When two streets don't actually meet, they don't intersect

        Following up my bloggery of May 17th, "Guess what? Mike Bara lied", Mike has now responded on his own blog, including a picture which is breathtaking in its dishonesty.

Mike Bara writeth:

"Recently, a demented nutbag who hides behind the moniker "Expat" online made an accusation claiming that I had "lied" in a lecture about the fact that 2 streets in the Redondo Beach area where I work intersected. This was part of my "Dark Mission" lectures back in 2007-08 (I assume).

"Normally, I would just ignore Expat's idiocy because he is always obsessively claiming things about me. But this one is so stupid and so easily testable that I decided to bring it up.

 

image credit: Mike Bara

"As you can see from the image provided, the 2 streets in question, Isis Avenue and 33rd Street, certainly DO intersect with each other. How any idiot could miss this or call my claim a "lie" is beyond me, but then again Expat is so mentally unstable that I really shouldn't be surprised. It is actually pathetic the lengths that this man and others will go to in order attack me and make false claims about me. But it comes with the territory.

        It's utterly amazing that a man of at least a little education would post a picture showing quite plainly two streets that do not intersect, claiming it as proof that they do. Even better when he's forced to depict the intersection happening right in the middle of the rail tracks. Here's another map view of the area, also showing the exact location of the 8-point star that he stated was at the non-existent intersection. Actually, you can easily see it on Mike's own doctored image. Again, he's saying "Look, I DIDN'T LIE" while showing a picture that proves he did.

 

That map is http://goo.gl/maps/813Q8

Here, in Google Streetview, is where 33rd dead-ends, in a self-storage facility:

...and here's where Isis dead-ends, on the other side of the rail tracks:

Got it, Mike?

       By the way, I noted in a comment to the previous piece that Adrienne Loska, Mike's manager, had written to say that of course these streets intersect, you just have to draw extension lines. I replied "Y'know, Adrienne, by your logic you could say that Isis Ave. intersects Colorado Blvd in Pasadena. It does, if you draw a long enough extension."

Robin Falkov Radio takes on the Inaccutron

"If you want something pre-digested and bearing no relation to the truth, you've got mainstream media"

        Thus Dr Robin Falkov^{note 1}, introducing the very first of what she intends to be a regular series of three-hour internet radio shows on the Sceptre Radio Network, under the racy (if a little obvious) title WHAT THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW.

        Well, what THEY apparently didn't want us to know about in this pilot edition was the plight of the Greek population in a crippled economy (hour 1, with Marie Christine Polymenacou) and the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 (hour 2, with John Edmonds). I must say I've heard plenty about both those topics on NPR, and Falkov's exposition seemed to me no less "pre-digested" than any presentation of a complex topic on mass media has to be of necessity. But I admit I was in sampling mode only for those first two hours, and may have missed something non-pre-digested.

Introducing the famous pseudoscientist

        So finally, Falkov introduced Richard C. Hoagland to amaze us all, and although she didn't exactly admit that Hoagland was her POSSLQ (look it up), the way she gushed about what a great time the two of them had prancing around Mauna Kea with the Accutron gear^{note 2} let that particular cat at least half way out of the bag. She declaimed "You're hearing this story here for the first time, before anyone else," which is not really true since the pseudoscientist had reported the Hawaiian jaunt live on Coast to Coast AM as it was happening. But then, Falkov never promised that her show would stick to the facts, did she?

        Hoagland said this was the chance of a lifetime, to take the Wacky-Accy to a latitude of 19.5° to do its stuff. If so, he was scampering up the wrong volcano. It's Mauna Loa^{note 3} which is at 19.5°. Mauna Kea is at 19° 49'.

        Well, you know Hoagland. Mister Blabbermouth. He couldn't bear to tell the story straight—first he had to give us a 25-minute lecture on the Allais Effect, which is the presumptive explanation for the phenomenon he claims to be sensing. I caught some weird extrasensory phenomenon myself as this dragged on, and I swear it was the power of Dr Falkov's "Get the fuck on with it, Richard" thoughts coming through to me.

I thought YOU had the spare batteries

        Finally we got the story, and it was a real screamer. They settled into the visitor center at 3:20 am, for an eclipse that was due 11 hours later, at 2:26pm. The pseudocientist immediately got such amazing "mind-blowing" readings—the frequency swinging all the way from 70 Hz to 540 Hz and back again— that he lost track of time and his battery ran out long before the actual eclipse began.

