EneMan
oracknows | April 1, 2007Given that my attempt last year to pull an April Fool's Day gag fooled no one and in essence went over like the proverbial lead balloon, I'm chastened enough not to try it again this year. Maybe by next year, I'll get up the nerve again.
In the meantime, this little gem came through a mailing list that I'm on, and I wanted to see what my readers thought of it:
Redondo Beach Surfer News. Where the sun shines most the time, and the feelin' is laid back.
Sunday Apr 1, 2007. 5:40am
Chiropractic treatment fights global warming
by Olga Re
With the specter of global warming on the horizon, many…
oracknows | March 4, 2007In all the confusion, work, and excitement of the last week, including an NIH study section and a trip to give a talk, you may have thought that I've forgotten about a monthly feature that has been ongoing here since the very beginning and that will likely continue as long as (1) this blog exists and (2) Fleet keeps sending me calendars.
If you're in college, as apparently our intrepid blog mascot and promoter of colon health is, March is usually the month during which your spring break appears. Of course, when I was in college at the University of Michigan, spring break used to be at the…
oracknows | February 3, 2007Here's a blog that Shelley discovered and that I've been meaning to mention for a week now: Drug Rep Toys.
Yep, it's a blog whose purpose is to review and rate the various bits of swag that drug reps hand out to us doctors in the hopes that (I guess) we'll prescribe or use their products. It's mostly pens and lights, though. He's missing some of the--shall we say?--over the top toys. For example, remember this post from long ago?
Yes! It's the very first time our intrepid blog mascot appeared, way back in December 2004, when I posted a picture of the stuffed EneMan doll and the multiple…
oracknows | January 1, 2007Sadly, for many, today marks the end of their vacation (or at least of their long weekend). Fortunately, I was smart enough (as well as able) to take one last precious day off tomorrow to head into the city and check out an exhibit at the Met that my wife and I want to see.
As I prepared to take a week and a half off just before Christmas, I had been concerned that I had not heard anything from my intrepid blog mascot (no, not the Hitler Zombie). Would 2007 be a year without him?
Fortunately, the answer is a resounding "No!" He's back, and badder than ever. In fact, you might even say he's…
oracknows | November 5, 2006October was a very good month for Respectful Insolence, a very good month indeed. In fact, traffic for this blog reached an all-time high, edging out the previous best month (May 2006) by about 1,000 visits on Sitemeter. It just goes to show that, although traffic has more or less leveled off and is fluctuating around a mean, there's still room for bringing that Respectful Insolence to more of the blogosphere.
It's not as though I'm ever likely to catch PZ or Ed in traffic. (I'd need my traffic to go up nearly an order of magnitude ever to catch PZ; even I'm not deluded enough to see that…
oracknows | October 8, 2006Pretty much everyone knows about the existence of the fabulous cave paintings dating back 30,000 years in places such as Lascaux and Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in France. In these caves, our forebearers used the walls as their canvases to paint amazingly vibrant and detailed paintings of animals and various other things. The paintings are beautiful, some of them even having been drawn using surprisingly sophisticated techniques of shading and perspective, and millions visit the caves to view .
Long we have assumed that we knew quite a bit about these drawing in these caves. But now evidence has been…
oracknows | September 3, 2006I don't know why, but yesterday I was thinking about Spinal Tap. It's a hilarious movie that I haven't seen in a while, and I've wanted to own the DVD for a while now. Somehow, this thought reminded me of something. Something about the blog. Something that, in my absence and now my return from vacation, I had forgotten to post. A monthly blog ritual, so to speak. Indeed, the memory of one particularly hilarious scene from This Is Spinal Tap triggered a reminder of what I must do.
So, here and now, I rectify my oversight:
I bet you didn't know that EneMan helped to build Stonehenge, did you?…
oracknows | August 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 5, 2006Angel Falls produces the tallest free fall of water in the world, at over 3,000 feet, with an uninterrupted drop of over 2,600 feet. If you read the conventional history of the falls, you'd know that the one credited officially with discovering the falls is James Angel, who found the falls while looking for an ore bed. Oh, sure, it's true that Ernesto Sanchez La Cruz found them first and that the Venezuelan natives in the area knew about them long before Angel showed up, but the falls weren't named after any of them, now were they?
