The Philospher's Stone

[rja.carnegie at excite.com]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "Amy Z" <aiz24 at h...> wrote:
> Robert wrote:
>  
> > > This book comes highly recommended from us at Graham Hancock.com!
> > 
> > Oh dear. ;-)  (wink at those who recognise name "Graham Hancock")
> 
> ::feels left out::  Who he?  Is this one of Marshall's pen names?

Not as far as I know.

(insert rant warning)

  He's one of those odd people
like Erich von Daniken - the type who believes (or
claims to believe) that they've detected the secret
behind human history that no one else knows.
Most of them have funny ideas about pyramids, for
some reason.  The most meretricious coincidence
that looks like evidence supporting their hypothesis
(say, that each of the products in the nine times table
adds up to nine) delights them; devastating critical
demolition of their arguments is like water off a
duck's back.

When these people are interested in religion, they
count the words and letters in the Bible or the other
holy book of their choice - or they're L. Ron Hubbard.
When they're interested in politics, they see America's
government subverting personal freedom to build a
communist-fascist state.  When they're interested
in machinery, it's perpetual-motion machines that are
fuelled by air or water.  And in ancient history,
the pyramids are practically bound to come into it
somewhere.  (For European mediaeval history, it's
the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, the corpse of Christ.)

The Internet is full of 'em, but they keep spilling out
into real life, too.  Newspapers love them because they're
just so much more _fun_ than serious scientists or scholars
with better- developed critical faculties.  And they almost
always have a book to sell.

(rant over, tries to look nonchalant) Since you asked...

In this particular case, www.grahamhancock.com
is the helpfully provided primer on his ideas.

I myself was briefly impressed by a text on pyramidology
which I read when much too young to have a proper
discriminating judgment of it.  However, the results
of the science experiments with the little cardboard
pyramids provided weren't at all impressive - although
I don't remember if that's why I lost interest.

Looking over this, I could simply have said,
"He's one of those pyramid freaks", and you'd probably
have got the sense of it.  But some people seem to
consider me an ornament online, which is far more
flattering than any kudos that I get in real life,
and anyway I can get away with it when I say my magic word -

Robert Carnegie
Meretricious!