Nature’s leading blagger-of-foreign-travel Geoff Brumfiel is still over near Geneva blogging the LHC. The rest of the world is still going crazy for the smasher too, you know you’ve made it in geek-land when you’re the subject of an XKCD comic strip

So press play on the embedded video (Pop Goes the World set to a music video about the LHC) and read on…

From over in Germany our correspondent Quirin Schiermeier notes that the LHC is the main story on Spiegel online, largest online news portal. Spiegel notes that there were some problems with the cooling system, but these were resolved quickly.

In Switzerland the Neue Zürcher Zeitung says the LHC got off to a “perfect start”. Rolf Landuas of Cern is quoted saying: “Only the collective [of physicists] is capable of understanding and using appropriately such a complex machine.”

It’s all about teamwork.

The Register is riffing on the fact the actually results to the LHC experiments will take ages to come through:

Today, it is being strongly implied, is the moment of truth – today is the big day, when the LHC might unmask the elusive “god particle” – or alternatively destroy the world and indeed perhaps the entire universe.

There’s just one snag with all that – it’s cobblers. All the good, interesting stuff from the LHC – the Higgs deiton, the dark matter, the possibly planet-gobbling black hole dimensional portal threat and/or universe-buster runaway strangelet or monopole soup plagues, dessert topping apocalypses etc – none of that’s on offer today.

Even Google is trying to crash the party with one of their regular special logos:

Sick of all this LHC praise? Why not watch this video which explains how “Satan’s Stargate” is designed “with one purpose only: to punch a hole in the Van Allen Belt to allow the return of the Anunnaki from the planet Nabiru in order … that they can do battle with God at Armageddon.”

In other news, NPR reports (from a few days ago):

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research are taking improv comedy classes so they can better explain to a nervous world that the new Large Hadron Collider will not, in fact, create a black hole that could end life on earth.