Ending the Year, Ending the Blog
I want to first thank those of you who sent in holiday wishes, especially LizDitz. (I shall always cherish the word "sausageness.")
I have been silently collecting my favorite fails and wins all year, hoping to do a year in review. Or maybe a "Nude Girls of Skepticism" calendar. I think that the former will get me less sued (more about that later).
Ideological enemies FoxNews and CNN share the award for the worst science reporting of the year in what is sort of a poopy parenthesis for the year. In January, FoxNews opened an article with the words:
The tremendous volcanic eruption thought to be responsible for Earth's largest mass extinction — which killed more than 70 percent of plants and dinosaurs walking the planet 250 million years ago — is still taking lives today.
Oh, the wrong. This one stuck in the treads of my sneakers all year. The second really, really bad job of communicating science to the public came from this month, just a few days ago, when CNN picked up something that Oprah had dropped.
Big fail in the summary, Sanjay, and your producers should be put into a dishwasher until they apologize. The eye scraping and nasal probing or "blockhead trick"...WTF? These are long-known carnival tricks and shamanistic charlatanry! Do 5 minutes of Internet research, Gupta, and let these woo-mongers have it.
This year, also saw the growth of my menagerie by one cat:
This cat's arrival threatened to turn my website into simply a series of updates about the cat. We slowly wormed his way into our hearts, not unlike a heartworm, and we eventually settled on about a dozen names for him, but his full Pastifarian name is Randini Gavin McLoud, or Gavin for short. Later, however, a miracle took place, and the image of Cthulu appeared on his forehead:
Beholding the image, everyone in my house instantly went insane, but Skepchick recognized the significance of this appearance, and Gavin appeared on Cute Animal Fridays. We still haven't heard from Joe Nickell, however.
Leaving a long unpleasant streak on my radar for the first time this year was Mike Adams, Health Clown. He did first appear long ago in a post called "Mike Adams, Docktor of Physik with An Especialitee in Malajustments of the Humours." I revisited him many times over the year, because he is such a twisted goofball. Adams is clearly a danger to public health and aesthetics:
The occasion for my coverage of him was the Dr. Rachie Shorty Kerfuffle, when a bunch of charlatans were cheating to win completely unearned health awards. Rachael ultimately won for achievements in the field of awesome. During this dust-up, I declared Jan 25th International Dr. Rachie Awareness Day, a day to remind us to keep Dr. Rachie in your hearts all year long. Out of this, HJHOP was mentioned a couple of times on the Skeptic Zone, a weekly podcast out of Australia that everyone should listen to, and which has spawned no small number of Australian luminaries of science education. I met many of them face to face for the first time at Dragon*Con. I was in a dowsing demonstration during Rachael and Richards Mystery Investigators show, which was a hoot, and I introduced myself afterward. We were attacked by ghost orbs during the resulting photos:
(I think the one above and to the left of Richard's head is probably a guardian angel, the one above and to the right of his head is probably spirit energy manifesting, the one way above Rachael's head is my great-grandmother, and the one next to her head is actually just a mote of dust reflecting the camera flash or possibly a light out of focus in the window behind us.) That night, we (Animala and I) heard that the Skeptic Track people were gathering in the hotel bar on the first floor. Rachael came by and talked to us for about 20 minutes, which was swell of her, and later we sat and talked to James Randi for about 15 minutes. Also temporarily depriving Australia of her immediate awesomeness was Kylie Sturgess, to whom I introduced myself and who delivered an ear-schredding squee and rib-shattering hug. It was great to finally meet her in person.
Regarding Answers in Genesis, it was a bountiful year. It started with Bodie Hodge's series on Really Embarrassingly Stupid Questions That Would Shame Most 5th Graders but that AiG Takes Seriously and culminated in the secular apotheosis of literalism that took up Answers In Genesis's challenge to "Stand unashamedly on the Bible." The site was mentioned on Pharyngula, and the campaign to stand on Bibles became part of the American vernacular, or at last used as and example of a literal metaphor on the site TVTropes (under tag "real life").
