In Mexico, New Agers hope Dec. 21 brings new era

Doomsday hour is here, at least in much of the world, and so still are we.
According to legend, the ancient Mayans' long-count calendar ends at midnight Thursday, ushering in the end of the world.
Didn't happen.
"This is not the end of the world. This is the beginning of the new world," Star Johnsen-Moser, an American seer, said at a gathering of hundreds of spiritualists at a convention center in the Yucatan city of Merida, an hour and a half from the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza.
"It is most important that we hold a positive, beautiful reality for ourselves and our planet. ... Fear is out of place."
As the appointed time came and went in several parts of the world, there was no sign of the apocalypse.
Indeed, the social network Imgur posted photos of clocks turning midnight in the Asia-Pacific region with messages such as: "The world has not ended. Sincerely, New Zealand."
In Merida, the celebration of the cosmic dawn opened inauspiciously, with a fumbling of the sacred fire meant to honor the calendar's conclusion.
Gabriel Lemus, the white-haired guardian of the flame, burned his finger on the kindling and later had to scoop up a burning log that fell from the ceremonial brazier onto the stage.
Still, Lemus was convinced that it was a good start, as he was joined by about 1,000 other shamans, seers, stargazers, crystal enthusiasts, yogis, sufis and swamis.
"It is a cosmic dawn," Lemus declared. "We will recover the ability to communicate telepathically and levitate objects ... like our ancestors did."
Celebrants later held their arms in the air in a salute to the Thursday morning sun.
"The galactic bridge has been established," intoned spiritual leader Alberto Arribalzaga. "At this moment, spirals of light are entering the center of your head ... generating powerful vortexes that cover the planet."
Despite all the ritual and banter, few here actually believed the world would end Friday; the summit was scheduled to run through Sunday. Instead, participants said they were here to celebrate the birth of a new age.
A Mexican Indian seer who calls himself Ac Tah, and who has traveled around Mexico erecting small pyramids he calls "neurological circuits," said he holds high hopes for Friday.
"We are preparing ourselves to receive a huge magnetic field straight from the center of the galaxy," he said.
Terry Kvasnik, 32, a stunt man from Manchester, England, said his motto for the day was "be in love, don't be in fear." As to which ceremony he would attend on Friday, he said with a smile, "I'm going to be in the happiest place I can."
At dozens of booths set up in the convention hall, visitors could have their auras photographed with "Chi" light, get a shamanic cleansing or buy sandals, herbs and whole-grain baked goods. Cleansing usually involves having copal incense waved around one's body.
Visitors could also learn the art of "healing drumming" with a Mexican Otomi Indian master, Dabadi Thaayroyadi, who said his slender hand-held drums are made with prayers embedded inside. The drums emit "an intelligent energy" that can heal emotional, physical and social ailments, he said.
During the opening ceremony, participants chanted mantras to the blazing Yucatan sun, which quickly burned the fair-skinned crowd.
