 Welcome to a very special season of Reason edition of The Randy's Show. Randy, can you just describe briefly what the season of Reason is all about here at the James Randy Educational Foundation? Well, it's sort of a substitute for Christmas. That's the way I look at it. Steve's the reason we're coming to the end of the year and people look over their account and say should I give away some money this year? And the accountant says yes. They say I have to give it to a non-profit and we are, the James Randy Educational Foundation, a legitimate non-profit as we can tell from looking at our books and talking to our account. But that is one reason we time it at the end of the year this way. And not only that, there are all kinds of bonuses that are being offered to people if they give $100 or more, but you can tell us about that, I'm sure. The big one is James Randy Ornament for your holiday tree. If you can go to randy.org you'll see a picture of it. It's you and a Santa hat sitting in a chair. We've gotten a couple of comments, emails, questions from people asking if you are in fact Santa Claus. That's not true, right? Well, it depends how you define Santa Claus. In this household, pretty well, yes. But not outside these walls. I have a serious doubt about the existence of the jolly old elf and flying reindeer. That's a little tough for me to take. Wait a second. I have a problem with that, Brian. I'm sure you don't have any problem with it. My mother told me that you aren't Santa Claus, but you're just one of his helpers. No, exposed. Exposed, finally. I knew this day would arrive. I just knew it would arrive. My apologies to the world and I hope that you'll put this on YouTube so that it will be exposed to the whole world. I am only a helper and I'm a little bit lame in the hip now, so I'm not doing that much helping. I do a lot of paperwork for the jolly old elf and I do it in Florida rather than doing it at the North Pole because I tried it one time and I gave up after about six hours of it. I was frozen to the pen and that gets your attention right away. Seriously, ladies and gentlemen, the season of reason is very important to us at the JRF and important to us who have literally dedicated our lives and our existences to bringing rationality and sanity to the public at large, not just to the members of the JRF but to schools and school teachers and structures of all kinds and through the amazing meeting that we involve ourselves in every year and this last one I had 1,672 attendees. That's a hell of a big figure, you know. Yeah, it's the largest conference for skeptics and free thinkers in the world. That's true. And from 35 countries, Brian, there were 35 countries represented there. That's really flattery. I don't think I could find 35 countries on the globe of the world if I tried to but we had that number of countries actually represented there. That's the thing to be very proud of and I'm personally very proud of it but it could not have been done without the cooperation of all those fine people who volunteer for us and who work for us. And we do have many, many, many supporters all over the world who help us out all the time and even though we're a small organization we've been able to accomplish quite a bit this year. You mentioned our educational programs that if people go to randy.org they can see how they can download educational modules to use in the classroom on all sorts of topics. Absolutely free. We've got an ESP module working on a dowsing module and a module on the Coddingley fairies that teach kids how to think critically and investigate things using the scientific method and has these fun topics as a sort of jumping off point for that kind of instruction. The Coddingley fairies is so amusing. It's so juvenile that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, pardon me, knighted in England, can you imagine? I mean actually knighted, not for the creation of Sherlock Holmes but for another support of the government that he was famous for. But this man actually believes these two little girls when they sent him these simple photographs of paper cutouts on the lawn with hatpins holding them up. It's an incredible story, the Coddingley fairies story but it's a good subject for kids because they'll get amused by it but then I hope that it syncs in on them the importance of it, the seriousness of it. The public at large believed this Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed it and thousands of people in the UK and in fact all over the world believed that there were fairies in Coddingley Glen. Incredible that people would believe this. But there are still people, we call them theosophists who believe in gnomes and the ganashing of gnomed teeth I always think of it and fairies and we folks. They still believe in it and they call themselves theosophists. Da, this is incredible but it's true and the modules that we turned out on that particular subject are not only entertaining as I said to the kids but it shows them that there is something important they can get their teeth into and when they get into a discussion of why did people believe this they can hardly believe the conclusions that they come to. It's very educational and it's very useful and I'm very proud that we have that out there. And in addition to that we also offer educational grants to teachers who want to develop a critical thinking curriculum for their own classroom we offer scholarships for students I mean just the list goes on and on and on just go to randy.org and click on our season of reason banner and you'll be able to see a rundown of everything that we've been up to this past year and what your money would go to support when we go into next year because we have a lot of big plans for the future. We are in tough times, sure we are. We are in tough times there's no denying that but you can make those times just a little less tough for us at the JRF and it will improve life for everybody, not only in this country but really around the world because we have a lot of fans a lot of supporters from around the world I hope that you'll join them in the season for reason. The Randy Show is a production of the James Randy Educational Foundation to learn more about how we promote science and critical thinking go to randy.org