I expanded my guitar and guitar accessories collection to what is basically perfection, with the addition of a Les Paul Studio, which I love, a Korg A3 signal processor, which is fantastic, a Keeley Modded TS 9, and finally a VoxAC 30 amp:
The whole set up (which I have since trimmed down a little and put on a pedal board) is featured in a post from August.
Woo-wise, this was a very interesting year for me, because I came into more direct contact with the weirdness than ever before. For instance, I visited the Georgia Guidestones. I also went to a psychic fair, where I was introduced to Robert Barner's homeopathic biofeedback, which was the biggest, most transparent load of horse leavings I had ever encountered. At the same psychic fair, a psychic talked to my grandmother, showing an uncanny ability to contact the living. Oh, I also got my cat certified in homeopathy; we were all so proud of her. I also attended my first webinar and live-tweeted Meryl Dorey's antivax strangeness. I, and most of Midtown, protested the Westboro Baptist Church's visit to Atlanta.
My increased contact with the world of woo, however, brought me some unwanted attention, which I have not written about here. These incidents have made me reconsider having a pseudonymous website, and I now feel that it will be better in the next year for me to write "on the record," as it were, under my own name in a new venue.
The first incident came after Dragon*Con. I had been to a pair of presentations by Chris Fleming, of the despicable show Psychic Kids. After his second talk, I recorded my exchange with him during the Q&A, when I asked if there was anyone who was independent of the show to looking after the children's interests. (The answer I got was basically, "What? My co-host is not independent?") This is an extremely important facet of normal, legitimate research, because kids are classified as an especially vulnerable population, and Hollywood has rules about kids working. I broadcast this conversation on my podcast. A lawyer in the Georgia AG's office has since said that I probably was within my rights to do so, but a few days after the podcast went up, I was contacted by the organizers of the Skeptic Track, Derek and Swoopy, both of whom I respect immensely. Swoopy sent me a strongly worded email, which warned me that if I did not take down the podcast, I could expect to hear from the Con's lawyers. My sense is that the lawyers affiliated with the show had complained about the podcast, and the Con wanted to send a clear message, which, holy shit, did they ever! Basically, I was told that I had jeopardized the entire existence of the Skeptic Track. I was, of course, not a representative of the Skeptic Track in any way shape or form. I was simply attending. Nonetheless, the recording came down instantly and I sent profuse apologies to... just about everyone in the world. When Skepchick recently raised the issue of that horrid show's renewal, I really wished that the recording was still around to inform the debate, but it was gone. The whole affair was deeply humiliating and frustrating.
Just about the time that I was starting to come back to post regularly on my site, I received an email from my boss to contact him or her at home. My boss wanted to let me know that I was going to be receiving a note from the office of Human Resources who had received a complaint about a website called Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes. This was a shock to me, since I have always tried to keep my work life and free time separate, and I have consciously never made my connection to any place of work public on the site. It has always been my own personal clubhouse, no work allowed. Hell, I don't even get email from the site at my work address. At any rate, someone creepily made the connection and talked to my superiors. I felt personally threatened, as nobody had contacted me about any factual errors or anything. This was when I restricted access to the site for a few days, which confused a number of regular readers. I was trying to ensure that if I had said something that was factually wrong, that I would try to, in good faith, limit the spread of any possible misinformation before the person/people contacted me. I still have no idea who complained or what the problem was. In the end I was not personally contacted by anyone about anything, so the site went back up.
And it will stay up.
This website has brought me immense amounts of joy and I have met a number of great people through it. It has been completely worth the time and trouble at all points, and the people who have participated over the years have made me immensely glad to have bothered. Nonetheless, I'm sure that I can do more as not-a-toad, and I want to write on the record. I have lined up a couple of higher-profile writing/speaking gigs with outside skeptical groups. I have a busy semester ahead of me and a lot of publishing to accomplish over the coming months. If there was ever a time to set aside this magnificent toy of a website, it would be now.
Keep this site on your RSS feeds for now, as I will make an announcement here of my new digs when I land. I do plan to continue contributing to the conversations we started here, just in a different forum, and I'd be happy to see you there as well. I am starting a much better thing, folks, and it would be a shame if you missed it.
HJ/B
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