The selfie from hell

"Selfies" are all the rage these days.  Heaven knows why, because they're usually poorly composed and not in focus.  They also tend to be taken at inadvisable times, such as when the subject-and-photographer has had one too many strawberry daiquiris, which is almost certainly what resulted in the invention of the truly unfortunate cultural phenomenon of "duck lips."

I won't say that I haven't succumbed to the temptation myself once or twice, although I hasten to add that it was sans daiquiris and "duck lips."  Here's a twofer selfie my wife and I took while we were hiking in the Grand Tetons a couple of weeks ago:

So they don't all turn out terrible, or embarrassing, the kind of thing you look at later and say, "How did this end up on my camera?"

Which was apparently the question that was asked by one Gina Mihai, 34, of an unnamed village in Romania, according to a story in The Daily Mirror (and reported on Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, which is where I ran across it).  Mihai says she was looking through the photographs on her cellphone one day recently, and found the following rather horrifying image:

Pretty scary.  Mihai was understandably creeped out, but she had an explanation ready at hand.  She told reporters, "When I switched the phone on I was horrified to see my dead grandmother’s face.  She had what looked like a snake around her neck, and the whole image looked as if it had been taken through a hole, like it was shot through a tear in the fabric that separates the living from the dead."

In other words, poor grandma ended up in hell, and for some reason decided to send her granddaughter what amounts to an infernal selfie.  Here's grandma in real life, just before she died:

I don't really see a lot of resemblance, myself.  But maybe that's because being in hell, not to mention having a snake around your neck, would kind of have a tendency to change your facial expression.

Mihai followed up the experience with a visit to a fortune-teller, because of course that's who you'd want to see if you wanted a touchstone of reality.  And the fortune-teller said that Mihai was right, granny was in hell, and the snake around her neck was because she was "being punished for certain sins."

The trouble is, the article also had a photograph of Mihai herself, which I include below:

And what strikes me is that the "selfie from hell" looks more like Mihai than it does like her grandmother.  My contention (and Sharon Hill's, too) is that Mihai digitally altered a photograph of herself, an easy enough thing to do with any ordinary image modification software, and now is getting her fifteen minutes of fame by disparaging her poor grandma.

But even if her contention is correct, and grandma is in hell, I thought that once you were there, it amounted to solitary confinement in the Lake of Fire?  It's hard to imagine Satan allowing texting: 

Grandma:  Excuse me, Your Infernal Evilness, can you hang on a minute?  I just need to send a message to my granddaughter.  *takes pic of herself with her cellphone*  

Satan:  Well, okay, I'll let it go this time.  Just so long as you don't do "duck lips."  That earns you five more years in the red-hot lava pit.

Grandma:  How about the snake around my neck?  I can show my granddaughter that, right?

Satan:  Sure.

So the whole thing seems pretty improbable to me, just as improbable as the claim we looked at a couple of days ago wherein god was allegedly communicating with a chef via patterns of seeds inside an eggplant.  You'd think that being powerful supernatural beings, they'd pick more direct ways of speaking to us, wouldn't you?  Like gigantic burning bushes or pillars of fire or hosts of heavenly and/or demonic entities rushing about.  But you never see any of that stuff, despite what you hear in all the folklore.

I wonder why that is.

A Titanic tale

I didn't realize what a fuss there still was over the sinking of the Titanic.

Okay, I know that it has some cachet as one of the biggest shipping disasters in history.  I know it was made into a movie, with heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.  (What, the movie isn't named Jack Dawson's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Really Bad Day?)  I know that the theme music, wherein Celine Dion's heart goes on and on and on and on and on and on, was played an average of 1,389,910 times a day for a year after the movie opened.

But really: what's the big deal?  [spoiler alert]  The ship sinks.  Lots of people drown.  End of story.

But no, that's not all there is to it, some folks say -- and by "some folks" I mean "people with the IQ of a bar of soap."  Because we haven't discussed why the Titanic sank.  And it wasn't because it ran into a great big hunk of ice.

Oh, no, that would be way too logical.

The R.M.S. Titanic in April 1912, just prior to its maiden (and only) voyage [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You can forget about all of that.  No iceberg necessary.  According to a new theory, the Titanic sank because a bunch of time travelers from the future went back to witness the Titanic sinking from on board the ship itself, and the extra weight of the passengers is what caused the ship to sink.