Violeta Simarro, a secretary from Perpignan, France, taking shelter under an awning, noted that the new age won't necessarily be easy.
"It will be a little difficult at first, because the world will need a complete 'nettoyage' (cleansing), because there are so many bad things," she said.
Not all seers endorsed the celebration. Mexico's self-styled "brujo mayor," or chief soothsayer, Antonio Vazquez Alba, warned followers to stay away from gatherings on Friday. "We have to beware of mass psychosis" that could lead to stampedes or "mass suicides, of the kind we've seen before," he said.
"If you get 1,000 people in one spot and somebody yells 'Fire!' watch out," Vazquez Alba said. "The best thing is to stay at home, at work, in school, and at some point do a relaxation exercise."
Others saw the gathering as a model for the coming age.
Participants from Asian, North American, South American and European shamanistic traditions mingled amiably with the Mexican hosts.
"This is the beginning of a change in priorities and perceptions. We are all one," said Esther Romo, a Mexico City businesswoman who works in art promotion and galleries. "No limits, no boundaries, no nationalities, just fusion."
Gabriel Romero, a Los-Angeles based practitioner of crystal skull channeling, was so sure it wasn't the end of the world that he planned a welcome ceremony for the new age at dawn on Saturday, when he would erect a stele, a stone monument used by the Mayans to commemorate important dates or events.
The Maya, who invented an amazingly accurate calendar almost 2,000 years ago, measured time in 394-year periods known as baktuns. Some anthropologists believe the 13th baktun ends Dec. 21. Still, archaeologists have uncovered Mayan glyphs that refer to dates far, far in the future, long beyond Dec. 21.
Yucatan Gov. Rolando Zapata, whose state is home to Mexico's largest Mayan population and has benefited from a boom in tourism, said he, too, felt the good vibes.
"We believe that the beginning of a new baktun means the beginning of a new era, and we're receiving it with great optimism," Zapata said.
He said thousands of tourists and spiritualists are expected for Friday's once-in-5,125-years event. "All the flights to the city are completely full," Zapata said.
The Yucatan state government has even invited a scientist to speak about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, to debunk the idea it could produce world-ending rogue particles, a concept popularized by author Steve Alten in his recent book "Phobos, Mayan Fear."
Alten suggests the rogue particles — "tiny black holes" — could unleash earthquakes that might cause a huge tsunami, but acknowledges that linking such events to Dec. 21 "is author's license."
"It's science fiction theory, I'm a science fiction writer," he told The Associated Press.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, however, has listed a number of odd subatomic phenomena — "magnetic monopoles," ''vacuum bubbles" and "strangelets" — that could play a role in the next apocalypse scare.
All of it amused Deyanira de Alvarez, a tourist from Mexico City, as she snapped a photo of the countdown clock mounted in the Merida international airport showing just over two days left to "the galactic alignment."
"My grandmother says that people have been talking about (the world ending) ever since she was a little girl," De Alvarez said. "And look, grandma is still here.

