I’ll tell you right here that I’ve voted for Republicans, Democrats, Reform Party candidates, Greenies, Socialist Reformers, Independents, Socialist Workers Party, and Libertarians. I’ve been registered as both a Republican and a Democrat. I’ve also had it, completely had it, with the current party system. But I’m not here to blog about that. I’m here to blog about email smearing.

While Obama (taking a cue from Dean) works miracles of money and support through the tubes and steampipes that make up the Internet, a darker magic emanates from his opponent. Perhaps not actually his opponent - I’ll give him the benefit of some honor - but his opponent’s supporters. The ones that take a slight truth or outright lie and inflate them into something terrible, dark, evil, and above all, false.

It seems innocuous enough. You get an email from a friend, and the subject line is simple. “FWD: Obama is Not a Citizen,” or “FWD: fwd: fwd: fwd: FWD: Obama’s Fifty lies,” or something as colorful and repeatedly forwarded. The friend in the email claims it has to be true because he/she got it from respected source, who is a friend of a cousin. Just close enough to lend credibility and far enough away to make fact-checking something of a hassle. So many unsuspecting readers read it and forward it on. And on and on and on, as the Journey song goes.

It’s very simple to stop and NOT forward the email, even if the contents are true. All it takes is a moment to check out the email on Snopes, factcheck.org, or some other reputable source, many of which are listed in the various places around this very blog. Our links list is littered, almost, with resourceful sites full of facts. However, if you’re reading this, you probably visit those sites already.

The proliferation of misinformation and propaganda is amazing, and it is an example of how nefarious and/or careless some people can be with information. These emails have a starting place. They don’t just appear on the net from whole cloth (digital cloth, I might add) or as a brainchild of Zeus. There has to be an origination point. Is the the original sender the actual source of the myth? While it might be fun to assassinate character as a work of fiction, and practice amateurish Wilde-isms in short bursts of email to a zombie audience, it is not right or ethical.

It’s not an easy area - very grey. Or gray. The email forwards, full of lies, half-truths, and defamatory statements, usually don’t come from a clear single source. They never seem to come directly from Mr. Obama’s opponent(s) (there is more than one opponent) but from their supporters. Are John McCain (and others) responsible for what those independent-minded people and groups decide what to do or say? Should McCain (and others) be accountable for the actions of those that want them to win? According to Judy Nadler and Miriam Schulman:

Candidates should also try in so far as possible to take responsibility
for independent groups making representations on their behalf.
If such a party is disseminating false information, it is not
enough for the politician to say, “They’re not part of my campaign.”

There are quite a few people who will mindlessly forward an email, not because what they read was the truth, or even slightly interesting, but because it might sway an otherwise rational person to believe the lies being propogated by a myriad number of unofficial campaigners for McCain. I like to send back the email listing the Snopes source, a quick rundown of the misinformation, and several links to sites that provide corrections. However, I am afraid that these informational emails fall into virtual desktop recycle bins across the country without the slightest consideration. So much for the truth.

SAPS is one the best things the actively skeptical Internet has to offer. Alison Smith and her crew at the Skeptical Analysis of the Paranormal Society investigate and debunk “paranormal” phenomena with wit, class and style. They’re the perfect antidote to the inanity of modern “ghost hunters,” waving infrared cameras, EMF meters and technical jargon around, trying to convince themselves they’re making any sense.

At the urging of Phil Plait, I emailed Alison, and she was nice enough to send me a SAPS sticker just like the one Phil has on his laptop. I stuck it on my computer, and took a picture of it in my preferred environment. Enjoy.

Click for more SAPS.

A Sasquatch Detective can be a Sasquatch who is a detective, rather than a detective who detects Sasquatches. Got it?

This will make more sense if you’ve read this.

In other news, “Sasquatch detective” is either the coolest, or stupidest, job title ever created by a delusional person for himself. If you could just make up your own job, what would it be? I think I’d go with Professor of Sarcasm and Mandatory Beer Tasting.

The rest of ABC’s Wednesday night schedule includes Private Practice and Dirty Sexy Money.  Nothing new here, just continuations of last season’s successes. However, I do not like Private Practice, and I have not cared to watch Dirty Sexy Money despite the guy from the morgue show on HBO. It also has one of the Baldwin boys, Keifer’s dad, and Jill Clayburgh. With that pedigree of actors, I’d say it should automatically be watchable. With that, and the sex. However, I haven’t seen an episode, only the teasers, so I can’t give you an honest anything about the show.  So I say TiVo the damn thing. (I’ll get to TiVo later.)

