beam for a day

[nibot]

The beam is ours now. We raised half our little e-cal up on the mammoth crane, the crane that eclipses the lamps and seems to make indoor weather, and set it down in the test-beam area. The other half will have its phototubes tomorrow and then it too will fly over to the test beam, and then we will unleash upon it a variety pack of hadrons, a lovely shower of protons and pions and who knows what else. We'll have real events and we'll do real physics, observing from our elevated yellow metal control room. If all goes well. Then we're hiking over the Juras to some village, our whole lab, tasting cheese or something. And apparently a CERN-logo vehicle was sighted in Paris.