Read More..

Mexico's Maya heartland awaits dawn of new era

 In the darkness before dawn Friday, spiritualists prepared white clothes, drums, conch shells and incense ahead of the sunrise they believe will herald the birth of a new and better age as a vast, 5,125-year cycle in the Mayan calendar comes to an end.
No one was quite sure at what time the Mayas' 13th Baktun would officially end on this Dec. 21. Some think it already ended at midnight Thursday. Others looked to Friday's dawn here in the Maya heartland. Some had later times in mind.
"Wait until the dawn on the 22nd; that is when we Maya will speak," Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu said earlier in Guatemala, another Maya area.
Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History even suggested that historical calculations to synchronize the Mayan and Western calendars might be off a few days. It said the Mayan Long Count calendar cycle might not really end until Sunday.
Whatever the details, the chance to welcome a new time seemed to be the main concern among celebrants drawn to the Yucatan peninsula.
Many people who came to Yucatan for the occasion were already calling it "a new sun" and "a new era."
"The galactic bridge has been established," announced spiritual leader Alberto Arribalzaga at a "galactic connection" ceremony Thursday in Merida. "The cosmos is going to take us to a higher level of vibration ... where humanity is in glory, in joy,"
What nobody was calling it is the end of the world, as some people in recent years have interpreted the meaning of the end of the 13th Baktun — despite the insistence of archeologists and the Maya themselves it meant no such thing.
"We'll still have to pay taxes next year," said Gabriel Romero, a Los Angeles-based spiritualist who uses crystal skulls in his ceremonies.
If the chanting and dancing of a crystal skull ceremony held Thursday weren't end fears of an apocalypse, scientists chimed in, too.
Bill Leith, the U.S. Geological Survey's senior science adviser for earthquake and geologic hazards, said that by late Thursday, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had been detected in seismic activities, solar flares, volcanos or the Earth's geomagnetic field.
"It's a fairly unremarkable day on planet Earth today, and in the last few days," Leith said. "There are no major eruptions going on."
There had been about 120 small earthquakes and a moderate temblor in Japan, he said. "That's very much a normal day."
Still, there were some who wouldn't truly feel safe until the sun sets Friday over the pyramids in Yucatan peninsula, the heartland of the Maya.
Mexico's best-known seer, Antonio Vazquez Alba, known as "El Brujo Mayor," said he had received emails containing rumors that a mass suicide might be planned in Argentina.
He said he was sure that human nature represented the only threat Friday. "Nature isn't going to do us any harm, but we can do damage to ourselves," he said.
Authorities worried about overcrowding and possible stampedes during celebrations Friday at Mayan ruin sites like Chichen Itza and Uxmal, both about 1 1/2 hours from Merida, the Yucatan state capital. Special police and guard details were assigned to the pyramids.
As Friday's dawn began sweeping around the globe, there was no sign of an apocalypse.
Indeed, the social network Imgur posted photos of clocks turning midnight in the Asia-Pacific region with messages such as: "The world has not ended. Sincerely, New Zealand."
Average residents of the Yucatan, where the Mayas invented the 394-year calendar cycles known as baktuns, the 13th of which ends Friday, were pretty upbeat about the day.
Yucatan Gov. Rolando Zapata said he felt growing good vibes.
"We believe that the beginning of a new baktun means the beginning of a new era, and we're receiving it with great optimism," Zapata said.
Even before the baktun's end, hundreds of spiritualists from Asian, North American, South American and European shamanistic traditions mingled amiably with the Mexican hosts at a convention center in Merida on Thursday.
Dozens of booths offered people the chance to have their auras photographed with "Chi" light, get a shamanic cleansing or buy sandals, herbs and whole-grain baked goods.
"This is the beginning of a change in priorities and perceptions. We are all one," said Esther Romo, a Mexico City businesswoman who works in art promotion and galleries. "No limits, no boundaries, no nationalities, just fusion.

Read More..

Puerto Rican TV show faces scrutiny amid outcry

A TV station in Puerto Rico that broadcasts a popular news and gossip show featuring a puppet has announced that the program will now be prerecorded.
Joe Ramos, president of WAPA TV, told reporters late Thursday that the SuperXclusivo show will be taped two hours before it is broadcast. The announcement follows a recent outcry over comments that the controversial puppet, known as La Comay, made about a man who was brutally killed.
More than 73,800 people have joined an online Facebook page demanding that the show be taken off the air. The page was created on Dec. 4, the same day that La Comay commented on the Nov. 30 killing of publicist Jose Enrique Gomez Saladin. Police say the publicist was carjacked, forced to take out money from an ATM and then set on fire and beaten to death.
Police said the carjacking occurred in the northern town of Caguas, on a street known for its drugs and prostitutes. La Comay, played by comedian Antulio "Kobbo" Santarrosa, questioned what Gomez was doing on that street and whether he "was asking for this" by being there.
A swift outcry followed, and several companies withdrew their sponsorship of the program, which has previously drawn the ire of many for its sensationalist style and derogatory comments about women and gays.
On Friday, several community leaders rejected Ramos' announcement, saying it wasn't enough and that they didn't believe it would happen.
"They've made similar proposals in the past, and after a couple of weeks, nothing changed," said Pedro Julio Serrano, spokesman for the U.S.-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "We'll continue fighting until SuperXclusivo is canceled.

Read More..