CBS is a bit confused on Wednesday nights. It thinks it can combine winning aspects of Monday and Tuesday for a hybrid night of television.  It starts off with The New Adventures of Old Christine, an okay show starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I’ve watched it and I’ve laughed.  That’s as much as I can say, except that my wife watches it and thinks it’s hilarious (though not as much as Big Bang Theory).

Old Christine is followed by another situation comedy about a guy named Gary who is recently divorced or unmarried, cleverly crafted titled, wait for it. . . Gary Unmarried. It features Jay Mohr and Larry Miller, so it has the potential to be another Hearts Afire.

From here, CBS Wednesday takes a weird turn from divorcee sitcoms to procedural dramas. It’s Criminal Minds, which is okay, followed by CSI:New York, which I consider the middle child of the CSI series despite the chronology of when the shows premiered. They are both good shows, but I don’t know if I can invest my time in another law enforcement drama after the final bow of The Wire. They just don’t have quite enough umph anymore.

For fuck’s sake, CW, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Sorry about the expletives, but there are no words for the CW other than a loud, pink, neon “FUCK.” Catty fashionistas get bitchy on each other and battle to become America’s Next Top Model, gearing themselves up for years of anemia, bulimia and ingesting bags of blow.

After that skeleton-fest, you can feast your eyes on the claptrap that is Stylista. Catty fashionistas get bitchy on each other and battle to become the editor of Elle magazine. I don’t know what they’re gearing themselves up for, but. . .  Forget it. I’m going to go drink some Jack Daniels, I’ll be back.

Holy shit, has it been three days?

Oh well, on to Fox. We get another season of Bones, which is a hit with the FBI-anthropology crowd. I admit, I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to anthropology, and I have a thing for David Boreanaz. No, not a House thing, but a “he’d be cool to hang out with” thing.  He’s a Steeler’s fan! He was Angel! I don’t know. I just like him, and I like the puppet avatar of him as well. So I watch Bones occasionally.

I also watch ‘Til Death, for similar reasons. I have a major crush on Joely Fisher and I’m proud of my imitation of Brad Garret. (I can actually do Ray Romano and Peter Boyle very well. Alll I need is a voice actress who can do Doris Roberts and Patricia Heaton.) The show was kind of funny, though the neighbors were kind of annoying. Fox decided to cancel half the show, which works.

The final show on Wednesday night Fox is Do Not Disturb. I know nothing about it except it has Jerry O’Connell (the fat kid from Stand by Me) and it’s directed by Jason Bateman, so it begins with two stars.  The rest is TiVo’ed for an episode or two, and then condemned.

NBC gives us a rehash of pop culture with a “re-imagining” of Knight Rider, only without the Hoff. The network can rest easily knowing that it should do as well as last year’s Bionic Woman. I liked some of the concepts of Bionic Woman, as well as some of the actors recycled from Battlestar Galactica, but it wasn’t a great show.

Deal or No Deal follows at 9 PM. This has to be the dumbest game show ever. There is NO skill involved that game. I don’t think it even qualifies as a game. It’s simply a matter of guessing and greed. Ugh. My six-year old loves it, but he still occasionally poops in his pants.

Finally, we have Lipstick Jungle. I think I watched an episode. I don’t remember. It was that fantastic. I love the idea of hot corporate women and I love the idea of sex, and the two seem to go well together. But I can’t remember a thing about Lipstick Jungle. Wait, no, I do. Brooke Shields. That’s it.

My verdict: Tivo Pushing Daisies, ‘Til Death, Do Not Disturb (until it’s canceled in November), and CSI: NY. Go out and have a bite to eat. The shows will be waiting for your viewing pleasure.

And CW? I don’t want to even talk about you anymore.

It is impossible, of course, to compare athletes from different eras, different sports, different cultures. Statistics don’t translate from sport to sport. Tastes and skills vary.

Phelps is an amazing athlete and competitor. Hanging arbitrary, hyperbolic labels on him doesn’t serve any purpose.

It is condescending to treat Muslims like excitable children who cannot cope with the probing, mocking treatment we hand out to Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. It is perfectly consistent to protect Muslims from bigotry while challenging the bigotries and absurdities within their holy texts.

His basic thesis is that silencing critiques of Islam, whether for fear of violence or from a misplaced sense of political correctness, will prevent the kind of liberalization and moderation that mainstream Christianity has experienced. Rational criticism and thoughtful examination are the surest antidotes to fanaticism.

If everyone was this smart, we’d be a Type 1 civilization by now.

[Online-radio host and Sasquatch enthusiast Tom] Biscardi said the DNA samples may not have been taken correctly and may have been contaminated, and that he would proceed with an autopsy of the alleged Bigfoot remains, currently in a freezer at an undisclosed location.

