Dates, glorious dates
27th October 2026
I was hoping to publish an article from our Skeptic of the Year winner, Lee Traynor, this week, but sadly there was no room for it and so you’ll all have to wait a fortnight to hear the fascinating story of when he worked with James Randi to expose some woo peddlers.
In its stead Patsy has kindly written to console me, making me feel a little more confident that I’m not suffering from cognitive decline (well, not yet, anyway):
Your article in the latest newsletter written after you heard extraneous audio coming from who-knows-where into your home cinema, and your clear-headed, rational response to finding the source, reminded me of one of those (true) medical stories that was passed around in my circle whenever two doctors were gathered together, for several years.
I have to be careful about confidentiality but a certain little old lady (LOL in future) presented regularly to her GP worried about hearing voices. Didn’t seem particularly mentally unwell, but, you know, the elderly can present sometimes in unusual ways, so treated seriously. After several consultations a referral was made to the local psychs, and, as this LOL didn’t really leave her remote village very often, a car with a driver was arranged to take her.
The driver rang the practice on the morning he was to pick her up, to say that he could hear the muffled voices too.
So the GP made a home visit. He could hear the voices. Coming from the fridge.
It’s worth pointing out that Radio 4 in the UK has a license to only transmit the voice, not music.
Yeah, the fridge was picking up the radio.
Home visits (now rare) did pick up some gems sometimes.
There are no strange voices in this week’s newsletter, but there is a lot of talk about calendar events. David Almandsmith starts us off by giving us a debrief on this years’ Global Skeptics in the Pub event, this time happening on International Skeptics’ Day. I follow this up by questioning the date of October 13th for International Skeptics’ Day, tracing the history of the event back to its genesis, and trying to figure out what date(s) its creator intended for it to be celebrated on.
After this, Bronwyn and Katrina both tackle issues around another date - Halloween. Bronwyn questions whether the Christian alternative to Halloween, Light Parties, are really Christian enough, and whether they’re a good idea. Then Katrina looks into the spooky tale of dangerous, adulterated candy given out at halloween.
Finally we have a couple of reports from Decult. I’ve written up my impressions of the many good talks I heard at the Decult conference last weekend, being honest about what I liked and what I wasn’t so sure about. And Bronwyn has written about a weird incident at Decult, involving subterfuge and disguises.