Now, wait, you may be saying, at least after you recover from the faceplant you undoubtedly did after reading this novel claim.  "If the time travelers are what caused it to sink, then how did anyone know it had sunk, since the ship had to sink in order for the time travelers to know to come back in time to watch it sink?"

Well, if you asked that question, all I can say is that you need to watch more episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge is always having to deal with paradoxes such as Tasha Yar's evil twin, who also turns out to be her daughter, coming after the Enterprise with revenge on her mind, because Tasha didn't actually get killed by the Sewage Monster, she was caught in an alternate universe time-warp and ended up having sex with a Romulan and giving birth to a daughter who looked exactly like her except for having pointy ears and wearing what looks like a dry-cleaning bag made of Reynolds Wrap.

So the Titanic really could have been sunk by time travelers.  At least if you believe that our world functions on the same level of scientific plausibility as Star Trek.

But that's not all.  (Oh, how I wish it were.)  Because apparently there are people who believe that not only was the Titanic capsized and sent to Davy Jones' Locker by misguided time travelers, that Jack Dawson was one of those time travelers.

Yes, we have people who have so lost touch with reality that they believe not only in ship-sinking time travelers, but that the movie Titanic is some kind of accurate historical documentary.  Why, you might ask, after recovering from a second, and more severe, faceplant?

Because the character of Jack Dawson in the movie has an anachronistic haircut, mode of speech, and attitude, and apparently somewhere in the movie mentions an artificial lake in Wisconsin that wasn't created until 1915.

That couldn't, of course, be because it was a movie.  And that the script-writers modernized the character for contemporary audiences, and got one miserable little detail wrong.

No, that can't be it.  It has to be that Jack Dawson was not only a real person, he was a time-traveler.

I think I'd better stop here, because like Celine Dion's heart, stupidity seems to go on and on and on, but my patience doesn't, and I'm reaching the point where my forehead won't stand much more in the way of impact stress.  So I'll wind up here, with the hope that no one is currently developing a theory that Game of Thrones is real history, because that would mean that Sean Bean actually was publicly executed, and heaven knows that poor man has been through enough.

A trip through the vegetable aisle

Times are tough for psychics.  There have been the legal troubles dogging famous names like "Psychic Sally" Morgan and Theresa Caputo, "The Long Island Medium," not to mention the efforts of people like The Amazing Randi to debunk professional psychics as charlatans and hoaxers.

So with all of this unpredictable bad stuff going on, you can imagine that it's becoming increasingly difficult for your average working psychic to afford crystal balls and magic wands and flowing robes, and all of the other necessities of the job.  That stuff has got to be expensive.  So no wonder that some of them have turned to doing divination using cheaper tools...

... like garden vegetables.

You probably think I'm making this up, but in a link sent to me by the inimitable writer, skeptic, and deep thinker Tyler Tork, we meet one Jemima Packington, a British woman who says that she is the world's only "asparamancer."

Yes, "asparamancer," as in "asparagus."  Because what Packington does is she goes out and buys some asparagus spears at the local grocery store, and then comes home, tosses them in the air, and then from the pattern they make where they fall, she tells us what's going to happen.

In the video in the link, which you all must watch, she does a demonstration of "asparamancy," in which the asparagus spears are supposed to tell us about the weather.  So she chucks her asparagus spears around, and proceeds to tell us that because some "little bits and pieces" fell off, that "this would suggest some rain."

What, the fact that you live in England didn't suggest that to you by itself?  I was in England on holiday for the entire month of July about fifteen years ago, and it rained pretty much continuously.  The locals, of course, didn't seem to be bothered at all.  I walked into a pub, soaked to the skin after a ten-mile hike in the Yorkshire Dales in a chilly downpour, and the owner of the pub looked over at me as I stood there, dripping and shivering, and said, and I quote, "Mistin' a bit thick out there today, ain't it?"

For cryin' in the sink, predicting rain in England is a little like predicting that January in upstate New York is going to be "a bit nippy."

She also said that because of the direction of the spears, there was going to be a lot of wind.  Note, in the photograph I posted above, her hair blowing in the wind, which once again you'd think would be sufficient, without the asparagus.  It reminds me of the magical Weather Forecasting Stone, have you seen it?

But Packington doesn't just forecast the weather.  According to the article, she has made a number of other predictions, to wit:

1. There will be sad a loss to the Royal Family.
2. But there will also be a happy addition.
3. A major entertainment mogul will retire.
4. Politics in the Middle East will continue to raise concern.
5. One political party leader will be dogged by turmoil and not recover.
6. A storm this month will bring more misery to Britain.
7. The weather in the Far East will deteriorate as the year progresses.
8. A musical supergroup will split.
9. There will be a string of celebrity divorces.

