The Large Hadron Collider is online and generating beam collisions at 7TeV. All four major experiments are producing good data.
Now, we begin to pry open another level of the Universe. I can't tell you how much it excites me to see this happening.
. . . then NO, THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER HAS NOT DESTROYED THE WORLD.
(Duh.)
(This message provided as a public service to apocalyptophobics everywhere. Not for internal application. For entertainment only. Do not fold, spindle, mutilate, puncture, burn, or dispose of in trash. Not yet known to cause cancer in laboratory rats. Contains no post-consumer recycled content. Made from 100% carbon-neutral factory-recertified bits.)
So. The toilet tank in one of our bathrooms has been leaking for a while, and I haven't gotten to fixing it because for so long we didn't have money for replacement parts. On Sunday, one of the toilet tank bolts fractured because it had corroded away due to the leakage (and due to not being made of anything remotely corrosion resistant, like, say, stainless steel or phosphor bronze).
Yesterday, I buy a replacement bolt/washer kit, dismount the tank, replace both bolts (a significant endeavor in itself, requiring the application of a methylacetylene torch because the broken bolt and its upper nut are solidly corroded into a single unit that cannot be freed with the torque possible on the badly corroded bolt head), and refit the tank. I discover after doing so that the tank is still leaking from the bolt holes. The new bolt/washer kit is not sealing the bolt holes because of a tolerance problem (the inner rubber washers are not thick enough to seal between the tank and bowl). I also discover that, having been disturbed during this process, the stopcock is now leaking as well.
Today, I get a new, different bolt/washer kit, a new tank-to-bowl gasket, a new flex hose to replace the non-reusable 1/4" semi-rigid copper feed pipe, and eventually find the only possible new stopcock that has the correct fittings on both inlet and outlet. I remove tank, turn off the water to the house, and remove the old stopcock - by the only feasible means, cutting it off the end of the pipe, since it seems to be a single-piece fitting integral to the pipe and chromed after assembly. I clean up the cut end of the pipe, go to install the new stopcock, and discover at this point that the pipe coming out of the wall is not ANY standard copper pipe size. It's just oversize enough that it will not in any way go into a 5/8" OD compression fitting.
I curse, scratch my ehad a lot as I try to figure out what the hell to do now, and eventually discover that, by chance, the proprietary-weird-size pipe fortuitously happens to be just large enough ID that by reaming it out a fraction, I can just barely insert a piece of standard half-inch (which is to say, neither the OD nor the ID is half an inch) copper water pipe into the oddball pipe.
I cut and prep a suitable 2" piece of half-inch copper pipe. I clean and scour both old and new pipe thoroughly, dry the inside of the old pipe as far in as I can, insert my pipe stub and solder it in place, using my rosin-core electronics solder because the lead-free plumbing solder that's all you can buy in hardware stores is utterly worthless crap. I fit the new compression-fit stopcock to the new pipe stub, turn the house water back on, and leak-test the new stopcock. The joints are good, so I fit the new bolts kit and gasket to the tank, combining washers from both bolt kits to get the tightest possible seal, and adding some RTV silicone for good measure.
I reinstall the tank, tighten all the bolts, connect the new flex water line to the tank, and leak test again. It's still leaking, from the other side now. At first I think it's the pipe joint, but on closer examination I discover that the leak is from a hairline crack in the bottom of the tank. A crack which originates, to no surprise whatsoever to any remotely competent mechanical engineer, from one of the mounting bolt holes, and which is invisible from inside the tank.
This is the point at which I inquire, yet again, of the universe in general what festering inbred excuse for the illegitimate offspring of an illiterate plumber's drunken apprentice and the village idiot's syphilitic pet monkey came up with the brilliant idea of mounting a toilet tank to a toilet by putting bolt holes THROUGH THE BOTTOM OF THE TANK. What could possibly go wrong with that stroke of genius?
The judge ruled today that Novell, not SCO, owns the Unix copyrights. SCO stock tanked almost 80% in about fifteen minutes.