        Any real scientist, of course, would have declared the expedition a total failure and repaired to the nearest pub to drown his or her sorrows. Not this pseudoscientist, oh no. This, he said, was brilliant re-confirmation of all his theories. The fact that it happened eleven hours early simply meant that the torsion field was coming from the planet Mars^{note 4} as it emerged from behind the Sun.

Then it got REALLY silly

        Then it got not just silly but, frankly, insane. The trace formed by the Wacky-Accy reminded them of a picture of the two Hawaiian volcanoes themselves, Loa and Kea. Clearly, to Hoagland and Falkov, "someone was sending messages," probably the secret space program. "It was a definite message," said Robin, as if she would know anything at all about physics. Hoagland explained that torsion waves propagate at billions of times the speed of light, and came up with this exquisite gem of Hoagland-style insanity:

"There has been a rumor that Curiosity and Opportunity have torsion transmitters that send secret faster-than-light messages to NASA."

Richard, go to your room.

A note on the  production values: There were plenty of technical glitches, and patches of dead air, as we've come to expect from what is, let's face it, a strictly amateur enterprise, internet radio. As hostess, Dr Falkov is not very good, but she's not hopeless and I can imagine she might be ok with experience. She has a tendency to giggle—but then, so does Terry Gross, one of the doyennes of NPR.

=================================

1] Dr Falkov is trained in oriental medicine and is a believer in the memory of water. Her idea of helping people afflicted by the Gulf Oil spill is to offer, on her website, bottles of diluted Gulf seawater that have been slammed onto a hard surface several times. From her website:

The price for the 2 ounce bottle of Gulf Oil Remedy is $22.99, plus shipping.
Shipping for one or two bottles is $5.00. The PayPal address is: DrFalkov@yahoo.com 

2] Once again, any readers who have no idea what "the Accutron" means can read a decent enough summary here.

3] Funnily enough,he made the same mistake in Dark Mission (page 91, 2nd edn).

4] When he reported live into C2C, he ascribed the wild excursions of the Wacky-Accy to interference from HAARP. He must have changed his mind about that.

Guess what? Mike Bara lied

        Back in July 2008, Mike Bara the ersatz aeronautical engineer gave a long, long lecture at the CEF Research conference which was turned into an interminable 9-part Youtubathon containing all the classic Hoagland/Bara prevarications, half-truths and outright lies.

        In Part 8, Mike says he works in the Space Park area of Redondo Beach, where all sorts of space-themed street names are common (Gemini Drive, Mercury Avenue, etc.) Then he adds a quasi-mystical piece of local info that turns out to be totally spurious.

[05:27] "There's an Isis Avenue, and there's also a 33rd Street. 33rd and Isis intersect right here ... there's a funny little symbol, looks like an 8-pointed star, which is a cult symbol..."

        Well, for a start, that's 33rd St Manhattan Beach, not Redondo Beach, but that's a minor detail. The main point is that Isis Avenue and 33rd DO NOT INTERSECT. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan rail line slashes right across the landscape at that point. The 8-point star is somewhat to the East of the pin marker, in a service road.

        So what's the "cult symbol" all about? It's decoration in front of the Springhill Suites hotel. Here it is in Google Streetview:

        Mike lied, and I thank Youtube commenter jetmarkjetmark for giving me the idea to check this out.

Mike Bara: Another Moon fantasy falsified

James Concannon writes:

        On pp. 84-85 of Ancient Aliens on the Moon, the perennially error-prone Mike Bara displays one of the favorite images of all "lunar anomalists" — a 1965 image returned by the Soviet Moon-Mars probe Zond 3.

        He writes this about it, as usual ignoring all reasonable explanations for the feature and emphasizing the one that supports his very shaky thesis:

"Located on the lunar horizon ... a large, eroded dome-like structure was plainly visible in the lower right corner ... [T]his "Zond 3 dome" extended several miles above the airless lunar horizon. ... I suspect that what Zond 3 captured was in fact the battered remains of a watch crystal type of dome just beneath the larger protecting scaffolding we've seen other places on the lunar surface."

        Well, as I said, this one has done the rounds of the conspiracy nutcases for many years, and I got involved in a bit of argy-bargy this week with a poster to the Fuckery-Bookery page The Final Frontier. The guy slapped up the picture and captioned it "A dome on the moon." I challenged him to report the coordinates of the feature, so that I could examine the much better images in the LROC library to see if there was anything real at that point. He didn't know the coordinates. He didn't know the resolution of the image. He didn't know what image processing was used by Zond.