Whoo!  Trouble in the Middle East and a string of celebrity divorces!  Those are some insightful predictions, there.  It's no wonder that Packington says that her predictions always come true.  That happens when you predict things that everyone already knew were going to happen.

But that doesn't stop her from claiming that she has magic powers that allow her to make accurate predictions about the future.  And you can follow her on Twitter if you want to keep up with them, @Asparamancer.  As for me, I think I'm going to go to the grocery store, but not for asparagus.  I think I should buy some eggplant instead.  Just last week a chef in Baton Rouge, Louisiana found an eggplant slice whose seeds spelled out "GOD," and promptly declared that it was a miraculous message from the Lord.

If I was a deity, I'd find a better way to sign my name than to inscribe it inside an eggplant, but what do I know?  Maybe vegetables do channel magic and/or holy messages, and instead of the bacon and eggs I had planned for breakfast, I should go cook up some brussels sprouts or something.

Wild West travelogue

Well, I'm back, and many thanks to my patient readers for sticking around during my two-week hiatus.  I'd like to launch this week with some observations from my travels, along with a few photographs taken by my wife (who is the amazing artist Carol Bloomgarden) and me.

Our travels this year took us out into the American West, where we spent some time in the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Park.  First of all, the natural beauty is stunning; while I like to think that we live in a part of the world that has awesome scenery (upstate New York), the grandeur of scale out there is something few places in the world can match.

The Grand Teton Mountains, from near Jackson Hole, Wyoming

There are a few additional things that have always impressed me about the American West, though.  One of them is that the Yee-Haw Attitude is alive and well, both in its positive and negative senses.  There's a feeling that personal freedom is paramount, as long as what you're doing doesn't impinge upon anyone else's personal freedom.  We did a lot of geocaching out there (and if you don't know about this amazingly weird and fun hobby, check it out here) -- and one of the caches we were seeking took us across a construction site up in Glacier National Park.  We started to cross, and were approached by two construction workers.  I expected that they were going to tell us to bugger off, that we weren't allowed there -- but they said, and I quote, "Do what you like as long as you don't mess with the equipment."

As another example of this, consider speed limits.  Near urban centers, even in the west, it's the usual 55 mph.  But as you get further out into the middle of nowhere, it goes up to 60, then 65, then 75 mph, until (in central Montana) they give up entirely.  "All right, go however the hell fast you want to," they seem to say.  "We know you're going to anyhow."

All of which is kind of funny, because our rental car was a Chevy Spark.  If you are unfamiliar with this car, all I can say is that the Chevy Spark is to cars as a pug is to dogs -- small, stubby, cute in a squashed sort of way, and not really particularly well adapted for any useful purpose.  I think that the Spark got its name from the fact that "spark" represents the energy level of which the engine is capable.  I noted that the speedometer went up to 120 mph, which was grimly amusing, because I don't think the Spark could go 120 mph if you dropped it off a cliff.  It went downhill like a boss, but going up (for example) Logan Pass involved lots of encouraging words from us and lots of nasty looks from the drivers of the cars who were in line behind us going 14 mph and who wanted for some reason to get to their destination that day.

Our Chevy Spark, recovering from a long climb

Of course, I spent a lot of time indulging in my favorite hobby, which is birdwatching.  Much of my behavior illustrated Dave Barry's contention that there is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness.  For example, we were at the LeHardy Rapids on the Yellowstone River, a site of amazing beauty, and there was also a rainbow trout run going on, which is pretty spectacular to see.  But my wife had spotted a Harlequin Duck, a bird I'd never seen, sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream.   The following conversation ensued:

Other tourist:  Wow!  This place is gorgeous! 

Me:  Look.  There's the duck. 

Other tourist:  That water is so blue!  And the trees!  And look at all of the trout in the river! 

Me:  But there's the duck. 

Other tourist:  Yellowstone is one of the natural wonders of the world! 

Me:  I know.  That's one incredible duck.