Court strikes down Costa Rica in-vitro ban

A Costa Rican ban on in-vitro fertilization has been struck down by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a decision that reproductive health groups said could lead to greater access to abortion and some contraception in other Latin American countries.
The court said in a ruling late Thursday that a long-standing Costa Rican guarantee of protection for every human embryo violated the reproductive freedom of infertile couples because it prohibited them from using in-vitro fertilization, which often involves the disposal of embryos not implanted in a patient's uterus.
The court said that governments cannot give embryos and fetuses absolute protection under the American Convention on Human Rights. The Costa Rican government said it will comply with the court's decision and move to allow in-vitro fertilization.
The advocacy groups said they believed they now would be able to successfully challenge bans such as the total prohibition of abortion in El Salvador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Chile, which are based in part on the assertion of total protection of life for embryos and fetuses.
"This is a wonderful day for reproductive rights," said Alejandra Cardenas, a lawyer for the U.S.-based Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed briefs in the case.
Oriester Rojas said he was forced to travel outside Costa Rica with his wife to get in-vitro treatment and told reporters, "I hope that from now on everyone who's been affected by this can have the opportunity to turn their dreams of being fathers and mothers into reality."
Advocacy groups said most important was language about a guarantee of the right to life included in the American Convention on Human Rights, a binding treaty ratified by most countries in the Western Hemisphere and overseen by the Costa Rica-based rights court.
The article declares that the right to life "shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception."
The six-judge panel said in its ruling that "it is possible to conclude from the words 'in general' that the law's protection of life under said provision is not absolute, but rather gradual and incremental according to the development of life."
Cardenas said that a new case challenging, for example, a total ban on abortion would have to follow the standard that protections for fetuses are not absolute.
"They are always subjected to exceptions and must be proportional and incremental," she said.
Costa Rican Attorney General Ana Lorena Brenes told reporters, "We don't agree with it, but that doesn't mean that the country won't respect the judges' decision."
In-vitro fertilization was introduced to Costa Rica in 1996 by a doctor who helped couples give birth to 15 babies over four years. It provoked strong opposition from conservative groups and the Roman Catholic Church, which campaigned against the technique because it led to the disposal of fertilized eggs.
In 2001, 18 people brought a complaint before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights after Costa Rica became the only Latin American country to bar in-vitro fertilization.
Costa Rican couples with enough money traveled to clinics in Panama, where hundreds of Costa Rican babies were born with the technique. One of the arguments the plaintiffs made before the Inter-American commission was that the ban was a form of discrimination against poorer families.
The human-rights commission ruled against Costa Rica and in 2010, after the failure of a congressional reform, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights took up the case, hearing testimony from both sides before issuing its binding ruling.
The regional court not only struck down the ban Thursday but said it was requiring Costa Rica to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation to the complainants and pay for in-vitro fertilization for low-income couples through its social security system.
The United States is one of 12 countries that have either not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights or have pulled out of it due to objections that it violates their national sovereignty.

Read More..

