Wild West travelogue

Well, I'm back, and many thanks to my patient readers for sticking around during my two-week hiatus.  I'd like to launch this week with some observations from my travels, along with a few photographs taken by my wife (who is the amazing artist Carol Bloomgarden) and me.

Our travels this year took us out into the American West, where we spent some time in the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Park.  First of all, the natural beauty is stunning; while I like to think that we live in a part of the world that has awesome scenery (upstate New York), the grandeur of scale out there is something few places in the world can match.

The Grand Teton Mountains, from near Jackson Hole, Wyoming

There are a few additional things that have always impressed me about the American West, though.  One of them is that the Yee-Haw Attitude is alive and well, both in its positive and negative senses.  There's a feeling that personal freedom is paramount, as long as what you're doing doesn't impinge upon anyone else's personal freedom.  We did a lot of geocaching out there (and if you don't know about this amazingly weird and fun hobby, check it out here) -- and one of the caches we were seeking took us across a construction site up in Glacier National Park.  We started to cross, and were approached by two construction workers.  I expected that they were going to tell us to bugger off, that we weren't allowed there -- but they said, and I quote, "Do what you like as long as you don't mess with the equipment."

As another example of this, consider speed limits.  Near urban centers, even in the west, it's the usual 55 mph.  But as you get further out into the middle of nowhere, it goes up to 60, then 65, then 75 mph, until (in central Montana) they give up entirely.  "All right, go however the hell fast you want to," they seem to say.  "We know you're going to anyhow."

All of which is kind of funny, because our rental car was a Chevy Spark.  If you are unfamiliar with this car, all I can say is that the Chevy Spark is to cars as a pug is to dogs -- small, stubby, cute in a squashed sort of way, and not really particularly well adapted for any useful purpose.  I think that the Spark got its name from the fact that "spark" represents the energy level of which the engine is capable.  I noted that the speedometer went up to 120 mph, which was grimly amusing, because I don't think the Spark could go 120 mph if you dropped it off a cliff.  It went downhill like a boss, but going up (for example) Logan Pass involved lots of encouraging words from us and lots of nasty looks from the drivers of the cars who were in line behind us going 14 mph and who wanted for some reason to get to their destination that day.

Our Chevy Spark, recovering from a long climb

Of course, I spent a lot of time indulging in my favorite hobby, which is birdwatching.  Much of my behavior illustrated Dave Barry's contention that there is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness.  For example, we were at the LeHardy Rapids on the Yellowstone River, a site of amazing beauty, and there was also a rainbow trout run going on, which is pretty spectacular to see.  But my wife had spotted a Harlequin Duck, a bird I'd never seen, sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream.   The following conversation ensued:

Other tourist:  Wow!  This place is gorgeous! 

Me:  Look.  There's the duck. 

Other tourist:  That water is so blue!  And the trees!  And look at all of the trout in the river! 

Me:  But there's the duck. 

Other tourist:  Yellowstone is one of the natural wonders of the world! 

Me:  I know.  That's one incredible duck.

The duck in question

Which is not to say that I didn't appreciate other stuff.  In particular, Yellowstone is an astonishing place, to the point of parts of it being kind of surreal.  The hot springs, especially, which look like some amateur artist decided to use up all of their supply of brightly-colored acrylics in painting a nature scene.  If you ever get a chance to go to Yellowstone, the must-see (in my opinion) isn't Old Faithful, but Grand Prismatic Spring, which is colored by minerals and brilliantly pigmented bacteria:

Speaking of Yellowstone, it was in the forefront of my mind to consider the possibility of eruption of the hotspot/supervolcano that lies underneath Yellowstone Caldera, largely because over the last couple of years the woo-woos have been running around making little squeaking noises about how an eruption is imminent and you can tell because the bison and elk are fleeing from the park in terror, and also because the evil US government is evacuating the place and herding everyone into FEMA camps.  Well, we saw lots of people who weren't being held prisoner in FEMA camps, not to mention hundreds of bison, and I can say first-hand that the bison showed no evidence of fleeing in terror.  Most of them were simply moseying about in terror, or even snoozing in terror.

