Come in, she said, I’ll give you....

I've been putting up a bushel of peaches for the freezer.  There is something soothing about the strong sweet smell that transports me back in time.

I remember eavesdropping on my grandmother and her sisters.  They were in my grandmother's bedroom in the house on Abercorne Street in Savannah, GA.  My great aunt Emmy Jo had come up from Florida with a box of mangos and oranges from her grove.  Great aunt Baby Dear had come from Tennessee and had stopped in Spartanburg for a few bushels of peaches.  It must have been summer. In my memory, their gatherings were always garnished with fruit and the work that went into putting the fruit up for the winter.

I can hear them talking, sisterly, about mango peelings and rashes.  One of the sisters would take a rash from peeling mangoes, which are related somehow to poison ivey, they said.  I don't think that's true, somehow, but it sounded right at the time and I felt I had learned something special.

They are in the bathroom washing their hands and giggling.  I am very small and sitting on my grandmother's rice bed with the nobbly white bedspread and wondering if she has any rock candy in her dresser.  She always did. I think about the peaches and wonder if my grandfather will whittle monkeys from the peach pits as he sometimes did for me.

Today, the scent of peaches clings to my hands like gloves.   I inhale the scent and for a moment I am five.

When that whole "Freedom Fries" thing came up...I was cringing.  As if our french fries could even hold a bic lighter to pommes frites.  There is absolutely no comparison and we should feel lucky that the French even allow us to call our pale, greasy imitation a "french" fry.

It's true...I drew a "moue" or seven while I was there.  Particularly in Paris, where the tone is a bit higher.  The coat check ladies at the Louvre were particularly offended by my smelly Barbour jacket that I wore everywhere.  They thought I was a Brit.  And everyone pleaded with me to please not speak French.  That's how amazingly bad my French is....plus it is spoken very slowly with a thick South Carolina Lowcountry accent. 

"ou est la toilette, y'all". 

But I think I got points for at least trying to speak the language.  I always loved David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day"....because that was so me as well.

It is one thing to love France.  Many people love France.  But it is another thing entirely to love the French.  I know my sister loves France...and she goes there quite often.  I wish I could travel there as often.  But I'm not sure she loves the French as I do. 

Loving the French means submersing yourself in a set of priorities that are quite foreign to Anglo sensibilities.  It means being violently passionate about certain things....and suffering from a dreadful ennui about others.  It means caring deeply about human rights, tradition, food, wine, leisure time and sex, while at the same time having an abiding concern and devotion to Catholicism, family and privacy.  As I do with any culture, I identified more with the country folk than with the Parisians.  I just don't enjoy "putting on the dog" as we say, as much as other people.  Paris is all about "putting on the dog".

I'm probably putting it poorly.  I'm fairly certain that I don't actually "get it".  But I've tried awfully hard to do so.  I was probably as much of an ugly American as the next guy. 

But I think I got points for not asking directions to the Bastille.

I couldn't make up my mind as to what to put in the Gullible's Travels gallery today.  Did I want to do the psychic dog?  Or maybe MoonFakers?  There are just so many wacky things to choose from.

If you are wondering why this is important to me...it's because I see an enormous amount of zeal flowing into things that aren't real.  We have big problems.  Big problems that are real.  If we could channel the energy we spend on the things that aren't real into the things that are...I just wonder if maybe we could actually do something about things like global warming, wars, food safety, the environment, the rise of fundamentalist extremism, the awful political situation the US is in....ad nauseum.

These are taken from Robert L. Park's excellent article, The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science, that appeared in the January 31st 2003 issue of The Chronical of Higher Education.  I encourage you to read the article in its entirety.  While most of the skeptical articles I refer to deal with science...the principles hold true for politics, commerce and day to day living.  You will readily recognize many of these warning signs from advertising.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
"An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists."

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
"The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government."

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
"All scientific measurements must contend with some level of background noise or statistical fluctuation. But if the signal-to-noise ratio cannot be improved, even in principle, the effect is probably not real and the work is not science."

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
"If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science."

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
" Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories."

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
"Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many scientists."

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
"A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, must not conflict with what is already known. If we must change existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account for an observation, it is almost certainly wrong."

Also check out Robert L. Parks book, Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.