This belated podcast is a ‘best of’ of sorts, that is dedicated to my co-host, coauthor and most significantly, father, Jef Clark. Dad has been fighting his second battle with cancer over the last 6 months. He passed away this weekend. He was 61. I love you mate. You’ll always be with me and all of us.
In the podcast I mention Dad’s writing for the Australian Skeptic. You can read his articles here: http://www.skeptics.com.au/publications/magazine/
See issues: 23.4 | 24.1 | 24.2 | 24.3 | 24. 4 | 25.2 | 25.3 | 25.4 | 26.1 | 26.2 | 26.4 | 27.2 | 27.3
7 comments:
My condolences Theo. I've loved the interaction between you and your father during the podcasts. He was a genuinely great guy.
I'm sorry to hear this news Theo, thanks for your strength and consideration for sharing it in this manner.
I'd like to tell you that your podcast has held a special respect to me- Out of the 20 or so podcasts I subscribe to, yours is the ONLY one in which I keep every single episode. If your podcast didn't exist, I would have been searching endlessly for one that covered fallacies in the depth that you two did.
I will miss Jef's routine of sabotaging your serious dialogue with satire and sarcasm. That always made me laugh.
Awe Theo, I'm really sorry to hear of your loss. Your father was a great man. Thank you for sharing your dad with us.
I have fond memories of going for walks this summer listening to each and every episode. I just know I'm going to re-listen to your shows next summer and the next...
I'm very sorry for your loss Theo. I just listened to the podcast after downloading it last week, eager to hear another round of sarcastic and hilarious banter. This particular episode was a fantastic tribute to someone I found to be a beautiful man, just from listening to your podcast over the past year or so. He will be sorely missed. A wonderful tribute, yet in some ways unnecessary. Jef's on-air presence justified your descriptions of an incredibly intelligent, humorous and wonderful human being. Clearly loved by his family and certainly a no-bullshit kind of guy. I really liked him! I was chuffed that you ended the podcast with the "off-air" out-take from the episode on Sanctimony; one of my favourite pieces of iPod listening EVER! In fact, it was I who sent a subsequent note about being one of the chimpanzees who'd accidentally downloaded the podcast. Great stuff! Jef's superb grasp of irony and sarcasm are up there with Milligan's grasp of nonsense and idiocy. Superb and never forgotten!
Keep the podcast going, please. You've done such a fantastic job that it can't stop here.
My deepest sympathy and condolences,
Ben, Canberra
Thanks for all your kind words. It means a lot.
I just listened to The Skeptic Zone #80 - 30.April.2010 when I heard Kylie Stugess' tribute to your father.
I'm so sorry to hear about your loss, and in truth it is a great loss for us all. I know all grief is private in that it is impossible to know what how person actually feels, but hearing about it twists the knot in my heart where the loss of my own father a few years back still aches, so maybe I have an incline of what you are going through.
Hearing the back and forth banter between the two of you as I again listen to some early episodes makes me think that you had a very special bond. I hope the memory of those times can become a vade mecum for you — just as in a slightly different sense of the expression — your book has become something that I mentally carry with me to make sense of tangled discourse and misinformed bogosity.
—————
I have been picking through skeptical podcasts for the last few month with an eye as to how I'm going to introduce my 9 year old son to more complex logical concepts — he is waaay too smart, and already feared by peers and teachers for being able wear out their ears and sanity with his arguments. It would be so much easier to give him the tools so we can sidestep some of the repetition and more obscure chains of "reasoning". I hope that giving him the right mental tools will mean we can get to the more fun core of the topic sooner (and before I go nuts).
Yes, I realize I'm giving him a loaded gun, but it is like a chess master once told me [and I'm paraphrasing] "It is sometimes harder to play a true novice to chess, because they will do such strange moves that you can't use strategy. Everything becomes tactics."
Hunting Humbug 101 quickly rose to the top as a place to start his education in reasoning, and I'm thinking that I'll have him read the book first (he's a voracious reader) and then we'll listen and discuss each set of fallacies.
So, Theo, I think I can safely say that your and your fathers work will live on for yet one more generation.
Thank You.
--j
PS Is there a place where you discuss how your father introduced you to skeptical reasoning? If not, may I suggest it as a topic for a future podcast some day?
That's really sad news. I had just got Humbug out again and was going to give it a second read. Still will but with some sorrow. Cancer is one of those diseases that we can't rid of soon enough.
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