Zany pranksters!

        This blog got a mention during Richard Hoagland's disastrous "open lines" digital radio show in the early hours of Wednesday 11 November. I say disastrous because his callers were by no means Hoagland sycophants, and several of them gave him a hard time. Some of the pranking was pretty juvenile, but in the end he was forced to apologize for having said, the previous night, that many of his listeners were "useless eaters" because they fell asleep leaving their devices connected. This, to Hoagland, is stealing his precious bandwidth -- bandwidth he now has to pay for to the tune of a grand a month. Personally I highly doubt that a largely sleeping audience makes a ha'p'orth of difference to his bandwidth bills, but it's a lovely thought.

        Anyway, this blog was mentioned by one of the early callers, and Hoagland jumped in immediately with this:

"That is not my book. That is a spoof run by a couple of really zany pranksters, one from Europe and one from the United States, who are pretending it's my book."

        Now look. I shouldn't have to write this, and I'm sure I don't for 99% of my readers, but I make no pretense that this is a book. It's a blog taking pseudoscientists like Hoagland to task for their manifest dishonesty. The title is a satirical reference to the fact that the likes of Hoagland & Bara have made some pretty nice coin, in their time, from telling lies about the planet Mars. I imagine all that money is long gone now, however. Hoagland is reduced to worrying about whether he can pay for bandwidth, with his audience nodding off all around.

Hoagland, we know you're a dog
        I'm not going to write a full review of the show, but a couple of items really stood out for me. One was a wonderful example of Hoagland's habit of taking credit for other people's creative work. He said this:

"Back when Art and I were doing shows, a long time ago, I actually said on the air, coined the phrase, On the internet nobody knows you're a dog."

        Well, he didn't. Cartoonist Peter Steiner did, in a famous New Yorker cartoon published on 5 July 1993.

source: wikimedia (fair use)

Some other examples of Hoagland's mental disorder:

* "The hammer and feather stunt on Apollo 15 was my idea." He said that on 2 July 2013, on C2C-AM. The stunt was, in fact, dreamed up by Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Joe Allen.

* "I was the co-creator of the Pioneer 10 message to extraterrestrial life." This claim is part of the welcome message on his terrifyingly bad web site (scroll all the way to the end.) On 13 July 1990 he said "Carl [Sagan] for many years has been taking public credit for the Pioneer plaque which, of course, Eric Burgess and I conceived." In fact he had no part in the design of the plaque, which was done by Sagan, his then wife Linda, and Frank Drake. Hoagland was merely present when Eric Burgess made the original suggestion to Sagan.

public domain

Pluto and mendacity
        The other Hoaglandism that was salient for me in Wednesday morning's show was his breathtaking statement about the results of the recent New Horizons survey of Pluto. "I'm the only guy who got it right," he said as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. So what did he get right? His vision was and still is of a previously-inhabited planet with moons that are not really moons but abandoned space stations. He got it WRONG, in other words. Stuart "astroguy" Robbins, who is actually on the New Horizons science team, commented "There are not words to describe the disgust when he says this."

Hoagland, you're a DOG.