        I had my own guess as to the coordinates, based on the relationship to Mare Orientale, which is clearly seen in the whole Zond image (and I thank Carol Behan for pointing that out.) I guessed it would have to be somewhere within this frame, centered on 24.5 S, 59 W. Here's a permalink.

        The original poster responded "Well obviously you will not find any evidence on anything that has been publicly released," which I thought probably signaled that we were at the end of any meaningful discussion.

Don Davis to the rescue

        The renowned space artist Don Davis monitors that FB page, and his attempts to knock some sense into the flim-flam men and Branch Hoaglandians have been heroic and tireless.  Don's information about the Moon and Mars is highly reliable and very detailed. I reproduce his contribution here with Don's permission and with only very slight editing.

"Here is the story behind that Zond Moon photo, as a background to others interested in this subject.

The history of early Lunar exploration is chronicled in the NASA Special Publication 'Exploring Space With A Camera'.

The far side of the Moon was first revealed by a pair of Soviet Lunar probes, beginning with Luna 3 in early October 1959 which sent back static degraded transmissions of its view of the Moon revealing a rarity of the dark 'maria' across much of the side we never see from Earth, but little else.

On July 20, 1965 the next Soviet Lunar probe, Zond 3, obtained a view of the Eastern regions of the Lunar Far side, also including features visible from Earth for reference. It used an improved film camera which developed the film on board and scanned the negative, transmitting the image to Earth. The early Zond 3 photo releases were as prints, of which the frame shown in the NASA SP referenced above is an example. Soviet news release photos were not often known for their quality control, so making claims based on some minor detail in them is risky. There may also have been an effort to degrade the quality a little in the copying process to hide some of what they were capable of doing, as similar film readout methods were being used in spy satellites planned and flown by both nations. Such was the Cold War context of early space exploration.

 
I look at the bright blotch over the sky in the lower right corner and wonder what caused it, and where in the 1960s Soviet era duplication chain it appeared.

There are two possibilities. Either a real visual display of large size was captured by the original camera optics along the Lunar horizon, or the light splotch was a photographic imperfection in the original or a fault in the duplication chain as a shiny original caught an uneven reflection of a ceiling light or something like that. 
 
Fortunately the original Zond photography of the Moon has been recovered from the transmission data as the developed film was scanned on the spacecraft. Here is the image, Zond 3 picture 28.

There is no sign of any bright projection from the Lunar limb (edge). Nor does it appear in any of the other Moon images made by Zond 3.

This demonstrates that the original camera images show no extraordinary display corresponding to what appears in the initial very contrasty press release print. 

But let us play 'What if?. What if the camera really saw something recorded as such a blotch projecting beyond the limb of the Moon? [T]his could resemble a volcanic plume such as [can be] seen erupting from Jupiters moon Io.

So where on the Moon would such an erupting volcano (or ancient alien dome, if one wanted to commit oneself rather precariously) have to be located? 60 Degrees W, 30 Degrees South is about where that spot on the edge of the Moon should be just by comparing the photo with a front side Moon map. [NOTE: This point falls within the rectangular area I had guessed at]
 
If one was really careful about this a roughly rectangular area on the map could be defined as where something that large could be, if it is continuously there. it's 'base' would appear to be nearly as wide as the dark lava pool filled crater named Grimaldi, the prominent dark oval near the right limb. It would be about 60 miles across, just shy of 100 kilometers. This region of the Moon can be readily inspected through a telescope, and the lack of anything bright looming over that region of the Moon is the best evidence one can have that the most likely origin for that bright spot on the print was a mundane one somewhere in the photolabs of the Soviet news services.

Of course, anyone wanting to make a claim of something extraordinary on the Moon is obliged to include as evidence the latest photos of the region taken by the Lunar Recon Orbiter. Orbiters from Japan, China and India have also mapped virtually the entire Moon independently, but the US satellite has the best quality data. Go explore the super detailed photo maps now becoming available, imagine being there one day on a rover or on foot!"

