[bpsdb] Well here it is, the Carnival of the Africans, coming to you belatedly from Windsor in England, which is fairly sub-Saharan if you turn your globe upside-down and squint a bit. I'm thrilled to be hosting this as I've been a big fan of Africa ever since my first visit to the continent in the early 90s. Indeed, an African adventure is indirectly responsible for this blog, and I'll be telling you that story in between entries. I'll come back to that in a minute, but first of all, breasts!

Angela of the Skeptic Detective kicks us off with a mammary-nificent article about everybody's favourite secondary sexual organs. She describes the, er, scientific principles (or lack of) behind Dr Tomabechi’s "rock melon" breast-enlarging ringtone - a mobile phone sound guaranteed to make your breasts grow.

So back in 1996 I visited Kenya with my parents. It was my second time there, and our plan was to hire a car in Nairobi, and drive ourselves around the country for three weeks visiting various game reserves on the way, including a week spent with family friends on the shores of Lake Naivasha. It was, in short, the perfect holiday, and our first task after the red-eye flight to Jomo Kenyatta Airport was to pick up our car - a with hindsight appallingly-chosen Suzuki - and drive up to Sweetwaters Ranch, near Nyaharuru and dead on the equator. We were shattered from having been up all night, so food and drink were the last thing on our minds as we set off that morning with just a few leftovers in the car from our airline meals. We intended to make Sweetwaters by sunset. We didn't make it.

Angela submitted three entries in total, which is probably against the rules, so there's no way I can point you to her articles about acupuncture and astrology!

Things began to go wrong at lunchtime. We had pulled over at the side of the road where we got out of the car and attempted to stretch the creases out of our limbs, and generally take a moment to recover from the constant battering of the uneven Kenyan roads. We had a little water which we drank, ate the leftovers, found a convenient bush to squat behind, and prepared to set off. The starter motor whirred, but nothing happened. We tried a push start, but still nothing. The car that we had rented just a few hours earlier was now completely dead.

There's a bit of an atheism theme in this edition, so let's look at an interesting dilemma posed by the Skeptic Blacksheep - what would you do if your friend, in a coma, mistook your voice for the voice of God?

Dad walked to the next village, a couple of miles up the road, leaving Mum and I at the roadside. An hour or so passed, before finally a matatu lurched over the hill with about a hundred and fifty people perched on board, including my father, and a friendly young mechanic he had found. Three hours after we had stopped, and ten pounds lighter in the wallet, we were on our way again, but the delay had catastrophically altered our schedule. It was approaching 4pm, and on the equator in May the sun would set at around 6pm. In the dark, the rough Kenyan roads and tracks would be treacherous.

James at the Cheetah-esque Acinonyx Scepticus, looks at the case of Jehovah's Witnesses who attempted to withold life-saving medical treatment from a child. Fortunately, it turns out that in South Africa's constitution, the right to life outranks the right to believe in fairy-tales.

We knew that we had to get to Nyaharuru before heading East, but by the time we reached the town, we had fallen even further behind schedule, thanks to a wrong turn some miles back. By now it was after sunset, and the night had closed in around us. In the dark, Nyaharuru was a confusing mess of a town, with no apparent center, and no obvious track that looked like the one that should lead us the last fifty miles or so across the savannah to Sweetwaters. Finally, we hit upon a candidate, and turned away from the lights of the town, into the darkness. We contemplated pulling up, sleeping in the car, and waiting until dawn, but drove on confident that we could avoid the risks of driving down remote African tracks in the dark.

Christine Maggiore, the AIDS denialist whose daughter died of AIDS, died of AIDS herself in January. Richard, aka the Botswana Skeptic gives us his views on her death.

The hole came out of nowhere. We had been bouncing along for several miles, perhaps fifteen, peering at our wildly shifting compass as the needle jostled around from the movement, but generally pointed East. But it was beginning to feel more and more likely that we had picked the wrong road, and our fears were confirmed when it abruptly ended in a gate, with what seemed to be a large field behind it. Frustrated, Dad drove the Suzuki into the field to turn round. The lights picked up the gaping hole too late for anyone to react, and with a wicked jolt the car pitched down into it. The front left-wheel fell three feet, leaving the rear-right high above the ground, with the whole body twisted at a forty-five degree angle. We were in the middle of nowhere, and we were well and truly stuck.

The anonymous writer of A Subtle Shift in Emphasis has a great article up this month about "Fatwa-Envy" among the South African Christian press. A student magazine there dared to print blasphemy (da-da-duuuummmm!), and now the press want to get holy on their schmolies. Evidently some Daily Mail writers are on holiday there on something.

We worked for two hours, perhaps more, pushing and shoving and building up piles of rocks in a desperate attempt to extract our vehicle from the hole, until the car battery began to die, and for the first time we accepted that we would be spending the night here. We had been fuelled by adrenanin, but as we reached the end of our efforts, we realised that we had another problem - we had eaten nothing substantial since the flight the previous night, precious little to drink, and we had no supplies beyond a tin of boiled sweets in the glove compartment. It was going to be a grim night, and come dawn we still had to figure out a way out of the mess we were in.

