Did he seriously quit over this?

dejmakeup Mayıs 14, 2022

I've been skimming the Isaac Hayes rumors that are flying around not only the blogosphere but the "Respectable" newsmedia. I found the episode YouTubed and linked on someone's livejournal.

I hadn't seen it, but was naturally curious. Was is possible that it was treated with less respect than the major organized religions? I mean, the Mormons got smoked. Maybe there's a reason to be offended. Maybe people are massively misunderstanding Scientologists. My own religion embraces some fairly kooky stuff. It has questionable origins. Who am I to judge?

So, I did try to approach this objectively. Two items did me in.

I'd forgotten what the E-meter was. I've read about the little black box before and was under the impression that it was an unreliable medical tool (In Cults of Unreason I remember reading that shortly after Hubbard began using it, the regular medical community stopped using it) for measuring body temperature and pulse. Good thing I googled it. It's really just an Ohmmeter for your flesh. Now, I must confess I do believe in a lot of New Age and mystical stuff, but I also work on electronics and I can't imagine using test equipment to try and pin down the metaphysical without learning what it's doing and what causes it to do that in the natural world. I think it comes from having to actually read up on all that stupid test equipment in case I actually do need to know how an Ohmmeter is measuring resistance to account for a bad reading. This knowledge about the E-meter threatened to melt a part of brain when I saw it.

I survived that mention, only to have my brain turned to mint jelly around the time they said "..looked like DC-8s.." You see, I've been in Aviation longer than Electronics. I couldn't handle that, and the accompanying animation didn't help.

I had a nice Green Lantern essay in mind, but am unable to complete it because of this experience. While my mind recovers from the shock, see for yourself:

The Episode