I made my own duct tape wallets starting in the summer of 1992. In about 2003 I started making wallets out of a kind of tape that I believe is superior. It goes by several names, but one common name is “house wrap tape.” It’s often sold in conjunction with Tyvek house wrap. The tape is made of polypropylene, and is very strong for its weight. Unlike duct tape it’s isotropic, meaning that it’s the same in all directions, and won’t tear or fray. The adhesive is a very aggressive acrylic, which is needed to stick to the slick surfaces of Tyvek house wrap.

DuPont’s Tyvek house wrap tape is by far the most common brand of this kind of tape. The only downside is esthetic; it has “Tyvek” printed in large letters all along the tape. It’s possible to buy plain colored house wrap tape; I bought the roll I’m using in this essay online. I once had several rolls of Owens Corning house wrap tape which came in pink and had no text. Additional information about these tapes can be found here.

To create a house wrap wallet, we need to know how fancy we want to go. My wallets are simply the main currency pouch plus two smaller card pouches. These instructions are for this style.

To start off we will create the two smaller card pouches. Unroll a 7” or 8” length of tape and place it sticky side up on your table. Unroll a similar length and overlap it about half way lengthwise. Cover the remaining section of sticky-side-up tape with another fresh piece. The fresh piece does not need to overlap the first. Turn the three pieces over and overlap the sticky side up section lengthwise. Repeat this process until you have a panel of tape about 7” wide by about 5” tall.

A typical plastic card like a driver’s license or credit card is about 2 & 1/8” tall by 3 & 3/8” wide. Our card envelopes will be about 2” tall to allow the tops of the cards to peak out and be easily grabbed. Mark the long edge of your panel with a straight line and cut it straight. A Sharpie permanent marker works well for drawing on polypropylene. To minimize edges that can come apart or expose adhesive, overlap a fresh piece of tape on this straight edge and roll it over on the other side to secure it.

You may notice the acrylic adhesive binding to the blades of the scissors you are using. One way to remove this is with WD-40, which also lubricates the revolute joint. Be careful when wiping scissors blades, as they can be quite sharp.

Fold the panel with the cards you intend to carry inside. Allow the tops of the cards to peek over the top. My card envelope dimensions are just about 4” or perhaps 4 & 1/8”.

If you look carefully, you might be able to see that the edges of this panel are squared and cut, and the edges covered with an overlapping length of tape.

Each card pouch panel is about 3 & 3/8” wide. Fold one panel in half and tape one edge together. Place your cards inside the pouch and tape the other side edge.

Once the proper height is determined, cut the panel into two sections.

Don’t worry if you are taping over a gap, as we will correct this in a latter step. Make sure to align the tops of the two envelope sides as you create this seal. Since the adhesive is on the inside, it creates an unfortunate situation, since the adhesive will tend to stick to the cards. We remedy this by everting the card pouches. Remove the cards and turn the pouches inside out. To fully evert the corners, use a single plastic card to push the envelope from the inside out. Eventually it should fully evert. Reinforce the sides with extra tape.

Now the two card pouches are joined side by side. Notice there is a gap of about ¼” between the two pouches. This is to allow them to fold together without binding along the crease.

A new panel is created for the main currency envelope. An American bill is about 2 & 5/8” by 6 & 1/8”. The width and height of the currency envelope will need to be greater than these dimensions. The width should match the width of the joined card pouches.

In this case the currency envelope is 7 & 5/16” wide. As with the card envelopes, cut the panel to the correct width then fold down the middle to create the crease. The height in this case is 3” so the panel height before folding would be 6”. Tape the edges, evert the envelope, and seal with additional tape.

Join the currency envelope to the card pouches along the sides and bottom. You will see a gap at the top of the card pouches that should be taped down. Slip a section of tape inside each card pouch and adhere it to the card pouch and the envelope pouch. Add additional reinforcement along the sides and bottom of the wallet.

There you go! My previous polypropylene wallet lasted about 5 years, and was much more elegant than a duct tape or gaffer tape wallet. I call this model the “Big Red One.” Good luck!

