Nevertheless, fan death is real!

Fan Death? Not Really.

Let's try to be serious...

(Image from Encyclopedia Dramatica)

Yesterday, an unnamed fellow from the great, wide internet discovered my blog entry of September 12, 2006 on fan death: "Fan Death is Real!"

Long-time readers may recall that entry for the logical reasons that I offered and the empirical evidence that I supplied to prove the scientific reality of fan death. If not, then allow me to jog your memory:

How can people doubt fan death!? Fans kill thousands of people each year, but most of the deaths go unreported because the fans were in a different room. It's a little-known fact that the whirling blades cause disturbance in the ether that pervades the universe, and the ripple effect impairs organisms up to 500 feet distant.

This summer, fans killed several of my son's pets. First a stag beetle died when our cat, driven mad by ripples in the ether, overturned the beetle's plastic terrarium and fought the poor beetle to its death. Miraculously, the cat survived. Our eel was not so lucky as the cat. Driven insane by the whirling blades' insidious disturbance of the ether, it managed to flip itself out of its aquarium -- through a tiny hole in the top!! -- and die. We found it on the floor ... shriveled and dry. That could happen to you, too. Since then, two other stag beetles have died. Snails as well. And a goldfish has turned deathly white! Scary.

Miraculously, our cats and children have survived, but we're taking no more chances, especially now that our two fans have begun to alter weather patterns in our apartment. In the past two days, they've actually been blowing cool air at night -- even though there's no air-conditioning unit attached! We think that the fans are now trying to freeze us to death, so we've put them away in a closet, completely covered in a bag zipped carefully shut to prevent them from doing even more damage.

Fans are killers. Why do you think that they're called fans? The word "fan" is short for "fanatic." You can't trust fanatics. Don't trust fans, either.

How could anybody deny such a cloud of witnesses? Nevertheless, disbelievers abound, especially outside of Korea.

Such as the anonymous skeptic who visited my blog yesterday. Unconvinced by my arguments for the truth of fan death, he signed on as "Anonymous" and posted this comment:

Lol, you are stupid.

Along with this attempt at a well-reasoned refutation of my views on the reality of fan death, Anonymous added a link to support his own views. I discovered that the link leads to an fan-death article on a website called Encyclopedia Dramatica, which looks rather like Wikipedia but isn't.

Initially, I was confused because the site appears to confirm the truth of fan death, yet Anonymous calls me "stupid" for my princely and valiant efforts to warn non-Koreans about the great danger of sleeping in closed rooms with fans left blowing their virulent breezes. Indeed, the Encyclopedia Dramatica article had some excellent, scientific information on how fans kill:

An electric fan creates a vortex, which sucks the oxygen from the enclosed and sealed room and creates a partial vacuum inside.

The fan uses up the oxygen in the room and creates fatal levels of carbon dioxide (i.e. more carbon dioxide is magically created simply by blowing air around).

If the fan is put directly in front of the face of the sleeping person, it will suck all the air away, preventing one from breathing (you'd think it would actually blow air towards the person).

Fan blades chop up oxygen molecules Tae Kwon Do-style so that the air is no longer breathable, thus resulting in suffocation.

Fans cause hypothermia, which can only be caused by freezing the guts, not merely the skin's surface like fans do.

All of these very likely factors combined can also cause fan death.

But along with this excellent evidence, the article began to trouble me. Why, for instance, does it add such a remark as "carbon dioxide is magically created"? We're not talking magic! This is science!

Moreover, the article undercuts some of its own evidence by noting that fans suck up oxygen but then explicitly calls this point into doubt by suggesting that fans don't suck air but blow it. Now, I ask -- is there really a difference? Making such a distinction might lead some fan-death believers to question the truth of fan death, so this sort of indecisiveness about how fans kill people should be avoided in public discussions.

At length, I came to see that the article is not supportive of fan death but is actually critical of people who believe in fan death!

No wonder Anonymous left this link along with his ridicule about my intelligence.

As I read very closely, I came to see that the article is satire. Maybe not entirely satire, though. The arguably racist remarks about Asians, especially in another cross-linked article, don't sound especially satirical. But that point aside, the article is satiricial and only pretends -- albeit without consistency -- to be defending a belief in fan death.

Well, let me just state my views very clearly. Despite Jonathan Swift's assured position in the Western Literary Canon, I think that satire has no legitimate place in reasonable discussions. Satire is inherently offensive because it pretends to be what it is not and is therefore no better than lies. Indeed, satirizing is worse than lying because not only is it unethical deception, it compounds this immorality by setting up as objects of ridicule those who fail to see through the satire.

Therefore, given the profoundly serious faults inhering in satire, I for one refuse to put up with it on my website.

I hereby declare Gypsy Scholar to be a satire-free zone.

Oh, and just in case anybody is still wondering ... I also hereby declare that fan death is real.