A baseline at last -- but it's self-defeating

James Concannon writes:

        We here at Emoluments HQ have been ragging on Hoagland for years now, about the pathetically inadequate protocols he reports from his Accutron measurements. One of our criticisms has been that he never presents baseline readings. In other words, when he shows us traces like the one below and calls them "stunning", we only have his word for it that the 40-year-old watch doesn't behave like that all the time.

image credit: Richard Hoagland

        If it did, of course, that would render his "measurement" instantly meaningless, since it would just be the normal behavior of a malfunctioning wristwatch.

        Well, it's beginning to seem that his baseline really is as wonky as his "stunning" experimental results. How about this, from the panel discussion at the Glendale Awake & Aware pseudo-conference:

[01:11:04]
Since I am measuring actual documented changes in the physics, particularly since the 2012 date... Where we live is miles away from the Sandias—which is this huge 12,000 ft mountain range that I conducted the solar eclipse measurements from, that you saw, that were so stunning... I now understand why native peoples think of mountains as sacred and spiritual, because the physics is higher there. It's simply a huge amplifier, solid state amplifier, of "The Force".

It used to be that I could do measurements in my office and I would get nothing but noise—straight line. You have to go to a pyramid, or to that mountain, to get really interesting stuff. Over the last several months, particularly the last several weeks, I have seen readings [...] that are as boggling as any at any pyramid anywhere in the world, just sitting there in the office. And it's replicable—it's happened more than once, in fact one set of readings was so bizarre it looked like it was some kind of artificial modulation of the torsion field, with square waves. You don't get square waves in nature—you don't get, y'know, when a supernova goes off, a pulsar rotates ... curves and all that. This was beautiful square waves. In one part the curve tracked from higher to lower frequency over a particular window of time like redundant messaging.

Several comments come to mind:

:: He reports this as though it's a new phenomenon. And yet, discussing the Inaccutron on Coast to Coast AM last June, he reported "The Accutron went nuts for 12 hours non-stop" in his office on the occasion of the summer solstice.

:: His expression "the physics is higher there" has no conceivable meaning.

:: He uses the word replicable. I point out that the behavior of a broken wristwatch is replicable, too, in that sense. But when real scientists use that word, they mean "When Procedure A is applied to a system, B is the reliable result." They do not mean "B happens quite often."

:: And then, we still have all our other objections to his protocol: No controls, no specific predictions, no actual stated measurements or even  a statement of what units the torsion field is measured in.

        Truly junk science. In case any reader is totally new to this topic, there's a good summary here.

Hoagland: Ghastly in Glendale

        I really hate to subsidize Kerry Cassidy's nutty ventures in any way, but yesterday as the sun failed to appear I thought "wtf, it's only $5" and paid up for the privilege of getting 156 ghastly minutes of Hoagland in a tiny sub-window with atrocious audio.

        This was the Awake & Aware lecture from Glendale last weekend, by all accounts not well attended, so possibly Kerry made a loss on the event, which she had originally planned for the Joshua Tree conference center.

        Hoagland sure does love his SciFi, doesn't he? He spent a full 50 minutes just showing us images of famous works of the genre, from H.G. Wells to the latest Dr Who on BBC tv. In honor of the latter, the lectern was dressed up to look like a Tardis -- I kid you not.

        Just to be sure we all understood we were not here witnessing anything resembling science, he threw in a little numerology. I can give you a flavor of that very easily:

sin 19.47° = 0.3333
0.3333² = 0.1111
0.1111 transforms to 11.11
therefore 11.11 is code for 19.5^{note 1}
Isn't it interesting that 11 different actors have portrayed Dr Who?
The BBC must be hyperdimensional.

        The audio wasn't good enough for me to hear whether anyone in the audience shouted "NO RICHARD, IT'S NOT INTERESTING -- IT'S USELESS TRASH!"

Meaningless spikes
         Well, finally we got to the Accutron traces^{note 2}, which he characterized as "a totally new tool for astrophysics". In a stunning confirmation of my theory that Richard Hoagland is incompetent at mathematics, he told his audience that the frequency of the tuning fork decreases as its inertia increases, in accordance with the Newtonian equation F=ma^{note 3}.

        He went through his "experiments", starting with the 2004 Venus transit during which he actually had the wrong time for 3rd contact (it was really 07:07:33 EDT, not 07:03:53). He showed Teotihuacan, April 2009, again pretending that the first frequency spike coincided with the moment of dawn although it most assuredly did not (it was 6min 25sec later). He showed the "astounding" frequency excursions he recorded at Tikal, also in April 2009 -- the biggest of all his meaningless spikes even though they were recorded at a time when nothing special was happening astronomically.

