Comments on: What it's like to be the subject of a conspiracy theory

By: flyclops

flyclops — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:40:00 +0000

Bill Willingham’s Fables? If so, I don’t remember that happening.

By: EvilTerran

EvilTerran — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 09:28:00 +0000

Reminds me of the Ruler of the Universe from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruler_of_the_Universe

By: Michael Ellis Day

Michael Ellis Day — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 06:56:00 +0000

Um…don’t ride the bike with your head?

By: cdh1971

cdh1971 — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 04:19:00 +0000

Moi???

By: jackbird

jackbird — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 04:18:00 +0000

Finding a payphone? That takes obsession.

By: Repurposed

Repurposed — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 03:52:00 +0000

Seems to be the sort of club a narcissist joins.

By: Warren_Terra

Warren_Terra — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 03:02:00 +0000

Well, sure, but can you do it on a landline fifteen or twenty years ago?

Besides, one assumes an obsessive will find a payphone to use if they must.

By: chris jimson

chris jimson — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 01:12:00 +0000

You guys can mock us all you like, but if not for The Group (as we like to call it) I would not know which underwear holds up best, nor the proper way to ride a bike without chafing my most important appendage, to say nothing of learning proper urinal etiquette when someone just can’t stop staring.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:47:00 +0000

I can block numbers.

By: Maggie Koerth-Baker

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:15:00 +0000

I always thought that Mensa was one of those groups that probably made a lot of sense back in the 1970s, when there were probably a lot of people who didn’t live in large cities where a measure of weirdness was accepted, but really wanted to find the other handful of people near them that they could have a really fun, geeky conversation with. And then the Internet happened.

By: Maggie Koerth-Baker

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:11:00 +0000

Exactly! This is just like “Fables”!

By: Daniel Friesen

Daniel Friesen — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 23:55:00 +0000

This really makes me think of one thing…
I can’t believe we are STILL using a system so ancient that you can’t block a phone number’s calls as ubiquitous communication.

By: malindrome

malindrome — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:54:00 +0000

That’s just what he want’s us to think!

By: malindrome

malindrome — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:52:00 +0000

I suspect the meetings consist of a lot of comments about the temperature and depth of water in rivers they are standing next to.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:33:00 +0000

I have the teensiest suspicion that they might not pass the meatspace test.

By: LinkMan

LinkMan — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:27:00 +0000

I suspect Antinous might know a guy or two who would also be happy to host.

By: chris jimson

chris jimson — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Interestingly enough, Penn was also a suspect for a while (go figure, a guy obsessed with numbers, just like the Zodiac, and who lived in California near where the murders took place.)

By: Cooper DiBiase

Cooper DiBiase — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:53:00 +0000

With a little work you could transition your theory into a bad-ass conspiracy theory. Like MENSA exists as a sort of sociological experiment intended to identify those (see: Penn) who can be deployed to harass an individual (O’Hare) who, in his policy research, is dangerously close to messing with the anonymous third party’s nefarious plans.

Oh, and the new-to-us theory that that 90 year old cuckolded alcoholic is the Zodiac Killer should fit in there somewhere. With the pattern.

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:43:00 +0000

There’s also some guy living in Cornwall or someplace who is supposedly the mastermind of the Bilderberg Group or something. Some reporter tracked him down and found a pensioner living in a cottage without an internet connection who was completely unaware he was supposedly an international puppetmaster.

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:38:00 +0000

I know a gal who would let them have meetings at her house.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:29:00 +0000

What is it about Mensa that attracts people like this? Something to do with monomania, persecution complex, what?

I wonder if there’s much overlap with the Large Penis Support Group (no I didn’t make it up), where men complain about how difficult it is having a big dick and how regular people can’t possibly understand.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:21:00 +0000

This seems like less of a conspiracy theory and more just obsession. I mean, shouldn’t a conspiracy theory involve more than one dude?

Did your reptilian masters tell you to say that?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:18:00 +0000

Or even “unplugging the phone” when retiring for the night. Even crazy people may give up when nobody answers.

By: cleek

cleek — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 20:45:00 +0000

heh. :)

By: corydodt

corydodt — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 20:42:00 +0000

I like your theory. It fits the pattern.

By: knappa

knappa — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 20:41:00 +0000

I think that it is because Mensa is a stupid person’s idea of what a club for smart people would be. (To paraphrase a description of Newt Gingrich.)

By: LinkMan

LinkMan — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 20:03:00 +0000

The bar to joining MENSA isn't that high. My guess is that a significant percentage of Boingboing readers have scored high enough on a standardized test at some point to qualify. I personally know hundreds of people who I'm sure qualify, and yet I can't think of anybody I know who ever joined MENSA. My own theory is that people join MENSA for self-validation because they haven't found success or been satisfied with the recognition of their abilities in more typical academic, economic or social spheres. This is why the Comic Book Guy on the Simpsons and Gareth Penn are members, while I'll bet $5 that the overlap between MENSA and Harvard Law Review membership is miniscule (even though I'll bet that almost every HLR member has a MENSA-qualifying LSAT score).

By: doranchak

doranchak — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 19:57:00 +0000

One of my hobbies is to analyze and debunk claims people make about solving the Zodiac cryptograms. More info here:

http://www.zodiackillerciphers.com/

I have a recent article analyzing Lyndon Lafferty’s claims of finding his suspect’s name in the codes. I also analyzed Corey Starliper’s solution, which he seems to have completely fabricated: http://oranchak.com/zodiac/corey/hoax.html

I’m interested to see how Penn extracts O’Hare’s name from the codes. It’s very likely he uses techniques similar to all these other bogus claims. In general, they all suffer from a varying combination of pareidolia and too many “degrees of freedom.”

By: cleek

cleek — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 19:56:00 +0000

the Mensa qualifying test is full of pattern matching, math tricks, word games – brain teasers. and so Mensa itself is a group of people who are better than average at clever-little-monkey stuff. it’s not necessarily intelligence or wisdom; it’s an affinity for (and an enjoyment of) a certain kind of quick symbolic thinking.

now tip a mind like that just a bit off-balance and all that pattern matching cleverness is going to come up with some crazy stuff…

that’s my theory anyway.

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 19:40:00 +0000

Crips? Bloods? God is a straight-up muthafuck’in OG! It’s in his name, that’s how old school he is.