The ghosts of the Petit Trianon

I sometimes get grief from readers because of my tendency to reject claims of the paranormal out of hand.

In my own defense, I am convincible.  It just takes more than personal anecdote and eyewitness accounts to do it.  Our memories and sensory-perceptive apparatus are simply not accurate enough recording devices to be relied on for anything requiring scientific rigor.  I find myself agreeing with the hard-nosed skeptic MacPhee in C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength: 

"My uncle, Dr. Duncanson," said MacPhee, "whose name may be familiar to you — he was Moderator of the General Assembly over the water, in Scotland — used to say, 'Show it to me in the word of God.'  And then he’d slap the big Bible on the table.  It was a way he had of shutting up people that came to him blathering about religious experiences.  And granting his premises, he was quite right.  I don’t hold his views, Mrs. Studdock, you understand, but I work on the same principles.  If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

And the difficulty is that so often, when you take a close look at the eyewitness testimony itself, even it doesn't hold water.  The minimum standard for scientific acceptance is one in which the paranormal explanation accounts for the claim better than any of various competing natural explanations, and I've yet to see a single example where that applies.

As an example of this, let's take a look at one of the most famous claims of witnesses to a haunting -- the Moberly-Jourdain Incident.

The event in question took place in August of 1901.  Two friends (some have claimed, with some justification, that they were lovers), Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, were on holiday from their teaching jobs at St. Hugh's College, Oxford University.  They traveled together in France, and on the day in question were touring Paris.  They'd visited Versailles, and after seeing the palace decided to walk from there to the Petit Trianon, a château built on the palace grounds during the reign of Louis XV.

They were using a Baedeker guidebook to find their way, but missed the path they were looking for and became lost.  This is when, according to their account, things started seeming odd.  A feeling of dread and weariness came over them; the whole scene started looking like a tableau rather than reality, as if somehow they were inside an animated work of art.  "Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant," Moberly later wrote.  "Even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry.  There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees."

The people they saw -- a woman shaking a piece of cloth out of a window, what seemed to be palace gardeners, and some men who looked like "very dignified officials, dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats" -- had a vaguely unreal appearance.  Weirdest of all was the man they came across seated by a garden kiosk.  According to Moberly, his appearance was "most repulsive ... [his] expression odious.  His complexion was dark and rough...  The man slowly turned his face, which was marked by smallpox; his complexion was very dark.  The expression was evil and yet unseeing, and though I did not feel that he was looking particularly at us, I felt a repugnance to going past him."

Another person they saw was a fair-haired lady in an old-fashioned white dress, sitting on the grass working on a sketch.  She, too, paid Moberly and Jourdain no attention, and seemed to look right through them.

At this point, they saw the building of the Petit Trianon in the distance, and walked toward it.  Upon reaching the front entrance, they were met by another group of tourists and a guide, joined them for a tour, and nothing else odd happened.

Neither woman mentioned their peculiar experiences to the other for almost three months.

Aerial view of the Petit Trianon [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ToucanWings, Vue aérienne du domaine de Versailles par ToucanWings - Creative Commons By Sa 3.0 - 052, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It was Moberly who triggered a reconsideration of what they'd seen by asking, out of the blue, if Jourdain thought the Petit Trianon was haunted.  Jourdain said she thought it was.  After briefly describing what they remembered, they decided each to write down their memories of that day, then compare notes.  There were some differences (Jourdain, for example, didn't recall seeing the lady in the white dress), but there was decent agreement between their accounts.  After some discussion, they concluded they'd seen ghosts -- that they'd witnessed a re-enactment of events from August 1792, immediately before the beginning of the French Revolution.  The evil-looking man, they said, was Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil (who was smart enough to flee France before things became too dangerous), and the woman in white was none other than Queen Marie Antoinette (who would lose her head on the guillotine only a year later).

So, what really happened here?

