Songs of the flowers

I remember a family friend when I was a child who talked to her plants.

Mostly she gave them ultimatums.  There was a particularly recalcitrant chrysanthemum, I recall, that didn't want to flower, and our friend told it that it had one more year to show up to the game, or it'd find itself on the compost pile.

The chrysanthemum flowered like crazy that year.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now I don't think that our friend really believed that her talking to the plants made any difference; it was more of a running joke.  But there are definitely people who believe that plants are conscious.  A lot of them still believe the completely discredited claims of Cleve Backster, who back in 1966 said he hooked up a polygraph machine to a house plant and then threatened to burn it with a lighter.  The needle, Backster said, jiggled crazily.

Supposedly the plant also knew when Backster was on an airplane that was experiencing a rough landing.  Given that this is the same guy who had threatened to torch it, maybe it was excited at the prospect of getting rid of him.

Be that as it may, Backster has become something of a hero to the woo-woo world.  His experiment was written up in the International Journal of Parapsychology in 1968, and he went on to try to show that not only were plants telepathic, so were bacteria and sperm.  None of these "experiments" were ever replicated under controlled conditions, and virtually all scientists consider Backster's claims to be unsubstantiated nonsense.

But that hasn't stopped people from wanting it to be true, and just a couple of days ago I ran into some people who are making an extraordinary claim.  Before, we could talk to plants, and all we could do is assume they heard us.  But these folks have invented a device...

... that lets the plants talk back.

Apparently, the device, which costs £499 (not including shipping), hooks up some kind of electrical sensor to plants' leaves, and then converts the minute signals registered thereon to music.  You might be thinking: well, that's cool, but that doesn't mean they think these are deliberate communications, do they?

The answer is yes, they do:

Do you talk to your plants?  Would you like to hear them respond?  Nature has many incredible ways of communicating, and with the Music of the Plants U1 device, there is finally an avenue of expression for the plant world.  A Music of the Plants device in your home or garden will awaken a deeper sense of awareness and connection to the natural world.  Crafted by hand, the U1 is the result of over forty years of fascinating research at Damanhur.  The music created is organic and relaxing, allowing listeners to be at one with nature and to appreciate the impact that our interactions and intentions have on the plant world.  Discover this a unique and profound connection for yourself.

So naturally, I had to find out more about Damanhur, which I discovered is a commune north of Turin, Italy that calls itself the "Laboratory of the Future."  A lot of what they talk about -- peaceful and sustainable living, supporting each other in achieving goals, living harmoniously -- sounds pretty awesome, honestly.  But of course, they couldn't just leave it at that.  When I went to their page about their plant "research," I found the following:

Researching and exploring aspects of human potentiality results in the amplification of individual sensitivity.  As such, it's easy to intuit that plants, just like humans, animals, and other life forms, have their own intelligence and sensitivity...  As early as 1976, Damanhurian researchers had created equipment capable of capturing electromagnetic changes on the surface of leaves and roots and transforming them into sounds.  The trees learn to control their electrical responses, as if they are aware of the music they are creating.

There was a recording of some of the music from red and white roses on their website, so I decided to give it a listen.   And my considered opinion is: if that's all the plants have to say, it's no wonder most humans don't pay much attention.  It sounds like a piece that was rejected from Music From the Hearts of Space on the basis of not being peppy enough.

Maybe it's just because they picked roses, I dunno.  My dad grew beautiful show-quality tea roses, but only by pampering them continuously, so maybe they're too hoity-toity to say anything with substance.  It'd be interesting to see what the results would be if they listened to, say, crabgrass.

In any case, I don't think that the "music of the plants" is going to take either the music world or the scientific world by storm.  If you convert random electrical signals to music, you'll get random music, which is pretty much what they've done here.  Ascribing meaning to it only is possible if you apply to it the meaning you'd already decided it had, which makes the whole exercise one big study in confirmation bias.

Even so, I think I might have a talk with the lime tree in my greenhouse.  It keeps getting infested with scale insects, then spreading them to my other plants.  Maybe it'll try harder to stay healthy if I threaten it.  Might sing another tune, you think?

Cult of the week

It appears that we have a new religion on our hands.

