I finished Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? last night. One of the later chapters was on people trying to validate their prophecies of the second coming of Christ, the antichrist, and other tidbits from the Book of Revelations. The book got to discussing theories that Ronald Reagan was the antichrist, largely based on numerology. There are six letters in each of his names (Ronald Wilson Reagan), hence 666, the number of the beast. That got me thinking ... Edward Elliot Graves ... 666 ... apparently i'm the antichrist now that Ronnie is gone. Mwa ha ha. Actually, my sister Hilary is also a 666 ... brother and sister beast?

Anyhow, the book was largely a disappointment. My main problem with it is that i don't think topics like end of the world theories or cults even belong under the classification "pseudoscience". There's no science in them to begin with. My complaints that the author doesn't really debunk and instead just classifies were addressed in a later chapter, where he responded to a specific accusation by saying he'd never waste his readers time by bothering to explain why something like remote viewing is baloney. Ok, there's some sense in that ... i wouldn't even know where to begin with a scientific explanation of why the Heaven's Gate cult's idea of UFOs hiding behind comets coming to take believers to a higher plane of existence is wrong. I suppose i expected a book subtitled "Debunking Pseudoscience" to deal with less obvious cases of misinterpreted science, and to demonstrate their errors. Anyone with half a brain can figure out that people claiming to be able to clairvoyantly observe distant places, planets, spaceships, or even subatomic particles are full of shit. Do we need a whole book cataloging all the nuts out there?