Great column Ben!

Andrew.

There is such a thing as Burr walnut (possibly other wood types too) This is a bulge that grows in the side of the trunk. The grain of this does not have a structured pattern to it, as normal growth wood does, but exhibits a very chaotic growth instead.

I don;t know the actual cause of this but it’s apparently quite rare and the wood’s fairly saught after.

I find 2 things more suprising than the fact Vernon Coleman believes he was visited by the spirit of a dead sheep. First I find it weird that people actually name sheep and would see a name such as ‘Karen’ appropriate. What exactly was it about that particular sheep that suggested this name? Perhaps a particularly beautifully toned ‘Baahh’ brought the late Karen Carpenter to mind? Secondly, and perhaps more bizarrely, it appears people are not only cremating sheep but are then collecting their ashes. For what purpose? To finally lay them to rest with the rest of the family?

Remember: Knowledge is knowing a Tomato is a fruit. However, wisdom is NOT putting one in a fruit salad.

All that antioxidant stuff that plants have is there to reduce cell damage from photosynthesis – all the oxygen and reactive oxygen that it produces is just as much of a problem as UV and heat damage from the sunlight (you mean it’s not there to make overpriced beauty products from? *gasp* ).

I thought they had isolated the HIV virus? can anybody confirm or deny that one?

Yup, and cloned it, sequenced it and crystallised most, if not all, the proteins it produces. The genome is in Genbank, though it has variants from mutating all the time, so that particular on probably doesn’t exist in the ‘wild’ anymore.

I think in most plants the bits that have evolved to absorb as much of the of the UV that hits them as possible (the leaves) fall off every year, taking any possible potential cancerousness with them.

http://www.vernoncoleman.com/astrangeexper.htm

Damn right. This is the basis of most quackery and superstition. H.L. Mencken said it best:

“The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex — because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged — and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple — and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.”

interesting that he can’t destinguish between AIDS being a symptom of a disease rather than a disease itself

“Largely, I confess, because I’m still not convinced that there is any such specific disease as AIDS.”

“It would be nice, for a start, if the multi billion pound AIDS industry could actually produce the virus which is said to be responsible for this disease.”

I thought they had isolated the HIV virus? can anybody confirm or deny that one? if so can we “shoot him up” with a batch of it as he seem’s to think it does not exist.

“I lost faith in the AIDS industry when I learned that in Africa patients with tuberculosis were being listed as AIDS `victims’. In many years of criticising medical methodology I don’t think I have ever come across an area of medicine where there are more myths and more sloppy thinking than there are in the world of the AIDS industry.”

Umm… well seeing as how AIDS itself does not actually kill people then quite possibly they are AIDS victims as they might have resisted the Tuberculosis if the immune systems had still been working?

and for the wonderful classic comment…..

“First, I have long suspected that patients who are described as being HIV positive are suffering from extremely weak immune systems. And I have, for many years, asked whether such patients might not benefit if they boosted their immune systems.”

no sh*t sherlock!

That’s what the whole AIDS thing is…. it effectivly shuts the immune system down so it could possibly be confused with a … oh i give up!

On another point don’t you think the “including when it’s raining” is an interesting localisation? If Brink lived in the UK, not Africa, I doubt this would carry the same heinousness overtone.

The trad version is that it was whalemeat: hence the alternative term WTS (whale tumour story) for urban myth (see Rodney Dale).

http://www.vernoncoleman.com/

there are days of entertainment here.

Andrew.

I like all of Dr Rath’s various letters written to people who have then blattantly ignored, that he’s then posted on his site – “See everyone I am being ignored and shunned because I know the truth”….. Loony