Vice reported this week that actor Andrew Keegan has founded his own cult, called "Full Circle," in (surprise!) California.  Keegan, you may recall, was one of the actors in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, and is also known for his bravura performance as "Gotham PD Police Officer In Fight At End" in The Dark Knight Rises.

So you can kind of see why he might have turned his attention away from acting.  Keegan's nascent religion attracted the attention of reporter Brett Mazurek not only because of Keegan's debatable fame, but because it's a pretty peculiar belief system.  "Full Circle" members don't see it that way, of course; they describe it as "the highest spiritualism founded on universal knowledge" and say that Mazurek came to talk to Keegan and his followers because he "came through the vortex of Keegan's energy."

Whatever that means.

Oh, and one of Keegan's inner circle said his name was "Third Eye," following in the great tradition of being known for having non-standard numbers of body parts, such as Six-Fingered Man in The Princess Bride and One-Legged Man in Treasure Island.  (Yes, I know he's talking about the "mystical Third Eye," not an actual extra eye in the middle of his forehead, or anything.  But there isn't the slightest bit of evidence that the "mystical Third Eye" exists, so I'm not sure how else someone like me is supposed to interpret it.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What do the Full Circlers believe, you might be wondering?  Here's the belief system explained, in Keegan's own words.

Synchronicity.  Time.  That's what it's all about.  Whatever, the past, some other time.  It's a circle; in the center is now.  That's what it's about...  We're very, very aware of the shift that's happening in the mind and the heart, and everybody is on that love agenda.  We're very much scientifically, spiritually, and emotionally aware of how it works, meaning that there's power in the crystals, there's power in our hearts, there's an alignment, there's a resonance... and it transfers through water...  (T)he mission is to take the war out of our story, which is essentially peace, but activated peace.

All of this puts me in mind of the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, which strings together words and phrases from Chopra's Twitter feed, and comes up with fake Chopra quotes that sound convincingly like the real thing (i.e., they have lots of New Age buzzwords, but don't really mean anything).  Here's the one I got: "Eternal stillness is the wisdom of universal sexual energy."  Which I think should be added to Keegan's mission statement.

In fact, they should just use the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator to create their entire dogma.  It'd probably be more sensible than what Keegan himself said about it.

As far as how Keegan came to found Full Circle, he told Mazurek that he had been attacked by two gang members on the same day as the tsunami hit Japan -- March 11, 2011.  That had to mean something, Keegan said.  And after that, he had some odd experiences:

I had a moment where I was looking at a street lamp and it exploded.  That was a weird coincidence.  At a ceremony, a heart-shaped rose quartz crystal was on the altar, and synchronistically, this whole thing happened.  It's a long story, but basically the crystal jumped off the altar and skipped on camera.  That was weird.

So I suppose at that point, he had no choice but to form a cult.

So far, Keegan has attracted what looks like about three dozen members of his church.  Which is kind of surprising, not only from the standpoint that most of what he talks about seems to be woo-woo gibberish, but also because they apparently believe that everyone should have regular colon cleanses. That would have turned me away all by itself.  I mean, I'm all for seeking enlightenment, but I'm pretty sure that it has nothing to do with what amounts to sticking a garden hose up your ass and turning it on.

So there you are.  A new religion, because evidently we didn't have enough of them before.  I'm guessing this one won't last very long; these things have a way of coming and going pretty quickly.

Although people would probably have said the same thing about L. Ron Hubbard when he founded Scientology.  So maybe we should keep our eye on this one.

Ghosts of Christmas present

Ouija boards are back in the news again, perhaps because of the recent release of the movie Ouija, which has people stirred up despite getting a 7% rating over at the site Rotten Tomatoes and reviews such as, "... strikingly like High School Musical, only with screaming."

Be that as it may, there is something about Ouija boards that really scares people.  Tales abound of people getting freaked out by messages from demons or evil spirits, even though the stories are usually of the "I heard it from my best friend's uncle's barber's daughter" type.  When you try it yourself, you quickly find that any "messages" that come through are banal at best, and easily explained through the ideomotor effect.  (For a really cool experiment that demonstrates this conclusively, go here.)