A bison, standing around munching on grass in terror

It did occur to me, though, that these might be suicidal bison, who realized that the volcano was going to blow and decided to stick around because they were depressed and wanted to end it all.  And in fact, "Meh, fuck it" seemed to be a common attitude amongst the wildlife we saw.

Which is a good thing, because otherwise the main cause of death in Yellowstone wouldn't be people getting vaporized by a volcanic eruption, but tourists being killed in messy ways because of sheer stupidity.  I have never seen so many people who evidently do not understand that "hot spring" means "so hot that it will boil your skin off," and "wild animal" means "animal that could easily kill you if it wanted to."  A former student of mine, who has worked in the national parks, told me that just a few weeks ago, a guy tried to put his son on the back of an elk so that his wife could take a photograph, and elk bucked and kicked the father in the head.

And killed him.

We didn't see anyone get killed in Yellowstone, but it wasn't for want of trying.  We saw one woman who was jumping up and down in front of a bison, waving her arms and shouting, "Hello, bison!  Hello, pretty bison!" so that it would turn its head for a picture with her.  When it refused to cooperate, she laughed and said, "Bye-bye, pretty bison!" and scampered off.  But the worst was when we saw a bear by the side of the road...

... a grizzly bear.

Okay, I took a picture of it, but using my zoom, and from the safety of my car.  But there were dozens of people who got out of their cars.  Despite the fact that this is clearly the most dangerous animal in the park, and is unpredictable.  And huge.  Which is why you're supposed to carry a whistle and pepper spray with you whenever you hike in the area.

You do know how to tell the different kinds of bear scat apart, right?  Black bears eat a lot of fruit, so black bear poop contains seeds and stems.  Brown bear poop often contains fish bones.  Grizzly bear poop, on the other hand, contains whistles and smells like pepper.

But that didn't stop people from acting like complete raving morons, running up to the wild animals and stepping on unstable ground over boiling hot lakes, despite the multitude of signs and warnings that were everywhere.  And I'm sure that if something bad had happened, the last thing that would have gone through these tourists' minds before being mauled and/or cooked to death would have been, "Why didn't someone warn me of the danger?"

But despite all that, the trip was amazing, and I highly recommend it to any of you who like to travel.  Traveling is, I think, the most eye-opening experience out there, and the natural world is full of beautiful, stunning, awe-inspiring places to visit.

And lots of really incredible ducks.

The guiding stones

(The last of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in September 2011.  I'll be back in the saddle on Monday!)

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It is virtually self-evident that belief in an odd idea can propel you to do odd things.

Of the many odd things I've run into, however, the Georgia Guidestones definitely come near the top of the list.  Built of polished granite and standing sixteen feet tall, the Guidestones are arranged on the top of a treeless hill in Elbert County, Georgia.  They are so imposing (and so mysterious) that they've been compared to Stonehenge, or to the weird black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons) 

Not the least mystery about them is who commissioned them, and why.  They were erected, under mysterious circumstances, in June of 1979.  The land on which they stand is owned by Elbert County, and was deeded to them by a "Robert C. Christian," who had purchased the land from a Wayne Mullenix.  I put "Robert C. Christian" in quotes because this almost certainly is a pseudonym -- curious researchers have tried, unsuccessfully, to identify who he is (or was).  (There is apparently persuasive, if circumstantial, evidence that R. C. Christian is Ted Turner.)

The message on the Guidestones is a series of (if you will) Ten Commandments, evidently intended to help the survivors create a better society once the apocalypse knocks off the rest of us.  These pronouncements are presented in twelve different languages -- English, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Hindi, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Babylonian Cuneiform, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics.  These last four, I suppose, are there in case the apocalypse spares some (for example) Ancient Sumerians.

The Guidestones themselves have various notches and holes cut into them, apparently in an effort to make them line up with the position of the sun, moon, and stars at various times of year.  The overall effect is to deepen the mystery, and perhaps heighten perception of the structure as resembling Stonehenge. 