Ten years afterward, Moberly and Jourdain published a book about the incident, called An Adventure.  It was an overnight sensation.  However, objections began to mount just as quickly.  Among them:

• Both Moberly and Jourdain were known for oddball claims besides their most famous one.  For example, Moberly once said she'd seen the ghost of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the Louvre in 1914.  (What he was doing in the Louvre is anyone's guess; maybe ghostly Roman emperors take vacations just like the rest of us.)  Jourdain had a definite paranoid streak -- during World War I she became convinced that a German spy was hiding in St. Hugh's (of which at that point she was principal), and at the time of her death in 1924 she had become so notorious for erratic and autocratic behavior that she had provoked mass resignations amongst the staff.  So it's not like the two women are what I'd call reliable witnesses.
• An analysis of the original manuscript of An Adventure (dating from 1903), the first published edition (in 1911), and subsequent editions shows increasing embellishment, and the addition of new details each time the story was republished.  This is certainly a bit suspicious.
• Both women told their stories separately on numerous occasions, and as time passed, their versions converged -- suggestive that as they compared their memories, each of their own recollections became tainted with the other's.
• At the time of their visit, the French writer Robert de Montesquiou lived near Versailles, and was known to host themed parties on the palace grounds in which he and his friends wore period dress and staged tableaux vivants.  French artist and historian Philippe Jullian has suggested that Moberly and Jourdain stumbled upon one of these parties, and were understandably freaked out by what they saw -- and, furthermore, that the evil-visaged, pockmarked man was de Montesquiou himself, whose appearance by all accounts was creepy enough to explain their revulsion.

The upshot of all this is that despite this story showing up in countless books with titles like Twenty True Tales of the Supernatural, and being cited as one of the best-documented accounts of a haunting, it doesn't meet that minimum standard -- that the paranormal explanation accounts for the claim better than the purely natural ones.

So, in conclusion: I'm not saying ghosts and an afterlife aren't possible.  I'm not, honestly, a disbeliever.  I simply don't have enough convincing evidence to come down one way or the other, and at least regarding an afterlife, I figure I'll find out sooner or later anyhow.  Until then, I'm with MacPhee.  I need more than just "you saw it."

Although I can't go with MacPhee's suggestion of a camera providing good evidence.  Those were the Good Old Days, when making a faked photograph took at least some skill.  These days, Photoshop probably has a one-click "Add Ghost" feature.

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Crying wolf

While I understand being deeply fascinated with a specific subject, there's a point at which an interest becomes an idée fixe.  The result, especially for a scientist, is such a single-minded focus that it can cloud judgment with regards to the strength of the evidence.  We've seen that here at Skeptophilia before -- two examples that immediately come to mind are the Sasquatch-hunting geneticist Melba Ketchum and the British proponent of extraterrestrial panspermia, Chandra Wickramasinghe.  And the problem is -- for them, at least -- their obsessions have had the effect of completely destroying their credibility in the scientific community.

I can already hear the objections -- that (1) said scientific community is a hidebound, reactionary bunch of sticks-in-the-mud who resist like mad any new ideas, and (2) there are times the mavericks have been vindicated (sometimes after a long and arduous battle to get someone, anyone, to take them seriously).  The former can sometimes be true, but almost all scientists are well aware that groundbreaking ideas -- as long as they are supported by adequate evidence -- are how careers are made.  Look at the list of Nobel Prizes in the sciences in the past fifty years if you want examples.  Virtually all of them were awarded for research that expanded our scientific models dramatically (in some cases, overturned them entirely).  

As far as the second -- that sometimes the fringe-dwelling researchers who say "our entire prior understanding of the science is wrong" turn out to be correct -- okay, yeah, it happens, but if you consider the history of scientific paradigm shifts, what will jump out at you is how seldom that actually occurs.  The Copernican/Galilean/Keplerian heliocentric theory, Newton's Theory of Gravity, Maxwell's and Faraday's studies of electromagnetism, the Germ Theory of Disease, Einstein's Theories of Relativity, quantum/atomic theory, thermodynamics, Darwin's evolutionary model, Hubble and the Big Bang, the gene as the carrier of inheritance, and the plate tectonic model of Vine and Matthews. 

And that's about it, in the last five hundred years.

The point is, we're in a position now where the amount of evidence amassed to support the edifice we call science is so colossal that the "it could all be proven wrong tomorrow" objection I used to hear from my students (especially the lazy ones) is about as close to absurd as you want to get.  Sure, there will be some modifications made to science in the future.  A few -- probably very few -- will be major revisions.  But there's no reason to think that science as it stands is in any way unstable.

And people who come at it with earthshattering claims based on extremely slim evidence are almost certainly wrong.

Which brings us to Avi Loeb.

