The Dumbest Story Ever Told

Simcha Jacobovici is the biggest idiot who has ever lived. I say this without fear of contradiction or even serious challenge. Indeed, it is by a wide, wide margin that this dickhead has managed to carve out the most highly public failure of a career in bullshit archaeology. Simcha Jacobovici goes by the name The Naked Lunatic Archaeologist, which is also the name of his show. The only possible contender for the As Big An Idiot As Simcha Jacobovici Award is James Cameron, who has to be the most gullible sugar daddy in the history of pseudohistorical incompetence.

Actually, that gives me an idea.

James Cameron, I wanted you to know that I found the Fountain of Youth and El Dorado. Give me one million dollars and I will hire a film crew and go out into the Everglades and Dondequiera, South America and point to exactly where they used to be. Fucking. History Channel. Magic. What do you say, Jimmy?

So, why am I unloading on the international disgrace known as Simcha Jacobovici? Because of something that he did to my eyes and brain tonight. It all began as I waited to go into a meeting this afternoon. Outside my boss's office is a bookshelf where you take a book or leave a book. I saw a thin cardboard DVD sleeve bearing the title The Exodus Decoded. In a red band at the top it reads: "FOR YOUR EMMY CONSIDERATION--OUTSTANDING NON-FICTION SPECIAL."

A quick check of IMDB reveals that it won nothing. Nothing at all. If I had been a judge for the Emmy, I would have taken awards away from James Cameron, just on fucking principle.

It's like The Da Vinci Code, except that the main character is completely incompetent at everything he tries. As with conspiracy theories, the clues are everywhere if you just know how to look, and according to Jacobovici every single biblical scholar, archaeologist, and historian has been entirely wrong..."until now." (As we watched this horrid thing, my roommate Animala and I considered inventing a drinking game every time Jacobovici said, "....until now." But we soon realized that if we ever played this game, we would quickly become raging alcoholics.)

Seriously, this guy is so bad at his job, you can tell that the people surrounding him, actual scientists and scholars, are just appalled at everything that comes out of his mouth. He is so staggeringly intolerable to the professionals around him that the only way he can hide their abject horror and disdain for is to keep them almost entirely out of frame. Indeed, his academic betters, for whom scholarship is more than pointing to a random object and saying, "SEE! THE BIBLE (WELL ONLY REALLY THE OLD TESTAMENT) IS TRUE!" when they are showing him their museum collections, often look appalled at his uninterrupted existence on this planet. The best example of this was in The Lost Tomb of Jesus, another Cameron-funded pasture patty--you could tell that during the tour of the Israel Museum collection of ossuaries that Jacobovici was on the last nerve of the curator, David Mevorah. See the following clip from 1:00-2:40, the exchange. Jacobovici has no basic concept of the restraints in interpretation to which professional archaeologists judiciously limit themselves. (It's called competency, Simcha. Look it up.)

Now go to 5:49 and see Mevorah get a little more annoyed. David, you have the patience of a zen master. Seriously. I had kind of hoped that the interview would deteriorate into ossuaries being broken over Jacobovichi's head, but no such luck.

Anyway, Jacobovichi cites without horror the pseudoscholar and Velikovskite John Bimson. You may be familiar with Velikovsky's hypothesis that Jupiter farted Venus, which zoomed around the solar system, had a number of near-misses with the earth and caused Noah's Flood, the Egyptian plagues, manna from heaven (in a rain of hydrocarbons, which are unfortunately not carbohydrates), before settling down in its current orbit. Of course, I believe Carl Sagan calculated that in order to generate the escape velocity to propel a "comet" the size of Venus off of Jupiter at 60km/sec, you would need more energy than would be released by 100 million of the largest solar flares ever observed on the surface of the sun. And Jacobovichi actually doesn't punch this guy--he embraces him and cites him, presumably as an authority or intellectual superior, which, actually, I can see.

The problem is that Jacobovich's incoherent ramblings are as implausible as Velikovsky's harebrained hypothesis. A more "just-so" hypothesis has never been, and in this case it is the eruption of the badass Santorini volcano. Really, his bullshit utterly fucking fabricated chronology of disaster smacks of Answers in Genesis-level catastrophicism bullshit.

The other intellectual powerhouse outhouse that Jacobovici cites approvingly (and repeatedly relies on) is a hopeless ding-dong by the name of Charles Pellegrino, whose Ph.D. is in theoretical archaeology, as in, his degree in archaeology is entirely theoretical and without basis in reality.

I actually have a lot of work to accomplish before I go to sleep, but I would like to direct you to the Higgaion blog, which published perhaps the most perfect, thorough and utter savaging of bullshit that I have ever encountered. Seriously, Jacobovici's documentary is raped and left in a gutter to die. It's a fucking wonderful thing to watch, and you just want to kick it while it's lying there, sobbing and humiliated. The reason why I examine unqualified incompetents like the bozos mentioned here is because by simply assuming that they are magnificently, extravagantly, exquisitely wrong, when you fact check you invariably inadvertently learn a lot.

HJ