David Bloomberg
Happy 5th Anniversary!Yes, amazing as that sounds (at least to me), REALL has been around for five years now. We’ve grown some in numbers and recognition, and we’re still going strong. A big part of the reason I can say this is due to all those people I thanked in my Thanksgiving column. But an even bigger part is due to all the REALL members -- whether you’ve been around as long as we have or you’re brand new. I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again: REALL exists because of its members. Without you, we couldn’t have made it this long. Thanks to all of you!
And I was glad to see so many familiar faces at our 5th Anniversary meeting featuring Professor Steve Egger. I was just as happy to see so many new faces, and I hope to see them again at upcoming meetings. We had a great turnout (we were bumping up against the fire code limit)! Thanks to Steve for a really interesting talk.
We have two more presentations lined up for our next two meetings. On Tuesday, March 3, Wally Hartshorn will be again taking us through a tour of some of the weirdest Web sites on the Internet. Wally is the webmaster of REALL’s unofficial site -- www.reall.org -- and was a founding member of REALL. Anybody who was at his first talk on this subject won’t want to miss this follow-up. Anybody who missed the first one definitely will want to make sure they see this one! Wally does some great Web surfing and he finds some hilarious (and in some cases, truly bizarre) stuff out there.
On April 7, Professor Alex Casella will be talking to us about "Science and Pseudoscience." He recently taught a class at UIS on that very topic, and I know he’s eager to tell us about it. Another can’t-miss talk!
In other news, Editor Bob and I are working on putting together a "Selections From The REALL News" special issue to be used for promotional purposes (instead of giving out old newsletters, for example). I’d like to put in an article on UFOs by Martin Kottmeyer (there is no way we’d put together a collection from our newsletter without at least one article from Martin -- I don’t know what we’d do without him), one dealing with creationism, one on alternative medicine, one on "psychics," etc. We have some thoughts on what we should put into it, but if you have any suggestions for articles that you’ve seen here in the past five years, let us know. We might have missed one that you think is a must-read for anybody interested in REALL.
That’s about it for me this month (you get another two doses of me in "REALLity Check" and "REALLity Checklist"). I’ll see you at the meeting!
