It seems Rich’s post about the rude, arrogant, and not particularly talented Fumento’s email has received quite the following:

DailyPundit
Spoons
USS Clueless
MySelf

You can access Mr. Fumento’s site here. You can send him an email at fumento@pobox.com.

Update: Here’s a review of one of Fumento’s scholarly endeavors. Some choice quotes:

After a sycophantic foreword by JoAnn Manson, an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical who should know better, you’ll find a nasty, simplistic book devoid of significant substance written by an average-sized man who lost 25 pounds and considers that weight loss one of his life’s biggest accomplishments.

It becomes apparent after reading the first few pages that Fumento desperately tries to be funny. His idol seems to be Dave Barry, but he isn’t in Barry’s league. Example: “I found a stack of papers so high that a pair of bald eagles built a nest on top.”

Fumento (ab)uses all those footnotes to make wild statements that are often neither explained nor substantiated. Instead, there are footnotes and more footnotes, sometimes four or five within just a couple of paragraphs, giving the author carte blanche to make just about any statement he wants. Who’s going to go to the library to check what’s really behind a reference like “Lawrence Garfinkel, “Overweight and Mortality,” Cancer 58 (8 [15 October 1986]: 1826-29″?

And all those footnotes notwithstanding, Fumento often struggles with fact. For example, he calls executive director Sally Smith “president” of NAAFA. For an author who frequently cites the NAAFA Newsletter and Workbook, that seems a glaring error, especially for a medical journalist who must be especially careful with titles and credentials. Is the rest of his research equally shoddy? He also claims that NAAFA had polled its members and decreed that to qualify as fat a woman had to be 289 pounds, a weight which, Fumento offers, “is grotesquely, horribly, obscenely fat.” In fact, NAAFA never did such a survey. He gleefully calls model Anna Nicole Smith “the first obese playmate” though at the time she was featured in Playboy, she wasn’t statistically overweight. He says he lost 25 pounds at one point in the book, then later brags that he lost 20% of his body weight, which would indicate that he started at an unlikely 125 pounds. Is the rest of his math off, too?

Yup, he’s better than bloggers.

Update2: Seems Fumento has what is basically a blog and he mentions his encounter with Rich by being insulting.

Posted in uncategorized on August 13th, 2003 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |