Articles tagged with "fire"

Bronwyn, being the troll that she is, asked if I'd be writing about EV fires this week, after seeing news articles, here and here posted about a fire on the Auckland Harbour Bridge, which involved an EV.

Last Wednesday, the “anti-mandate” protest at the Parliament Grounds in Wellington, which had lasted for 23 days, came to an end. It was not an end that the protestors wanted, but was forced on them by police action.

In September, a 70 year old man apparently burst into flames in London. It's a sad event, and a horrible way to die. The press have started calling it a case of Spontaneous Human Combustion - the idea that people sometimes just randomly burn.

Tony Robbins is a very popular motivational speaker, and charges US$1,000 or more for a high energy day of talks. Events have names such as "Date with Destiny", "Life and Wealth Mastery" and "Unleash the Power Within". Tony's website has testimonials from famous celebrities, such as Hugh Jackman, Bill Clinton and Serena Williams. Video of Tony Robbins events look a lot like evangelical christian sunday services - lots of music, jumping around and highly emotional sermons.

"There's no need for your organisation. We're all skeptics nowadays."

For some years the Skeptics have had a collection of videotapes available for members to borrow. These are on topics thought to be of interest to skeptics, including firewalking, spontaneous human combustion (unrelated to firewalking!), homeopathy, UFOs, alien abduction, etc. and have been sourced mainly from material broadcast in New Zealand.

Visitors to Fiji are still being told that village people have the hereditary ability to walk on white-hot stones. This is quite untrue (see Hot Footing it in Fiji,Skeptic 26). A tourist promotion video for airline passengers features the ceremony. It is pretty obvious to the discerning viewer that the stones are not white-hot, but how many tourists give more than a cursory glance?

Denis Dutton travelled up the Sepik River in New Guinea earlier this year to study tribal carving. He couldn't resist teaching the locals a few tricks.

A fire that recently burned a marquee at a Christian camp "inexplicably" died because of the plastic roof — not a miracle of God.