Upsetting Day: CERN Satan’s Playground 🌭

CERN: Satan’s Playground is boilerplate conspiracy crap by a man whose brain is soup.

It’s also less fun than the title suggests. I wanted descriptions of Satan having a lovely time running physics experiments. Satan chatting around the Perrier cooler with his Franco-Swiss work friends. Instead, this book is crank crap. Crank crap…from my library???

My dearest Hotdoggers: I am processing a betrayal. CERN: Satan’s Playground is my local library’s top search result for the search term “cern”. It appears they e-shelved CERN: Satan’s Playground without checking the subtitle, cover art, or any other aspect. That stinks! If I know how library e-book licensing works, they’re spending my tax dollars on significant recurring fees. And I discovered this while researching an episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. I researched the topic of “http www”. What is its deal? Why is it the strange set of characters on the front of the normal words “1900hotdog”? Partial answer: CERN. So I wanted to know more about that. My SIFpod prep depends on library resources. I searched “cern” in my library’s catalog. Their top suggestion is misinformation. How dare my beloved library betray me like this? When I want to read something horrendous, I turn to the Hot Dog Discord tip line. Dennard puts together fun summaries of what’s in there. Curses abound, in a good way. That’s not what I seek at my library. CERN: Satan’s Playground belongs in its author’s thick file folder at the asylum, not the giant combined library system serving five counties in a blue state. The Mid-Hudson Library System pools the resources of 66 libraries. Those 66 libraries fell one digit short of the funniest possible reason to e-stock this crap.

Speaking of e-stuff: e-books are a wild medium for fearmongering about the Internet. I read all of CERN: Satan’s Playground. It never achieves self-awareness. There’s not one word along the lines of “using the devil’s own hypertext to debug him.” Writing an anti-Internet e-book is like writing an environmentalist manifesto by drilling Alaskan nature preserve oil to make pen ink. Or sourcing a fresh writing quill by plucking a condor. I guess I can’t criticize too much, because I post things on TikTok that I hope make TikTok contain a few more vitamins and minerals. This is of course a fool’s errand. I am a fool, and so is author Nick Huntley. Gaze in grim fascination at his bio page.

What a long-winded way of saying “No actual qualifications to claim CERN = Cenobites.”

This author bio is at the end of the book. You’re coming at it without a key piece of context. That context: every sentence in the book lacks any awareness of what came before it. Nick Huntley exquisite corps’d himself. He writes like something degenerative is bouillabaissing his brain.

If you know that, you see tragedy in this bio’s repeated invocation of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Without context, you might guess this guy loves Fort Wayne. Or you might think he learned the grade school maneuvers for padding out an essay, and never learned he’s allowed to stop doing that. Or you might think he’s touting himself as from THE REAL AMERICA, in the sense people use when their location lacks value and they can’t sit with knowing it. All these guesses make sense. They also fit one of Nick Huntley’s sins. That sin: the same sin as most American adults. Nick Huntley is so confident he’s the main character of life, he thinks every aspect of his life is an important, magical, hero’s journey step. Did you know Nick Huntley grew up in the early 1970s? To most humans, that would be a plain fact. To Nick Huntley, that is a building block of Nick Huntley’s centrality in the universe. He was forged in the crucible of a better time, before THE ALMIGHTY CELL PHONE took over. Being a child in the 1970s is amazing about him, and boring about other people, and the same goes for bagging groceries at a Kroger. That’s Nick Huntley’s entire deal: combining a major fault with a major rail spike through the noggin. Almost every chapter rehashes introductory information about CERN being a research facility with a particle accelerator, and pitches that information as if it’s a glorious revelation from an author who’s the greatest man of history. He’s too big of an asshole for me to feel sorry for him. Also it’s annoying as a reading experience. Several pages made me feel like my e-reader glitched and jumped back ten chapters. Every line reads as if it was written after its bearded bleary author demanded to know what year this is.

I also describe Nick Huntley’s brain as a soup, because he brings up literal soup a lot more often than you’d expect. Have you ever heard the phrase “primordial soup”? A lot of science communicators throw that out there one time, before using actual science words to describe the beginning of the universe. Nick Huntley is built different. “Soup” is the alpha and omega of Nick Huntley’s understanding of existence. In this way, CERN: Satan’s Playground gives new meaning to the name “alphabet soup”.

