This is one of those things you are not supposed to do out in the open as a writer, admit that you have unfinished projects on a blog, but this place will be ELEVEN YEARS OLD in October, and I have to be honest with you.
Doing an Essjay article. I've started and stopped a post on the subject twice. I promised one years ago, and nothing came of it. The real problem in writing an Essjay article in 2025 is that we are now talking about an event that boiled to the surface 18 years ago.....which is a billion years in Internet time. It's like The Baffler writing indignantly about that time when suck.com made fun of them in 1997 or 1998 (the "Baffler happy meal" crack), but doing it now, when The Baffler's website is behind a paywall and suck.com's URL is a GoDaddy parked page, with all the ruins on the Wayback Machine. It has to be done, but it's is hard due to nobody willing to be interviewed after being fooled 20-plus years ago
Finishing the Fram post. That was started when Fram was being the enemy of the month at en.Wikipedia a few years ago, and it will be hard to finish because Fram has sort of petered away. I was never truly interested in Fram outside of the slight geographical connection to the Brabant Killers; to me he was yet another Wiki-asshole like MONGO or Kirill Lokshin, so that makes doing the work hard, if you have no emotional connection or interest in this example of dickheadedness.
The James Randi article. This is the Great White Whale of the blog, originally written as a rebuttal to the very positive BLP of Randi written by Susan Gerbic's crew of skeptic sycophants, it was supposed to be finished before Randi croaked, which he did in 2020. Now that he is dead, it's like the man never existed -- the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation) is moribund, its messageboard was turned over to a made up "International Skeptics Society" long before Randi died (there was a lot of drama after 2007 and the organization closed its second office before 2016.) My only problem in doing all this work on a Randi bio is that I might not be able to publish it as a chapter in a book mainly due to Randi's partner Devyi Orangel Peña Arteaga (aka "Jose Luis Alvarez"), who might object over any recounting of Randi's (actual name: Randall James Hamilton Zwinge) actual life. Biographies were supposed to be written on Randi, by writers he picked, and yet a finished Randi bio has never been published. There are many possible reasons: Randi's dealings being exposed would make his "former" brothers in the Magic Castle unhappy (he was a member of that stage magicians' fraternity); Randi possibly did not want his connection to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation discussed in detail (he and Martin Gardner were "advisors" to the FMSF board, even though neither were neuro-scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, or medical doctors; Gardner was still with the skeptic group CSICOP but Randi had left over legal issues, though Randi and Gardner will still close friends); the JREF drama was embarrassing; Randi found his time on stage in Montreal as "Randall the Telepath" in the 1940s to early 1950s retroactively embarrassing; the various slander/libel lawsuits with Uri Geller and others in the 1980s and 1990s look stupid in retrospect; having to discuss living in the closet for decades might be tough; there may be something else I'm not knowledgeable of. Randi was never the lifelong skeptic he claimed to be in the 1980s to 2010s, he switched to that viewpoint after Uri Geller showed up in America in 1973 because Geller infuriated him on some deep level. Anybody willing to share an NYC office with James "Saucer Smear" Moseley and Timothy Green Beckley (aka "Mr. UFO") in the late 1960s can't be a lifelong skeptic.
The loose ends of 2017. 2017 was not a good year for this blog; I had a laptop implode, and a few time-sensitive posts were never completed. I need to finish them for completeness' sake.
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