Loeb is an astrophysicist at Harvard University who has garnered significant notice (and notoriety) in the past few years from his fixation on the extrasolar source of some astronomical objects.  (By extrasolar I mean "originating from outside the Solar System.")  In 2017 he made headlines by claiming that the oddball astronomical object 'Oumuamua was not only extrasolar -- something fairly certain given its trajectory -- but that it was the remnant of a spacecraft from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.  Since then, his obsession with extraterrestrials visiting the Solar System has become so intense that it has drawn unfortunate comparisons with this guy:

The latest salvo from Loeb et al. is a sample of metallic beads scavenged from the floor of the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea, that Loeb says are the remnants of a meteor that exploded in 2014.  So far, nothing to raise an eyebrow; meteoritic debris is cool but hardly uncommon.

But (as always) he goes one rather enormous step further, and claims that the meteor it came from was extrasolar, and the concentrations of metals in the beads indicate the object that exploded may have been an alien spacecraft.

Look, I'm as eager as the next Doctor Who aficionado to have a meet-cute with intelligent aliens.  (As long as they don't turn out to be Daleks, Sontarans, or Stenza.  I do have my boundaries.)  Hell, the way things are going down here on Earth, I might even ask to be taken on as a crew member when they leave.  But if you're asking me to believe you have bits of an alien spaceship, I'm gonna need more than a few oddball microscopic metal beads.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as Carl Sagan used to put it.  And this ain't it.  

At the moment, Avi Loeb is increasingly reminding me of a famous character from fiction -- The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  I have no problem with Loeb and his friends continuing to search; maybe (to quote a luminary of the field) The Truth Is Out There, and Loeb's dogged determination will eventually pay off.  But the problem is, there's a significant chance that (like The Boy in the fable) if he ever actually does find the hard evidence he's looking for, by that time he'll have exhausted people's patience to the point that everyone will have stopped paying attention.

So sorry to rain on the UFOs-and-aliens parade, but me, I don't think we've got anything here but some pieces of a curious metallic meteorite.  Worthy of study, no doubt, but as far as what it tells us about extraterrestrial intelligence, the answer seems to be: nothing whatsoever.

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The bottleneck

When I was young, I was very much attracted to stories where things worked out because they were fated to happen that way.

It explains why so many of my favorite books and movies back then were Hero's Journey stories -- The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Prydain, A Wrinkle in Time, Star Wars.  The idea that there's a reason things happen -- that life isn't just chaotic -- is seductive.  (And, of course, it's a major theme in most religions; so many of them have some version of "God has a plan.")

Appealing as this is, my view now is more like the conclusion Brother Juniper comes to by the end of Thornton Wilder's brilliant and devastating novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey -- that either God's plan is so subtle the human mind can't fathom it, or else there is no plan.  In my sixty-two years on this planet, most of what I've seen is much less like some orderly pattern than it is like a giant pinball game.

This seems to be true not only in the realm of human affairs, but in the natural world as well.  There are overall guiding principles (such as evolution by natural selection), but much of what happens isn't destined, it's contingent.  Even such basic things as our bilaterally symmetric body plans with paired organs, and our having five digits on each appendage, seem to be the result of what amount to evolutionary accidents.  (Which is why, if we're ever lucky enough to contact alien life, it is extremely unlikely to be humanoid.)

Another chaotic factor is introduced by random geological and astronomical occurrences -- the eruption of the Siberian Traps, for example, that kicked off the cataclysmic Permian-Triassic Extinction, and the Chicxulub Meteorite collision that took out (amongst many other groups) the non-avian dinosaurs.  Each of those events radically altered the trajectory of life on Earth; what things would look like now, had either or both of these not occurred, can only be vaguely guessed at.

It's a little humbling to think of all of the different ways things could have happened.  Most of which, it must be said, would result in Homo sapiens never evolving.  And researchers have just identified one more near miss on nonexistence our species had -- a colossal genetic bottleneck around nine hundred thousand years ago, during which our entire ancestral population appears to have dwindled to around thirteen hundred breeding individuals.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerónimo Roure Pérez, Homo heidelbergensis. Museo de Prehistoria de Valencia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Species like ourselves, that are slow to reach maturity, which have few offspring at a time and require lots of parental care -- ones that, in the parlance of ecological science, are called K-selected -- tend not to recover from events like this.  The precariousness of the situation is highlighted by evidence that the population didn't really bounce back for over a hundred thousand years.

We were teetering on the edge of oblivion for a long time.