Mexico's Maya heartland greets dawn of new era

Dec. 21 started out as the prophetic day some had believed would usher in the fiery end of the world. By Friday afternoon, it had become more comic than cosmic, the punch line of countless Facebook posts and at least several dozen T-shirts.
At the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza, thousands chanted, danced and otherwise frolicked around ceremonial fires and pyramids to mark the conclusion of a vast, 5,125-year cycle in the Mayan calendar.
The doomsayers who had predicted apocalypse were nowhere to be seen. Instead, people showed up in T-shirts reading "The End of the World: I Was There."
Vendors eager to sell their ceramic handicrafts and wooden masks called out to passing visitors, "Buy something before the world ends."
And on Twitter, (hash)EndoftheWorld had become one of the day's most popular hash tags.
For the masses in the ruins, Dec. 21 sparked celebration of what they saw as the birth of a new and better age. It was also inspiration for massive clouds of patchouli and marijuana smoke and a chorus of conch calls at the break of dawn.
The official crowd count stood at 20,000 as of mid-afternoon, with people continuing to arrive. That surpassed the count on an average day but not as many as have gathered at the ruins during equinoxes.
The boisterous gathering Friday included Buddhists, pagan nature worshippers, druids and followers of Aztec and Maya religious traditions. Some kneeled in attitudes of prayer, some seated with arms outstretched in positions of meditation, all facing El Castillo, the massive main pyramid.
Ceremonies were being held at different sides of the pyramid, including one led by a music group that belted out American blues and reggae-inspired chants. Others involved yelping and shouting, and drumming and dance, such as one ceremony led by spiritual master Ollin Yolotzin.
"The world was never going to end, this was an invention of the mass media," said Yolotzin, who leads the Aztec ritual dance group Cuautli-balam. "It is going to be a good era. ... We are going to be better."
Ivan Gutierrez, a 37-year-old artist who lives in the nearby village, stood before the pyramid and blew a low, sonorous blast on a conch horn. "It has already arrived, we are already in it," he said of the new era. "We are in a frequency of love, we are in a new vibration."
But it was unclear how long the love would last: A security guard quickly came over and asked him to stop blowing his conch shell, enforcing the ruin site's ban on holding ceremonies without previous permits.
Similar rites greeted the new era in neighboring Guatemala, where Mayan spiritual leaders burned offerings and families danced in celebration. Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina and Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla attended an official ceremony in the department of Peten, along with thousands of revelers and artists.
At an indigenous South American summer solstice festival in Bolivia, President Evo Morales arrived on a wooden raft to lead a festival that made offerings to Pachamama, Mother Earth, on a small island in the middle of Lake Titicaca.
The leftist leader and 3,000 others, including politicians, indigenous shamans and activists of all stripes, didn't ponder the end of the world, just the death of the capitalist system, which Morales told the crowd had already happened amid "a global financial, political and moral crisis."
"The human community is in danger because of climatic reasons, which are related to the accumulation of wealth by some countries and social groups," he told the crowd. "We need to change the belief that having more is living better."
Despite all the pomp, no one is certain the period known as the Mayas' 13th Baktun officially ended Friday. Some think it may have happened at midnight. Others looked to Friday's dawn here in the Maya heartland. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History even suggested historical calculations to synchronize the Mayan and Western calendars might be off a few days. It said the Mayan Long Count calendar cycle might not really end until Sunday.
One thing, however, became clear to many by Friday afternoon: The world had not yet ended.
John Hoopes, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, was at the ruins, using the opportunity to talk about how myths are created.
"You don't have to go to the far corners of the earth to look for exotic things, you've got them right here," he noted.
End-of-the-world paranoia, however, has spread globally despite the insistence of archeologists and the Maya themselves that the date meant no such thing.
Dozens of schools in Michigan canceled classes this week amid rumors of violence tied to the date. In France, people expecting doomsday were looking expectantly to a mountain in the Pyrenees where they believe a hidden spaceship was waiting to spirit them away. And in China, government authorities were cracking down on a fringe Christian group spreading rumors about the world's end, while preaching that Jesus had reappeared as a woman in central China.
Gabriel Romero, a Los Angeles-based spiritualist who uses crystal skulls in his ceremonies, had no such illusions as he greeted the dawn at Chichen Itza.
"We'll still have to pay taxes next year," he said.
As if to put the final nail in the coffin of such rumors, Bob McMillan of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory confirmed Friday that no large asteroids are predicted to hit anytime soon.
And Bill Leith, a senior science adviser at the U.S. Geological Survey, noted that as far as quakes, tsunamis and solar storms for the rest of the day, "we don't have any evidence that anything is imminent."
Still, there were some who wouldn't truly feel safe until the sun sets Friday over the pyramids in the Yucatan peninsula, the heartland of the Maya.
Mexico's best-known seer, Antonio Vazquez Alba, known as "El Brujo Mayor," said he had received emails with rumors that a mass suicide might be planned in Argentina. He said he was sure that human nature represented the only threat Friday.
"Nature isn't going to do us any harm, but we can do damage to ourselves," he said.
Authorities worried about overcrowding and possible stampedes during celebrations Friday at Mayan sites such as Chichen Itza and Uxmal, both about 1 1/2 hours from Merida, the Yucatan state capital. Special police and guard details were assigned to the pyramids.
Yucatan Gov. Rolando Zapata said he for one felt the growing good vibes, and not just because his state was raking in loads of revenue from the thousands of celebrants flooding in.
"We believe that the beginning of a new baktun means the beginning of a new era, and we're receiving it with great optimism," Zapata said.

