If the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about and you accept that usually the best sportsmen get booed because of petty jealousy, then can there be anything more flaterring than being recipient of a death threat?

A death threat sounds like a very scary thing to get.  I’ve seen them in the movies and they are usually written in rat blood on a mirror or are a message cobbled together from printed newspaper cut outs.  They can even be etched with a finger on the back of a very dirty Hiace (although meteorological conditions such as a heavy shower can nullify the impact).

Some death threats make perfect sense.  If, perhaps, you are of a certain religious persuasion and you live in the middle of another religious persuasions community then you are ripe for a threat of death.  If you are a referee or umpire who made a very bad call in a game that caused a team to lose then you can expect death-related daubings on your garden gate the next day.

But if you are a scientist working on the most high-profile scientific experiment of all time; an experiment that will have you working in a high-security cavern in Switzerland operating a $9 billion machine for many months, is a death threat really going to concern you?  

How likely is it that some unemployed crackpot who Alt-Tabs from porno to conspiracy websites all day long is going to be able to infiltrate a secure location housing the finest minds in the world, killing all of them in a hail of gunfire, destroying their neatly-written project instructions, dismantling the $9bn machine, killing everyone all over the world who understands basically what needs to be done to re-build it and then repeat the cycle over and over until the threat is over?

I’d say it’s not very likely at all.