Scofticism
Roger Knights

During every vigorous and prolonged controversy each side invents nicknames for its opponents to indicate their errors, wrong-headedness, and bad faith. The best ones are so pointed and barbed that they “stick,” permanently damaging the public image of the other side. One such term is “woo,” another is “pseudoscience.” They effectively suggest the enemy’s rational “shell” conceals an inner “nut.” The further implication is that pseudoscientists are not only biased but untrustworthy. In thrall to their Inner Nut, they are prone to Believers’ Blather: exaggeration, omission, evasion, obfuscation, absurd reasoning, etc.

Our side’s comebacks have lacked its punch and pizzazz. Neither fundamentalist materialism nor pseudo-skepticism nor pathological skepticism nor sneer-quoted “skepticism” can match it as a Tenacious Taunting Tag. But my term, “scofticism,” fills the bill. It too implies its targets are posers: their posture of Rational Doubt (“Show me the evidence”) masks Die-Hard Denial (“I’ll see it when I believe it”). Its further implication is that scoftics are not only biased but untrustworthy. In thrall to their Inner Nut, they are prone to Slimy Scoftic Subterfuge: exaggeration, omission, evasion, obfuscation, dissimulation, etc. (Bills of particulars can be found on anti-scoftic websites. Start here and follow the links. My thumbnail definition of scofticism is “UNhealthy skepticism.” This is a play on the common phrase, “a healthy (dose of) skepticism.”

My coinage (which I’ve used since 8/13/03 on Bigfoot Forums. derives of course from scoffer and skeptic, hence the spelling (please retain!). It floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, so I urge its widespread adoption. However, it shouldn’t be applied to every disbeliever, only to those who are far from fair-minded, and who justify themselves by citing certain scoftical Doctrines of Denial. (An examination of which would require a longer article.)

You may (and should!) freely reproduce this article. [This line wasn't printed in Fate.]

Not surprisingly Bigfoot advocates shot back, claiming that these accusations were about a dead man who could not defend himself, that they were personal attacks that has no bearing on what was seen in his film, and even that he was broke because of medical bills and more or less had to write bad checks!

The following images are intended to demonstrate that Patterson was unequivocally engaged in Bigfoot related fraud before he made his famous film. These images obviously have nothing to do with writing bad checks.

The individual credited with discovering these images posts on various internet forums as “Kitakaze.” I find it rather surprising that it wasn’t until well into the 21st Century that this was discovered, though the magazines and books have been around since the mid 1960’s.

The first montage includes an illustration by Mort Künstler, and appeared in the December 1959 issue of True Magazine. The illustration accompanied the essay entitled “The Strange Story of America’s Abominable Snowman”… by Ivan Sanderson. Beneath is the drawing Patterson plagiarized which appeared in his 1966 book Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?

The second montage includes an image by artist Louis S. Glanzman, and appeared in another True Magazine article written by Ivan Sanderson, this one from March 1960 issue entitled A New Look At America’s Mystery Giant. The lower drawing is again from Patterson’s book.

Frankly I rather liked Valley of the Dolls, but the analogy stuck with me. It’s valid for things like soup, which are by and large homogenous. As time went on I began to think that many things in life are homogenous, at least human behaviors and esthetic productions. Certain things like the output of performers or favorite TV shows have remarkable and very public declines. A few things have remarkable advances. I remember in the mid 1980’s when I first encountered the RE/Search books. I was sort of shocked to see the humble beginnings of RE/Search as a tabloid magazine. I was amazed at how much the production values and depth of research had increased. Did they sell their souls to the devil to get that good?

I think people naturally use the soup metaphor even if they don’t know it, especially on the Internet. There is so much information generated daily that to even sample a day’s content one has to give things a “taste test” before consuming the entire thing. If you have a YouTube account you can see how long a particular video of yours was watched before the audience departed. Popular websites like Reddit commonly post stories from users that are a few hundred words long. These are later edited down to a sentence or two with the obligatory “TL;DR.”
Long before the Internet people understood the power of a “first impression.” Again, this follows the “soup” analogy, as it assumes that an individual’s long term behavior is relatively homogenous. At the opposite end of this homogenous model of human behavior is the fantasy of domestic violence victims who believe their abuser is “turning the corner” or “getting better.”