Read More..

U.S. gun website sued for alleged ties to slayings

 A prominent U.S. gun control group on Wednesday sued a gun auction website it says is linked to a mass shooting at a Wisconsin spa in October and the stalker slaying of a woman near Chicago in 2011.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence alleges that the design of armslist.com facilitates illegal online sales to unlawful gun buyers with no background checks, and enables users to evade laws that permit private sellers to sell guns only to residents of their own state.
"We as a nation are better than an anonymous Internet gun market where killers and criminals can easily get guns," said Jonathan Lowy, the Brady Center's Legal Action Project Director, in a statement.
The wrongful death lawsuit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of the family of Jitka Vesel, 36, an immigrant from the Czech Republic who was shot and killed last year by Demetry Smirnov, a stalker.
The suit, which the Brady Center says is the first of its kind, alleges that Smirnov illegally bought the gun from a private seller he located through armslist.com.
Vesel was killed in the parking lot of the Chicago-area Czechoslovak Heritage Museum, where she was a volunteer preparing for a celebration in memory of Czech-American Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.
Cermak was slain with a handgun during an attempted assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
A representative for website owner Armslist, LLC was not immediately available for comment. The company is based in Noble, Oklahoma, according to public records.
The website includes a "terms of use" page on which users must promise they are age 18 or older and will not use the site for illegal purposes.
The Brady Center said that the case does not infringe on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, noting that 74 percent of National Rifle Association members believe that no guns should be sold without a criminal background check.
A representative for the NRA was not immediately available for comment.
Radcliffe Haughton, who killed his estranged wife and two other women and wounded four others before killing himself in a shooting in a Milwaukee suburb on October 21, also got his weapon through armslist.com, according to Wisconsin officials.
Haughton, who was under a restraining order for domestic violence, avoided a background check through a "lethal loophole" by buying a gun through the website, according to a letter to Armslist sent by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Wisconsin U.S. Representative Gwen Moore on October 26.
Sales conducted over the Internet also have been linked to mass killings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. In 1999 eBay announced it was prohibiting online gun sales, according to the Brady Center lawsuit.
Craigslist did the same in 2007. Amazon.com and Google AdWords also prohibits the listing of firearms for sale, the suit says.
An undercover investigation of online gun sales by New York City last year found that 62 percent of private gun sellers agreed to sell a firearm to a buyer who said he probably could not pass a background check.

Read More..

Ten Commandments join Isaac Newton's notes online

A copy of The Ten Commandments dating back two millennia and the earliest written Gaelic are just two of a number of incredibly rare manuscripts now freely available online to the world as part of a Cambridge University digital project.
The Nash Papyrus -- one of the oldest known manuscripts containing text from the Hebrew Bible -- has become one of the latest treasures of humanity to join Isaac Newton's notebooks, the Nuremberg Chronicle and other rare texts as part of the Cambridge Digital Library, the university said on Wednesday.
"Cambridge University Library preserves works of great importance to faith traditions and communities around the world," University Librarian Anne Jarvis said in a statement.
"Because of their age and delicacy these manuscripts are seldom able to be viewed - and when they are displayed, we can only show one or two pages."
Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nash Papyrus, was by far the oldest manuscript containing text from the Hebrew Bible and like most fragile historical documents, only available to select academics for scrutiny.
The university's digital library is making 25,000 new images, including an ancient copy of the New Testament, available on its website (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/), which has already attracted tens of millions of hits since the project was launched in December 2011.
The latest release also includes important texts from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.
In addition to religious texts, internet users can also view the 10th century Book of Deer, which is widely believed to be the oldest surviving Scottish manuscript and contains the earliest known examples of written Gaelic.
"Now... anyone with a connection to the Internet can select a work of interest, turn to any page of the manuscript, and explore it in extraordinary detail," Jarvis said.
The technical infrastructure required to get these texts to web was in part funded by a 1.5 million pound ($2.4 million) gift from the Polonsky Foundation in June 2010.

