (and then Croatia). I think he's still asleep.

So that's all the news from the discotheque at the center for nuclear research.