No, I think it was mostly from the time I stuck it in my shorts mountain biking in South Africa.

My previous (US) passport was beat completely to shit by the time it was close to expiration. I got chewed out once in Germany by a passport agent who disapproved, and nearly didn't get let into Egypt at all. The martinet checking passports in Cairo was most offended by my treatment of the document. But I remember returning to the U.S. from Cairo, and the agent at JFK turned the passport over in his hand and said, in a thick New York accent, "Whadya, put a cigarette out innit?" and that was it. I knew I was home.

Now I really want a drink and a smoke.

Nope. Nobody would ever think somebody who says shit like this is aloof, insular, or difficult to get along with.

I'm aware of that. You're speaking nonsense, or, in technical terms, gibberish.

This is total nonsense. Quark/antiquark annihilation is perfectly well-described in standard theory. The answer to the OP's question is that the quark and antiquark do annihilate, which is why all mesons are unstable. But it takes a little bit of time for the annihilation to happen, which gives you the lifetime of the meson.

Combinations of fundamental particles like quarks themselves behave as particles. The most familiar examples of such composite particles are the proton and neutron, but there are many others consisting of various excited quantum states of various combinations of quarks. Quark/antiquark pairs are called "mesons", and combinations of three quarks are called "baryons". Since energy and mass are pretty much interchangeable in these systems, excited (higher energy) states, act like particles with a larger mass.

It's not because they're technophobic. Their IT guys won't let them connect their "toys" to the network.

Uh, no. Unless thee circumstances are very special, a computer crash or a network intrusion is not going to result in the loss of life as in the case of a fire. It's exactly this sort of inflated self-importance that breeds contempt for IT.

Not every IT situation is the same. Providing infrastructure for a hospital naturally requires strict control over everything. IT infrastructure for an open institution like a university benefits from a more flexible approach. And when IT places the needs of "their" network over the needs of the institution the network serves, people are going to undermine their efforts. One small example at my place of employment (a university) is that, because network access is so strictly controlled by central IT, campus visitors are entirely unable to get internet access without a complicated and bureaucratic application procedure. The result? A proliferation of rogue access points in visitor offices.This is actually detrimental to security.

The harder you clench your fist, the more lusers slip through your fingers.

IT departments are plumbers: they provide the infrastructure for a utility. There is nothing wrong with being a plumber. It takes a lot of skill, experience, and smarts to be a good one. The only difference between IT and actual plumbers is that actual plumbers don't think they have a right to godlike control over everybody's bathtub.