Boob Scotch

Last night, Einzige sent me an email (which I opened this morning) pointing me to a video of a song by Bob Log III called "Boob Scotch" (NSFW). Bob Log III is a guy who performs wearing a motorcycle helmet, singing through a telephone microphone, and simultaneously drums and plays guitar. The sound was very familiar, reminiscent of a band I saw perform at the University of Arizona Social Sciences Auditorium back in 1994 called Doo Rag. As it turns out, Bob Log III was half of Doo Rag, the guy I remember singing through a vacuum cleaner hose.

The other bands who performed at UA that day (April 30, I'm a bit obsessive about collecting information) were Formica Bob, A Band Called Moss, Teeth, Click, Cortex Bomb, Irving, The Lonely Trojans, and the Fells. I was there with my friend Pam, who knew people in Irving and The Lonely Trojans, the latter of which included a student, Chris Morrison, from one of my philosophy classes, who's now using the name "C.S. Morrison" for his music, probably due to the large number of other musical Chris Morrisons.

Pam's two friends in Irving were Greg Petix and Gerard Schumacher who were also in the Lonely Trojans. The two went on to form another band called the Weird Lovemakers, and Gerard still has a band called The Knockout Pills.

Wikipedia seems to have way too much information about Tucson bands... I just learned that Schumacher was also in The Fells and intends to return to Australia this year, and that Petix formed a band called The Cuntifiers (no albums released yet).

Internet People

Dan Meth's song and animated tribute to virtually every major viral video of the last several years.



UPDATE (September 30, 2007): Rumors Daily has tracked down links to the videos referenced.

Our dogs featured on RESCUE's new website

Arizona RESCUE has gone through a website redesign, and the new design now features photos of our dog Otto and our former foster dog Ollie. The front page cycles through photos of rescued dogs and cats at the top right; Otto is the black and white dog with the ball in his mouth and Ollie is the bassett hound. Both can be seen simultaneously on any of the other web pages, such as the "About RESCUE" page, where Otto's second from the left and Ollie is third from the right.

Kat previously blogged about Ollie almost a year ago.

Also check out RESCUE's donation page...

Marcello Truzzi's Zetetic Scholar online

Eastern Michigan University sociology professor Marcello Truzzi was a co-founder and co-chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, now just CSI) and the editor of its original magazine, The Zetetic (later renamed Skeptical Inquirer). After he broke with the group over what he perceived as dogmatism and a desire for a more academic than popular approach, he published his own journal on paranormal and fringe science subjects, the Zetetic Scholar.

George Hansen has now put the first five issues of the Zetetic Scholar online at his website as PDFs, along with the tables of contents of issues six through eleven. (Only one other issue, a larger one identified as a double issue, twelve and thirteen, was published.) Issues 9, 10, and 11 are noteworthy for publishing debate about CSICOP's "Mars Effect" controversy. My personal collection includes only issues 9 through 12/13, so I'm happy to see the older issues made available.

Truzzi died of cancer on February 2, 2003. He was a meticulous researcher who was very generous with his time and sources. I corresponded with him on a number of occasions, and had several telephone conversations with him about skepticism and the Mars Effect controversy, about which I've assembled a very lengthy chronology and bibliography (large RTF file). When I wrote a chapter on "Veteran Psychic Detective Bill Ward" for Joe Nickell's book Psychic Sleuths, Truzzi provided me with a few newspaper clippings on Ward that he had obtained while researching his own book on psychic detectives, The Blue Sense.

Truzzi was agnostic to a fault--he would refrain from coming to conclusions even when evidence was overwhelming.

Maricopa County foreclosure and notice rate database

The Arizona Republic has an online database of 2007 foreclosures and notices of trustee's sales, searchable by community (mostly cities), region, or zip code. I'm sorry to see that my neighborhood (mostly built up in the last 3-4 years) has pretty high rates of 25.9 foreclosures per 10,000 households and 115.94 notices per 10,000 households. At least I'm not in Surprise's 85388 zip code, which has seen 310.9 foreclosures per 10,000 households and 997.8 notices per 10,000 households. Ouch! That's over 3% of the zip code foreclosed upon already, and another 10% in danger, and we haven't even seen the peak of ARM resets yet.

Draper vs. Plantinga on Evil and Evolution

Part two of the Internet Infidels' "Great Debate" project has been posted at the Secular Web, on "Evil and Evolution." Draper makes an argument for atheism on the basis of a version of the problem of evil informed by evolution, and Plantinga gives a version of his argument that evolution undermines naturalism. Each offers an objection to the other, followed by a reply.

Reader questions are being solicited for the next couple of months, which the authors will respond to on the site.

Two free issues of Reports of the NCSE

I have two extra copies of the latest issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education, which contains my article, "Trouble in Paradise: Answers in Genesis Splinters," which I'll send to the first two U.S.-based readers of this blog to request a copy in the comments.

This is getting ridiculous

August's total was 3249, beating last month's record high by an additional 746!

Memory and the persistence of falsehood

From the Washington Post:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

The article suggests that when we hear or read a denial of a statement, we tend to remember the association of the items in the statement but not the fact that the statement was a negation. Thus nonsense tends to persist in the face of refutation.

Radical Honesty

There's an interesting and entertaining article at Esquire about Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty movement, which seems to me to take a good idea--being honest--too far into inappropriate sharing or "too much information." I think even little white lies (and especially "bullshit") can be extremely insidious, and should be avoided, but that doesn't mean removing all filters between thought and speech.

James Morrow wrote a 1992 novel called City of Truth in which he described a world where everyone always speaks the truth in a way quite similar to the radical honesty movement, but the main character finds a need to lie in order to save his son's life.

Plato and Machiavelli would agree with each other that no political leader could survive by adopting the radical honesty approach. I think that's disappointingly true.

(Via The Agitator.)