(Emphasis mine.) This is hilarious, and I see two possibilities here. First, perhaps these wannabe hoaxers gave the scientists a handful of possum fur, figuring that no actual scientist would be able to tell. (As in, “Them city folk cain’t tell the diffrunce b’tween a possum and a bluetick houn’ dog, shee-it!”)

Actual photo of Sasquatch in its native habitat of Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Or maybe not. Maybe the more plausible explanation is that they put their Bigfoot in a chest freezer that’s been stocked with possum for the winter, and that’s how the sample got “contaminated.”

In any event, whatever they found can’t possibly be Bigfoot. Everybody knows that Bigfoot — like the tree octopus — lives in the Pacific Northwest, not in Georgia!

In other news, apparently that “cat found” poster that’s been all over the internets, the one where it says that the cat is really unfriendly because it “might be scared,” but it’s really an opossum in the picture, you know which one I mean — there’s more than one version kicking around. Another possum-related hoax. And worldwide! I’ve seen them from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles, USA. Won’t somebody think of the possums?

I’ll begin with a second word about Monday night - sucks. Okay, that out of the way, I’d also like to reconsider Samantha Who? Perhaps I was a little harsh, I’ll give it a second chance, if only that I genuinely like Christina Applegate without ever having met her. I’m not even three degrees of Kevin Bacon from her. Four maybe, but not three. And Chuck I’ll get on Netflix and give it a go. But keep in mind, I’m writing this without actually ever having seen the shows in question. It’s all opinion masked as some sort of snarky journalism. Kind of like Fox News.

Tuesday nights on ABC (Always Bland Crap) gives us the craptacular event Opportunity Knocks, which is the mother of the reality show, the game show. It seems to be a hybrid of the game show and the home makeover show. Not the great game shows that were risque and sported seventies collars, but the later shows that extolled the virtue of greed and backbiting. So proud, so PROUD! The game show comes to you! Next up, if you can believe it, is a SECOND night of Dancing with the Tards, Stars, D-listers, whatever. Then it’s Eli Stone cranking away from 10 to 11. I like the actor playing him; he was great as part of the Trainspotting ensemble. But the show doesn’t appeal to me, not even in an eighties/nineties-retro-George Michael-pop-culture way. Maybe it’s because I’m cranky, but that’s because I’m not getting enough fiber.

CBS (Crappily Bad Shows) gives us another season of NCIS which, I must admit, I have watched every once in a while, thanks to my wife’s watching habits. As far as procedural dramas go, it’s not bad. However, CBS seems to think that it needs to completely fill its schedule with either procedurals or Survivor-type shows (as opposed to Survivor Type shows, based on the short story by Stephen “They taste just like ladyfingers” King), so they’ve added The Mentalist at 9 PM. I watched a ten minute clip (it felt like ten minutes) on The YouTube and I was completely…  bored. You can watch it here if you’d like, but a caveat; don’t drive or operate heavy machinery for an hour. If you watch the show, you might as well stay up for Without a Trace, which has become a snorer after so many years. It’s procedural drama night on CBS! Part one, anyway.

The Crap Wok (CW) gives us a bland dish of fecal noodles with a water-based sauce for its Tuesday night schedule. 90210 “returns” at 8, followed by Privilege at 9. 90210 is an update of the old series of thirty-somethings playing teens, revised to show…  what? How the rich and snobby are still rich and snobby? Right, The CW follows this pointless rehash with Privilege. It’s about a (presumably) privileged girl who graduates from Yale, gets fired from her cushy job then gets hired to tutor a richer, more privileged woman’s twins granddaughters in West Palm Beach. I always love to watch people with money to burn complain about their privileged lives. Ugh. Two nights, two strikes, CW.

Fox (I can’t decipher this acronym) gives us House and Fringe. House is getting a little lame (pun intended), but I really like Hugh Laurie. I have a man crush on him, and so does my wife. I really long for the days of Black Adder II, III, Goes Forth and Jeeves & Wooster, but I’ll settle for the curmudgeonly Gregory House any day. Sure, it’s all very improbable, and he makes a mess of the lives of everyone, but it’s a damn fine character study and I’m sure this next season will give us more without giving too much more. Fringe, an entry from Lost and Alias’ JJ Abrams, wants to be an X-Files for the 21st-century. I want to ensconce myself in cashmere and become the King of Kalahui, but that isn’t going to happen either. My verdict - half a night of crap. Catch House and switch the station before Fringe tries to suck you in.

