Friday Woo
oracknows | August 17, 2008It's Sunday, which makes it a perfect time for a little blog housekeeping, especially about a feature that used to appear regularly on Fridays.
As you may recall, after the death of Echo I put Your Friday Dose of Woo on hiatus for a while because I just couldn't get myself into the appropriately light-hearted and silly frame of mind. Time has passed, and, although things will never be the same, a semblance of normalcy has (somewhat) returned. The loss still hurts--a lot--but my wife and I are slowly and reluctantly adapting. (We did finally share that third ear of corn, by the way; I don't…
oracknows | July 10, 2008It's been a week now since my wife and I learned that our beloved dog, whom we've had for eight years, had terminal cancer. At the time I was so sad and down that I just couldn't even imagine getting myself into the appropriately light-hearted frame of mind that I try to maintain. In the week since the shock of learning the diagnosis, I still can't achieve that frame of mind, although, as you may have noticed, I've been able to achieve the level of sarcastic snarkiness directed against pseudoscientists and antivaccinationists that my readers have come to expect. It's easy when you're angry…
oracknows | July 4, 2008
Today is Friday, which has normally meant for the last two years that it's the time every week when I poke fun at some particularly outrageous woo. Indeed. I even had a great idea for a 4th of July-themed post today that (I hope) would have been hilarious. I had even started to write a bit of it a couple of nights ago.
Then real life intervened, and I didn't feel the least bit like humor last night. I still don't feel capable of humor this morning, either. Those of you who don't have pets may want just to skip the rest of this; you may not understand why I'm feeling so down and may view…
oracknows | June 27, 2008I realize that I've been mighty hard on Jenny McCarthy these last several months. I've made fun of her for her idiocy, her arrogance of ignorance, and her antivaccination lunacy, not to mention her utter ignorance of science, and, yes, I've been rather vicious at times. However, she richly deserved it. Indeed, I argue that in fact my reaction was actually mild in comparison to the sheer lunacy that she regularly spews and the threat to public health her ignorant antivaccinationist activism represents.
But it's Friday, and that means it's fun day. That means it's time for an excursion into…
oracknows | June 20, 2008I know I like to say that woo is eternal, and it is. That doesn't, however, mean that individual examples of woo are necessarily eternal. Some, it seems, are. Does anyone doubt, for example, that homeopathy, which has been around for over two hundred years now, will still be around 200 years from now? I'd like to think it won't, but fear that it will, even though I know I won't be around to find out. Ditto for energy-based "healing" and naturopathy, among others. On the other hand, not all woo is eternal. Sometimes the reason is fashion, which, as we all know, is fickle. Sometimes the reason…
oracknows | June 13, 2008
Hard as it is to believe, this little weekly vanity project of mine, this little weekly excursion into the wild and wacky world of woo, is fast approaching two years of existence. Really. I kid you not. This wouldn't really disturb me so much except that I had been rather hoping to do a special anniversary edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo in a couple of weeks, but I really don't have anything suitable. No, it's not that I don't have lots of woo in the infamous Folder of Woo. There's stuff there for the foreseeable future. It's just that I'm like a little kid. When a really, really good…
oracknows | June 6, 2008I'm tired.
I apologize in advance if I'm not as--shall we say?--energetic as usual this week. I'm sure you'll understand. After all, I just spent the last three days subjecting myself to the most toxic and concentrated woo known to humankind. If you're a regular reader here, you clearly know what I'm talking about, namely Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's "Green Our Vaccines" rally on Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, it wasn't as large as attended. Although its organizers claim that 8,000 showed up, more realistic estimates were maybe around 1,000. Maybe. Even better, the media hardly…
oracknows | June 1, 2008In the nearly two years of its existence, I have strived to feature only the finest and most outrageous woo that I can find. It's mostly been medical quackery but sometimes it's other topics as well. Oddly enough, the vast majority of the woo featured nearly every week never attracts the attention of any regulatory bodies. Given the hilariously, extravagantly pseudscientific or spiritual claims made to support some of these devices, it's hard to image how so many of them never attract the loving attention of the Food and Drug Administration or the counterpart of the FDA in other countries in…
oracknows | May 30, 2008If there's one thing I've learned over the last couple of years of doing this little feature, it's that there are a couple of kinds of woo. Actually, there are certainly more than a couple, but pretty much all woo can be divided into a couple of types. The first time is where the woo is based on no science at all, but rather mysticism or some other religious or "spiritual" force. This may or may not be combined with the physical or with some sort of scientific or pseudoscientific explanations to justify it, but at its very heart the woo far more religion than science. Then, there's another…
oracknows | May 23, 2008I like my Folder of Woo.
Besides providing me endless fodder for this little weekly feature, my Folder of Woo also provides me nearly endless amusement. Sometimes, I'll just peruse it, looking at woo old and new, woo that's been featured in this little weekly exercise in diving into the belly of the beast, woo that has yet to be featured, and woo that will probably never be featured. Unless people suddenly discovery rationality and science, my Folder of Woo is likely to continue to exist. I suppose that could happen, but it's pretty unlikely, which means my Folder of Woo is likely to continue…
oracknows | May 16, 2008This week was difficult.