Let's move on to Leonie at Scorched, who writes about homeopathy. Having bought some remedies during her innocent days in 2002, she has converted to skepticism (*applauds*), and writes an excellent dissection of homeopathy. "Britain’s Royal Pharmaceutical Society agrees there’s place for “harmless faith-based ­remedies”. But when a cancer patient abandons chemo or a kid’s eardrum ruptures because the infection didn’t get treated with more than sugar pills, that’s another matter. And my medical aid payments are subsidising another’s sham treatment. That irks." Hear, hear.

That night we huddled in the car, Dad across the front seats, Mum in the rear, and me in the boot. In spite of our efforts, the car remained tilted at a precarious forty-five degree angle, and so I can remember trying to sleep in a semi-standing position, with my feet pressed against the lower end, and my shoulders wedged against the opposite side. We had tipped our luggage out into the night - spare clothes being less important than shelter. It was the rainy season, and while the days were hot, the nights were damp, and cold. We lay there for hours in the dark, not talking, wrapped in a kind of numb silence, pretending to sleep, and hoping that we would wake up in bed at Sweetwaters. Our absence there had not gone unnoticed, and far away in the night, search parties came hunting for us.

Jonathan at LimbicNutrition reviews an article recently published in Wired regarding a new concept termed "agnotology". The idea, in a nutshell, is that in certain subjects, ignorance is culturally created: "when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion." Think of it as a sort of "information entropy".

Dawn came, and with it the eerie sounds of the savannah - a faint chorus of wails and cries. The rains of the day before rose back into the sky as dense fog, trapping us in a cloud, unable to see much beyond our car. We attempted to relax, and waited for the mist to clear. Dad had been sick in the night, and it was decided that my mother and I would attempt the walk back to Nyaharuru. We had a decent idea of the direction, and guessed that the distance was something like ten miles, maybe less, maybe as many as fifteen. We walked to the gate. It was now approaching twenty-four hours since we had last had a drop to drink, we were dehydrated, and I could taste a metallic hint of blood in my mouth as I looked at the dirt track we had travelled down the night before. Weirdly, I wasn't at all daunted. There was a certain peace in that moment that is hard to explain, but it was if the fact that I had a clear plan of action was enough, even though with hindsight it was unlikely that we would manage such a feat of endurance. I had switched my brain off, and I was going to keep walking until I couldn't any more.

Spats between authors are always amusing, and George at Prometheus Unbound is involved in one himself, with a science writer who rather unwisely chose to endorse creationism. Or rather, Intelligent Design, which is of course the same thing. The target of his ire is one Leon Rousseau, a man who seems to be more than a little troubled by our intrepid blogger.

They saw us before we saw them. We had barely begun our trek when a couple of young men - tall, black, carrying tools and machetes - approached my mother and I. It was an intimidating sight, but they looked as confused as we were. Amazingly, one of them spoke passable English. They had seen us the night before, they had seen our headlights stop, and then fade, and they were wandering down to see if they could be of help. One of them - I wish I knew his name - whistled, and suddenly a whole bunch of people emerged from bushes around us to help, and the whole motley crew turned and made our way back to the car. They were far fitter and stronger than us, and they had the vehicle out in no time at all. They even helped us pile our luggage back into the boot, and we tipped them generously - they had, after all, just saved our lives. Smiling and waving we drove off towards Nyaharuru, food, drink and safety, oblivious to the fact that the rear door was still open, and that our luggage was tumbling out of the back.

Our final entry this month isn't actually about skepticism, but was so moving I felt it should be included anyway. Other Things Amanzi is the blog of "Bongi", a general surgeon working in a particularly notorious area of South Africa. He passionately describes the dififculties of being a surgeon in Africa. It's well worth a read, along with the rest of his excellent blog.

Sometimes an event occurs that shapes the way you think for the rest of your life. On that day in May 1996, I had come face-to-face with my own mortality for the first time. More than that though, I had shared this moment of vulnerability with half a dozen African villagers. We spoke different languages, we came from wildly different backgrounds, but they had helped us, and we had thanked them, and we had laughed together as our luggage had erupted from the back of the vehicle. Ever since then there are two things that I have known to be true: that it is adventure, and the willingness to go beyond the limits of your comfort that truly rewards you as a human being; and that wherever I go in the world, however different the cultures, customs, privileges and traditions are, underneath it all most people are just the same reasonable, decent human beings as you or I.

Well that's it for this month, I hope you've enjoyed the entries and my little tale. You can find out more about the Carnival of the Africans at Ioinian Enchantment. The next edition will be at Ioinian Enchantment on March 28th. In the meantime, get blogging!