Some time around the first of July, Xanga stopped sending me e-mailed subscription digests.  I don’t know if this is a glitch, or if it’s just their policy to stop sending them when an account hasn’t had any new postings by the account owner for some time.  OK, mea culpa on that last one.  I’ve been busy.  But now I’m not so busy, so you can expect me to start posting again.

I’ll start with something that I randomly ran across: backmasking.  Click here to read a description.  I think it’s hilarious that xians have gotten worked up into a lather over the idea of subliminal messages embedded in Rock recordings.  I’m sure that Shermer is right and the detection of backmasked messages is an example of faulty pattern recognition; hearing words that really aren’t there—a false positive.  You can observe this phenomenon if you watch very many foreign-language movies—sometimes it sounds like they’ve said something in English, clear as day, but you’re just interpolating.  The same thing happens when people think they see shapes (which they attribute to be ghosts or spirits) in the random speckles of television “snow”.

The thing that I think is hilarious about the xian hysteria over alleged subliminal satanic messages is that apparently they’ve never tried it with recordings of Christian songs.  It would really be a hoot if someone played a bunch of xian rock backwards and publicized the secret satanic messages they found there.  Xians would be, like, “OMFG, we’re letting our youth clasp a viper to their bosom!!”

I’d look for the messages myself, but seriously.  I’m not that hard up for something to do.