The duck in question

Which is not to say that I didn't appreciate other stuff.  In particular, Yellowstone is an astonishing place, to the point of parts of it being kind of surreal.  The hot springs, especially, which look like some amateur artist decided to use up all of their supply of brightly-colored acrylics in painting a nature scene.  If you ever get a chance to go to Yellowstone, the must-see (in my opinion) isn't Old Faithful, but Grand Prismatic Spring, which is colored by minerals and brilliantly pigmented bacteria:

Speaking of Yellowstone, it was in the forefront of my mind to consider the possibility of eruption of the hotspot/supervolcano that lies underneath Yellowstone Caldera, largely because over the last couple of years the woo-woos have been running around making little squeaking noises about how an eruption is imminent and you can tell because the bison and elk are fleeing from the park in terror, and also because the evil US government is evacuating the place and herding everyone into FEMA camps.  Well, we saw lots of people who weren't being held prisoner in FEMA camps, not to mention hundreds of bison, and I can say first-hand that the bison showed no evidence of fleeing in terror.  Most of them were simply moseying about in terror, or even snoozing in terror.

A bison, standing around munching on grass in terror

It did occur to me, though, that these might be suicidal bison, who realized that the volcano was going to blow and decided to stick around because they were depressed and wanted to end it all.  And in fact, "Meh, fuck it" seemed to be a common attitude amongst the wildlife we saw.

Which is a good thing, because otherwise the main cause of death in Yellowstone wouldn't be people getting vaporized by a volcanic eruption, but tourists being killed in messy ways because of sheer stupidity.  I have never seen so many people who evidently do not understand that "hot spring" means "so hot that it will boil your skin off," and "wild animal" means "animal that could easily kill you if it wanted to."  A former student of mine, who has worked in the national parks, told me that just a few weeks ago, a guy tried to put his son on the back of an elk so that his wife could take a photograph, and elk bucked and kicked the father in the head.

And killed him.

We didn't see anyone get killed in Yellowstone, but it wasn't for want of trying.  We saw one woman who was jumping up and down in front of a bison, waving her arms and shouting, "Hello, bison!  Hello, pretty bison!" so that it would turn its head for a picture with her.  When it refused to cooperate, she laughed and said, "Bye-bye, pretty bison!" and scampered off.  But the worst was when we saw a bear by the side of the road...

... a grizzly bear.

Okay, I took a picture of it, but using my zoom, and from the safety of my car.  But there were dozens of people who got out of their cars.  Despite the fact that this is clearly the most dangerous animal in the park, and is unpredictable.  And huge.  Which is why you're supposed to carry a whistle and pepper spray with you whenever you hike in the area.

You do know how to tell the different kinds of bear scat apart, right?  Black bears eat a lot of fruit, so black bear poop contains seeds and stems.  Brown bear poop often contains fish bones.  Grizzly bear poop, on the other hand, contains whistles and smells like pepper.

But that didn't stop people from acting like complete raving morons, running up to the wild animals and stepping on unstable ground over boiling hot lakes, despite the multitude of signs and warnings that were everywhere.  And I'm sure that if something bad had happened, the last thing that would have gone through these tourists' minds before being mauled and/or cooked to death would have been, "Why didn't someone warn me of the danger?"

But despite all that, the trip was amazing, and I highly recommend it to any of you who like to travel.  Traveling is, I think, the most eye-opening experience out there, and the natural world is full of beautiful, stunning, awe-inspiring places to visit.

And lots of really incredible ducks.

The guiding stones

(The last of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in September 2011.  I'll be back in the saddle on Monday!)

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It is virtually self-evident that belief in an odd idea can propel you to do odd things.

Of the many odd things I've run into, however, the Georgia Guidestones definitely come near the top of the list.  Built of polished granite and standing sixteen feet tall, the Guidestones are arranged on the top of a treeless hill in Elbert County, Georgia.  They are so imposing (and so mysterious) that they've been compared to Stonehenge, or to the weird black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons) 

Not the least mystery about them is who commissioned them, and why.  They were erected, under mysterious circumstances, in June of 1979.  The land on which they stand is owned by Elbert County, and was deeded to them by a "Robert C. Christian," who had purchased the land from a Wayne Mullenix.  I put "Robert C. Christian" in quotes because this almost certainly is a pseudonym -- curious researchers have tried, unsuccessfully, to identify who he is (or was).  (There is apparently persuasive, if circumstantial, evidence that R. C. Christian is Ted Turner.)

The message on the Guidestones is a series of (if you will) Ten Commandments, evidently intended to help the survivors create a better society once the apocalypse knocks off the rest of us.  These pronouncements are presented in twelve different languages -- English, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Hindi, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Babylonian Cuneiform, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics.  These last four, I suppose, are there in case the apocalypse spares some (for example) Ancient Sumerians.

