Well, here’s a turn up for the books. I pass the buildings of the Center for Inquiry (West) in Hollywood quite regularly on my to-ings and fro-ings, and always wondered what it was. About what were they inquiring? My inquiring mind wanted to know, but by time I got back to a computer, I’d forgotten all about intending to Google it. I was sort of expecting that it might be some, er, fringe organization, given the neighbourhood (not 1/4 of a mile away is 
the mother ship (or one of them) for the Scientologists, and a similar distance in the other direction is the “Scientology Celebrity Centre” too, where John, Tom, Kirstie, and others from the remarkably large movie star Scientology set presumably go and hang out and feel… celebrated).
Well, it turns out that it’s not like that after all, but a place where, as far as I can tell, serious reason-based inquiry into issues surrounding the places where, e.g., science, religion, culture and superstition intersect (such as, you know, real life) is encouraged. I like that poster of theirs I found, for example (image to the right).
They have a number of speaker series, where all sorts of interesting people come to speak, and people come to listen and discuss. One is called Feed Your Brain, and the other is Cafe Inquiry. This is all very excellent and almost on my doorstep, and so I will keep an eye out for interesting events. I do not need to do so for at least two Feed Your Brain events since, for one of them, Chris Mooney (of The Intersection) is the speaker, and he emailed me about it earlier today! He talks on Sunday 4th May at 11:00am, and the title is “The War on Science: What Have We Learned?”. More about it here.
For the other event, I also know the speaker. It is me. More later.
-cvj
Heh. We filmed The Skeptologists pilot there a month ago! I’ve been there once before; I gave a talk there back in ’93 I think it was. They do good work; investigating nonsense, putting out information, giving workshops at educators’ conferences.
The theater there was sponsored by Steve Allen, a skeptic though of some repute for his other works. 🙂
That’s a depressingly long list of Scientology-practicing celebrities. I love that poster. Too bad it doesn’t appear to be for sale. It would make a stimulating focal point for a library display in my small high school where a slew of kids observed the National Day of Prayer today.