Of course, there's another explorer to contend with who also…
oracknows | July 20, 2006
Thirty seven years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong became the first man ever to walk on the Moon. (You can quibble and say it was July 21 by Universal Time (a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time), but I'm an American, and to me as a child it happened on July 20.
In any case, I have two things to post that are of interest on this anniversary of the first Moon landing. First, here's an über-cool website that allows you to view a panoramas of the Moon made up of high resolution photos from the original missions digitally stitched together from photos taken during original lunar…
oracknows | June 14, 2006I've heard of physicians using themselves as guinea pigs for their own research before, but this is ridiculous.
Yesterday, my copy of General Surgery News arrived at my office. As I was whiffling through it to see if there were any articles worth reading, I came across a tale of a Japanese doctor who was truly dedicated to his research, so much so that that I had to hand it to him. Well, sort of.
Yes, on p. 22 of the June issue of General Surgery News (sadly, not yet online as of this writing, so you'll have to take my word for this--or check up on me in a couple of weeks when they'll…
oracknows | June 4, 2006Doing the random Technorati search, I happened to come across a disturbing statement. Indeed, our intrepid colon cleanser was not pleased when I forwarded this to him:
Eneman, real last name, Fleet, is an illegal immigrant worker.
We know that there are dirty jobs to be done in the world, and the proper ones to do those dirty jobs are aliens (the kind that don't travel a thousand light years to look up your ass, but very closely related.) Fleet formerly lived on a street in London named after him and decided that that part of London was so personally degrading that he felt it was necessary to…
oracknows | May 19, 2006Uh-oh.
Periodically, via Sitemeter, I like to check out what sorts of searches are leading people to my humble blog.
Recently I noticed one coming here from Italy via a Google search for "giant enema." Number two on the search list was this post.
I'm guessing my Seed overlords are probably relieved that the post to which that search led was on my old blog, not the current incarnation of Respectful Insolence. (Or maybe not. After all, traffic is traffic.) Me, I'm curious why someone in Italy is searching the web for giant enemas. Maybe EneMan would like a trip to Europe.
oracknows | May 13, 2006Yes, I know I've been remiss lately, since moving to ScienceBlogs, about getting these out on the first of each month. And I've been hearing about it too.
Given this years' theme of EneMan Travels Through Time, you might wonder where our caped colon crusader would turn up next. Well, wait no more! For the month of May, EneMan shows that he's a true blue American through and through.
I bet you didn't know his American pedigree stretched so far back--or that the Pilgrims on the Mayflower had such a problem with regularity, which would have been a real bummer on a long ocean crossing. Good…
oracknows | April 8, 2006As you may remember, our intrepid blog mascot has been traveling though history since January, going from Mount Everest, to Canada, to inventing paper currency. He even found time to wish fellow SB'er PZ a happy birthday. Fans probably wonder where he'd end up next. I realize that this is a few days late, but that was intentional, so that I had an excuse to post the April Fools Day EneMan.
So where will he appear next?
Here's where:
Don't mess with EneMan. He wields a nasty sword and isn't afraid to use it. I bet you didn't know that underneath that cheery exterior lurks the heart of a…
oracknows | April 1, 2006You know, after all these years as a scientist, physician, and skeptic, I've been wondering. Perhaps it's time to undergo a reassessment of my and philosophy. I've always been a bit of a curmudgeon, and it hasn't really gotten me anywhere. My words appear to have no impact on the credulous.
For example, perhaps I've been a bit harder than I should be on purveyors of dubious alternative medicine. Millions of people use it every day. Would they use it if there weren't anything to it? I think not. After all, look at all those testimonials for chelation therapy, Reiki therapy, Chinese energy…
oracknows | March 12, 2006Regular readers of this blog since before the move to ScienceBlogs a month ago have probably wondered when everybody's favorite blog mascot would return. It's likely that Christopher Mims and the rest of the ScienceBlog editors probably hoped that he wouldn't, so as not to associate the Seed Magazine name with such strangeness. Perhaps even my fellow ScienceBloggers, some of whom may not be familiar with the wonder that is Orac's mascot, may find themselves scratching their heads and wondering, "WTF?" while wishing Orac would restrain his stranger impulses.
If only it were so easy. Orac has…