The Guidestones themselves have various notches and holes cut into them, apparently in an effort to make them line up with the position of the sun, moon, and stars at various times of year.  The overall effect is to deepen the mystery, and perhaps heighten perception of the structure as resembling Stonehenge. 

Given the time and effort someone put into all of this, and how seriously he seems to take himself (I'm assuming that R. C. Christian is a man, given the male pseudonym), I find it a little disappointing how generally inane the Guidestones' "Ten Commandments" are.  Some of them aren't bad ideas, but are hardly earthshattering ("Protect People And Nations With Fair Laws And Just Courts"), while others seem a little pie-in-the-sky ("Unite Humanity With A Living New Language.")  I have to admit to some disappointment upon reading what they said.  Given all of the mystery, and all the expense someone obviously went to, I was expecting something a little more profound.  (You can read the entire message on the Guidestones here.) 

What I find even more baffling about this whole thing is how people have responded to them.  New Age types mostly think they're great.  Yoko Ono, for example, says they are "a stirring call to rational thinking."  Some prominent Christian thinkers, predictably, disagree, one Evangelical minister calling them "The Ten Commandments of the Antichrist."  An Atlanta psychic, Naunie Batchelder, predicted as far back as 1981 that they were of alien origin, and their purpose would be revealed "within thirty years."  (The aliens had better get on that, as they've only got three and a half months left.)  

Conspiracy theorists, of course, think they're just the bee's knees.  Mark Dice, whose favorite topics are the Illuminati and the New World Order, believes that they are of "deep Satanic origin," and has demanded that they be "smashed into a million pieces."  Dice thinks that somehow the Bilderburg Group were involved with the funding and construction of the Guidestones.  A researcher named Van Smith has done some numerological analysis of the Guidestones and claims that they are somehow connected to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building -- and believes that the dimensions of the Guidestones, when properly manipulated, predicted the date of death of Dubai's emir, Sheik Maktoum bin Rashid al Maktoum.  Noted wingnut Alex Jones thinks the Rosicrucians are responsible. 

All we need is to somehow get the Knights Templar involved, and we'll have a full house of bizarre explanations.

And, of course, all of these folks have followers, and those followers are happy to take action, when they're not picking at the straps of their straitjackets with their teeth.  Chickens have more than once been sacrificed in front of the Guidestones.  They are a frequent meeting site for a coven of Wiccans from Atlanta.  The Guidestones themselves have been repeatedly defaced, most recently by spray-painted graffiti stating "Death to the New World Order" and "Jesus will beat u satanist."  There has been more than one attempt to topple the Guidestones, but given that each of the stone blocks weighs twenty tons, those efforts have been thus far unsuccessful.

So, that's today's little dose of weirdness.  Next time I'm in Georgia, I'm going to make an effort to go see these things.  Not that I particularly think their message is all that profound -- but just to have had a chance to see, first-hand, what all the fuss is about.  And since one of the Guidestones' rules says, "Rule Passion - Faith - Tradition - And All Things With Tempered Reason," I figure I owe them at least that much.

The ley of the land

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in September 2011.)

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I ran into the idea of ley lines fifteen years ago on a trip to the UK.  I spent a month in the summer of 1995 hiking in the north of England, visiting old cathedrals and monastery ruins, and while I was at Rievaulx Abbey, I had a chance meeting with an English woman who said that if you connected the positions of holy sites on a map with straight lines, it made a pattern.

"They sited monasteries, cloisters, and cathedrals where they did because they were places of power," she said.  "The ley lines are channels of psychic energy, and where they intersect, it creates a kind of vortex.  The ancients felt this, and that's why they built monuments there, and later churches and abbeys."

Couldn't it, I asked her, also have to do with building in places where there was good access to water, and perhaps pre-existing roads?

"I suppose that also might have had something to do with it," she said, sounding doubtful.

For all her claims of the antiquity of this idea, the concept of ley lines is less than a hundred years old, and at first, it had nothing to do with anything psychic.  Alfred Watkins, an amateur archaeologist, noted in his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track how often multiple sites of archaeological or historical relevance lay upon the same straight lines, and he coined the term "ley lines" to describe this phenomenon.  He suggested that the reason was for ease of road-building -- especially in the southern half of England, where the terrain is mostly gentle, a straight line connecting several population centers is the smartest way site roads and settlements.  It wasn't until 48 years later that noted woo-woo John Michell, author of The View Over Atlantis, took Watkins' ley lines and connected them to the Chinese idea of feng shui and came up with the theory that ley lines were rivers of psychic energy, and the intersections ("nodes") were places of power.