There you have it: the universe is soup, and that universal soup is a kind of soup-iverse. Also “Hot Quark Soup” is phenomenal. “Hot Quark Soup” is the Feeld query you’ve all tried. And come on, Nick. You can’t let “soup” be your entire description of how the universe began. No scientist would do that. By the way, Nick, how would you describe the scientific research process?

So if CERN is a soup kitchen, is Satan Ratatouille-ing them inside their berets? Nick claims this is so. He also claims CERN has one of the only two particle accelerators on the face of the Earth, before providing a list of many more accelerators a few chapters later.

I’m almost interested in tracking down Nick Huntley’s closest kin, to ask them to get him help. He’s a danger to yourself and others. We’ve gotta rescind the driver license of any fella who’s this much of a bisque-for-brains. However, I fell short of that humanitarian act, because I despise Nick Huntley. As I did the moral calculus of whether to aid him, I realized I have a rule: everybody’s allowed to freestyle one crappy book. If you do that, reread it, and never write again, you get a mulligan. This Goodreads page is more of a triple bogey.

Even worse, Nick Huntley dedicated this book to an evil dream. When you begin reading the dedication page, you think he’s celebrating his daughter. By the end, you learn Nick wants to make his daughter our planetary God-Emperor.

Listen pal: you’re not allowed to be mad at CERN for trying to end the world if you think your CERN book will help your seed conquer that world. Also if you believe what you’re writing, you are literally failing the entire world. As the book’s title and cover indicates, Nick Huntley thinks he is on a mission to prevent CERN from opening a demonic portal. In an astonishing act of selfishness, Nick sees this “hellmouth devouring the Alps” situation, and thinks it’s his kid’s time to shine.

Tragically, Nick Huntley’s CERN concerns (“CERNcerns”?) are tedious. He spent three years writing a book breaking zero new ground. Nick begins where you think he will. In the previous decade, CERN discovered stuff about particle physics that led the media to put the term “God particle” in headlines. When you dig into what a “God particle” is, it’s new theories that raise more questions. When Nick Huntley digs into that, he assumes scientists are doing the evil he already assumed they do. Then he steals space pictures and stock illustrations from the Internet.

Sure, Nick. Many believe many things. That’s beliefs for ya. And did you know some beliefs come from [gasp] pagans? Nick fixates on this too much. His next piece of the puzzle is one statue of the god Shiva, gifted to CERN after decades of collaboration with scholars in India. To Nick, its mere presence on a European campus he’s never visited SAYS IT ALL.

Swing through a Hindu community sometime and ask them about their Infinity Dwarf. They love that. Like how Christian churches love questions about their Trinity’s “Spooky God Fog.”

Anyway this book is not all fun and games. It’s not all soups and Shivas. Nick proceeds to reveal he cannot stop masturbating.

Why is Nick masturbating? Why is this crank cranking his crank so crankily? The culprit: the Internet. And who is the culprit behind the Internet? Tim Berners-Lee. Who was funded by CERN, which was funded by the Rockefellers, who definitely own the university the Rockefellers put their name on. That’s how endowing a university works, as sure as getting horny online is the fault of a CERN employee who organized CERN’s physics research databases in the early 1990s and then gave away a lot of his information-formatting systems for other people to enjoy.

“And the rest is history.” Did you know you don’t have to finish explaining ideas? You can pivot to the very smart yada-yada of “and the rest is history” and be all done writing. After all, history. You know history, by existing. You also know a lot about how people who read books describe the act of reading.

Good news: the Rockefellers are Protestants. Bad news: every time Nick mentions the Rockefellers, it still feels antisemitic. Worst news: Nick gets around to worrying about (((CERN’s founders))) in due time.

In between losing track of how often he’s established the basics of concepts, Nick rehashes every right wing idea that’s ever been brain-wormed. Did you know climate change isn’t a thing? It’s actually a side effect of CERN particle-collisions that are causing earthquakes, and making clouds sprout faces.

Nick also struggles to give the worm-noggin crowd what they came for. He’s inefficient. He drags out the buildup. After some appetizing paranoia about bosons and Shiva, he devotes a dozen chapters to the driest possible copy-pastes from encyclopedia type resources about physics. That’s way too slow. None of RFK Junior’s familiars are gonna stick around for the dessert courses. They’ll never reach the Promised Land of Chapter 16, and its sudden claims that Stargates are real and that “the Groundhog Day effect” is a scientific concept. Sorry Nick: you’re describing the premise of the Bill Murray movie, with a couple of Science Words grafted onto its caboose.

