The Rogues' Gallery

Top 5 Ridiculous Comments: Weakly Words

Evan Bernstein August 25, 2014 46 Comments

Another week, another batch of ridiculous things people have been saying. This week features statements pertaining to Robin Williams, the public education environment, UFO’s, life after death, and haunted dolls. Without further delay, here were the top 5 most ridiculous comments from the past week:

Our old “friend” Alex Tsakiris delivers the #5 ridiculous comment via his “Skeptico” podcast. For those of you unfamiliar, Alex professes himself a skeptic who is skeptical of skeptics. In other words, he believe in all sorts of unproven and scientifically invalid notions, such as ESP and life after death. On his last show, his special guest was Patricia Pearson, a writer specializing in the notion that there is some sort of life after death. Here is a small sample from the interview:

“So those kinds of experiences, which also turn out to be quite common, again sort of get you away from the scientific frame, because it has nothing to do with whether somebody is or is not flatlined, and that whole debate around the NDE. Rather, it has to do with are there situations of distress in which we somehow manage to transcend – our consciousness begins to transcend our bodies, expands out of it in some fashion, and into this kind of grounded being. And what does that tell us about how potentially not that frightening the actual dying experience it? It looks like people kind of start to bliss out, and that’s very reassuring, actually.”

Has it become entirely taboo to use the word “God” in everyday vernacular? Especially when spoken in a government building, such as a school? The USA is a secular nation, with no government-sponsored religion, and the concept of “the separation of church and state” (thank you, Thomas Jefferson) is a tradition widely upheld in American society. But have we gone too far when a teacher removes a student from her classroom because the student said “God bless you” to another student after they have sneezed? If people are not allowed to utter “God bless you” in response to a sneeze, we’ve gone to a place which focuses more about limiting people’s free-speech rights as opposed to preserving a secular-based government. So the #4 ridiculous comment goes to the (unnamed) teacher who kicked the student out of her class. Of course, there are two sides to this story, and the teacher is claiming the student was disruptive, shouting her “bless you” across the room, but here is the student’s recounting:

“[The teacher] said ‘Why did you say that?’ I said ‘Because it is courtesy.’ She said ‘Says who?’ I said ‘Says my pastor.’ … I asked her why it was a big deal to her. She yelled at me and said ‘We will not have Godly speaking in my class!’ That is when I stood up and said ‘My pastor said I have a constitutional right — 1st amendment freedom of speech.’ She said ‘Not in my class you don’t.”

The #3 ridiculous comment of the week goes to the Committee for the Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena of Chile. They make no bones about their opinion on UFO’s; they are extra-terrestrial crafts. They recently convened a meeting of scientists and other professional advisers. Each participant accepts the “fact” that UFOs are a real phenomenon which needs to  be investigated. The director of the agency in charge of the meeting had this to say:

“Until now, in practice, we have seen only the effects. And those we have captured through photographs, videos, official reports, testimonies, etc. And thus, we are able to say the phenomenon exists. But its origin, we have not defined. And without this definition, we cannot establish a strategy to counteract it.”

Houses and buildings are probably considered the most “haunted” objects on the planet. In my experience, dolls are likely second on the list. And why not? They look like little humans and they have those glass-like eyes that stare at you from every direction. Katrin Reedik from Ireland believes that as many as 13 of her dolls are “haunted”. She has earned the #2 ridiculous comment of the week with this one:

“The dolls are not possessed as such, the doll is the spirit’s home. The spirit is attached to the doll and sometimes leaves it in the same way humans go to work every day.”

And for the #1 ridiculous comment of the week, it involves the recently departed actor and comedian Robin Williams. The folks at The National Enquirer are suggesting there could be a very eerie coincidence linking Williams’ death to an old “curse” from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. Here are the comments which solidified this as the most ridiculous comment of the week:

“In Sir Laurence Olivier’s film version of HAMLET (1948), Peter Cushing (of Hammer horror films fame) played Osric. Cushing died August 11, 1994. In the Kenneth Branagh’s movie of HAMLET (1996), Robin Williams played Osric. Williams died August 11, 2014. Coincidence or NOT?”

Coincidence!