Congratulations CERN media relations, someone in Spain is clearly drinking your Kool-Aid (or Flavor Aid, it seems history is unclear).

Remember that smutty detector porn that CERN started feeding the media a few years back? The stuff where our super-conducting toroids are laid bare, nothing left to your nerdy imagination. How can you not forget?

Here, let me introduce you to an old friend, it may have a temporary word with your techno-thalamus,

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Either the guy is really small or the orifice is really big.

This image can be found in the ATLAS barrel magnet gallery as well as in every media packet ever distributed by CERN. If you are a heavy pop-sci consumer you senses are probably already deadened to it. (Do you remember your mom warning you about this stuff back when you were 13? She should have.) Well, if you browsed the magnet gallery just a little bit too long then you might be struck by a jarring final image like this

Familiar? from a production of Berlioz's Les Troyens last year

This is from what seems have been a very short lived production of Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Spain. It’s the classic legend of Troy and Carthage in the form of opera, but this very contemporary production seems to have been ripped from the science and technology section of your local paper by the same people who brought you Battlefield Earth. According to one review the theater company directing the production “was received with mixed applause and boos.” After watching the following montage of the production–where it seems bits of every sci-fi drama ever produced was collided at near the speed of light, irradiating the performers, and transporting them back to college in which everyone is issued a MacBook–I think I would be applauding and booing at the same time, both loudly. The ATLAS toroid scene is at 1:09,

[By the way, if you want to learn more about this theater company, La Fura dels Baus, and you decide to visit their web site at www.lafura.com, you might take into consideration the fact that you will be treated to immediate full screen video. If you are lucky (or unlucky, depending on your setting and sensibilities) the random clip will include nudity or even simulated sex. Good times.]

Correction: as the first comment points out, I originally put “Palau de les Arts” where I meant “La Fura dels Baus” in the last paragraph.