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I suppose I was being heavy-handed in yesterday’s post, but perhaps heavy hearts call for heavy hands. The positive way to say it is this: As soon as I went to the Page to contribute to the Obama Campaign, typed in my credit card number and sent off my $2300, it was as though a great weight had been lifted.

This way, should I wake up on November 5 to find (shudder) that the country has voted for four more years of this nonsense, I’ll know it won’t be because I couldn’t spare a little travel money for some kid volunteering to get the vote out in Ohio.

On the other hand, perhaps the world has bigger fish to fry (no, that “fish” reference was not a secret way of insulting John McCain). A friend sent around an email the other day pointing out that the universe had not, after all, fallen into a black hole when the CERN Large Hadron Collider went into operation near Geneva.

Trying to be objective about the whole thing, I chimed in with the following:

I would just like to add, for the record, that operation of the new Large Hadron Collider has not, as some have feared, induced the formation of a black hole, thereby swallowing up our solar system together with everything in it.

Of course I could be wrong. Since yesterday we might actually all be living in a Bose-Einstein Condensate, caught for the rest of our subjective lives between two successive moments in the “real” universe that surrounds the recent local region of collapse, reduced forever to the lowest quantum state of our external potential, only manifested on a macroscopic scale.

But this may always have been true anyway…

In response, several friends sent fun and exquisitely learned emails, in which they discussed the apparent impossibility of knowing for certain whether the universe you experience is real or merely an illusion.

But the link that somebody eventually sent around took first honors, hands down, for its sheer awesome coolness.