Evidence for this bottleneck comes from two sources -- a drastic decrease in human remains in the fossil record, and strong genetic evidence that all modern humans today descend from an extremely restricted gene pool, a little less than a million years ago.  This event coincided with the onset of a period of glaciation, during which sea level dropped, ice coverage expanded from the polar regions, and there were widespread droughts.  These conditions destroyed all but a tiny remnant of the human population -- and those few survivors are the ancestors of all seven billion of us modern humans.

Populations this tiny are extremely vulnerable, and that they survived long enough to recover is downright astonishing.  "It’s an extraordinary length of time," said Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum of London, who was not involved in the study.  "It’s remarkable that we did get through at all.  For a population of that size, you just need one bad climate event, an epidemic, a volcanic eruption and you’re gone."

We made it through, though.  Somehow.  And I guess near-catastrophes like this don't really settle the issue of whether it was all Meant To Be.  You can just as well interpret our winding path from the origins of life four billion years ago, with all of the close calls and almost-wipeouts we survived, as coming from our being part of some Master Plan.  But to me, it seems more like the vagaries of a chaotic universe -- one where all of us, humans and non-human species alike, are walking a tightrope.  If you went back sixty-seven million years and looked around, you'd have seen no reason to believe that the dinosaurs would ever be anything but the dominant group on Earth, but in the blink of the eye geologically, they would all be gone.  It's a cautionary tale about our own fragility -- something we should take to heart, as we're the only species on Earth that has evolved the intelligence to see the long-term consequences of our own actions, and potentially, to forestall our own being toppled from our position of dominance.

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Mystery disk

I'm always fascinated by a good mystery, and that's definitely the appropriate category for an artifact called the Phaistos Disk.

Found in the Minoan palace of Phaistos, on the island of Crete, in 1908, the Phaistos Disk is fifteen centimeters in diameter, made of fired ceramic clay, and (most interestingly) has an inscription on it. Here's a photograph:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons C messier, Δίσκος της Φαιστού πλευρά Α 6380, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Disk is thought to have been made in the second millennium B.C.E., making it approximately contemporaneous with the Linear B script of Crete, which was successfully deciphered in the early 1950s by Alice Kober, Michael Ventris, and John Chadwick.  This accomplishment was the first time that anyone had cracked a script where not only was the sound/letter correspondence unknown, but it wasn't even known what language the script was representing.  (As it turned out, it was an early form of Mycenaean Greek.  Earlier guesses were that it represented Etruscan, a proto-Celtic language, or even Egyptian.  The script itself was mostly syllabic, with one symbol representing a syllable rather than a single sound, and a few ideograms thrown in just to make it more difficult.)

The problem is, the Phaistos Disk is not Linear B.  Nor is it Linear A, an earlier script which remains undeciphered despite linguists' best attempts at decoding it.  The difficulty here is that the Phaistos Disk has only 242 different symbols, which is not enough to facilitate translation.  Once again, we're not sure what the language is, although it's a good guess that it's some form of Greek (other linguists have suggested it might be Hittite or Luwian, both languages spoken in ancient Anatolia (now Turkey), and which had their own alphabet that bears some superficial similarities to the symbols on the Disk).

This lack of information has led to wild speculation.  Various people have claimed it's a prayer, a calendar, a story, a board game, and a geometric theorem, although how the hell you'd know any of that when you can't even begin to read the inscription is beyond me.  But it only gets weirder from there.  Friedhelm Will and Axel Hausmann back in 2002 said that the Disk "comes from the ruins of Atlantis."  Others have suggested it's of extraterrestrial origin.  (Admit it, you knew the aliens were going to show up here somehow.)

Others, more prosaically, think it's a fake.  In 2008 archaeologist Jerome Eisenberg proclaimed the Disk a modern hoax, most likely perpetrated by Luigi Pernier, the Italian archaeologist who claimed to have discovered it.  Eisenberg cites a number of pieces of evidence -- differences in the firing and in how the edges were cut, as compared to other ceramic artifacts from the same period; the fact that it's incredibly well-preserved considering how old it supposedly is; and vague similarities to Linear A and Linear B characters, with various odd ones thrown in (Eisenberg says the symbols were chosen to be "credible but untranslatable" and selected "cleverly... to purposely confuse the scholarly world."

