If you've got a highly questionable investment to sell and are therefore in search of people with a remarkably high ratio of disposable income to intelligence, you really can't go past sportsmen.
And, in a procedure practically diagnostic of pseudoscience all by itself, Firepower have promised lots of really convincing test results that prove their claims but, so far, failed to deliver.
(In case you're wondering, "spruik" is a more-Australian-than-English word meaning "advertise", particularly in the context of making a sales speech to people passing by. Some Australian shops employ "spruikers", traditionally English (sounding...) people, to stand outside with a microphone and a little amplifier and encourage people to come inside. This is a parody, but it's a quite accurate depiction of the species. And it's also aimed at AWB Limited, the previously mentioned scandalously corrupt Australian quasi-governmental organisation that's loosely connected with Firepower.)
Oh, wait - did I forget to mention that Firepower's European chief executive was previously the head of Halliburton in Germany?
(First Firepower post here.)
More fancy footwork from the good folk of Firepower (previously).
Oh, and Firepower's chief executive apparently had something to do, at least peripherally, with the AWB's delectable handing over of $AU290 million in humanitarian funds to Saddam Hussein, to use for his own no doubt very philanthropic purposes. Lots of other people paid these kickbacks as well, in order to get their slice of the pre-Gulf-War-2 Iraq pie. But thanks to AWB Limited, we Aussies were the single biggest contributor.
This has, therefore, been something of a scandal down here in Oz-land, despite the government's insistence that it didn't happen and was no big deal anyway and had nothing to do with them and they didn't know about it and even though they did know about it there was nothing they could do.
(Back in June last year, by the way, the Sydney Morning Herald were suckered by Firepower's tall tales about death threats from oil interests over Firepower's amazing, and amazingly untested, fuel saving products. So they're probably a bit annoyed now.)
I cannot recall previously encountering a game promo video that used one of the famous "In A World" voiceover artists.
The reason for that is pretty simple, of course. Don LaFontaine and/or Hal Douglas (I'm not enough of an expert to be able to tell them apart) are expensive, and most games cannot even pretend to have enough gravitas to justify one of those Overblown Voice-Overs.
OK, sure, maybe an RPG or a big-ass space shooter could pull it off, but this is "MotorStorm", which doesn't even appear to have guns in it. It's just a very pretty off-road racing game for the PS3.
But, nonetheless, it would appear that "In this ageless valley, a new breed of warrior has been born." Et cetera.
Don and Hal have done better work.
On the off-chance that you haven't seen it, here's Don and everybody else who's anybody in the movie trailer voice industry except Hal:
And here's Hal:
A few readers have just pointed out this Sydney Morning Herald feature to me, regarding the "Firepower" company mentioned in this letters column.
Astoundingly enough, it turns out that people who sell magic gasoline improving pills may be a little bit dishonest.
Fancy that!
(Don't miss the sidebar in which it is revealed that Firepower's special unique amazing main product is actually exactly the same as something called the Power Pill FE-3, which in turn is alleged to be made by a very plausible outfit called UBiee. Anyone want to lay odds on whether Firepower/UBiee will end up going the same way as the similarly revolutionary entrepreneurs at Bioperformance?)
Thanks to my previous musings on bogus fuel and energy gadgets (and additives, and more...), I attract more letters about such things.
Most recently, a correspondent has brought the Hydrodrive Electronic Converter to my attention. He did, to his credit, say that it sounded "completely bogus" to him, but he still asked me "Does it really actually do anything?"
I confess that I did not spend a lot of time examining the Electronic Converter page.
That's because it looks like a perfectly typical long crackpot rant (not helped by the fact that it's a freeservers.com page; like Geocities before them, Freeservers are an absolute wellspring of groundbreaking physics...). I see no reason to even start trying to unravel what the hell all that multicoloured capitalised marqueed-and-blink-tag text is trying to say.
It is not, of course, impossible that the person responsible could have actually come up with a revolutionary device to do... whatever it is this device is supposed to do. It is also not impossible that Elvis is still alive and, thanks to some magnificent plastic surgery, currently serving as the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
I consider these two possibilities to be similarly likely, and I also wonder why on earth anybody would even bother asking someone else about it.
Is there anything, anything at all, about that gadget that suggests that it has any value at all? Am I missing something? Or is this just like the Unanswerables that plague Barbara and David, as the world's e-mail-forwarding-aunties keep asking them whether that little boy really does need a new body to replace his burlap bag filled with leaves?