        I know you're dying to see what he recorded at Chichen Itza last December 19th, before being tossed out by security guards. Hey presto!

        The resolution is way too low to comment  much, except to say that this trace is obviously quite unlike anything he's shown us before. He didn't think that was important enough to explain.

        There's an objection to his reasoning on this which I haven't noted as much as I perhaps should have, in past bloggery on the subject. In addition to the fact that he has published no baselines or controls, and that many of his spikes are off-scale, I mean. It is this: He has written that the torsion field increases (and hence frequency decreases) when the tuning fork is parallel to the spin axis of the planet or star creating the field, but the field decreases (and frequency increases) when the fork is orthogonal to the spin axis. And yet he has never, even once, told us what the orientation of the tuning fork was during any of his "experiments."

        Last week, in e-mail to me, he told me that I had missed the point of Neil Armstrong's speech at the White House and admonished me to "stick to engineering". Well, I think he should stick to science fiction. Come to think of it, I guess that's what he's doing anyway.

=====================================

1. He claims hyperdimensional significance for the number 19.47 because it's the latitude at which three vertices of a tetrahedron appear when the tetrahedron is inscribed in a sphere with the other vertex at a pole.

2. For readers new to the Accutron -- I've written about this many times. There's also a good concise explanation here.

3. Quite likely E=mc² and F=ma are the only two equations Hoagland has ever heard of. Sadly, neither of them is remotely relevant to the frequency of a tuning fork as a function of the properties of its material. The real equation may be found here.

No, Neil Armstrong did not liken himself to a parrot‏

        In comments to the previous post here, I metaphorically rolled my eyes at the fact that Richard Hoagland, after all these years, is still repeating the canard that Neil Armstrong likened himself to a parrot in his 25th anniversary speech at the White House.

        Hoagland said this during the panel discussion at last weekend's Awake & Aware conference in Glendale. I decided to chide Hoagland in e-mail, and it led to this exchange, which is only informative in that it testifies to how utterly obtuse the man is.

Reminder: What Armstrong actually said was "Wilbur Wright once noted that the only bird that can talk is the parrot, and he doesn't fly very well, so I'll be brief".

EXPAT
I can't believe you trotted out that falsehood yet again at the A&A panel discussion. Armstrong was possibly the greatest pilot in history, and also famously poor at public speaking. You are saying he likened himself to a bird whose talents are THE EXACT OPPOSITE???

Please think before you speak and write.

HOAGLAND
The first responsibility of a real scientist/engineer is to OBSERVE.

Please watch and listen CAREFULLY.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeQriZqkKIk

Neil Armstrong, at the opening of this famous White House speech, on the 25th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Landing, DOES directly compare himself to ... a parrot!
The real meaning of this astonishing, personal comparison (given your obvious point -- that Neil was, demonstrably, the unparalled pilot of all time), is equally obvious--

He was (in this, and in all his public speeches re Apollo ...) merely repeating "a carefully-sanctioned script" ... which (as a guy obviously wrestling with his own integrity in all of this) he wanted all Americans to know--Even if he couldn't "tell it straight."

EXPAT
It is YOU who should be watching and listening CAREFULLY. I can't believe you are really this obtuse. He is saying "My talent is for flying, not talking, SO I'LL BE BRIEF". In other words, THE OPPOSITE of a parrot. Dear me, dear me....

HOAGLAND
I hope you're a better engineer than writer!

You really missed the entire point of his remarkable, carefully-chosen opening ....

EXPAT
If, as you claim, he was likening himself to a parrot, WHY WOULD HE SAY "SO I'LL BE BRIEF"???

Parrots are GOOD AT TALKING. Surely you can understand that!!!!!

HOAGLAND

Why bring up "parrots" at all ...?                 :)

What is the ONE THING parrots are universally known for?

Not "talking" ....

But REPEATING ... what other people say.

Neil knew EXACTLY what he was doing with that opening ....          :)

EXPAT
>>Why bring up "parrots" at all ...?    <<

Because Wilbur Wright did.

Now look -- Parrots are a) Good at talking, b) Bad at flying.
Armstrong, by his own admission, is a) Bad at talking, b) Good at flying.

THE OPPOSITE of a parrot!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HOAGLAND 

No, he QUOTED Wilbur ....

Why?