Given the time and effort someone put into all of this, and how seriously he seems to take himself (I'm assuming that R. C. Christian is a man, given the male pseudonym), I find it a little disappointing how generally inane the Guidestones' "Ten Commandments" are.  Some of them aren't bad ideas, but are hardly earthshattering ("Protect People And Nations With Fair Laws And Just Courts"), while others seem a little pie-in-the-sky ("Unite Humanity With A Living New Language.")  I have to admit to some disappointment upon reading what they said.  Given all of the mystery, and all the expense someone obviously went to, I was expecting something a little more profound.  (You can read the entire message on the Guidestones here.) 

What I find even more baffling about this whole thing is how people have responded to them.  New Age types mostly think they're great.  Yoko Ono, for example, says they are "a stirring call to rational thinking."  Some prominent Christian thinkers, predictably, disagree, one Evangelical minister calling them "The Ten Commandments of the Antichrist."  An Atlanta psychic, Naunie Batchelder, predicted as far back as 1981 that they were of alien origin, and their purpose would be revealed "within thirty years."  (The aliens had better get on that, as they've only got three and a half months left.)  

Conspiracy theorists, of course, think they're just the bee's knees.  Mark Dice, whose favorite topics are the Illuminati and the New World Order, believes that they are of "deep Satanic origin," and has demanded that they be "smashed into a million pieces."  Dice thinks that somehow the Bilderburg Group were involved with the funding and construction of the Guidestones.  A researcher named Van Smith has done some numerological analysis of the Guidestones and claims that they are somehow connected to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building -- and believes that the dimensions of the Guidestones, when properly manipulated, predicted the date of death of Dubai's emir, Sheik Maktoum bin Rashid al Maktoum.  Noted wingnut Alex Jones thinks the Rosicrucians are responsible. 

All we need is to somehow get the Knights Templar involved, and we'll have a full house of bizarre explanations.

And, of course, all of these folks have followers, and those followers are happy to take action, when they're not picking at the straps of their straitjackets with their teeth.  Chickens have more than once been sacrificed in front of the Guidestones.  They are a frequent meeting site for a coven of Wiccans from Atlanta.  The Guidestones themselves have been repeatedly defaced, most recently by spray-painted graffiti stating "Death to the New World Order" and "Jesus will beat u satanist."  There has been more than one attempt to topple the Guidestones, but given that each of the stone blocks weighs twenty tons, those efforts have been thus far unsuccessful.

So, that's today's little dose of weirdness.  Next time I'm in Georgia, I'm going to make an effort to go see these things.  Not that I particularly think their message is all that profound -- but just to have had a chance to see, first-hand, what all the fuss is about.  And since one of the Guidestones' rules says, "Rule Passion - Faith - Tradition - And All Things With Tempered Reason," I figure I owe them at least that much.

The ley of the land

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in September 2011.)

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I ran into the idea of ley lines fifteen years ago on a trip to the UK.  I spent a month in the summer of 1995 hiking in the north of England, visiting old cathedrals and monastery ruins, and while I was at Rievaulx Abbey, I had a chance meeting with an English woman who said that if you connected the positions of holy sites on a map with straight lines, it made a pattern.

"They sited monasteries, cloisters, and cathedrals where they did because they were places of power," she said.  "The ley lines are channels of psychic energy, and where they intersect, it creates a kind of vortex.  The ancients felt this, and that's why they built monuments there, and later churches and abbeys."

Couldn't it, I asked her, also have to do with building in places where there was good access to water, and perhaps pre-existing roads?

"I suppose that also might have had something to do with it," she said, sounding doubtful.

