Truth and the Devil

We need to get PZ Myers to write more book reviews.

Whoa. Bryan Appleyard has reservations about the book. That tells you how bad it has got to be. If you show your new baby to your sister, and she doesn’t scrunch up her face and say “OOOH, she’s cute widdle one!” but instead starts talking about the miracles plastic surgery can do, you know you’ve got a really ugly baby. This book is one ugly baby. It’s the baby that would inspire your sister to get her tubes tied to prevent the possibility of repeating your mistake.

Don’t buy this book. Stick your brain in a blender first. If you want a short, safe feel for what the whole thing is like, Beauregard has an article online (it opens with a quote, but only one, thank Waring), but I’ll say nothing more — I’ve read half his book, a sufficiently painful experience. Fortunately, Shelley skewers him with a sneer. Read that instead.

Shelley also uses the word “crackpottish,” not me.

I disagree. That pot ain’t cracked, it’s pulverized and powdered. It’s a smear of dust. It’s gone to the Great Kiln in the Sky. It’s a non-pot. It has ceased to hold soil. It is soil. You could point a gentleman to the spot with the pot, and he’d have to use his imagination—and even at that, the best he’d be able conjure up in his head would be a loose pile of gravel. You know the phrase, “He hasn’t got a pot to piss in”? That’s this pot. This pot is fractured, splintered, split, shattered, blown to flinders, smashed, demolished, obliterated.

So no, I’m not going to make the mistake of calling this a work of crackpottery.

Hilarious.