I've noticed that one of the common features of many of these kinds of sites is a page proudly displaying completely ridiculous "awards", which the crackpots responsible cannot tell from real ones.
A fine example of this phenomenon may be found at the justly famous site of the Atom Chip Corporation. Their URLs have shifted around since I last wrote about them (end of this column), but their proudly displayed Bogus Prize That Looks Exactly Like An Academy Award, I Mean, How Obvious Can You Get, Jeez, is still on display. It's now here.
Srinivasan Gopalakrishnan, the fellow responsible for the Hydrodrive Electronic Converter, lists on his personal page a similar, if smaller, collection of awards. He does actually seem to have invented some real things before he came up with the Converter, so I dare say the patent and such lower on the page may be for genuinely useful things (though a patent does not actually mean the patented idea has value; it's not the patent office's job to figure that out).
But the second thing on that page is a letter congratulating Srinivasan for having made it through the rigorous qualification procedures for the American Biographical Institute's frightfully prestigious "International Directory of Distinguished Leadership".
Unfortunately, the ABI's IDoDL - like their rather popular Man of the Year nomination, which Srinivasan reprints next - is one of those bogus Who's Who scams, kin to the expensive Forums and poetry collections whose only real purpose is to extract money from the people listed, invited or published.
(After that, Srinivasan has another similar certificate from an Indian outfit with no Web site that I'll betcha is just as fake, though less successful.)
I was, at first, amused to find someone who's apparently proud to have attracted the attention of both the American Biographical Institute and the International Biographical Centre of Cambridge, England (so "Centre" is not actually misspelled, you twit). But my smile faded as I discovered that pretty much anybody who falls for one of them seems likely to fall for the other.
Apparently Wikipedia is not as well known as I thought. But people are about as dumb as I thought.
Yes, I have received letters from these kinds of scammers, too. Not for years, though. There's nothing like being nominated as one of the World's Most Super-Smart And Really Cool Ultra-Professional Top Executives, Wow, You're Like James Bond And Warren Buffett Rolled Into One, You Are when you're 22 years old and, in my case, living with your mum, to tip you off to the scam.
(I might have been younger. I don't remember exactly. I was licking frogs pretty often back then.)
XXL Bio-Fuel Enhancer is an amazing development from Malaysia, where there are many palm oil plantations and palm oil costs very little. And where, by means of a secret refining process, it turns out that one can convert this palm oil into "XXL nano-molecules that can crack and reform hydrocarbon molecules in fossil fuels into high quality, powerful fuel molecules that contain vast amounts of energy and oxygen"!
And all you need is one drop per litre! Which is good, because now the palm oil costs, I don't know, a hundred times as much? More?
See? It's just that simple!
And in absolutely no way a gigantic pile of bollocks!
Don't listen to those people who foolishly suggest that breaking molecular bonds to turn a compound into another with greater combustion energy is difficult without, you know, some kind of energy input. Not to mention anybody who points out that when your fuel molecules already have oxygen in them, that means they're already partially oxidised, which means you get less energy when you burn them (that, essentially, is why alcohols have less energy per litre than hydrocarbons).
Presumably one should be careful not to add too much XXL Bio-Fuel Enhancer to one's fuel tank, lest it crack all of the bonds in the gasoline hydrocarbons and leave you with a fuel tank full of charcoal, and a cloud of hydrogen floating away into the sky.
After I said rude things about an incoherently promoted automotive gadget in this letters column (as usual, it promised to give you better fuel economy, more power, and anything else they could fit on the page), one of the people who worked there sent me an e-mail.
He was, thankfully, not threatening to sue me (unlike some people mentioned in that same column...), but he did say that it was their policy to only charge customers who agree that they "feel the difference".
He asked me if I'd ever heard of a scammer who offered this level of service. He has not replied to me since I told him "yes, just about all of them".
Money-back guarantees are, actually, absolutely standard in this field. I'm sure some of those guarantees are fake, but they seldom need to be. People who're willing to buy a quantum dimensional vortex optimiser for their car's fuel line are also people who're likely to "feel the difference" from it, even when there isn't any actual difference to feel.
I often link to Tony Cains' excellent Guide to Fuel Saving when I'm talking about these kinds of gadgets (and fuel additives), because he's pretty much got the whole field covered. His page about the dangers of testimonial evidence is particularly relevant, to both this specific issue and the general subject of bogus products in which people believe.