Further, there was a test run by none other than James Randi, where people who believed in the powers of Ouija boards were blindfolded and then asked their spirit friends to deliver messages anyhow.  The spirits all of a sudden seemed unable to see, themselves, and what they put out was gibberish, unless there's a language in the spirit world where "GHISKNNDPSBPLG" means something.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But still, the risks from demons and ghosts is ever-present for some people, and there are many warnings to "stay away from those things," even though you'd think Hasbro wouldn't sell many of 'em if every kid who used them ended up possessed.

This fact evidently has escaped some of the devout, who are alarmed by the hype that the movie has caused.  Ouija boards are expected to be a sellout this Christmas, which has freaked out the powers-that-be enough that a priest in Ireland made a public statement -- although under conditions of anonymity.  Maybe he didn't want the demons and evil spirits to find out he's been trash-talking them, assuming the demons and evil spirits read The Independent, which is where the story was covered.

"It's easy to open up evil spirits but it's very hard to get rid of them," the priest said in an interview.  "People, especially young people and teenagers who are likely to experiment with Ouija boards on a whim, can be very naive in thinking that they are only contacting the departed souls of loved-ones when they attempt to communicate with the dead using the boards.  It's like going to some parts of Africa and saying I'm personally immune to Ebola.  But it does leave people open to all kinds of spiritual dangers.  People don't intend any spiritual harm by it, but we live in a spiritual realm and you have no way to control what may impinge on you."

Yes, it's just like saying you're immune to Ebola, except that Ebola actually exists.  

The anonymous priest wasn't the only one to make a public statement.  Church of England vicar Peter Irwin-Clark is equally appalled by the surge in popularity of the toy, and told a reporter for The Daily Mail, "It is absolutely appalling.  I would very strongly advise parents not to buy Ouija boards for children.  It’s like opening a shutter in one’s soul and letting in the supernatural.  There are spiritual realities out there and they can be very negative.  I would hugely recommend people not to have anything to do with the occult.  People find they are having strange dreams, strange things happening to them, even poltergeist activity."

I wonder if that's what's wrong with my wife, who two nights ago dreamed she was participating in a chicken rodeo.

So anyway.  Predictably I'm siding with James Randi et al., who think that the Ouija board is just a silly toy.  I'd invite anyone who is looking for a Christmas present for me, though, to get me one, and it will occupy an honored spot next to my decks of Tarot cards.  I'm assuming that this will be a more economical choice than the other thing I want, which is a "haunted sword" that appeared over at Craigslist a couple of days ago, with a price-tag of $150.  You can get a Ouija board over at Target for around $20, which I think you have to admit is quite a savings.

Redirecting the outrage

I have to wonder, sometimes, why so many Christians seem to be more concerned with what people do with their naughty bits than they are with Jesus's dictum to Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself.

And to forestall the flood of comments I get when I post on topics like this, yes, I know it's not all Christians.  But it's enough of them, and there's crashing silence on the topic from a good many of the rest.

Let's start with the Arizona pastor who has recommended getting rid of AIDS by executing all homosexuals, "like God recommends."

Steven Anderson, of the Faithful Word Baptist Church of Tempe, posted a YouTube video this week (which you can watch at the link posted above, if you can stomach it) in which he had the following to say:

Turn to Leviticus 20:13, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS.  "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death.  Their blood shall be upon them."  And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing.  It’s curable — right there.  Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.

And about his taking a more hate-the-sin, love-the-sinner approach, Anderson said:

No homos will ever be allowed in this church as long as I am pastor here.  Never!  Say "You’re crazy."  No, you’re crazy if you think that there’s something wrong with my "no homo" policy.

And this is the same guy who has spoken from the pulpit about the evils of women speaking in church -- which, after all, is also mandated by the bible.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So far I have seen one (1) self-professed Christian post this story and repudiate this wacko's statements.  But let's contrast this with the twelve (and counting) times I've seen outrage over the story about football player Ben Watson, who wrote a moving piece about the Ferguson riots and ended it with a statement about his religious beliefs:

I'M ENCOURAGED, because ultimately the problem is not a SKIN problem, it is a SIN problem. SIN is the reason we rebel against authority. SIN is the reason we abuse our authority. SIN is the reason we are racist, prejudiced and lie to cover for our own. SIN is the reason we riot, loot and burn. BUT I'M ENCOURAGED because God has provided a solution for sin through the his son Jesus and with it, a transformed heart and mind. One that's capable of looking past the outward and seeing what's truly important in every human being. The cure for the Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner tragedies is not education or exposure. It's the Gospel. So, finally, I'M ENCOURAGED because the Gospel gives mankind hope.