Of course, this didn't settle the controversy.  Archaeologist Pavol Hnila cites four different artifacts, all discovered after the Disk, that have similar characters to the ones on the Disk, and that there is not enough evidence to warrant accusing Pernier and his team of something as serious as a deliberate hoax.

So the mystery endures, as mysteries are wont to do.  I find this fascinating but more than a little frustrating -- to know that there is an answer, but to accept that we may never find out what it is.  That's the way it goes, though.  If you're a true skeptic, you have to be willing to remain in ignorance, indefinitely if need be, if there is insufficient evidence to decide one way or the other.  This leaves the Phaistos Disk in the category of "Wouldn't this be fun to figure out?" -- a designation that is as common in science as it is exasperating.

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Storm of controversy

As I write this, category-3 Hurricane Idalia is currently battering parts of northern Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.  It strengthened with astonishing speed, going from a tropical depression to (briefly) a category-4 hurricane in a little over two days.  Another result of anthropogenic climate change -- warm surface water is the fuel for tropical storms, and this summer, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean is (in the words of one climatologist) "bath water."

This vindication of the facts that (1) Florida, and indeed the entire Gulf Coast, are frequent targets for storms, and (2) climate scientists have been predicting bigger storms for decades, has not had the effect you'd expect if the world was halfway sane, which is for people to say, "Oh, I guess this is what the scientists warned us about."  No, instead it's created bigger and better crackpot theories.  The storm is still howling and already I'm seeing conspiracy theorists posting that:

• Idalia is a "false flag" to get people to buy into the "climate change scam."
• Idalia is manmade, but not in the sense the climate scientists mean.  It was created by sophisticated weather modification devices run by some shadowy government agency.  No one I've seen has mentioned HAARP yet, but it's only a matter of time.
• Evil Joe Biden deliberately steered Idalia toward "Ron DeSantis's Florida" in order to distract DeSantis from campaigning for the Republican nomination.  "Where this storm hit is no coincidence," one guy posted.  "I'm surprised it didn't hit Tallahassee straight on."

Well, you're right about one thing,  you catastrophic clod; where the storm hit is "no coincidence" because it's a typical storm track at this time of year, and the Gulf of Mexico is like a giant hot tub right now.  But no one, including Evil Joe, can "steer a hurricane."

Even using HAARP.

Hurricane Idalia [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

Of course, it may be that everything will be okay, at least if you listen to popular evangelical wingnut "prophetess" Kat Kerr, who went on record as saying that Idalia was not going to cause any problems, because she was gonna pray at it really hard:

Attention all weather warriors, who are taking authority over the storms that are in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Gulf, which are heading toward the East Coast.  Remember to take authority in Jesus's name, because we have the right to stop the storms from coming.  Command the pressure systems (millibars) to rise within them, so they will downgrade until they diminish.  Send the Host to shred every band of the storms and tear them apart.  The sooner we do this for the storm in the Gulf, the better...  When God made the Earth, he set a boundary for the ocean so it cannot come ashore.  We are agreeing with what God says, so speak to the storms and remind them of the boundary.  In Jesus's name, these storms will become nothing!!!  Woo hoo and Zap Bam.

As usual, allow me to state up front that I didn't make any of that up, including the "Zap Bam" part.  

Lest you think this kind of lunacy is the sole provenance of some fringe-y freak element, allow me to remind you that just a week ago, a "reporter" on Fox "News" said in all apparent seriousness that Tropical Storm Hilary, which dumped huge amounts of rain on southern California and Nevada, was (like Idalia) Joe Biden's fault.  Hilary, the reporter said, "made landfall in Mexico several hours ago, but they let it right into the country because it’s Biden’s America."

Although saying Fox isn't a "fringe-y freak element" might not be that accurate, honestly.  And given the storm's name, I'm surprised they didn't bring Hillary Clinton into it somehow.  That has to be significant, right?

Of course right.

It's always been a mystery to me why people gravitate to wild magical thinking and bizarre conspiracy theories rather than applying Ockham's Razor and the principles of scientific induction.  In fact, only a few days ago a study appeared in the journal Research and Politics looking at people's motivations for believing in conspiracies, and the results were fascinating.  Disturbingly, it found that most people who promote conspiracy-based beliefs aren't "Just Asking Questions" (something the site Rational Wiki amusingly calls "JAQing off") or "trying to present both sides" or callously pushing an agenda regardless of their own beliefs (something many Republicans have been accused of, apropos of Trump's "Big Lie") -- they honestly believe the loony ideas they're disseminating.  

