August 04, 2005

• Waking Up to Sleep Paralysis Too, Kary Mullis has issues. I am reminded a bit of Linus Pauling.
• Mullis is a fascinating guy, sort of like the Hunter S. Thompson of molecular biology. Can't believe he hasn't been discussed here before.
• There was a fascinating thread about sleep paralysis' on the blue. Some of its' possible connections to alien and otherwordly visitations are discussed. Having experienced several times that feeling of being unable to move while some presence makes itself present, I can say it's not pleasant at all.
• cassandra's comment to the linked-to post is fascinating. reads like a twilight zone episode.
• I would never use Mullis as a model of normal. Have you read his book? He supposedly thought up PCR while driving the PCH on acid. I wouldn't be surprised if many of his other thoughts were acid- or drug-driven. Not that they're wrong (PCR is amazing), but to be sure, it provides a reason to question his credibility, especially when discussing things that rely on a first-hand, unsupported account.
• There is no such thing as normal.
• "cassandra's comment to the linked-to post is fascinating" where?
• When I used to work nights and when I got off work early I would love to listen to Coast to Coast AM on my 45 minute drive home. I am very interested in this type of stuff. I don't beleive in it, but I am interested in the people who claim to have these experiences and other experiences and powers. ...Especially since the time I woke up in the afternoon and some guy who had grown up in my house was wanting to look around at what my parents had done with the house and in return for our kindness he gave my mom a "spiritual healing." (I guess wierd things aren't that unusual in my parent's house!)
• If we start ignoring people because of drug use, I was going to say, we start throwing out the thoughts of people like Crick, Sagan and many others. As for Coast to Coast and Csicop, I have equal disregard for both of 'em. I tend to ignore anything from either camp; if you ask me the rabid skeptics are as bad as the rabid UFO religoids. I really would just like to, one day, have a conversation with people who don't just start spewing talking points from either camp - not aimed at anyone here right now, btw.
• I refuse to believe in anything, no matter how true it is!
• I feel the same way about those cocksuckers at the Bureau of Weights and Measures. Any time I mention the simple math of four simultaneous twenty-four hour days within a single rotation of Earth, they blindly spew IERS talking points. Singularity is death worship.
• Yeah, nice rhetoric. I'm talking about objectivity. Gettin' sick of ditto head skeptics quoting fuckin' James Libel Randi and Michael Twat Shermer.
• Don't let 'em push you around with facts, man. FIGHT THE POWER. The truth is out there.
• Facts? Randi and Shermer? They use more fudging and bullshit in their screeds than the fuckin' GOP.
• >the rabid skeptics are as bad as the rabid UFO religoids Amen to that. While I'm suspicious of people who are too-readily credulous of this kind of stuff, in some ways I find it even harder to understand folks whose answers for every question are 'science' and 'weather balloons'...
• Science isn't an answer, it's a methodology through which to arrive at an answer. It is clearly not applicable to domains of faith, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and the like.
• There is no Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was just a weather balloon that, due to unusual atmospheric conditions that day, was covered in linguine.
• "Science isn't an answer, it's a methodology through which to arrive at an answer." Many "hardcore skeptics" that I've heard discuss these things talk about science just as if it were a faith, a doctrine that must be bowed to. They react to those with an interest in data that falls outside mainstream research with an attitude that amounts to personal affront, it often seems. I have no problem with healthy skepticism, I need it. There's no reason to throw out the scientific methodology, far from it. I would argue the scientific methodology is far more objective than the methodology of Randi, CSICOP etc. These guys are more concerned with influencing the media than doing research.
• It is impossible for the weather balloon to have been covered in linguine. The prevailing wind would have dried the linguine, negating its spaghetti-like properties. I instead propose the temperature-inversion/capellini effect as an explanation for airborne spaghetti-based phenomena.
• Chyren, what do you have against Randi? Not that I have a dog in this fight, just wondering.
• He's dishonest.
• While I'd like to believe in UFOs and aliens, and while I *do* believe not only that we are not alone in the univese but that someday we'll discover that the universe is *teeming* with life? The distances to get here are just too damn far. We are here on a little no-name planet in the butt-end of an out of the way galaxy. Whatever/whoever is out there? I am sure they have bigger fish to fry than flying hundreds of years to come visit our dumb asses.
• I'm missing a few hours from last Thursday night. It's either aliens or all that free Stella I drank at a gallery opening. I'm thinking it's the aliens.
• those cocksuckers at the Bureau of Weights and Measures that rocked!
• I wish I had a talking raccoon. We'd go drinking together, maybe a pizza or kebab on the way home... *stares dreamily off into distance*
• *stands up in distance, gives kitfisto the finger*
• *Is shocked, but not surprised* See him off, Colin! [Colin is my talking raccoon. He's one baaaad mo'fo!]
