The Insult To The Intelligence

My own fault.

I knew as I poked the iPad screen that I was doing the wrong thing. But I had a half hour to spare while the rest of the family got ready to go out ( My dad once got to read War And Peace while waiting for my mother to get ready…) so I looked at a video that purported to explain the Philadelphia Experiment. A supposed experiment to make a destroyer disappear in Philadelphia Navy Yard.

It was eery, and ooey, and it was only when I noticed that the video footage seemed to be of French naval workshops and German torpedo boat destroyers that I realised that it was a melange of merde. I had read a suitably vague and corny paperback about the subject years ago – and got nothing out of it – but I didn’t realise that YouTube allowed people to make such rubbish in such spectacular form.

I always hesitate to use the term ” Fake News ” as my cousin, Donald Trump, seems to have gotten himself into a lot of hot water by using it so often. And this Philadelphia nonsense is not news anyway – not if it has spawned cheap paperback novels. My cousin, Barack Obama, once visited Philadelphia.  I think he called on my other cousin George Wallace…for political advice.

He could have asked me. But I don’t want to insult your intelligence with that…

For the record: The heading image is not an American destroyer in Philadelphia Navy Yard.