The truth is out there. In Bangor of all places.
This BBC Northern Ireland report on “UFOs” over Bangor last year is stranger than any X-File.
Present Tense »
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What would Jesus do (take a scrum or line-out?)
At least one school had a Mass ahead of its Leinster Senior Cup rugby match this week. It’s interesting to hear that God takes time out from his busy schedule – deciding who lives and dies, triggering natural disasters, fiddling the Republican nomination race – to pay an interest in schools rugby. Maybe he went to a school for fee-paying dieties. Maybe he has a couple of quid on the outcome. Whatever, other schools will now need to up the ante in order to curry his favour. Ritual sacrifice before the match, perhaps.
Seriously, I’m amazed that anyone would think that any God would bother influencing a minor sporting event on this sprawling planet. With the Olympics coming up, he’ll be far too busy trying to decide which God-bothering sprinter should win the 100m.
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Selection Box
- If there can be a Math Rock then there can be Grammar Rock. Here’s Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend.
- Cloverfield is out in the States, and critics say it’s brilliant/rubbish.
- Complaints about the UK press rose 31 per cent in 2007
- McDonald’s drops plans to advertise on the front of school report cards
- Are you just a brain floating in space?
- RTÉ’s tradition for dodgy comedy goes back a long way. Here’s a 1970 Christmas Special, which packs two stunning punchlines into the first minute. Then skip forward to three minutes to see Dickie Rock’s comedy masterclass.
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Gawking at the Scientologists
The Tom Cruise video, is nothing too unusual. “Religious fruitcake makes mad pronouncements about the power of his beliefs” – apart from the particular context, it could have been anyone from the Pope to Paisley to plenty of people you meet each week. Although, you do get the feeling that each of those would call an ambulance if you had an accident. (more…)
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An antidote to homeopathy
Ciaran gets in touch:
In case people haven’t seen it, ben goldacre (he of bad science fame/infamy) had an article on homeopathy in Friday’s g2…
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Medium, not so rare
Last week, The Last Word’s stand-in host Anton Savage interviewed “medium” Derek Acorah. Tough one for Savage, sitting in for a few days, given a total dud of a guest. But you didn’t need to be psychic to guess that an uninterrupted interview would allow Acorah to get away with saying pretty much whatever he wanted. So when Savage made a last-ditch attempt at injecting some reason into the chat, Acorah could say “sure there’s loads of scientific evidence” for psychic powers (mainly in Russia. Solid.) without any real fear of getting taken up on it.
Luckily, Jon Ronson’s Guardian piece on Sylvia Brown came along. Brown is a US TV “psychic” and a woman with a unique insight into missing children cases.
She’s become famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids. Distraught parents go to her during her weekly appearance on The Montel Williams Show on CBS television. Montel is like Oprah. Sylvia tells them, “Your child is dead” or “Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.” (more…)
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Selection box
Some links:
73man highlights one of RTÉ’s more ridiculous online polls.
66 Simpsons scenes alongside the movies that influenced them. (via BoingBoing)
TV3 has been given some stick for its coverage of the rugby. New Zealand’s TV3 has been getting abuse too. Maybe they could form a support group.
A supreme-court judge in the Phillipines announced that he chats with three elves only he can see. He’s become a TV favourite because of it. The Supreme Court’s medical clinic says he’s suffering from a form of psychosis. The judge says he’s not. You decide.
Fresh from turning back Venezuala’s clocks by half an hour, Hugo Chavez’s TV show lasted a record eight hours this weekened.
The Ryanair of bus tours: Megabus
New York Times gives Americans the impression that all one-off housing in Ireland can be an architectural masterpiece.
Best bit about Friday’s match? The fan getting stuck in the bog.
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10am: Why God doesn’t exist. 11am: Mass
The 13th European Skeptics Congress takes place in Dublin on 7-9 September. Should be an interesting event, although what they really won’t be able to believe is the price of a pint.
Among the guest speakers will be the Guardian’s in-house debunker, Dr Ben Goldacre. His Bad Science site is always worth a read, and currently has the entirety of the first part of the recent Dawkins series, in case you missed it.
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Psychic: “I predict a silly season splash”
Now, to the “Irish” Sun, which today leads with a ridiculous story about a psychic “tip-off” dragging gardai to a Co Dublin house, in the hunt for Annie McCarrick. “It was,” said the Sun, “the first major break for the gardai since the 26-year-old American vanished 14 years ago.”
The first major break? The gardai dug. They found nothing. A psychic tells them to dig deeper, and gets a nice bit of publicity out of sending everyone of a fool’s errand. And the Sun, which would complain about any perceived waste of taxpayers money, encourages just that by giving the pathetic episode a front page splash.
UPDATE: The search actually took place three months ago, which explains why the report made no mention of when the search took place, and also featured a picture of the “psychic” at the scene.
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Some links
As humanity’s actions lead to the extinction of Yangtze dolphin, we can be next to die out if we follow the lead of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
Sean Hughes tells the Telegraph that his Madeleine McCann joke was legitimate (more…)
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UFOs. LOL
The British ministry of defence has released last year’s UFO files, and the conclusive result? That there’s nothing conclusive about it. Except that there was a strange increase in sightings around Guy Fawke’s night.
There have been, though, 11 sightings in the North over the past decade, according to seperate files. Hopefully, the peace dividend will encourage more UFO visits. Perhaps a large grant can be given to set up a North/South body charged with advertising the whole island as a great place to begin an alien invasion. (more…)
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Great arguments against the theory of evolution #23,563
“When animals breathe out their breath sinks to the ground but when a human breathes out their breath rises up to heaven, so obviously the evolution theory is wrong and God really did create the world in seven days.”
So a student told Conortje , who explains at his blog that the Dutch aren’t always as progressive as we think. -
Looking for signs of evolution
American bloggers have been aflutter over the arrival there of an 800-page monster of a book, The Atlas of Creation by a Turkish Islamist Adnan Oktar (going by the name of Harun Yahya). It is an Islamist attack on Darwinism, and an argument in favour of the idea that animals haven’t actually changed in the millions of years since God put them here. The tome landed in The Irish Times in March, slumping on my desk for the few minutes it took me to realise that while it might be ornate, colourful and superficially impressive it was proof only that the Islamic world can be prone to just as much pseudo-scientific, theological hokum as the Christian West.
Examining the fossil record, we see that living things are exactly the same today as they were hundreds of millions of years ago—in other words, that they never underwent evolution … This demonstrates one indisputable fact: Living things did not come into being through the imaginary processes of evolution. All the living things that have ever existed on Earth were created by God.
Yahya sent out thousands of copies to scientists and journalists, but what rational mind could possibly be attracted by such intellectually substantial gaudiness?
Step forward Kevin Myers. (more…)
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The Curse of the Psychic Investigators
This week, gardaí searched an area in Boyle, Co Roscommon, in relation to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Their source? A psychic “tip-off” relayed to them by Interpol.
The result of the search? Nothing. Except to remind us that in any major disappearance or murder case, one thing is all too predictable: half the continent’s self-declared psychics and clairvoyants will insist on “helping”.
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Feather-brained?
Victoria Mary Clarke has been talking to her “angels” about the Madeleine McCann case. And today, she tells us what they said. Extraordinary piece. Perhaps they should have told her to go and talk to some real people instead.
Link: Victoria Mary Clarke’s angels have their say
I wrote about the infestation of angels back in January (before I started this blog). Here’s that article:
(more…)
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