Mermaid Body Found?
July 24, 2012
Has the body of an actual mermaid been discovered? Well, no, but that very idea was launched by an Animal Planet “documentary” that proved to be a crockumentary—in this case a fictional story offered in the realistic style of The Blair Witch Project (1999).
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High-Wire King Claims the Falls
July 18, 2012
During the night of June 15, 2012, I watched Nik Wallenda, of the famous Wallenda acrobatic family, become the only person ever to walk a high-wire across Niagara Falls. (Other funambulists, beginning with the Great Blondin in 1859, traversed the gorge a mile or so downstream.) Wallenda—a man of impressive daring and discipline—is a fascination to me, especially since I have acrophobia. (I don’t even like being this tall!)
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Will ETs Invade During the Olympics?
July 09, 2012
The extraterrestrials may have finally done it: zapped Nick Pope’s brain!
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“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (A Nickell-odeon Review)
June 29, 2012
Is nothing sacred? Ask that of the novelist (Seth Grahame-Smith) and the subsequent moviemakers behind Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. How else does one explain their cra$$ exploitation of the sixteenth president, who was martyred for emancipating the slaves and saving the Union at the cost of a bloody war? Bloody? Humor here, with fake blood by the barrelful. Ha, ha!
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Dr. Drew: $elling Out $cience
June 27, 2012
Flipping through TV channels (June 11, 2012) I happened upon Dr. Drew, just in time to watch the physician uncomfortably hosting the notorious “psychic medium” James Van Praagh. I say uncomfortably because Dr. Drew Pinsky does not for a moment believe Van Praagh can talk to the dead. So why, in the name of Ethics, you ask, does he have the pretender doing readings on his $how? Can we $olve thi$ my$tery?
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A Scintillating UFO Experience
June 18, 2012
Journalist Jacqui Jeras—reporting on CNN Newsroom, Sunday, May 27, 2012—described a UFO that had been seen over Blue Springs, Missouri, for the previous two weeks. It first looked like a star, “experts” said, but then began flashing red and blue colors, leading to descriptions of “a purple light” and “freaky blue lights in the sky.” Video closeups confirmed the effect.
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Stargazing: The Transit of Venus
June 07, 2012
As a stargazer (a lighthearted term), I have often looked at the heavens—as in my personas of poet, skeptical UFOlogist, even miracle claims investigator, or often, simply as one interested in the real world that science best explains. As a boy I was taken by my uncle Charlie Cunard to the University of Kentucky observatory to see Mars. Over the years I have witnessed solar and lunar eclipses, Perseid meteor showers, and many other celestial events, both with and without telescopes. (Once, at Conyers, Georgia, where “sun miracles” were being reported, I looked in vain for one, working with Georgia Skeptics who had set up a telescope equipped with a solar filter.)
“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (A Nickell-odeon Review)
June 05, 2012
If you are not a senior citizen and plan never to become one, perhaps you could skip The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. But I wouldn’t recommend doing so.
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The Blob Ness Monster
May 21, 2012
Has Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster, best known from a 1934 photo that has since been revealed as an April Fool’s prank, once again been recorded—this time on sonar?
“The Raven” (A Nickell-odeon Review)
May 16, 2012
Baltimore, 1849. First, there is the brutal murder of a woman and her daughter in a fourth-floor apartment that is locked from the inside. Then the body of a man named Griswold is found in a torture chamber, sliced in half by a great curved blade at the end of a pendulum.
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