There are so many condo development in Pattaya right now that it must be hard to come up with a new name. Even so, perhaps “Mr. Bond” is pushing the boundaries a little.

Aperture and shutter, set. Focus, set. Now, how in the hell do you expect me to press the shutter?

I have a complaint about OWC; and the complaint is that their customer service is too good.

Not so long ago I reported that the SSD in my Mac had died. I also mentioned that the drive seemed to have a different serial number than that on the invoice, so a warranty claim was unlikely. And if it did succeed, I would get an inferior replacement after several months of haggling. So I bought a new one and it is installed and running.

Staying overnight in Bangkok before my monthly doctor’s appointment always leaves me tired. The place I stay is OK; but I never sleep well in a strange bed. Yesterday morning I rushed to the hospital, then spent a fruitless hour trying to find film developing chemicals before battling through the rain back to Pattaya. Then she who must be obeyed was on the late watch at work so it was late to bed, and then up early this morning to have breakfast with her before she started work early.

Off to Bangkok for my monthly meeting with my thyroid doctor. After a couple of months of heavy hyper thyroid reaction, the blood test finally shows the thyroid plummeting towards inertia in a radioactive induced death spiral. Good news and good riddance.

Doctor pronounces that I may now stop taking the thyroid suppression pills that I have been chucking down my throat for more years than I can remember. And now we wait a month to see how the thyroid will react. It will either settle down and act as a normal thyroid should, now that it has been given a good kicking; or, equally as likely, it will continue to fade and die at which point I will return to a daily pill intake, but this time of the much more benign thyroid hormone.

Today is my wedding anniversary. I know this because I have a reminder set in my phone the date is emblazoned upon my heart by gossamer winged angels of love. Unfortunately, she who must be obeyed has also set a reminder, so I can’t win any points by being the only one to remember.

Can’t win any points for my gift either; because I didn’t buy one. There had been a pre-anniversary discussion about this:

SWMBO: (Hopefully) So what is the romantic item associated with six years? Me: (After consulting Wikipedia) Sugar! SWMBO: How boring. Each year should be something like ruby, then emerald, then sapphire. Or (warming to the task); just make it one diamond, two diamonds, three diamonds etc. Me: Or straight six, V8, V12. SWMBO: Whatever.

Eventually we might do something sweet, such as descending upon a smart restaurant and having a fancy dessert with a dessert wine; we’ll see what the evening brings. For my companion of nearly ten years and wife of six years is at work until late so we will see how much energy either of us have left for an outing.

With her busy working life, she who must be obeyed makes less of an appearance on these pages than she used to. But her smile still lights up my life every morning when I awake and provides entertainment whenever I am with her; and even when she is asleep her spectacular snoring is good for a giggle. I can’t imagine living my life without her and I really should make more of an effort to mark the occasion of our anniversary.

Fortunately, fate took a hand at breakfast, giving me a free, rather dry looking cake the opportunity to purchase a limited edition item of confectionery which I then hand-crafted as a symbol of my affection.

I have a friend who develops LED lighting solutions. One of his new products has a number of separate components and he asked me if I could do a video showing a “fly-by” of the components, and then a voice-over could be added describing each as it passes by.

My answer was “probably not”, because I have never shot video and have no equipment with which to capture a fly-by. But I promised to give it a go.

A first attempt involved just moving the camera over the components; a complete mess in every direction. Then I tried a swinging arm on a tripod, and that was a dismal failure too.

Next, there was this:

Anyone who writes probably reckons they have a book in them somewhere. I certainly do, and a few years ago I set out to write mine. Made it as far as half way down page one and gave up; surprisingly boring to write, and equally boring to read. Maybe I would try again later; and maybe now is the time.

The latest publishing sensation is Fifty Shades of Grey, an apparently poorly written novel which has so far sold in excess of ten million copies and made the author a millionairess.

Much excitement today as the clever boys and girls at CERN announce they have found a new boson, and they are pretty sure it belong to Professor Higgs.

Expect general apathy. After all, it’s not a shiny new widget that we can buy, or a Z-list personality whose marriage and almost immediate divorce we can follow in the Daily Mail. It’s a boson, and if we really understood what a boson was and how it operates we would be sat in a laboratory doing clever sums and making out with lab assistants called Felicity (I have a somewhat skewed perspective of an academic life).