For all her claims of the antiquity of this idea, the concept of ley lines is less than a hundred years old, and at first, it had nothing to do with anything psychic.  Alfred Watkins, an amateur archaeologist, noted in his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track how often multiple sites of archaeological or historical relevance lay upon the same straight lines, and he coined the term "ley lines" to describe this phenomenon.  He suggested that the reason was for ease of road-building -- especially in the southern half of England, where the terrain is mostly gentle, a straight line connecting several population centers is the smartest way site roads and settlements.  It wasn't until 48 years later that noted woo-woo John Michell, author of The View Over Atlantis, took Watkins' ley lines and connected them to the Chinese idea of feng shui and came up with the theory that ley lines were rivers of psychic energy, and the intersections ("nodes") were places of power.

The interesting thing is that Watkins himself wasn't even right, appealing though the idea is.  Mathematician David George Kendall and others have used a technique called shape analysis to demonstrate that the occurrence of straight-line connections between archaeological sites in England is no greater than you would expect from chance.  Put simply, a densely-settled place like England has so many sites of historical relevance that if you are allowed to pick and choose, you can find any number of lines that intersect, or at least clip, interesting places.

Take a look, for example, at the following diagram (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons):

This image shows 137 randomly-placed points.  A computer program was employed to find all of the straight-line connections of four or more points -- and it found eighty of them!

So, even if you eliminate all of the woo-woo trappings from the idea, it seems like the whole concept of "sacred sites" falling along straight lines is attributable to coincidence.  A pity, really.  I have always wondered if our house was at the intersection of two ley lines.  I was all prepared to use Intersections of Psychic Energy Channels and Nodes of Power Vortexes to explain why my digital alarm clock runs fast and why the dryer keeps eating my socks.

Ear candles and carrot dances

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in April 2011.)

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Just when I thought "alternative medicine" couldn't get any weirder, I came across a practice I'd never heard of before:  "ear candling."

It's also called "thermo-auricular therapy," which is a little like an elevator operator wanting to be called a "vertical transportation technician."  Basically, the concept is that many people suffer from impactions of ear wax, and so what you need to do is to lie on your side and stick a lit candle in your ear.  The lit candle will create a suction that will pull the ear wax out.

Practitioners always cut open the candle stubs at the end, showing all the orange goop inside the candle -- but in a controlled experiment performed on himself by skeptic and brave soul Bobby Nelson, it was demonstrated that the orange goop was residue from the candle itself, and was there even if you let the candle burn while sitting on a cereal box.  (We are assuming that the cereal box did not have an impaction of ear wax at the time.)  You can read the account of his experiment here, and see photos of Nelson lying there with a lit candle in his ear and a very grim expression.

As I was reading about this, I kept thinking this was some kind of prank medical procedure, as April Fools' Day was last week, but tragically, it's not.  People really do this, and some people swear by it.  Never mind that if the candle actually was capable of creating a powerful enough suction to suck up ear wax, it would rupture your ear drum.  Never mind that claims of the practice originating with the Hopi turned out to be lies -- the Hopis, when questioned, responding, "Of course we don't stick lit candles in our ears.  Do we look like morons?"  Never mind that dozens of people have ended up in the emergency room because hot candle wax ended up dripping down into their ear canals.  Never mind that there have been two recorded cases of people performing ear candling on themselves, falling asleep while doing so, and burning down their houses.

I am always amazed at how far the placebo effect and confirmation bias can drive people.  Now, don't misunderstand me; there are some types of "alternative medicine" that actually might work, and which are currently being studied by reputable medical researchers.  Acupuncture and a few of the herbal medicines come to mind.  But to quote Tim Minchin:  "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."  I'm much more willing to believe the dozens of controlled studies that have shown that ginkgo biloba doesn't improve your memory than the anecdotal evidence of people who say "it worked for me."  But when not only is there no evidence for something, and controlled studies show that it doesn't work, and there's a good argument that it can't work as advertised, and people still believe in it... that I really don't get.