So that's not reassuring at all.

But even weirder to me is that they found a correlation between belief in conspiracies and what they call a "need for chaos" -- a fervent desire to disrupt things irrespective of partisanship or beliefs, and without a specific goal in mind (e.g., replacing the system with a better one).

And I truly don't understand this.  You have only to look at the effects of real, honest-to-goodness chaos -- the ongoing mess in Sudan comes to mind -- to see how quickly things can devolve into a Lord of the Flies-style horror show.  I can sympathize with the frustration a lot of us feel about wastefulness and corruption in the government, but tearing it all down and leaving nothing in its place is hardly a solution.

In any case, no, Idalia wasn't created by weaponized weather modification, it's not a false flag, and Joe Biden had nothing to do with any of it.  Praying at it won't do a damn bit of good, something you'd think would be obvious from the last 583,762 times people tried praying at something and it didn't work.  It'd be nice if people would learn some science, but these days expecting that is a losing proposition.

Especially in "Ron De Santis's Florida."

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Diluted nonsense

Every time I think homeopathy can't get more ridiculous, I turn out to be wrong.

I thought they'd plunged to the bottom of the Crazy Barrel with their announcement of a remedy called "homeopathic water."  This is, unfortunately, exactly what it sounds like.  It's water diluted with water, then shaken up, then diluted again and again.

With water.

So I thought, "This is it.  It can't get any loonier than that."

I was very, very wrong, and found out the depth of my mistake at Frank van der Kooy's site Complementary Medicine -- Exposing Academic Charlatans, wherein we find out that watering water down with water is far from the nuttiest thing the homeopaths make "remedies" from.

Here are a few things that van der Kooy discovered form the basis of a homeopathic remedy:

• Black holes.  Yes, I mean the astronomical object, and yes, I'm serious.  An amateur astronomer put a vial of alcohol on a telescope aimed at the location of Cygnus X-1, the first black hole to be discovered.  My guess is that said astronomer had consumed a good bit of the alcohol first, and that's how he got the idea.  But after the vial had sat there for a while, and gotten saturated with the Essence of Black Hole, it was diluted to "30C" (known to the rest of us as one part in ten to the thirtieth power).  The homeopaths say if you consume it, it causes you to have a "drawing inward" sensation (because, I'm guessing, black holes pull stuff in).  One person who tested it said it felt like her teeth were being pulled backwards into her head.  Why this is supposed to be a good thing, I have no idea.
• Vacuum.  I'm not talking about the machine, I'm talking about the physical phenomenon.  I don't have a clue how you would mix a vacuum in water, nor what "diluting a vacuum" even means.  The "practitioner," however, says it's really good for treating the flu.
• The note "F."  Why F and not C# or Ab or something, I'm not sure, but apparently this is made by playing the note F at some water, then diluting it a bunch.  After that, it's good as a "tranquilizer" and "cardiac regulator."
• The south pole of a magnet.  Again, I'm not sure what's special about the south pole, but if you somehow introduce south-poliness into some water, you can use it to treat frostbite, hernia, dislocations, ingrown toenails, and "levitation."  (I feel obliged at this point to state again for the record that I'm not making this up.)
• Dog shit.  Supposedly, consuming diluted dog shit helps you get over feelings of self-disgust, which you would definitely need if you're consuming diluted dog shit.  It also helps if you dream about dogs, or "feel like your arms and legs are getting shorter," which I didn't know was even a thing.
• The Berlin Wall.  A remedy made from a chunk of the Wall -- and not to beat this point to death, but the Wall piece was shaken up in water and diluted a gazillion times -- is good for treating despair.  I could use some right now, because after reading about how many people believe this kind of thing works, I'm inclined to agree with Professor Farnsworth.

I really should stop reading stuff like this, because I really can't afford any further declines in my opinion about the general intelligence of the human species.

Once again, I'm struck not by people coming up with this nonsense, because selling nonsense to make money has been a pastime of humans for a long, long time.  What gets me is that apparently people read this stuff, and don't have the response that I did, which is to snort derisively and say, "You have got to be fucking kidding me."  Instead, they pull out their credit cards and start buying.

So here we are again, shaking our heads in utter bafflement.  At least I hope you are.  I hope you haven't read this and said, "What's he pissing and moaning for?  This all makes perfect sense."  If that was, in fact, your response, please don't tell me about it.  Now y'all will have to excuse me, because I'm going to go take my anti-despair Berlin Wall remedy, mixed well into a double scotch.  That might actually have some effect.

