Every day I seem to realize anew that people are crazy. Every day this elicits from me some comment to some person along the lines of “People are crazy,” “It blows my mind how crazy people are,” or “How do people walk around all day inside these brains? They’re crazy!” Inevitably, my companion accepts these statements as fact and contributes a comment of her own along those same lines. The blog Swallowing the Camel is something of an extended ode to such everyday insanity.
The blog describes itself as taking on the mission of “examining hoaxes, scams, schemes, bizarre ideas, bogus products, disinformation, misinformation, impractical jokes, literary fraud and anything else that smells bad.” I mean, I read some of this stuff and I have enough justification to call people crazy every day for the rest of this life and my next life and the life after that. For example, new stories about the real-life Thelma and Louise, a biography of an “anti-gravity pioneer,” evil reptiles who rape people and give them cancer…
The crowning achievement of the site is its list of “The World’s Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories.” The blog is anonymous, so I have no idea what qualifications this person has to judge what is weirder than what, but I’m really in no position to judge. Among my favorites? “Stephen King killed John Lennon.” “George H.W. Bush was really George Scherff Sr., a Nazi sent to destroy America as a teenager and adopted by Prescott Bush.” “The early Middle Ages…never occurred. Everything that supposedly happened during those years was either a misunderstanding, an event from a different era, or an outright lie—Charlemagne, for instance, is a fictional figure.”
Crazy, right? Or am I just being all “glass half empty”? Maybe I should feign delight and say instead, “Ah, the power of our imaginations!”
