God and Thurber

 Forenote: Deus ex machina, literally 'God from the machine'. A plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly solved by the contrived intervention of some new event.

 Apparently if you type God into Google you get some strange results, not surprising really since when you mention God to anyone you are likely to raise some eyebrows. Try typing Thurber however and you get a plethora of results. Not sure what this means except perhaps that Thurber is a better read than fire and brimstone. As usual I digress. When my daughter was young and gullible - she is now much older but still gullible - she reported to me that she had been learning about God at school so I replied 'Did you know God was black and a woman ?’ She chewed this over for a while but that was the end of the conversation. Some days later she was at her grandmother's, a stalwart of the local Baptist church, and said to her 'Nana did you know that God is black and a woman'. My wife got into serious trouble over that, for allowing her children to be exposed to such blasphemy at home. Perhaps in hindsight she was not as gullible as I thought.

 I once wrote that to stand aloft a sand hill in the Simpson Desert was to be touched by the hand of God. My friends immediately started asking me questions - do you hear voices, or, have you stopped taking your lithium. My attempt at trying to explain a mystical experience was a path to the psychiatric ward. Of course when we find the Higgs Boson God particle all will be revealed. You have got to take your hat off to those two guys, Higgs and Bose, who dreamed up a particle that cannot be seen and cannot be measured or observed - a bit like the Emperor's new clothes - and then convinced the world to spend $9 billion to look for it - a bit more like the Emperor's new clothes. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the result at CERN in Switzerland. Now CERN is also an acronym but it is in French so I can only give you a rough translation - the Committee for the Employment ofReally large numbers of Nuclear physicists. The search for the God particle was on; obviously this was serious stuff, Deus ex machina literally.

 There was considerable concern when the LHC was first fired up. Actually the first time it was run it practically destroyed itself, but that is another story - apparently the staff simply did not have enough bottle, magnetic that is, and destroyed half the machine. Anyway prior to the restart fears were expressed that a small black hole would be created which might swallow Europe, not that I found this news disturbing since most of Europe is foreigners any way. Actually they turned out to be partly correct; the entire financial system in Europe vanished.

 The Japanese were not about to take the fact that God might be Swiss lying down and have announced plans to build an even bigger Collider. Their Collider will be straight unlike the Europeans circle, when asked why straight they replied that while God may move in mysterious ways none of those ways were circular. The Americans have been very quiet, probably because they already know that God is American. But their patience may wear thin now that CERN have announced that they are on the verge of developing a Theory to Explain Everything (TEE), after all the Americans already do know everything. Anyway I suspect that this theory was developed in the Clubhouse at the 19th TEE. And I also thought in my ignorance, that we already knew the meaning of life and all that from The Hitchhiker's Guide when the super computer Deep Thought tackled the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything and came up with the answer 42.

 So there you are, the mysteries of CERN are solved. But the mystery remaining is how Thurber arrived in this story. But of course you already have a clue - Deus ex machina. Thurber said you can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some o the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.