• Does Colin resemble Bucky? If so, I'd be interested... ya know, just in case. Interesting post. Does make you kinda wonder! I use to think abduction was complete bunk, until a relative (whom I have no reason to distrust) told me a story out of the blue one day. I didn't know what to make of it - either he was fucking nuts or something really strange *did* happen to him. He lived on a farm in rural South Dakota. He had specific memories of "aliens" coming to visit him in the middle of one of his pastures. When he told me, his demeanor was casual and somewhat emotionless. After he finished the story he said, "You'll never about this from me again." Anyhow, he died of cancer last year. I forgot about that story until I just read this post. Weird...
• meant to type, "You'll never hear about this from me again."
• *begins running away in distance, is savaged by raccoon, disappears over horizon*
• Chy, this is the cassandra comment I was referring to: I was in a new truck I had bought a few weeks before following a friend to his house one March afternoon around 5 pm. I say 'following' but I had been there many times before, I wasn't literally dependent on following him, but I was several blocks behind him while keeping him in sight. I turned off a main artery onto a small stretch of expressway. There was only one way you could turn, I did make a wrong turn. I was going to correct direction to feed onto the expwy. The entry ramp had a 90 degree blind turn. As I came around it, there were 3 cars ahead of me waiting to merge onto the expwy, and one car length between me and the third car in line. The thought passed through my mind that if I had been going faster, I might not have had time to stop, and that since my new truck was much smaller than the old behemoth I had before I needed to be careful not to let my speed go up without noticing it. Next thing, as in literally next thing--I had no sense of any time having passed--I was driving along and had NO idea where I was. None. I didn’t panic because I was in fairly heavy traffic but I looked around trying to place where I was. I realized I was on the expwy I had been waiting to merge on...but maybe a quarter mile away from where I had been AND GOING THE OPPOSITE WAY. After the next intersection I turned around in a parking lot and came back going the way I should have been, and got to my friend’s house. I asked him how much time had passed since he got there. He said a couple of minutes. I asked if he had begun to wonder what happened to me, why I wasn’t there. He said no. I told him what had happened. He said ‘obviously’ I got on the ramp going the wrong way. I told him I most certainly did not, I was waiting, completely stopped, fourth car in line, to merge going the correct way, then instantaneously I was in the process of driving the opposite way. He said maybe I was daydreaming and went into one of those ‘driving trances’ people go into where they are on autopilot. I said I was far from on autopilot, I had just been thinking quite clearly that if I’d been going faster I might not have had time to stop before hitting the car in front of me. I also said that I would have had to go from that state of alertness into a ‘trance’, waited while 3 other cars merged into rush hour traffic, merged into it myself, crossed two lanes of busy traffic, waited for a light to do a U turn, gone back UNDER the overpass I came from, UNDER the parallel railroad overpass, PAST an exit I used to take all the time when I worked nearby--all without registering having done/seen any of this. And then ‘come to’ a few blocks from the intersection, totally disoriented. He said I’d been under a lot of stress lately, maybe I had a blackout. I said I’d had DOZENS of experiences in my life more stressful than the current situation and NEVER had a blackout (I should say here I was sober, don’t drink, don’t do street drugs, was on no prescription drugs except thyroid supplement I’ve been on since 1982 without side effects, and have never done ANY hallucinogens.) So he went back to the ‘took the wrong turn’ hypothesis and said he’d ‘prove’ to me I just got on a loop that took me the wrong way. (Don’t ask me how he explained my having been in a queue to merge EASTbound after accidentally going WESTbound.)
• *Takes Colin for well-earned pint of Stella*
• That sounds like Petit Mal epilepsy, or something, Hawthorne. If it had been a longer period of time, I would perhaps be more intrigued, but from my experience, having a family full of neurological nutbars, I've learned that there are fugue-like states that people can have and never have again, while operating nominally in charge of a vehicle, and such like.
• Reading Communion was one of the more horrifying experiences of my formative years and this article brought it all back. Now it's 2 AM and I'm too freaked out to turn out my lights, but I still can't stop reading.
• Whitley Strieber is nuts, imho. He's also a bullshit artist. Communion had a big effect on me when I first read it, too, but you gotta remember the guy is a professional horror writer and knows how to press your buttons. He's also been caught out being highly creative with the truth, shall we say. I'm also highly skeptical of Budd Hopkins' work. I think these people are enablers of folks who are having some kind of weird experience, but I don't think there are aliens literally abducting people and all that jazz, it is inherently illogical, quite apart from the scientific and physics issues. Abduction style stories have always been with us, they trace back to myths about the faeries, etc. It's amazing how the core stories are the same as the changeling tales or the folk going to dance with the faeries and coming back after days have passed, etc. This is why Jacques Valee's work is interesting because he factors in that stuff. But in the oddest of the tales, say the Betty & Barney Hill case, the Travis Walton case, the Pascagoula case; there's stuff in there that is very interesting indeed that definitely suggests something more than just a psychotic episode is happening.
• If an employee of the Bureau of Weights and Measures sucks cock, are they obliged to weigh and measure it first?