On the other hand, the obnoxious side of my personality (never very deeply buried) wonders if I might not be able to have a little fun with this.  Perhaps I should come up with an alternative medicine therapy of my own, and create a website to promote it, and see how many people I can get to give it a try.  How about this one:

Are you tired?  Do you sleep poorly?  Do you feel like you're not grounded, of late?  Invoke the Earth Spirits and realign your Root Chakra by performing the CLEANSING DANCE OF THE SACRED CARROTS.  Take two carrots, and bless them, saying, "Oh great Carrot Spirits, bring to me your sacred wisdom."  Then stick the carrots up your nose.  Then put on some nice New Age music (we suggest Yanni) and dance around in your living room until the carrots are Saturated With The Heaviness Of Your Soul and fall out.  Wear gloves to dispose of the carrots so that the Tired Energy doesn't seep back and infect your chakras again.  You'll feel better immediately.  Trust me.

A Comprehensive Field Guide to Aliens

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in May 2011.)

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That people believe all sorts of weird things without any hard evidence is so obvious as to barely merit saying.  What never fails to astound me, however, is how complex some of these beliefs are.

Witness the website that a student of mine was kind enough to send me, which gives information about all of the different alien races that are currently visiting Earth.  Me, I thought there were only a couple -- the bug-eyed gray guys featured on various historical documentaries (for example, The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the shapeshifting reptilian dudes called the Annunaki that are the favorites of conspiracy theorists.  These last have supposedly infiltrated world governments, and many prominent human leaders have been replaced by heartless, cold-blooded scaly extraterrestrials, bent on world domination.  Apparently the trained eye can still recognize which are the real humans, and which are the Annunaki replacements.  Personally, I'm suspicious about Dick Cheney.  Doesn't he look a little like someone who has only recently learned the rule, "when you smile, raise your lips and expose your teeth," and still can't quite manage to make it look authentic?

In any case, imagine my surprise when I learned that the bug-eyed gray aliens and the Annunaki are only two of a whole petting zoo's worth of different alien species.  And I'm not talking about your typical Star Trek type alien, who looks like a guy speaking in a fake Russian accent while wearing a rubber alien nose.  I'm talking some serious non-humans here.

For example, consider the Arcturians.  These guys are only three feet tall, but are super-powerful, telekinetic aliens with turquoise skin, enormous almond-shaped eyes that are entirely glossy black, and only three fingers per hand.  Visiting Earth is rough for the Arcturians because "Earth's vibrational energy is harmful to their fifth-dimensional frequency."  Whatever that means.  But that's apparently why you see so few of them around.

Then, there are the Dracos, who hail from, amazingly enough, the constellation Draco.  Even more coincidentally, they look kind of like dragons.  While I was reading this, I started talking to my computer.  "You... you can't be... from a CONSTELLATION!" I yelled, alarming my neurotic border collie, Doolin, who began to pace around and look for something to feel guilty about.  "A constellation is a random assemblage of stars!  And Draco only looks vaguely like a dragon if you see it from this vantage point!  From somewhere else in space, it would look ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!"  Then I had to go get a cup of coffee and calm down for a while.  So perhaps we should just move on.

Then there are the Els, or Anakim, which is a race of giant red-haired humanoids, who "ran the Garden of Eden" and built the pyramids.  And when I say "giant," I do mean seriously height-enhanced.  Some of them, this website claims, were 250 feet tall.  The description of the history of the Els on this website runs to several pages, and I won't even attempt to summarize it, except to mention that it involves Scotland, the Jews, the Templars, the Merovingians, L. Ron Hubbard, the Masons, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Three Wise Men, and clams.  It's worth reading.  I recommend doing it while drinking single-malt scotch.

Then we have the Ikels, which are like little hairy humans with cloven feet.  The Ciakars, or Mothmen, one of whom was featured in the historical documentary Godzilla vs. Mothra.  The Pleaidians.  The Hyadeans.  The Cetians.  The Orions.  The Lyrans.  The Weasel-People of Wahoonie-3.

Okay, I made the last one up.  But really... it's no weirder than their actual claims.  The people who wrote this website obviously believe it all; it has none of the hallmarks of a spoof.  It's full of links to pages describing how various malevolent aliens are plotting to take over Earth, with intricate details of which alien races are in league with which, who might tentatively be on our side, which ones have already established bases on Earth, and so on.  You  have to wonder if the people responsible for this are simply paranoid and delusional -- which, as a mental illness, I can have some sympathy for -- or if they are making the whole thing up to see how many people they can bamboozle.  (Speaking of L. Ron Hubbard...)