You can see the tacit acknowledgement of the soup metaphor when people admonish others to “wait for it” when posting videos. If it’s not happening in the first 10 seconds your instinct tells you it probably won’t get better.

It’s popular these days to claim the Internet is killing our attention spans. There may be truth to this, but I believe we are simply doing a lot more sampling now before deciding to assimilate the whole thing.

Obviously there are things of value that grow on us. It would be foolish to make long term judgments about everything in life from initial reactions. There is a huge class of things that are “acquired tastes.” But over time, I tend to thing that there are many more soup-like things in the world than there are acquired tastes.

In the past Loren Coleman has been taken to task for including stories about unknown animals with images and text about 9-11 on the Cryptomundo blog. Critics, including myself, claim this is done for the simple reason of garnering hits to the Cryptomundo site.

On November 12 of this year Loren Coleman posted a blog entry to Cryptomundo regarding Nittany Lions. Evidently Coleman discovered some sort of association between cryptozoology and child rape, and was willing to publicize his thoughts on the subject. Frankly this was not surprising, as previously Coleman asked whether Osama Bin Laden was as tall as Bigfoot:

In his recent entry on Nittany Lions, Coleman seems aware that others find his actions reprehensible:

One does not need to be an “insensitive skeptic” to test whether Coleman’s musings garner Google rankings. Today I simply entered the term “Nittany Lion” into Google image search. The result is shown:

My result is that the sixth most popular Google search for “Nittany Lion” is for Cryptomundo.
Because Google ranks images as well as text it’s possible to garner hits to a site just by the use of images. Here in Seattle the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a semi-defunct newspaper, often includes photo sets of scantily clad women, ostensibly as “news.” A regular Google web search for the term “Nittany Lion” returns Cryptomundo, but significantly lower than the image search, at least for me. In some cases the text surrounding a photo is less relevant for garnering hits than the photo itself, and thus becomes so much lorum ipsum, or in our case “Loren ipsum.”

No Loren, it’s not the skeptics that are insensitive, it is you and Craig Woolheater who continue to capitalize on human tragedy for the sake of profit and attention.

Contemporaneous with the publication of Meldrum’s book was an analysis by Dr. Anton Wroblewski, a professional geologist with a background in paleontology and ichnology. Wroblewski created a photomontage that cleanly matched the features found in a wallowing elk to those found in the Skookum Body Cast.

As we can see in Wroblewski’s photomontage, the elk’s hooves are beside the elk, not under it as in Meldrum’s drawing. In addition, an informal written analysis was posted to a popular Bigfoot Internet forum, and later reposted to the James Randi Educational Foundation forum. Needless to say, this caused a firestorm in the Bigfoot community, as the credibility of multiple Bigfoot advocates was called into question. A variety of arguments were advanced by Bigfoot advocates that the cast did not represent an elk. One persistent claim has been about how elk leave hoof prints when rising from a wallow. On page 119 Meldrum writes:

“And finally, and perhaps most telling, when an elk rises from a repose it must place its hooves directly under its weight in order to stand, leaving tracks in the centerline of its imprint, Yet there are no elk tracks located in the center of the Skookum imprint, only deep and clear elk imprints skirting the imprint.”

This claim is in direct opposition to Wroblewski’s analysis:

“Significantly, the lack of hoof prints directly within the outline of the main body print is exactly what is seen in deer, elk, and other ungulate lays (see Elbroch, 2003). Hoof prints found outside the main body outline, but related to the forelegs reveal how the animal stood up.”

Here is a set of screen captures taken from an elk hunter’s video. As we can see from the digital time display, the elk bounds out of the wallow very quickly, within a second. First off, we see from the video that “wallowing” is a dynamic activity, and the elk is in different positions at different times. Here is a screen shot that shows the elk on its side, not on its belly, as in Meldrum’s drawing.

The next still image is just after the elk has been hit with an arrow.