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Monster mash

Well, the biggest mass search for the Loch Ness Monster in history has come and gone, and like Monty Python's camel spotters, the searchers spotted nearly one monster.

This past weekend hundreds of amateur cryptid enthusiasts, in partnership with the Loch Ness Centre and Loch Ness Expeditions, studied the lake both in person (many using sophisticated cameras and microphones to record any anomalies) and virtually via video links, but the end result was... not much.

It's a shame, really.  I was honestly rooting for them, especially after I found out that one of the leaders of the effort is named (I swear I'm not making this up) Craig Gallifrey.  I was hoping that his assistants would be Joe Skaro, Annie Appalappachia, and Rex Raxacoricofallapatorius, but no such luck.

Gallifrey, for his part, is undaunted.  "I believe there is something in the loch," he said.  "There's got to be something that's fueling the speculation."

Stories about a creature in the lake (and the River Ness) go back a long way.  The first certain mention of it is in the seventh-century C.E. Life of St. Columba by Adomnán of Iona, in which Columba came upon some people burying a guy by the bank of the river, and after inquiry, was told that he'd been mauled to death by a water beast.  The saint then commanded one of them to swim the river, and instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to look at Columba like he'd lost his mind and say, "Were you even fucking listening to us just now?  Especially the 'mauled to death by a water beast' part?", the dude went, "Okay, sure," and jumped right in.  On cue the monster came swimming up, but Columba made the Sign of the Cross and said, "Go no farther.  Do not touch the man.  Go back at once," and the monster went, "Dude, whatever, simmer down," and backed off, and the locals were all super impressed.

But after that, you pretty much have to wait until the nineteenth century to get any more serious accounts.  In the 1930s there were several sightings, leading to a craze -- especially when The Daily Mail Fail, which apparently was as dedicated to accuracy back then as it is today, published the famous "surgeon's photograph" in 1934, now known to have been a hoax:

But even so, interest has continued, lo unto this very day.

The evidence generated by this weekend's search was pretty slim, however.  "We did hear something," search leaders report.  "We heard four distinctive ‘gloops’.  We all got a bit excited, ran to go make sure the recorder was on, and it wasn’t plugged in."

The fault, of course, lies with the Sound Engineer In Charge Of Plugging Stuff In, Roderick Ranskoor av Kolos.  You can't get good help nowadays.

In any case, they later admitted rather ruefully that the "gloops" might not have been Nessie.  "It may well be gas escaping from the bottom of the loch."

Lake flatulence notwithstanding, my guess is the negative results aren't going to dissuade enthusiasts.  Negative results never do.  Witness shows like Ghost Hunters, wherein a bunch of intrepid haunted house aficionados get together and visit spooky locations week after week, always at night, stalk around for an hour with flashlights and recording equipment, and never find anything.  This doesn't mean there aren't dramatic moments, e.g. this actual scene from an episode I watched when I was in a hotel one evening and turned on the television because I was bored:

Ghost hunter 1: Here we are in the attic of this abandoned courthouse.  As you can see, it's extremely atmospheric, with cobwebs and dust and all.  We're expecting to see a ghost any moment now.

Ghost hunter 2:  Yes, as I turn this corner and pan my flashlight beam across the wall, I can see... *screams*  *several bleeped out obscenities*

*cut to commercials*

Ghost hunter 1:  Let's replay that dramatic sequence, shall we?

*sequence replays*

Ghost hunter 2: *several more bleeped out obscenities*  Wow, that is one bigass yellowjacket!

That's it?  I sat through about eight stupid commercials, thinking I was finally going to get to see a ghost, and instead, I get a "bigass yellowjacket"?  I got stung by one of those in my own back yard a couple of days ago, and I was not impressed with that one, either.

In any case, I'm expecting that no one will be discouraged by the fact that Craig Gallifrey et al. didn't see anything this past weekend, and we'll still have periodic excursions to find Nessie and other cryptids.  My general response is: knock yourself out.  Like I've said many times before, I'm not a disbeliever, per se, I'm just waiting for the evidence.  So we'll just have to see what comes up with the next expedition, to be led by crack cryptid hunters Cathy Castrovalva and Mike Metabellis Three.

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