Of course there will be the inevitable documentaries on what it all means; featuring very few facts that we can grasp, accompanied by computer generated graphics of galaxies exploding as a small compensation for us being so stupid. Personally, I will look forward the Dr. Brian Cox show. Not only does he stir my homoerotic tendencies, he is also bloody good at explaining stuff without appearing to be dumbing things down too much; even though from his perspective he is talking to brain-damaged toddlers. He also has a great production team. I remember an episode of “Wonders of the Universe” where he spends half the show walking around an abandoned prison in Rio. This initially seemed like a massive waster of someone’s money; until he used it to explain the creation of elements in a dying star, and finished off the story with the star/prison being blown up. Genius storytelling.

But bugger the apathy. Even attempting to wrap our inadequately evolved brains around the magnificence and complexity of the universe is enough to trigger awe. I am talking real awe here, not the awe as in “awesome” when your waiter applauds your dessert choice. And the people who dedicate their lives to researching this stuff? They exemplify all that is admirable in the human spirit (unless they are only in it for the lab assistants).

Fortunately for you gentle reader, you do not have to wait for the offerings from the established media to further your understanding of the Higgs Boson (shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in there somewhere? Genuinej, please advise). At vast personal expense (mainly threats), I have arranged for our own, our very own, Camberley to provide an explanation.

When I first met Camberley he was, like me, a fairly junior accountant. When I last met Camberley we had both clambered over the bodies of the dead and reached “Finance Director” status; except I had the honour of being FD for a teeny tiny offshoot of the empire, and he was the FD of the chemicals sector which gave him considerably more seniority, and cash. But my teeny tiny offshoot was based in Bangkok, and he worked in London, so I won.

The difference in our career trajectories, and indeed our basic intelligence, is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that I left school at seventeen with a handful of O levels and a pocket full of scruffy dreams (none of which were realised), and Camberley knocked off a doctorate in nuclear physics (spin theory if I recall) before even looking at a set of books. So, who better than Camberley, sorry, Doctor Camberley to give us some perspective on today’s announcement:

The Higgs Boson for laymen.

That is what Spike asked me to write about given today’s announcement from CERN. He obviously thinks I know a lot more than do. But anyway here we go.

Once upon a time a man named Higgs said “Why do particles have mass? I know; I will say that all particles have mass because of something called a Higgs Boson that can only be detected with a multi-trillion dollar machine and an army of physicists. That should keep the buggers busy for decade or so.” And so it came to pass.

I must say this has been one of the longest ever confirmations in history, and even now they are not sure. They saw hints of the particle some months ago. How can you have a hint of a particle? Now while some of them are cracking open bottles of champagne others are saying, and I quote:

“Formal confirmation of the discovery is expected within months, though it could take several years for scientists to work out whether they have found the simplest kind of Higgs particle that theories predict, or part of a more complex picture…one of a larger family of Higgs bosons.”

So now there maybe other kinds of Higgs (someone clever than me will have to work out how to pluralise that word, or better still develop a collective noun for a group Higgsis – see, I said it needed someone clever than me).

It was all so different when I was at school. We knew what gave things mass, it was something called stuff. Lead had more stuff in it than air and so was heavier, simple.

What else has changed in that time? It used to be that the universe started as a Big Bang, everything was expanding, but because of gravity it all would eventually start contracting to end in a Big Crunch. Oops, it seems the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. Explain that then. “I know” said the scientists, “it is cause by something called Dark Energy which will require the total GDP of all the countries in the world for the whole of human civilization to find. That should keep the buggers busy for … ever.”

To sumarise the little bit of what I gather is current scientific thinking:

• String Theory (apparently the theory of everything) says we live in a 9 dimensional world, except some think it might be 11 or is it 5?).

• After the Big Bang the universe rapidly expanded (called inflation), that is, space itself got bigger so that some things that were near each other suddenly were millions of miles apart – without any of them moving.

• Actually no say some others, the Big Bang did not happen in one place it happened everywhere at once and that our 4 dimensional (??) universe is actually a surface on a 5 dimensions object and our surface collided with another surface of this object and that was the Big Bang.

• Well possibly not say others. Our 4 dimensional universe is possibly (?) a holographic representation from a 3 dimensional thing (my word).

• Don’t worry about it say others, there are an infinite number of universes and we just happen to be in one of them. Oh and by the way quantum mechanics says that time can run backwards.

Is you brain hurting yet? Would you trust these people to run your banks? I would say “yes” to the first and “can’t be worse than what we have now to the second”.

Thank you Doctor Camberley, and please give my regards to your charming wife Felicity (I rest my case).

So there you are, perfectly clear to me now; although even eleven dimensions is not enough to explain she who must be obeyed’s shoe collection. But I fear there may be some of you who may still be confused; and for you I have prepared a simplified explanation.

Consider this photo: