EneMan
oracknows | August 2, 2013"Alternative medicine," so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or, as it's become fashionable to call it, "integrative medicine" is a set of medical practices that are far more based on belief than science. As my good bud and collaborator Mark Crislip so pointedly reminded us last week, CAM is far more akin to religion than science-based medicine (SBM). However, as I've discussed more times than I can remember over the years, both here and at my not-so-super-secret-other blog, CAM practitioners and advocates, despite practicing what is in reality mostly pseudoscience-based…
oracknows | January 17, 2013Even though I've been at this skeptical blogging thing, particularly about "alternative" medicine, so long (eight years now) that I think I've seen it all, that nothing the quacks do can shock me any more. It's a foolish hubris, I admit, but, I hope, an understandable one after over eight years of blogging multiple times a week about science, skepticism, and quackery that can and has made my head spin. It is true that encountering something that gets my attention and truly knocks me on my posterior is getting rarer and rarer. It's not so rare that it doesn't still happen every now and then:…
oracknows | December 25, 2008Continued from Christmas last year...
Well, if I were Santa, I'd be scared too if this guy sat on my lap:
You didn't think Christmas could pass without our old friend making an appearance, did you? Yes, our blog mascot can be a bit scary at times to those who have not met him before, but as you can see he's really into the Christmas spirit:
Here's hoping you and yours have a Merry Christmas. From EneMan.
Just be glad our other blog mascot hasn't been particularly active in 2008.
oracknows | November 27, 2008Continuing the theme from yesterday one last time this week and bringing our long disused blog mascot front and center, I wish all my readers a happy Thanksgiving!
oracknows | November 26, 2008...EneMan thinks he's "too sexy":
Unfortunately, someone else is claiming EneMan as her mascot:
We can't have that. Remember, EneMan has been this blogs mascot since December 2004. Maybe he's getting restless because he hasn't been featured very often the last couple of years. I wonder if I should remedy that...
oracknows | September 27, 2008I realize I've been a bit remiss in my usual monthly feature, in which I have until recently featured a photo of our blog mascot from the infamous Fleet Pharmaceuticals calendar. This year's been the most bizarre one of all, a radical departure. One might wonder why I've missed August.
Here's why:
That's one scary image of EneMan. However, I do see some utility to it here. I think I may adopt it as the logo for any post in which Orac applies some serious not-so-Respectful Insolence to someone who is so full of crap that he or she requires our mascot's "little friend" to clean it out.…
oracknows | June 23, 2008
If you happen to be a blogger, has there ever been anything that you meant to blog about, but it totally slipped your mind? This is just such an item for me.
Yes, multiple people e-mailed me about this on Friday, and for some reason in my amusement at David Kirby's antics over the weekend twisting a CDC report and then looking even more clueless as he modified his post in response to his errors being pointed out, producing a mangled mess that made even less sense than before, in all the fun, I totally forgot about the item.
And my blog mascot is not at all pleased. Here's why:
MOSCOW - A…
oracknows | April 20, 2008An image from in front of the San Diego Convention Center last week:
I never knew our blog mascot had a second job. I guess working for Fleet must not pay what it used to.
oracknows | March 2, 2008As I mentioned in January, everybody's favorite blog mascot has seemingly undertaken a new career in show biz. In fact, he's become a big movie star, even popping up in some fairly avant garde movies.
This month, however, he's popping up in a most unexpected place: In one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time:
Even better, though, there's something that my readers would most definitely appreciate. You--yes, you!--can, if you so desire, peruse the various movies that EneMan is slated to appear in through the course of 2008 and vote for your favorite at EneMan Goes to Hollywood.…
oracknows | February 9, 2008I'm on the road for the weekend, and Internet access will likely be spotty until sometime Monday afternoon. Does that mean Orac has abandoned his readers? O ye of little faith! Of course not! There are scheduled posts in the meantime; that is, assuming that ScienceBlog's post scheduling feature doesn't let me down. Lately, it's been--shall we say?--rather less than reliable. So if my scheduled posts don't show up or, as seems to be more common, don't show up until hours after they were originally scheduled, it's not my fault. Really. They're there.
First up, never let it be said that I've…
oracknows | January 1, 2008It's a new year.
Overall, 2007 was a good year for Respectful Insolence. When I first started this whole blogging thing, I had no idea that I'd still be at it three years later. Moreover, I had no idea that I'd still be able to produce posts good enough that people still want to read them. Heck, I even produced a fair amount of work in 2007 that I'm proud of and that compares well with anything I've ever done.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of a feature of this blog from the very beginning. Sadly, 2007 was not such a good year for this blog's mascot. It's not really his fault. It's…
oracknows | December 12, 2007
It's times like these that I wonder if I've been at this blogging thing a bit too long. I ask that question because I've done it again. I've done the same thing in 2007 that I did a year ago in 2006.
I missed my own blogiversary.
Yes, believe it or not, yesterday was the third anniversary of a cold and dreary Saturday when, more or less on a whim, I sat down in front of my computer and wondered if I could do this blogging thing that had been written about in the media so much over the preceding few months. After all, I had had several years' experience sparring with Holocaust deniers,…
oracknows | November 25, 2007I've been very remiss in featuring what has become, from a very early point in this blog's history, its de facto mascot. Maybe it's because he's just been so busy being BEOC (Big Enema on Campus), or maybe it's a bit of laziness on my part. Or maybe having a giant walking Fleet's enema bottle representing this blog hits a little too close to home when it comes to the usual content here. Whatever the reason, it's time to catch up with what the Big E has been doing since August, which, unbelievably, was the last time he made a new appearance here. (Recycling old Thanksgiving pictures doesn't…
oracknows | November 22, 2007...from EneMan.
Here's wishing everyone who celebrates it a Happy Thanksgiving. As you might expect, our blog mascot is joining in the fun, preparing the turkey, and loading up on tryptophan!
Believe it or not, given my usual prolific nature, I'm taking the day off from blogging to engage in the traditional Thanksgiving Day activities of eating, drinking, and falling asleep on the couch watching football.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and I'll be back tomorrow.
You know, this reminds me. I've been very, very remiss in not featuring everyone's favorite blog mascot for his usual monthly…
oracknows | August 5, 2007...Eneman!
I was remiss in July. It happens that I totally forgot to post the monthly feature that has become a tradition over the last two years of blogging. Oh, I tried to make up for it by resurrecting a rather amusing EneMan article from nearly two years ago as an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo when I didn't have time to come up with new material.
What I can't figure out is this: If EneMan is so busy being the industrious and hard-working student, where does he get the time to do all this extracurricular stuff?
JULY 2007
I have to say, I'd be pretty scared if I saw a 6 foot…
oracknows | August 3, 2007Unfortunately, I was way too busy this week to come up with a new edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. However, there's still stuff to be mined from the ancient history of this blog, stuff that most of you, my readers, have probably not seen. This one, for instance, dates back nearly two years (September 2, 2005) and features this blog's mascot, everybody's favorite real colon cleansing product. In this installation, our mascot shows the woo being sold by a colon-cleansing altie for the product of his action that it is.
Rrrrr.
As you may recall, last month's appearance of everybody's favorite…
oracknows | June 9, 2007This is what Orac would look like this weekend if he were his blog mascot and if those piles of papers surrounding him were NIH grants.
Yes, NIH Study Section time is coming up in less than two weeks. It's grant review crunch time, and this is how I will be spending the remainder of my weekend, other than taking an hour or two to mow the lawn and the occasional sanity break to blog. Fortunately, the grant load this cycle is not too bad for my study section compared to some past cycles. If I really push (excuse the term), I should be able to get more than half the remaining grants taken care…
oracknows | May 6, 2007Our intrepid mascot has been revealing sides of himself this year of which I had previously been unaware. After all, who knew he was so into art that he'd pose nude without embarrassment? Or that he was a Shakespearean actor? Or that he has a way with the ladies?
Maybe it's because he's so suave and debonair, as we see this month:
I ask again: What's he got that I haven't got? Is it the tux? Is it--gasp!--the appliance on top of his head.
Best not to go there.
oracknows | April 13, 2007...and how!
Who knew our intrepid mascot liked hockey so much? I wonder if he's Canadian. Maybe so.
oracknows | April 7, 2007I don't recall how I came across this. Perhaps it was while looking for photos of our intrepid mascot that I don't already have, or perhaps it was to see if anyone else has anything to say about our cheery but strange mascot, the purpose of whose head you really don't want to think too much about. (On the other hand, I would compare EneMan to Casey Luskin, given how firmly Luskin likes to put his head up the behinds of various luminaries of the "intelligent design" movement, but that would be a profound insult to EneMan, who at least serves a highly useful purpose in preparing the rectum and…