No, it wasn't difficult because I had hit one of my periodic woo writer's blocks that I whine about, no doubt to the occasional annoyance of my readers, even though I have one of the greatest hobbies in the world. I mean, I get to do something that I love (writing and blogging) and even get paid a nominal sum for doing it. Even better, this whole Respectful Insolence⢠thing has grown far beyond my wildest imaginings when more than three years ago, on winter's day in a deep and dark December, I experimented with Blogger on a whim and created the first incarnation of…
oracknows | May 9, 2008Last week's woo was pretty darned hard to top, don't you think? It had it all, after all: Boner potentiation, penis enlargement, magnets, near infrared, and more. The only thing it lacked that would have made it absolutely perfect woo were references to pseudoscientific "vibration" or, even better, quantum theory. That's the reason I could only give it a 9.5/10 rather than a perfect score of 10/10. All I can say is: Better luck next time.
In looking for something that could at least live up to last week, if not surpass it, I was surprised that there actually was such a link in my ever-…
oracknows | May 2, 2008
As I approach the second anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo (now only a mere two months away), it occurs to me: What sort(s) of woo, if any, have I neglected? Is there a kind of woo that is commonplace but has somehow slipped under Orac's radar? Hard as it may be to believe, there have now been over 100 installments of my weekly bit of vanity. Looking back over it, I see all manner of woo. Quantum homeopathy? Check? Sound healing? Of course! DNA Activation? That was definitely a fun one! Detoxification footpads? Not once, but twice! 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories? Yes, I've even…
oracknows | April 25, 2008
There's a new woo in town. Unfortunately, it's the same as the old woo.
I first noticed it around Christmas. Inexplicably, I started getting a greatly increased amount of traffic to an old Your Friday Dose of Woo post of mine. The post to which I'm referring is one that I did a year and a half ago about some fabulously silly woo that claimed to remove toxins through the soles of your feet through a special foot pad, which inspired me to entitle the post These boots were made for detoxifyin'. This product in question was called "Miracle Patches" and, it was claimed, can remove all manner of…
oracknows | April 18, 2008
The woo is good again.
Regular readers may have caught an undercurrent of whining in the last few installments of my little Friday feature? Whining about what? A bit of burnout. In fact, looking back at my last few installments, I now wonder whether I was starting to show signs of burnout. There I was, complaining about having trouble coming up with new bits woo that really floated my boat enough to inspire me to ever more fevered bits of Respectful Insolenceâ¢. What a downer, man! Fortunately, this week was different. This week, there was an abundance of riches. This week, there were at…
oracknows | April 11, 2008It's that time of year again. Actually, it's well over a month past that time of year.
Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my old Blogger blog over three years ago, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative to describe a certain hardcore variety of alternative medicine aficianado who is utterly immune to evidence or reason. The…
oracknows | April 4, 2008Woo has patterns. I've learned to see them, and, if you read Your Friday Dose of Woo on a regular basis, perhaps you're starting to see them too. Not that I had originally intended to become so well-versed in woo that I start to notice these things. What really happened is that I just sort of fell into it when one day I happened to come up with the idea for this little Friday feature. Truth be told, it seems to have grown and taken on a life of its own, such that on weeks when I don't do it (like last week), something about the blog just doesn't feel right. On the other hand, it sometimes…
oracknows | March 21, 2008Sometimes a topic demands to be included in my little Friday bit of hubris and tweaking. Usually when that happens, it's obvious because somehow the topic is synergistic with what's been going on during the preceding week on the ol' blog, in the same way that herbalists claim that all the various compounds and contaminants somehow produce a synergistic therapeutic effect. Wait a minute. That's not such a good example, mainly because woo-meisters usually make this claim without much in the way of evidence, and the examples of true synergism between components of an herbal remedy are few and…
oracknows | March 14, 2008Readers who have followed my little Friday bit of fun every week have probably, like me, at times sat in front of their computer screens, jaw drooping, a little bit of spittle starting to drip out of the corners of their mouths, and eyes agape with wonder at just how anyone on earth could believe some of this stuff. Indeed, it is truly unbelievable to anyone with just a modicum of critical thinking skills. Sometimes, as I have, you've almost certainly laughed out loud at the silliness. Sometimes, as I have, you've probably had to stop reading because you feared that the concentrated woo in…
oracknows | March 7, 2008Sometimes my readers save my butt.
There I was earlier this week, looking through my Folder of Woo, as is my wont, and oddly enough nothing much was floating my boat. I know, I know, I've started this little weekly exercise before lamenting a lack of enthusiasm for the woo of which I am aware. Then as before then, I briefly wondered whether perhaps I had exhausted all the interesting woo. That seemed highly unlikely, given that I've only been at this about 20 months or so. After all, the woo supply is seemingly inexhaustible, and if I ever got tired of medical woo, there are so many other…