As mentioned elsewhere, I made a “Shittiest Years” as I couldn’t believe my top 5 worst years (apart from 1997) have been since 2017 but they are and the Weaselverse seems the best explanation. As well as all my personal woes, we’ve had Brexit, Trump and Covid.

That reliable relater of reality, The Oo-Ah Daily Star, has more:

a bizarre conspiracy theory argues that the course of history has already been fundamentally changed—after a weasel got stuck in the Hadron Collider in 2016.

In April 2016, the £4bn Hadron Collider was forced to shut down for a number of days after a weasel got inside a high-voltage transformer and was ‘fried to death’.

Although a spokesperson for CERN says that the weasel did not get inside the LHC’s tunnels, and despite the fact scientists were able to get things up and running again within a few days, the weasel’s death sparked wild speculation about the fate of the universe.

Conspiracy theorists on the Internet believe that the weasel’s intrusion set off a chain of events which have doomed civilisation as we know it, starting with the death of Harambe gorilla less than two weeks later and culminating in the election of President Donald Trump.

Comedian and writer Rob Sheridan has repeatedly taken to Twitter to share his theories about ‘the Weaselverse’, claiming that the weasel “shifted us into the wrong timeline” and saying “it explains EVERYTHING”.

Others have gone much deeper with the baseless ‘theory’. One Reddit user wrote in a thread that the weasel’s entry into the Hadron Collider “could’ve sent us into another dimension without anyone being aware of it directly.”

They said: “Things like the Mandela Effect can be attributed to people from these two different dimensions remembering events very differently as they would’ve happened differently between timelines.”

The conspiracy theorist added: “The fact that the team who was using the collider at the time was literally attempting to open dimensional gateways is really bizarre. Who knows what they did to the fabric of our reality? How could any of us know?! We wouldn’t but world events have definitely gone off the rails since then.”

One commenter simply said: “That little weasel screwed us.”

An idea started by a comedian, expanded on by a Redditor in r/ShowerThoughts and compiled by The Daily Star has to be horseshit. And yet… And yet…