If you are used to having your every whim catered for and words hung upon like you’re preaching from the mount, it is inevitable that you will sometimes say very stupid things. This is why I love listening to celebrities who have heard a tiny amount of information on a subject they like the sound of spout off as if they had been researching it for 20 years.
For example, everyone’s favourite Beatle swindling hopalong, Heather Mills, said that when you eat meat it stays in your gut for 40 years, putrefies and turns into disease that kills you. She followed up that with the phrase, “That is a fact”. It’s magnificent, isn’t it? She believed that enough to actually say that to someone who was going to put it in a newspaper.
Sense about Science have been publishing rebuttals to these people for ages but I had to highlight a couple that tickled me.
- Actress Suzanne Somers said that the contraceptive pill must be unsafe “because is it safe to take a chemical every day, and how would it be safe to take something that prevents ovulation?” She was unaware that natural substances such as hormones are chemicals and never thought to look it up.
- Roger Moore claimed that foie gras causes Alzheimer’s disease. WHAT?
- Sarah Palin dismissed evolution out of hand, with no other reason but she wanted to curry favour with Middle America. She “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” Dawkins was all over that one.
- Arsenal and Netherlands footballer Robin van Persie had horse placental fluid dripped onto an ankle injury by a Serbian doctor. And then claimed it was a miracle remedy that promoted faster healing. He is still unable to play through injury.
Aren’t they great? The combination of ego, ignorance and a forum with which to spout forth leads to hilarity. It’s very much worth going to the site and downloading reading the PDF entitled ‘Celebrity and Science 2009′, it’s tremendously enlightening, funny and saddening all at the same time. It’s an essential site.
