Every Idiot Has Its Audience

Part One: Why Shermer Has (erm) Physics Envy

Disclaimer: This post contains some very adolescent content. I am frequently infantile, but in honor of the occasion, I matured a bit. The Flesh-Kincaid reading level of 8th grade correlates with the emotional maturity of the jokes. I recommend you stop reading now if you find nothing funny in Monty Python joke names.

To understand my experience at the Skeptics Annual Conference, it is important to know that I am the dumbest member of a family of geniuses…er, genii….er, genuii. In an intellectual sense, I am the crazy sister banging her helmeted head against the dinner table.

As children, my sister’s Barbie would invite my brother’s GI Joes over to discuss the likelihood of a Cobra/Joe peace treaty. I would whine, be invited, and then run off crying after contributing, “Why can’t everybody just be nice?” My mom would comfort me by telling me that my well-dressed Barbie could attend the Gala once the rules of order had been ratified.

Nothing much has changed. The only virtue I bring to the family (as far as intellectualism goes) is that I find everything interesting, even long, boring conferences on law, science, and philosophy. I like to see the pretty diagrams, hear the long words, and catch a phrase or two for use at a party.

A month or so ago, my brother asked if I would attend some skeptic thing. “Cool,” I thought. “Scully was a skeptic. Maybe they’ll discuss aliens. I like Sci-Fi stuff about aliens.” (I also thought this my best chance to be the most desirable woman in a group. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that thanks to affirmative action, gender equity and hygiene have been restored to academia.)

If any of you are Skeptics, you got that joke. If you are a skeptic but aren’t a Skeptic, I recommend you check out the organization web page here. However, if you aren’t a skeptic or a Skeptic, then you really shouldn’t attend any event sponsored by Skeptics. They aren’t the most open-minded group about alternate realities or theories or ways of life or political platforms or religions or creeds or shirt colors or jokes or what to eat for breakfast or how to turn cartwheels without losing your loose change or which monsters are most likely to rule Japan or how to kill your in-laws or anything else I offered as a topic of conversation.

The official conference topic was mind and consciousness. This has something to do with something my brother does, but what he researches involves something so intricate he had to “dumb it down” so that the Ph.D.s at a top-ranked university could evaluate his dissertation.

The Skeptics themselves are middle-aged academics. For many years, I have wondered what over-educated, pompous, egocentric white men had been doing since the KKK and Neo-Nazis went adolescent. I didn’t ask them, though, for the reasons stated above. After the ‘kill your in-laws’ conversation, I was forbidden from vocalizing.

I blame my brother (who has requested to be referred to as Polo Dude in my blogs-he seems to want metaphorical genetic distance) for my utter failure at Skeptic-ism. Polo Dude told me that the conference was honoring a guy called Randi Something. He further informed me that he had wanted to get t-shirts made that said, “It’s rockin’ to be Randi.” Something like that is certain to get my 1 brain cell excited in the right wrong way.

About half-way through the morning session, the moderator announced that he had met the next presenter in a clothes-optional hot tub. Her name was Ursula Good-Enough.

I hadn’t realized that even the sex industry had been forced to reduce costs to survive the faltering economy. I wished for a government subsidy. After all, if you’re going to waste your family’s faltering disposable income on fast women, it should at least be better than good.

A few hours later, the crude comic crème de la crème occurred. A story was told about Peter Poppenoff. My younger brother’s addition to this story “Peter Poppenoff on the panel” did not do much to raise my intellectual experience of the day’s events. I wonder if Peter and Ursula wouldn’t be a good match. Ursula may not be great, but she’s got to be better than the option. (I will likely be sued for these jokes, but it will be worthwhile to see ‘Peter Poppenoff and Ursula Goodenough” eternalized in the public record.)

Polo Dude rolls his eyes in disappointment every time I mention Peter. I don’t blame him. By the end of the conference, Skeptics were offering him books on teaching sign language to gorillas and advising him to turn up my night-time oxygen for preservation of remaining motor neurons.

I am okay with that. I had two offers for research positions with room and board plus health plan. Not bad for a sub-intellectual like myself.


Coming Soon? Part Two! Choosing the Facts: What Really Happened at the Conference.