The interesting thing is that Watkins himself wasn't even right, appealing though the idea is.  Mathematician David George Kendall and others have used a technique called shape analysis to demonstrate that the occurrence of straight-line connections between archaeological sites in England is no greater than you would expect from chance.  Put simply, a densely-settled place like England has so many sites of historical relevance that if you are allowed to pick and choose, you can find any number of lines that intersect, or at least clip, interesting places.

Take a look, for example, at the following diagram (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons):

This image shows 137 randomly-placed points.  A computer program was employed to find all of the straight-line connections of four or more points -- and it found eighty of them!

So, even if you eliminate all of the woo-woo trappings from the idea, it seems like the whole concept of "sacred sites" falling along straight lines is attributable to coincidence.  A pity, really.  I have always wondered if our house was at the intersection of two ley lines.  I was all prepared to use Intersections of Psychic Energy Channels and Nodes of Power Vortexes to explain why my digital alarm clock runs fast and why the dryer keeps eating my socks.

Ear candles and carrot dances

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in April 2011.)

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Just when I thought "alternative medicine" couldn't get any weirder, I came across a practice I'd never heard of before:  "ear candling."

It's also called "thermo-auricular therapy," which is a little like an elevator operator wanting to be called a "vertical transportation technician."  Basically, the concept is that many people suffer from impactions of ear wax, and so what you need to do is to lie on your side and stick a lit candle in your ear.  The lit candle will create a suction that will pull the ear wax out.

Practitioners always cut open the candle stubs at the end, showing all the orange goop inside the candle -- but in a controlled experiment performed on himself by skeptic and brave soul Bobby Nelson, it was demonstrated that the orange goop was residue from the candle itself, and was there even if you let the candle burn while sitting on a cereal box.  (We are assuming that the cereal box did not have an impaction of ear wax at the time.)  You can read the account of his experiment here, and see photos of Nelson lying there with a lit candle in his ear and a very grim expression.

As I was reading about this, I kept thinking this was some kind of prank medical procedure, as April Fools' Day was last week, but tragically, it's not.  People really do this, and some people swear by it.  Never mind that if the candle actually was capable of creating a powerful enough suction to suck up ear wax, it would rupture your ear drum.  Never mind that claims of the practice originating with the Hopi turned out to be lies -- the Hopis, when questioned, responding, "Of course we don't stick lit candles in our ears.  Do we look like morons?"  Never mind that dozens of people have ended up in the emergency room because hot candle wax ended up dripping down into their ear canals.  Never mind that there have been two recorded cases of people performing ear candling on themselves, falling asleep while doing so, and burning down their houses.

I am always amazed at how far the placebo effect and confirmation bias can drive people.  Now, don't misunderstand me; there are some types of "alternative medicine" that actually might work, and which are currently being studied by reputable medical researchers.  Acupuncture and a few of the herbal medicines come to mind.  But to quote Tim Minchin:  "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."  I'm much more willing to believe the dozens of controlled studies that have shown that ginkgo biloba doesn't improve your memory than the anecdotal evidence of people who say "it worked for me."  But when not only is there no evidence for something, and controlled studies show that it doesn't work, and there's a good argument that it can't work as advertised, and people still believe in it... that I really don't get.

On the other hand, the obnoxious side of my personality (never very deeply buried) wonders if I might not be able to have a little fun with this.  Perhaps I should come up with an alternative medicine therapy of my own, and create a website to promote it, and see how many people I can get to give it a try.  How about this one:

Are you tired?  Do you sleep poorly?  Do you feel like you're not grounded, of late?  Invoke the Earth Spirits and realign your Root Chakra by performing the CLEANSING DANCE OF THE SACRED CARROTS.  Take two carrots, and bless them, saying, "Oh great Carrot Spirits, bring to me your sacred wisdom."  Then stick the carrots up your nose.  Then put on some nice New Age music (we suggest Yanni) and dance around in your living room until the carrots are Saturated With The Heaviness Of Your Soul and fall out.  Wear gloves to dispose of the carrots so that the Tired Energy doesn't seep back and infect your chakras again.  You'll feel better immediately.  Trust me.