Read More..

CERN students make "scientist fiction" zombie film

Murderous zombies are stalking the dark underground passageways of the renowned CERN physics centre near Geneva, hunting young scientists who have survived a devastating failure in its world-famous particle collider.
Gaunt men with peeling faces and stony-eyed women dripping blood from their mouths leer around corners and loom from behind wrecked equipment, impervious to the bullets from a gun wielded by one of their would-be victims.
And it is all happening right at the heart of the multi-billion dollar complex where, last July, physicists announced the discovery of what they think is the particle -- the Higgs boson -- which made life and the universe possible.
Well, happening at least on the Internet (http://www.decayfilm.com/). Scientists at the centre on Wednesday said they were pursuing their efforts to reveal the great mysteries of the cosmos and had not noticed anything unusual.
"But that does explain why my neighbor shouted: 'Watch for the Zombies,' when I left for work this morning," said one puzzled physicist who is part of one of the two large teams which jointly tracked down the Higgs.
The gory action comes in an 80-minute horror film, "Decay", shot in 2010 around open areas of the sprawling CERN complex at weekends by budding young scientists from Britain and the United States, without formal management approval.
"They asked for CERN's endorsement once the whole thing was in the can," said spokesman James Gillies. "Clearly we can't endorse such a thing, but nor were we going to stop it. After all, it's just students doing the kind of thing students do."
The movie burst onto the World Wide Web, itself invented at CERN 20 years ago. A notice on its site and a press release from the makers, H2ZZ Productions, declares: "This film has not been authorized or endorsed by CERN."
FLESH-EATERS
The cinematic mayhem follows a disaster in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), releasing the Higgs and its associated particle field which turn dozens of the technicians working around the subterranean complex into "living dead" flesh-eaters.
A group of scientists is isolated in the control room -- which the filmmakers move underground from its actual location on the surface -- and as they try to break out to safety they are picked off one by one by their zombie colleagues.
"It's a bit of fun in the best tradition of B-series Zombie movies," said a CERN researcher who followed the project. "It's well done, but I can't say the acting is Oscar quality."
"They wanted to make the film as unbelievable as possible, and the scientific 'facts' cited in it are laughable, so no-one could take it seriously."
The producers are at pains to underline that in making their technicolor epic they had no access to the actual 27-km (17-mile) circular tunnel where the LHC and the giant particle detectors and magnets are housed.
The writer and director of the film was Luke Thompson, who apart from his studies at CERN is a physicist and doctoral student at Britain's Manchester University, where the film had an early showing at the end of last month.
Co-producer and director of photography was Burton de Wilde, who holds a physics doctorate from Stony Brook University in the United States. The actors came from among CERN's several hundred doctoral or summer students.
The company set up to market the film says it has showings scheduled for several places in Britain, the United States and Europe.
"It might just turn out to be one of those off-the-wall successes," the CERN researcher said.

Read More..

