What the BLEEP was I thinking?

I knew nothing about the movie except that I’d heard the title and that Marlee Matlin was in it. So, when my suggested renting What the Bleep do We Know? last night, I thought — sure, why not?

Ugh. What a piece of New Age horsecrap littered with pseudoscience. If you’re not familiar with the movie, it’s a combination of documentary featuring a number of talking heads (unidentified until the closing credits) and a companion fiction piece that attempts to portray the hooey they’re trying to sell. The gist of the movie — that because there is indeterminism in the universe thanks to quantum physics, then we are able to create our own realities.

They use the old tried and true methods of any pseudoscientist. They quote unnamed sources (It has been proven that… Several universities are studying…). They take unproven assumptions as fact and use them to develop a house of cards. The big one here was a Japanese “study” wherein a man writes words on flasks of water and discovers that the structure of the water has changed in response to these concepts. Since that is true (they say), imagine…and off they go. They also take some big, big concepts and try to distill them down and force them into proving allegations they were never meant to address. Sure, reality is objective — we all cloud reality with our own perceptions and experiences, but they would have us believe that the chair I’m sitting on and the keyboard I’m typing on are pure constructs of my imagination — that I’m making up my own reality completely.

The fact that many of the experts are real scientists from reputable institutions only proves that if you spread your net widely enough you can find a dozen wingnuts anywhere! It helps there case not one bit that one of their “experts” is a collagen-pumped Tammy Faye Bakker lookalike psychic who is channeling a 35,000 man from Atlantis named Ramtha.

I went to the MWA Southwest conference on Saturday and had a good time. Had lunch with Joe R. Lansdale and his wife and Bill Crider and his wife. Entertaining as always. Lansdale was the final speaker of the afternoon. Via a series of funny anecdotes he conveyed the story of how he went from being a writer producing saleable stories that could have been written by anyone with a modicum of talent to writing works that were identifiably Joe R. Lansdale stories. That was my take home message from the conference — finding your unique voice.

Five days to the Stoker Awards. I suppose I should write an acceptance speech, just in case.