NBC is short for Nothing But Crap on Tuesday evenings. The Biggest Loser: Families is on. I think the true biggest families of losers are the ones who warm their hands by the blue glow of their television sets (damn, okay, LCD or HDTV’s, as well, I’m still stuck in 2003). I can imagine a family of five shoveling bags of overly processed cheese snacks into their gullets, their eyes glued to the images of fatties trying to get fit. While some may consider it inspiration television, watching people try their best to lose weight, I consider it fatsploitation. Law and Order: SVU, the weakest of the Law and Order lineup, rounds out the night with a chung-chung fizzle.

Tuesday night, I’d say your best bet for television (unless you watch “cable,” which we’ll deal with in another entry) is to not watch any at all. Tivo House, go out and get a coffee and listen to some local music or a poetry reading, or just sit quietly and read. TV, network TV anyway, is not worth watching on Tuesday nights at all, unless you’ve been suffering from insomnia. Stay clear of the Tuesday night cesspool.

Wednesday seems to have a lot more potential, but I’ll get to that later.

When I say nigh, I mean it in an archaic sense, as in the end is stingy. I was thinking that the Large Hadron Collider was going to create a massive black hole and suck every living and non-living thing into non-existence at the speed of light. That or Hank Scorpio would emerge from his underground labyrinth to simply terrorize us into giving up our freedoms. It turns out that the Albert Brooks-voiced Simpsons cameo is more likely than a collapse of such magnitude cause by this sophisticated machine.

What exactly is the Large Hadron Collider? Aside from being a huge ass circle of metallic death 300 feet below European soil, it’s a tool for hopefully finding answers as well as new questions to life, the universe, and, well, everything. (I hope Douglas Adams forgives me.) I’m not a theoretical physicist (or an actual physicist! *rim shot* Thank you! I’m here all week!) and I don’t even begin to comprehend the science those nerds in white lab coats are concocting, but I will damn well try to explain it, and how it is important to your life, in less than 1,000 words.

First of all, a hadron is just a nerdy way of talking about protons and neutrons (which make up atoms). Hadrons are made of quarks and gluons, which both sound like alien races from Star Trek. (Yes, I know Quark was a Ferengi, I also know that he was the Principal of Sunnydale High until he was eaten by a large demonic worm.) The Collider attempts to smash up the hadrons to see what’s in there. It’s kind of like a large-scale, multi-billion dollar Will it Blend? only with a possibility of the death of everything.

The truth is, the physicists don’t really know what will happen when the hadrons collide, but they speculate, and they are usually pretty good at the speculatin’. On August 8th, they tested the LHC, and conspiracy buffs were CERTAIN that it would create a black hole that would devour the world.

The scientists plan on going live with the LHC on September 10th. Let’s hope there isn’t some wayward nihilistic scientist brooding about his unrequited love for Vicky in quantum mechanics. He could press a few wrong buttons and poof. Well, if he does, you won’t be able to say I told you so. In fact, it will happen so fast, you will still be thinking about what you ate for breakfast that gave you so much gas when suddenly. . . nothing.

But the scientists at the LHC lab at CERN insist that the black holes they create will be very very small (it is wafer-thin) and last for fractions of a second. Not enough to do any damage except to some dust that might stray into the accelerator. They aren’t even concerned about the black holes, or making black holes, just with the shit the black holes leave behind. Black hole excrement (a rockin’ band out of the LA punk scene) will hopefully show scientists answers to questions about the Big Bang. One of the things they’re searching for is the Higgs particle, which is a clue into how the Universe began and expanded from nothing (absolute nothing) into, well, something. Most likely, they’ll do a thousand or a million of these experiments, which accelerate a hadron at near the speed of light by a series of magnets that bend the path over 17 miles working in tandem with electrical waves that boost the particle, and not find anything but more questions.

Why should we care? Science matters. Even big things that are meaningless to us today could have a tremendous impact in just a few years. Big, meaningless experiments that satisfied nothing but curiosity also begat all sorts of crazy shit like nuclear devices, computers, PDAs, cellphones, iPods, etc. What will this produce? Aside from a nervous populace awaiting their destruction and a mass of Black Hole excrement (I like the way it rolls off the tongue in my mind), a lot of what will result is still unknown. The great thing about the unknown is that it’s only in that state until discovered. It could create a new weapon of mass destruction that sucks the eyes out of enemies before a commander can issue an order, or it might unlock secrets that give the world an endless supply of renewable, clean energy. That is all speculation, (I’m much worse at speculatin’ than the CERNerds) but it’s still much more likely than LHC destroying the world at 299,792,458 m/s.

However, if they turn on the machine and the world does end, I’ll admit I was wrong.

* Saturday came and went and we’re all still alive. . . except those that are dead, but it’s doubtful the test had anything to do with that.