From there we see a quick series of positions, none of which show the elk’s hooves positioned in the main body impression. The elk has explosively heaved itself to the side, not placidly stood up in its own body impression. Remember, Meldrum claimed that an elk must place its hooves directly under its weight in order to stand which is an absolute statement. As such, Meldrum’s absolute claim is factually inaccurate.

It’s possible that Meldrum could have avoided making fundamentally flawed arguments like this if he had first consulted professional ichnologists. As Dr. Wroblewski put it:

“Mark Elbroch, whose book I used as a conveneient, (sic) authoritative, and recent reference in the hopes that BFers would actually take the time to investigate how “real” trackers work, has weighed in and agrees with my interpetation (sic) as well. There is no controversy as to the identity of this particular cast. Anyone with one working eye and an ounce of common sense can see that it’s an elk or large deer trace.”

For further reading, here is another account of Wroblewski’s analysis by Daniel Perez.

For a time several years ago I posted on a crypto message board also moderated by Coleman. I remember writing a long post comparing John Green’s advocacy of a particular trackway to Ivan Sanderson’s advocacy of 15 foot penguins. Coleman refused to publish this entry. I suspect, but don’t know, that it was refused because calling out Sanderson as a crackpot is a no-no for those promoting Cryptozoology as serious science.

As the years went by, the dual themes of pathological advertizing and Coleman’s repetitive censorship would become apparent to many others besides myself. In addition, Cryptomundo began to really go over the edge into the land of bad taste by linking Cryptozoology to 9-11, and repeatedly posting photos of sexy women. What in the hell does 9-11 or sexy women have to do with unknown animals? It was obvious to me this was a shameless attempt to game the search engine rankings of Cryptomundo, and I’m not the only one who believed this.

Coleman’s reputation took a big hit in 2002 regarding the means in which he obtained photographs from Bigfooter Peter Byrne in the late 1990’s. The damning account was published in 2002 in a Northwest newsletter called the Track Record. Similar accounts were published by Daniel Perez in his newsletter Bigfoot Times in the October-November 2005 issue. But now it’s 2011, and these days Coleman doesn’t have to physically obtain photographs to publish them. He simply finds them on the Internet, claims “fair use” then throws them up on Cryptomundo. I’ve had two photographs of mine “scraped” this way. Note that I’ve included screen grabs of Cryptomundo, as Coleman is fond of historical revisionism, either by editing or redacting information.

Coleman’s “fair use” claim is amusing in light of his own claims of copyright on photos he obtained of what is called the Myakka Skunk Ape:

Coleman’s use of my photographs is galling because Cryptomundo is not just a labor of love, but a for-profit business. One that now regularly functions in a morally onerous way. At one point Cryptomundo even published a topless photo of Natasha Henstridge in an article about the Chupacabra! As is Cryptomundo’s style, the photo was quickly redacted. Then came the chronic begging, or as it’s sometimes known on the Internet “bleging.” If Coleman had lost his leg in ‘Nam, I would have some sympathy, but I really have no idea why he does this.

Today we had another little kerfuffle, though it seems that Coleman has redacted his entry once again! As we see in the Cryptomundo caption in my photo, Coleman likes to label his opponents. Today he lashed out at Sharon Hill as a “scoftic.” What makes this incident rather bizarre is that Cryptomundo linked to an obviously satirical blog entry. Coleman is not stupid by any means, so I find it inconceivable that he wouldn’t notice that it was a parody site. Why would he press on, as if it was a genuine thing? Again, I think it all comes down to SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Here is a screen capture from the yet-to-be-redacted Cryptomundo feed of Bigfoot Forums:

As you can see, we have a large photo of Sharon Hill. I suspect, but cannot prove, that it’s all in the search engine optimization of the photo tags. Here is the result of a simple test I performed today. I entered the term “bigfoot sexy” into the Google Image search. Lo and behold the photo of the sexy woman in the black swimsuit is from Cryptomundo!

How else can one explain why Coleman chose to publish such an asinine blog entry? I’d like to propose that the text around scraped photos of sexy women that appear on Cryptomundo is just so much Loren ipsum…

Coleman has put himself in an untenable position; he wants to be respected and taken seriously as a “Cryptozoology expert” yet at the same time he engages in repetitively pathological moral behavior.