Sad to say, I've known people who actually believed in alien conspiracies, so the idea of someone falling for this nonsense is not as outlandish as it may seem.  And as I've commented before, once you've accepted that there's a Big Scary Evil Conspiracy, everything afterwards is seen through that lens.  My attempts to convince the alien believers that what they were claiming was complete horse waste were met with very little success.  In fact, afterwards, I sort of sensed that they acted a little suspicious of me -- as if my arguing with them just proved that I was in alliance with the aliens.

Or maybe... that I AM an alien!!!

I wonder which kind I am?  I don't want to be a little turquoise guy, and the reptilians are becoming a little passé, frankly.  Maybe I could be a Horlock, which are sort of like the Men in Black.  I look good in black.  Besides, they can disappear at will, and alter people's memories, which seem like pretty damn cool superpowers to have.

Asstrology

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in January 2012.)

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I bet, if I gave you a thousand guesses, you'd never be able to figure out what Sylvester Stallone's mother does for a living.

Go ahead, guess.  You'll be wrong.

You give up?  Okay.  Here it is:

She does psychic readings for people from seeing pictures of their naked butts.

See?  I told you you'd never guess.  And, for the record, I'm not making this up.

Stallone, apparently not one to skimp on patting her own, um, back, calls herself "America's foremost Rumpologist."  (I'd like to think she's America's only rumpologist, but chances are she can't be the only one who does this.)  So, you send her a photograph of your butt, along with a hefty check for her services, and she tells you what your personality is like, what's going to happen in your future, and so on. 

So I guess when Stallone says she's "getting a little behind in her work," she means it.

As far as how this could possibly work, she gives a wonderful explanation on her website, to wit:

Rumpology is sometimes called butt reading in modern parlance.  It is the art of reading the lines, crevices, dimples, and folds of the buttocks to divine the individual's character and gain an understanding of what has occurred in the past and get a prediction of the future... Jacqueline has discovered that the left and right cheeks reveal a person's past and future, respectively.  The right buttocks represents the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain, while the left buttocks represents the right hemisphere.  It is similar to palmistry -- where the left palm represents the past and the right palm represents the future.

So, wait... let me get this straight... your left butt cheek is connected to your right brain, so it tells you your past, and your right butt cheek is connected to your left brain, so it tells you your future?  I can't tell you how anxious I am to bring this up in my neurology class!  I think there's only one thing I will add, when I tell them about it, which is:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

She also says that your butt crack has a lot to do with your personality.  I'd like to be able to tell you what, but when I got to the part about "lawyers having unusually long butt cracks," I was laughing so hard that I don't think I remember much of what I was reading.

But that's not the only thing that Stallone does; and I guess it would be kind of a pain in the ass if all you did all day long was to look at photographs of people's butts.  She is also the "Dean of the University of Astrology" (accreditation pending), and describes it here, a webpage wherein we are subjected to music that sounds like the unholy bastard child of Pachelbel's Canon and "The Wind Beneath My Wings."  On this page are two photographs of Stallone, one in which she is blonde and smiling, and the other in which she is brunette and in which, to put it politely, the resemblance to Rambo is fairly obvious.  You can purchase her videos, in which you learn about things like the "Love Scale of Compatibility," for $99.95.

She also requests that you call her "Dean Jackie."

So there you have it, folks: astrology, and asstrology.  The latest from the world of the woo-woo.  You know, I keep thinking that I've found the wackiest belief possible -- putting holographic stickers on water jugs to "alter the water's health resonance field," using crystal pendulums to diagnose disease, treating those diseases by giving the patient pills from which all the marginally useful molecules have been diluted out of existence.  But people always seem to be one step ahead of me.

Which, if I was Jacqueline Stallone, would be exactly the vantage point I'd want.