From that point on, the conspiracy stuff squirts thick and heavy. Nick pairs these claims with astonishing confidence in his own wisdom. He classifies four tiers of multiverses. He tosses off the basics of an ultimate weapon under the Swiss side of CERN’s accelerator. My favorite one of these Genius Insights is Nick’s section on time travel, because he paints himself into a corner. Nick can’t quite declare time travel exists, because he’d have to explain time travel. He also can’t stop himself from presenting himself as an expert on everything. “Everything” includes time travel. Therefore, Nick implies every scientist in history is dumber than Nick, because they failed where he succeeded. Does Nick recognize this, delete, and start over? Or does he dunk on the reputations of every Nobel Prize winner he’s ever heard of?

The more books I give the Hotdoggery treatment, the more I learn conspiracy theories are a one-way road to megalomania. And “road” is too journey-oriented of a word. These guys are already at their megalomania destination when they type “Chapter 1”. Nick Huntley read a headline about CERN studying a “God particle”, and decided he holds such unique knowledge of the cosmology of why that’s bad. That’s how you find yourself text-hollering about the giants who terrorized the Earth before the Biblical flood. Did you know the Nephilim did not drown while Noah threw a yacht party with exactly two giraffes? Turns out the Nephilim are alive, and well, and on a coffee break under CERN – and poindexters like Carl Sagan (which is almost “Satan”????) are keeping that secret.

Nick keeps digging. Amazingly, this turns up a few interesting things. There are a few valid “weird” CERN stories. They’d be interesting in the hands of a writer whose cerebellum wasn’t a consommé. Unfortunately they’re grist for Nick Huntley’s conspiracy mill. One guy involved with the precursor of CERN really was in the Nazi armed forces. One tunnel adjacent to CERN really did have an artsy spooky dedication ceremony. A large new telescope really was called the acronym “LUCIFER” until people thought better of that. And a few CERN employees really did a (fake! prank!) human sacrifice at the facility. They did that for the (mean!) reason that it’s fun to trick people like Nick Huntley, who already insist Baphomet’s crew does that at CERN on the regular. They knew the Nick Huntleys of the world would never admit the prank is a prank. To Nick, the prank is a smokescreen. And did you know the CERN pranksters were CERN employees? If you insist the prank wasn’t a prank, that’s pretty important!

The book only gets more embarrassing. Most of its 43 chapters are brief. Nick could only sit at his keyboard so long before too much chowder leaked out of his ears. However, one chapter is longer than the rest. You will never guess the topic of the longest chapter. Would you like to write down a guess before you keep reading? Up to you. Here’s your opportunity to do that.

[Poxco musical interlude]

In this book’s longest chapter, Nick Huntley writes a detailed scene-by-scene summary of the movie Angels & Demons.

That’s all it is. Nick Huntley summarizes the movie, of the book, of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. Also shout-out to my man Nick for not just worrying about the Jews. Nick’s out here monitoring all the faiths. Nick’s sure me and my fellow (lapsed) Catholics are UP TO SOMETHING – and Nick’s got even more of somebody else’s art to prove it.

Take Nick’s advice. Fly over Saint Peter’s Basilica. You’ll absolutely see an upside-down cross if your flight path goes one specific direction.

One grand tragedy of conspiracists is their lack of new ideas. They think they know the most. They think they’re discovering the most. Yet their knowledge is limited to passing around existing weird art, and squinting at words until they look like different words.

As I approached the end of this library book (!), I turned up one gem. Nick Huntley achieves iconic outsider art in one way. In one image, he distills everything you need to know about the conspiracy theorist mindset. He does this by not bothering to fill in the text boxes on somebody else’s template. Behold:

So congratulations, CERN. You’ve been advancing science for several decades now. As a result, your prominent successes are a mouse trap for the most tedious Americans. They’re sure you’re evil. They’re confident they’ve proven you’re evil. And they’ll stand strong against your devious mission to hypnotize humanity into obeying your demonic orders to YOUR TEXT YOUR MANIFESTO GOES HERE.

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