Fandango launches Oscar-themed web series with Dave Karger

 Fandango is elbowing into the Oscar horse race.
The movie-ticket seller launched its first original digital video series Wednesday, "The Frontrunners," which will cover the major contenders for the top awards. The show will feature conversations with a star-studded group of Oscar hunters that includes Richard Gere ("Arbitrage"), Amy Adams ("The Master"), Hugh Jackman ("Les Miserables") and Ben Affleck ("Argo").
During the broadcasts, actors and directors will deconstruct key scenes from their movies, explaining how they crafted a moment of domestic conflict, in the case of Gere, or decided to intercut between a Hollywood script reading and the Iranian Hostage Crisis, as with Affleck.
However, commerce will be mixed in along with the art. Fandango will offer ticketing information along with the digital videos, with the hopes that the clips will inspire users to check out the movie being discussed.
The show, shot at Soho House in Los Angeles, will be hosted by Fandango's Chief Correspondent Dave Karger, the movie guru the company lured over from Entertainment Weekly in September. It's part of a bold bet that Fandango is making on original content.
To that in end, the company tapped former Disney digital executive Paul Yanover to serve in the newly created role of president and tasked him with creating a suite of programming for Fandango and its 41 million unique visitors.
"Our goal with Fandango is to make it the definitive movie-going brand across all platforms," Nick Lehman, the president of digital for NBC Universal Entertainment Networks & Interactive Media, told TheWrap in October. "We want to continue expanding in ways that entertain and inform and video is key to that strategy. Advertisers are clamoring for it because there is a dearth of high quality original video content on the web."
As TheWrap reported exclusively in October, Karger is also planning programs that will center on box office contenders and one program that will boast both A-List actors and below-the-line talent.

Read More..

Pope needs help sending out blessing in first tweet

After weeks of anticipation bordering on media frenzy, Pope Benedict solemnly put his finger to a computer tablet device on Wednesday and tried to send his first tweet - but something went wrong.
Images on Vatican television appeared to show the first try didn't work. The pope, who still writes his speeches by hand, seems to have pressed too hard and the tweet was not sent right away. So, he needed a little help from his friends.
Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli of the Vatican's communications department showed the pontiff how to do it, but the pope hesitated. Celli touched the screen lightly himself and off went the papal tweet.
"Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart," he said in his introduction to the brave new world of Twitter.
The tweet was sent at the end of weekly general audience in the Vatican before thousands of people.
The pope actually has eight linked Twitter accounts. @Pontifex, the main account, is in English. The other seven have a suffix at the end for the different language versions. For example, the German version is @Pontifex_de, and the Arabic version is @Pontifex_ar.
The tweets will be going out in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Arabic and French. Other languages will be added in the future.
The pope already had just over a million followers in all of the languages combined minutes before he sent his first tweet and the number was growing.
PAPAL Q AND A
Later on Wednesday after the audience was over and the television cameras turned off, the pontiff answered the first of three questions sent to him at #askpontifex.
The first question answered by the pope was: "How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?"
His answer: "By speaking with Jesus in prayer, listening to what he tells you in the Gospel and looking for him in those in need."
The pope, who, as leader of the Roman Catholic Church already has 1.2 billion followers in the standard sense of the word, won't be following anyone else, the Vatican has said.
After his first splash into the brave new world of Twitter on Wednesday, the contents of future tweets will come primarily from the contents of his weekly general audience, Sunday blessings and homilies on major Church holidays.
They are also expected to include reaction to major world events, such as natural disasters.
The Vatican says papal tweets will be little "pearls of wisdom", which is understandable since his thoughts will have to be condensed to 140 characters, while papal documents often top 140 pages.
The Vatican said precautions had been taken to make sure the pope's certified account is not hacked. Only one computer in the Vatican's secretariat of state will be used for the tweets.
After Wednesday, Benedict won't be pushing the button on his tweets himself. They will be sent by aides but he will sign off on them.
The pope's Twitter page is designed in yellow and white - the colors of the Vatican, with a backdrop of the Vatican and his picture. It may change during different liturgical seasons of the year and when the pope is away from the Vatican on trips.
The pope has given a qualified welcome to social media.
In a document issued last year, he said the possibilities of new media and social networks offered "a great opportunity", but warned of the risks of depersonalization, alienation, self-indulgence, and the dangers of having more virtual friends than real ones.
In 2009, a new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, went live, offering an application called "The pope meets you on Facebook", and another allowing the faithful to see the pontiff's speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.
The Vatican famously got egg on its face in 2009 when it was forced to admit that, if it had surfed the web more, it might have known that a traditionalist bishop whose excommunication was lifted had for years been a Holocaust denier.

Read More..