Planet cupcake

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in June 2011.)

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We've had a good bit of geological activity lately, here on the Earth.  Most scientists attribute this to plate tectonics, the shifting of Earth's geological plates relative to one another.  Their attitude is that these processes have been going on throughout Earth's history, and that any apparent clustering of tectonic events is simple coincidence, insignificant in the bigger picture.

Neal Adams disagrees.

Adams calls our attention to recent phenomena such as the following:

• The formation of a three-kilometer-long crack in the ground in Huakullani Chukuito, Peru, following an earthquake
• The opening of a wedge-shaped, 500-meter-long, 60-meter-deep rift in Ethiopia, along the Great Rift Valley
• The sudden creation of a crack in the ground in Iceland, and the subsequent draining of Lake Kleifarvatn into the fissure
• The presence of a deep hydrothermal vent in the Mid-Cayman Rise, a spreading center in the middle of the Caribbean Sea
• Increasing tension along the San Andreas Fault, causing cracks and fissures to form

Adams takes these stories, and many others like them, and has decided that the conventional explanation -- that all of these places are on plate margins, so cracks in the ground are to be expected -- is wrong.  And in a classic case of adding two plus two and getting 113, he has deduced the following:

The Earth is expanding.

Yes, just like a cupcake in the oven, the Earth is getting bigger, and as it does, its surface cracks and splits.  The tectonic plates are a mere side-effect of this phenomenon, and are basically the broken up surface of the cupcake, pulled apart as the inside swelled.  Now, a cupcake, of course, is only increasing in volume, as the air bubbles in the batter get bigger; its mass remains the same.  Is that what's happening here?  Some kind of planetary dough rising?

No, says Adams -- the Earth is actually gaining mass.

Wait, you might be saying; what about the Law of Conservation of Mass, which is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions?  Simple, Adams says.  No problemo.  Physicists have demonstrated that empty space can give rise to electron/positron pairs without any violation of physical law, because of the presence of "vacuum energy."  "Empty space" is actually, they say, a roiling foam of particles and antiparticles, most of which annihilate each other immediately.

So, Adams says, this sort of pair-production is happening inside the Earth.  So it's gaining mass.  And expanding.

Of course, Adams conveniently ignores the fact that half of the mass thus produced would be antimatter; if the Earth's middle was producing matter and antimatter fast enough to pop open cracks on the surface, the antimatter would follow the E = mc² rule (also strictly enforced) and blow us to smithereens.  After all, you may recall from scientific documentaries such as Star Trek what happens when antimatter containment is lost -- Captain Kirk strikes a dramatic pose, usually with his shirt ripped open, and they break to a commercial.  And heaven knows we don't want that to happen.

So there are some problems with Adams' theory.  But this hasn't stopped websites from popping up supporting the Cupcake Earth Hypothesis, and in fact Adams himself has made a video to illustrate the idea.  The video, which you should only watch if you are willing to risk your IQ dropping significantly, must be true because (1) it has cool animation of the Earth shrinking and the continents fitting together as you go back in time, and (2) uses dramatic music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Notwithstanding those points in its favor, it raises a few key questions:

• What happened to all of the oceans?
• If the Earth really was (let's say) a quarter as massive, 100 million years ago, it would have had a quarter of the gravitational pull.  Which would have resulted in a good bit of our atmosphere leaking out into space, not to mention herds of enormous dinosaurs bouncing about the landscape in the fashion of Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon.  So where did our atmosphere come from?
• Why am I spending so much time and effort addressing this moronic theory?

As far as the last question, I recognize that I can't debunk every goofy idea in the world, and in fact originally intended to write about marginally more reasonable claims, such as sightings of Sea Serpents off the coast of England.  But then I saw that the Expanding Earth theory actually had a Wikipedia page, and I thought, "I guess I'd better investigate."  So I did, at the cost of thousands of valuable brain cells.  It's a sacrifice, and one most of my friends would say I can ill afford, but I'm all about selfless acts for the benefit of my loyal readers.