aesmael

    There was a psychic detective show just on. Although the psychic involved in the featured case provided the police with no new information and did not lead them to the killer or a conviction - that was done years later through a tip-off from someone who had been threatened by the murderer, the concluding minutes of the show treated it as a positive outcome for the use of psychics in police matters and advised people with an unsolved case to try one.
    Grr.

    I am also annoyed at attempts to bully/shut men up by demeaning their masculinity. Really, since when did we decide gendered/sexist insults were okay? This complaint inspired by the recent advertising campaign showing young men driving recklessly and witnesses (and passengers) making gestures indicating they think the driver has a small penis.

    Orac|Respectful Insolence provides a list all the academic medical centres which offer woo, as it is put. List is here.

I believe the word sordid applies.

The story, near as I can make it out: Woman writes novel, attempts to get it published and along the way picks up notorious scam agent Christopher Hill. He does his thing, stringing her along with lies promising contracts. Meanwhile she is warned by a person who used to deal with him that he is no good. Hill persuades her otherwise, eventually tells her that her book has been rejected.
New deal: Hill will ghost-write for her a new novel to sell. In return she pays him $400 a month. This continues for two years until he claims to grow sick of her whining and gives her what he has produced, telling her she has all rights to it.
Woman picks up new agent, who she pays to find a publisher for this new book (agents pay writers, minus their cut, NOT the other way round). New agent secures her a deal with a vanity publisher - they will publish anyone who pays them to do so, so she pays again.
Finally, promotion. In the course of securing interviews to talk up this book it is discovered that, apart from the bits Hill wrote being reportedly atrocious, the first chapter is plagiarised from David Gemmell's novel Dark Prince.

More: Person who has paid someone to write a novel for her, then paid twice over to have it published claims on her website "I write because I feel each person has something unique to share with the world and writing is my gift to share".
Writer and agent, or people claiming to be same, then show up on the thread linked above to make legal threats and threats of magical retribution in retaliation for what they claim to be defamation. Christopher Hill is nowhere to be found and may be a nefarious figure in all this or may be a convenient scapegoat.

Edit: It gets worse. Seems the vanity publisher in question has only published one book and used lulu.com to do it. May as well go direct to lulu and cut out the agents and overcharging (if they want to make a profit) vanity publishers. Oh, and write your own novel.

    Something else from class. We were being shown the way some items were catalogued in the TAFE library and looking at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One of the copies had listed under 'other titles' The Chronicles of Narnia bk. 2, but no series title. It struck me as very odd that someone could read that on a book cover and conclude it to be a title of the book rather than an indication that this book is in fact the second volume of a series. Odd, but also familiar.

    ( Cut for Doctor Who series three (and the finale of series two) spoilers )

    So, yes. It puzzles me that some people, no matter how strong the evidence, seem to flat out refuse to make connections between what they see and instead treat each case as a separate, entirely unrelated entity.
    Yep, that catalogue entry reminded me of Creationism. Somehow, someone took the words 'The Chronicles of Narnia, book 2' from the cover of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and concluded that this was an alternate title for the book, not the series name and volume number. In fact it is an alternate title for the book. It is also a very clear indication that this volume does not stand alone, but has continuity with what came before and after.
    Of course, closer examination reveals that the Narnia books are not a simple ordered series. They were not published in the chronological order they are presented in, and were written in yet a different order. But, one needs to investigate to discover this - the manner of connection is less obvious than the fact.

Utter Loon.

Small sample:

"(Hoyle was one of the first to seize on the notion of an expanding universe in the 1950s)"

Although Hoyle did technically agree with an expanding universe, the theory he supported was the steady-state theory, not the big bang. In fact, the term 'big bang' was coined by Hoyle to deride the theory.

Edit: Blake Stacy suggests in his comment that this may not be entirely true. That reference does look like it contradicts everything I have previously been told about Hoyle's position wert the big bang though.

[Lookit them tags. Big head I've got, eh?]