by FRED CHARUNDER-MACHARRUNDEIRA, Alternate Reality News Service Science Writer
Esteban "Mickey" Lunarcher wondered why he was spooning sugar onto his morning cereal with his left hand. He hated cereal - he had been a pancakes and syrup man all of his life. But, no, that wasn't it: Lunarcher had been put on a strict whole grains diet after he had the shunt put into his spleen.
Lunarcher also hated mornings, but that wasn't it, either. Ever since the drug dealers and prostitutes had been chased out of the neighbourhood, he was woken to the sounds of bawling babies and fighting Yuppie couples at 7:36 every morning for the past six months. It got so bad, he now added ?gentrification? to the list of things he hated.
No, what was strange about this morning was that Lunarcher found himself left handed. He had been right handed his entire life. Somehow, during the night his dextrous orientation had shifted.
"I haven't decided if I hate it or not yet," Lunarcher, a man of great...passions, said. "Tell the truth, I probably wouldn't even have noticed except I use a right-handed teaspoon to pour the sugar onto my cereal."
The experience of Lunarcher, a door to door used pill salesman from Lunenberg-on-Thames, wasn't unique. In fact, at 6:37 am GMT, everybody in the world found that their handedness switched. Lefties became righties. Righties became lefties. And, those who were ambidextrous suddenly became very, very clumsy. (I could have opened this article with anybody in the world; the reason I chose Lunarcher that he happened to be selling pre-loved Viagra in the office as I started doing our research.)
"It was horrible!" Hidekeo Matsushita of the Tokyo Gerbils baseball team exclaimed. "I was in my wind-up when the change happened, so I lost the zip on my fastball, and the pitch was hit out of the ballpark! We were already behind 13 to 2, so it didn't affect the outcome of the game, but...okay, you know, now that I think about it, it wasn't really as traumatic as I may have originally made out it was."
Perfect bowling games thrown off. Peace treaties signed by squiggles that may be interpreted as meaningless by future generations. A thousand couples thrown off their rhythm (whether dancing or having sex). We will likely be calculating the costs of the devastation wrought by the reverse in humanity's orientation for generations to come. What could possibly have caused this?
"Oh, wait. No, no, no, no, no. You're not going to pin this on us," said Robert Aymar, the French director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). "The Large Hadron Collider has nothing to do with the sudden change in everybody's handedness. Nothing. Not a thing. Not one. None."
That would seem to be that, then. However, since you brought it up...
"Oh, here we go," Aymar moaned.
Did you enjoy blowing things up when you were young? (If you do as an adult, get help.) The Large Hadron Collider is, in essence, an experiment in blowing things up (by adults who didn't get help). Blowing them up real good. It does this by accelerating two atoms to 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light, then "introducing" them to each other.
At first, the atoms don't want to get together, sort of like...Ricky Gervais and Tea Leoni in Ghost Town. However, thanks to the logic of romantic comedies, they are inevitably drawn closer...and closer...and - BOOM! An explosion that could give scientists insight into the big bang.
Kind of puts your childhood explosions into perspective, doesn't it?
Before the collision, some people feared dire results from the experiment, everything from a black hole that would suck in the entire solar system (yes, including Luton) to comedian Steve Coogan becoming head of the European Union.
"But, they didn't happen, did they?" Aymar argued. "The dire predictions were made by people who never learned anything from blowing up things when they were younger. Well, I'm a professional things blower upper, and I am telling you that there can be no connection between the Large Hadron Collider and people's handedness changing!"
When asked why the change occurred at the exact moment the two atoms collided, Aymar lamely responded, "I...have to go look at some charts, now. We'll be analyzing the information we got for decades, you know. Ask me again when I'm finished."
Other than having to change the orientation of all of his cutlery, how has Lunarcher been affected by the switch from being right-handed to being left-handed? Unfortunately, I spent so much time explaining his predicament at the beginning of the article that I have no room to