Publishing North West

“I laughed out loud more than once and smiled quite a lot too. It deserves to be a huge success,” Helên Thomas

“Reminds me of the great Alan Sillitoe,” Tony Curry

“The most insanely convoluted explanation is usually the most amusing”

History records that William de Ockham (Occam as he is now known) stated “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate”, in what came to be known as Occam’s Razor - a hugely influential tool to the philosopher. This is normally paraphrased in translation as “The simplest explanation (i.e. the one that makes the fewest assumptions) is the one most likely to be true”. Tragically, he is not recorded as having stated that “The most insanely convoluted explanation is by far the most entertaining”, in what didn’t come to be known as Occam’s Blunt Instrument.
Furthermore, if Aesop was alive today, hadn’t written his well known fables and had instead written sarcastic para-parables, this is almost certainly the collection that he would have written. The facts that he isn’t, he had, he hadn’t and this is almost certainly not the collection that he wrote, have meant that the world of creative writing has lost this treasure trove of literary gems forever… Until now.
Were one to apply Occam’s Razor to the reported phenomena discussed in this book, one would ascribe all of them to the implausible, unverifiable ravings of cranks and dismiss them as pure nonsense. By applying the logic of Occam’s Blunt Instrument, Paul Neads and Dermot Glennon have instead proven them to be genuine phenomena with perfectly logical (if entirely refutable) rational explanations; the simplest thing to do when faced with New Age alternative medicines, superstitions and conspiracy theories would be to debunk them. Instead, the authors attempt the more difficult task of actually bunking them.
Each of these stories follows the simple pattern: listen to clearly erroneous claims made by backwoods weirdoes and notoriety-seeking freaks, pick up the ball and run with it (i.e. fervently believe what they are saying to be true), give a scarcely credible explanation for the phenomenon and finally descend into almost vitriolic sarcasm towards the end of the tale.
By this means, we hope to demonstrate that the truth is not always worth a rat’s ass.