He didn't HAVE to.             :)

Because--

He needed the "parrot/repeating" METAPHOR ... and, quoting Wright deftly deflected the responsibility of choosing THAT metaphor (for thos paying attention) from HIMSELF.

Stick with engineering ....             :)

EXPAT
What you write here has no credibility whatsoever. You are totally wrong. 

======================================
Hoagland's e-mail address is enterprisemission2001@yahoo.com

Another open letter to Adrienne Loska

Dear Adrienne,
Happy Easter. Christ is risen, etc. (Dunno if you believe in that stuff, but if you believe there's a one mile square ziggurat on the far side of the Moon, you're definitely the gullible type)

re: Your client Mike Bara, author and so-called aeronautical engineer

        Now look, Adrienne dear, this has gone a bit too far. Your client is seriously misinforming his audience. On Dark Matters internet radio, in early March, he reiterated his contention that spinning masses draw in energy from an invisible dimension. As an example, he cited the return trip of Apollo 13 from the Moon. Maintaining trajectory, he explained, required several mid-course corrections, and that was because the CM was powered down and the gyros were not spinning as they normally would be. Hence, you see, an important element of the spacecraft's propulsion was absent. He added:

"I think this was something that Von Braun snuck into the rocket equation back in the 1950s without anyone knowing."

        Dr.Derek Eunson, a working design engineer, has written that this statement is "one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard." He added some very uncomplimentary epithets about your client the author and ersatz engineer—there's no need to repeat them here.

Your client's proposition is wrong in the following five ways:

1] Drawing in energy from "other dimensions" violates the law of conservation of energy. If that law is wrong, it's extremely hard to understand why the physical world has appeared to obey it ever since it was formulated in the 19th century.

2] It is not true that an unusual number of mid-course corrections were needed to bring Apollo 13 home. There was one at MET 105:18:28, about one third of the way home, and another small one at 137:01:48, just prior to CM/SM separation. That is one fewer than the contingency plan stated in the Press Kit, issued prior to launch (see p.42, Transearth coast)

3] Your client the playboy-engineer is evidently under the mistaken impression that energy needs to be applied continuously to a spacecraft during the transit between Earth and Moon (or vice versa). Perhaps he is thinking—erroneously—that the situation is equivalent to that of a car, a train or an aircraft (the latter of which your client claims to have designed, so he's familiar with the idea even though he has written, mistakenly, that the lift generated by an airfoil is not mathematically understood). It is not the case. A spacecraft is set on its journey by a very precisely timed and aimed impulse from its engines, lasting at most a few minutes, and from then on (with the small exception of the mid-course correction) it is under the influence of gravity only. It's perhaps not surprising that your client the error-prone author should get this wrong. His writings over the years have demonstrated his utter ignorance of the nature of both gravitation and orbital mechanics.

4] The equation normally referred to as "the rocket equation" is not the work of Wernher Von Braun, but that of the Russian scientist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Here it is, and isn't it a sweetie?

5] It is not possible for anyone—not even Von Braun— to "sneak" terms into a well-known equation without anyone else knowing. Your client the fake engineer reiterated this fiction on Higherside Chats internet radio, and it's a very serious error. While it may be true that transfer orbits are calculated by computer rather than slide-rule now, the algorithms used by those computers are well known to a veritable army of software engineers. Since Von Braun's time two whole generations of rocket scientists have come of age and been trained. Does Mr. Bara think that their instructors would teach equations with "mystery" terms in them?

My plea to you, Adrienne, is that you tell your client to stop this nonsense.

One more thing, Adrienne...
        If your client the joke-engineer ever finishes his book Ancient Aliens on Mars, I wish you would persuade him that recruiting his cronies to write meaningless five-star Amazon reviews is unprofessional. I realize that something similar is a fairly normal feature of book promotion these days, but the way it is done is to persuade people to a) actually read the book, and b) write something coherent and persuasive. A little prevarication has come to be accepted, I guess.

        There is no better example of your client's extravagant abuse of this tactic than a "review" of The Choice posted on 3rd December last year by one "B. Hopper asdf1239". This person wrote as follows:

great value. i like it a lot.

        Amazon did not accept this as a review, since it fell short of the minimum required length. B. Hopper, a loyal buddy of your client the unintentionally comic author, revised it to say:

great value. i like it a lot. adding more words yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes  

        That's his "review." Adrienne, I put it to you that this takes unprofessionalism to new heights.

Regards, expat