The following is an edited exposé of the leaked minutes from the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting in Nantes, France of October 2011, currently featured in the 18th revised edition of Malleus Maleficus' [title withheld]. If you wish to report indiscretions or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com . To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .
He
left out nothing. It was a breathtaking tour-de-force. Then Carolyn Porco - CICLOPS
director and planetary scientist known for her pioneering work in the
exploration of the outer solar system – noted that the most radical change
for science and its male-dominated elite was not just, in truth, the advancement
of human knowledge, but “CERN’s momentous decision to appoint the first
female director-general in its 60-year history.” The formidable Fabiola
Gianotti, head of one of the teams that found the Higgs boson, had beaten at
least two male candidates to the job.[1] The
implication being, apparently, that females were exempt from ordinary laws of
progress because they were somehow less favoured by nature than the rest of mankind. A more
speculative version of the same report found room for Ms Porco adding, somewhat
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| I am militant feminst in that if u r male&assume u r superior bc of it, I will rip ur lungs out.” |
Frankly, it was all splendidly
robust, and I, for one, will never think of her famous proposal to send the
late planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker’s cremains to the Moon, in the same
way again.[2]
Indeed, I am intrigued to know what
happened to the Cremains, to say nothing of the proceedings of the conference
which, to my certain knowledge,
comprised some five-hundred pages of highly contentious views on what
has emerged as perhaps the decade’s most talked about phenomenon.
But
the first suggestion that too much emotional investment could be a dangerous
thing was also heard, this time in camera, on the penultimate day of the
meeting, when James Gillies, the Head of
Communication at CERN, was overheard as saying that The Cremains might not seem like the sort of items that would warrant such an outpouring of passion, but since precisely that had been the case, “could have properties very different from those
predicted.”[3]
This may seem an innocent enough
statement, but as a final act of pastoral aftercare, I
must say, it was a nonstarter. There was, if you ask me, a horseshoe in that glove. Indeed, it was a
measure of the confusion and delusion at CERN that, after NASA announced the
discovery of an ancient particle accelerator on Mars, the spokesman for CERN described the funerary eviction of the Shoemaker Cremains
as just “another syndrome of post-feminist angst” (- i.e., a perception among many
emancipated females that for all their achievements in the quest for gender parity,
the presence of such paternalistic remains still continued to offend them).
Unofficially, of course, it is rumoured
– and the wording is unlikely to have been accidental – that the immense
accelerations of the Large Hadron Collider
caused a local distortion of space-time and the occurrence of a colossal
gravitational wormhole, which, as a security adviser warned, “gave the Shoemaker Cremains entrance to a world that it is
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| Prof. B.Cox on BBC's Mastermind. Special Subject: The bleedin' obvious... |
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| Eugene Merle Shoemaker RIP |
[1] Her
mandate began on 1 January 2016 and runs for a period of five years.
[2] Not surprisingly, Ms Porco resists the idea that she should have favoured the dispatch of the Shoemaker cremains for reasons of feminist umbrage.
[3] The various merits involved in the ongoing dispute over the whereabouts of the Shoemaker Cremains, in my own view, could conceivably be checked against a reference system of recorded visual observations.
[3] The various merits involved in the ongoing dispute over the whereabouts of the Shoemaker Cremains, in my own view, could conceivably be checked against a reference system of recorded visual observations.
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