The Odd Emperor is a skeptic and makes no bones about it. When the guy on the TV tells the Odd Emperor that his soap powder works better than the other fellow’s soap powder, the Odd Emperor is skeptical. When a car dealer tell him that their new $100K gas guzzler will improve his sex life, the Odd Emperor is skeptical. When the fellow behind the pulpit says that if The Odd Emperor would turn over part of his income to his organization The Odd Emperor will have a reserved spot in heaven…Well The Odd Emperor happens to be skeptical about that too!
The Odd Emperor is a comfortable skeptic (which is why he’s so odd.) Most people think that he’s being silly when he points out that almost all shampoos are chemically identical, that commercial television is a bunch of bullcrap designed to get people to watch advertising and sell product. They think he’s off his rocker when he asserts that a local ball club is really a business and cities have no business building huge expensive venues for them, or that chiropractic “medicine” is little more than faith healing dressed up as a peer reviewed science.
Another thing that’s odd about the Odd Emperor is that he’s fascinated by all kinds of “metaphysical” things, UFOs, aliens, strange manifestations, magic, ghosts and bigfoots. This presents something of a quandary, a conundrum because something funny happed a few years ago. Something called the World Wide Web. It was supposed to be the greatest single repository of human knowledge in history. The Odd Emperor took a long hard look at the World Wide Web and discovered that it was a repository of knowledge all right, just not all of it happens to be accurate.
Not much of it as a matter of fact.
Why? Because a lot of other people discovered that they can get a world wide audience on the Internet without having to go through publishers, broadcasters, governments, peer reviews or having to shell out lots of money like in a traditional publishing venture. All they needed was a modest computer, a smattering of HTML knowledge, they can pontificate whatever they want in complete ignorance of facts, knowledge or truth.
Where once someone had to actually go to school (and do some research) to publicly proclaim they discovered the Unified Field Theory, where once one had to get accreditation to publish details of a vast government conspiracy or alarm us with news of yet another alien takeover, where once writers had to impress editors with their work to get published. Now with the Internet people can say whatever they want, to everyone, and they don’t have to tell the truth or mess around with facts
— or even use good grammar!
Thus the Internet has become the worlds largest tabloid. This page is the Odd Emperor’s reaction to the rising tide of nonsense on the Internet.
If you are a believer, if you think that people routinely talk to the dead, that there are vast government conspiracies designed to kill off the middle class or turn North America into a UN controlled nature preserve. If you think that the Earth is a hollow shell with strange monsters crawling out of it or malicious aliens are coming through your window to rudely poke stuff up your ass, if you “chase ghost,” The Odd Emperor advises you to close your web browser and never come back.
Or better yet, drop me a line, I would LOVE to hear from you!
But if you are like the Odd Emperor, a skeptic who thinks that the Internet is becoming a bit too full of nutballs–read on! Here is a collection of pages that have caught the Odd Emperor’s eye for one reason or another. Here are the links to some of the strangest pages in the world and what the Odd Emperor thinks of them. Some pages make sense, others are written by complete oddballs.
The Odd Emperor leaves which is which up to you. And just in case you think that the Odd Emperor is a cynic and not a skeptic..
Skepticism is sometimes confused with cynicism. Skeptics are seen as people who don’t want to believe anything. This is incorrect – skeptics, like scientists, are people who just want to be confident that what they believe and know is the most likely thing that accords with reality. Put another way, a skeptic is someone who likes his facts to be correct. It is difficult to change long-held beliefs and it can be distressing to find out that you have an emotional investment in something which is wrong. Sometimes, however, it is just necessary to put away childish things, because there can be real danger in knowing things that just ain’t so. – Peter Bowditch
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This publication the official weblog for the authors of the Empire of the Odd web page.
Please note, all comments are *moderated* by a human being (or something like that.) Comments will be passed through in their entirety so long as they do not contain material the blog owner finds objectionable.
The owner finds very little objectionable, here’s the list.
- Liable;
Please don’t. I’m not libeling people and neither should you. Attacking ideas (what I do) is not libel, even if you happen to think so. Attacking people with a bunch of unsupported allegations (what a lot of saucer fanatics do) is not very nice and I don’t like it. If you have something to say, fine. Back it up, or be mocked!
- Threats;
you may fold threats into sharp corners and stick them in a malodorous body cavity (your own please!) A threat is the language of a coward. Really stupid people make threats, really really insipidly idiotic people make the same empty threats over and over again. Utter mouth-breathing morons say stuff like “you gotta die.”
I don”t like cowards and I dislike stupid people. I will probably ban you if you persist. I’ll mock you first. Heck I’ll probably mock you afterward too.
(you can count on that.)
- Attempts at intimidation;
See above!
- Gratuitous bad language;
Sure-fine. We are all big boys and girls here (some of us.) I feel it”s not necessary most of the time . Bad form and all that. This is not MySpace!
- Harassing the Odd Empire staff.
Hey Alfred , Regan Lee and especially Lord Rick — Bite me OK?
- Off topic crap;
I’ll warn you several times, then it’s into the bozo-bucket with you!
I will probably mock you – for good measure.
- Posting anonymously or via proxy;
OK if you’re not Alfred and If you follow the rules! Post on topic etc. (Alfred can’t follow rules, not even his own so he gets special treatment.)
- What is the Bozo-Bucket?
So glad you asked. When I get a dozy, I put the message in the Bozo Bucket. It’s private, only we at the Odd Empire can see it (and whomever else we designate.) Once and a while I’ll pull quotes and post them on the main Odd Empire page. Simple right?
Alfred? We named the monkey Alfred!
How-bout a banana?
If you have something to say to me, for gosh sake say it! My email is oddemperor(at)oddempire(dot)com and I will always respond politely to a polite request. The people I mentioned above were not polite I really REALLY don’t like rude people.
Don’t be rude! OK?