Which was all well and good, until he was interviewed on CNN after his words went viral.  Watson was asked a question about his religious beliefs near the end of the interview, and he said, "The only way to really cure what's on the inside is understanding that Jesus Christ died for our sins," immediately before the time ran out on his segment.

What was the response of the devout?  Outrage that Watson had been "brutally censored for mentioning Jesus."

Really?  Come on, now.  If CNN hadn't wanted Watson to mention Jesus, they either (1) wouldn't have asked him the question, or (2) wouldn't have interviewed him in the first place.  Watson's being cut off was either a timer issue or a technical glitch (or both), but a lot of Christians are so sunk in a persecution complex that it became yet another opportunity to claim that they're oppressed.

Just like the "War on Christmas," which yes, is starting up again this year.  (Before I even had a chance to put up my Christmas tree, darn it.)  Just like author and political commentator Ben Carson's claims this week that it's the LGBT activists who are the ones who engage in hate speech:

The enemies are the people who try to divide each other.  The enemies are the ones who try to incite people to hatred, to anger...  Somebody who is pro-traditional-family, they’ll come up and say, "he’s a homophobe, they hate gay people, they’re nasty" and they just try to incite all this stuff really to further their own agendas...  Instead of getting into their respective corners and reacting to all of this hate speech, let's actually talk about the issue...  (T)he reason that a lot of those hateful people don't want to talk is that they've been reading a book by Saul Alinsky called Rules for Radicals, which says never have a conversation with your enemies, because that humanizes them, and you want to demonize them.

Right.  Like claiming that we should be executing homosexuals in order to get rid of AIDS.

I'll say something I've said before: it's going to take regular old Christians standing up and saying "SHUT UP" to this kind of thing to stop people like Anderson and Carson from being the public face of Christianity.  It'll take a shift in focus by the devout, from a conviction that they're being oppressed and persecuted to redirecting their outrage towards issues of social justice.

It'll take their suddenly remembering that Jesus himself put a lot more emphasis on things like "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me" than he did to the stone-damn-near-everyone laws of Leviticus.

Plausible deniability

One of the things I've never understood is the certainty a lot of people have that the universe is designed in such a way as to line up perfectly with their personal opinions.

It crops up fairly regularly in religion.  You think gays are icky?  Well, what a coincidence.  God doesn't like them, either!  You would rather that the power structure keep men in control of everything?  How about that, Allah would like that, too!

It'd be kind of an odd coincidence, don't you think?  Conservatives think god is conservative, liberals think god is liberal.  Never once do you go to a conservative church and hear the preacher say, "Sorry, brethren and sistren.  God told me that we need to welcome in illegal immigrants."  Nor do you go to a liberal church and hear, "God has a new directive.  Balancing the federal budget is more important than funding social programs."

Doesn't it seem like people are designing their religious beliefs so that they support their political biases, and not the other way around?

To be fair, there are exceptions, such as Reverend Danny Cortez of the New Harmony Community Baptist Church of Los Angeles, who recently broke with the party line of the Southern Baptist Convention and came out in support of LGBT individuals.  But it's rare.  Most of us are convinced we live in a comfortable little universe that in the Big Picture, works exactly the way we would like it to.

This tendency isn't confined to religion, though.  A study done at Duke University and published just this month supports the troubling notion that we even approach scientific findings this way.  Troy Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate in Duke's School of Business, and his team found that when test subjects were presented with scientific evidence of a problem, followed by a policy solution that would run counter to their political beliefs, they were more likely to believe that the problem itself didn't exist.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Conservatives, for example, were given a statement to read that showed evidence that the global average temperature would rise by 3.2 degrees in the 21st century.  Half of them then read a proposed solution requiring increased government regulation -- carbon emissions taxes, restrictions on fossil fuel use, and so on.  The other half were given a solution that involved support of the free market, such as reducing taxes on companies that use green technology.

When asked whether they believed that the Earth's temperature would rise by the predicted amount, only 22% of the first group said they did -- compared to 55% of the second group!

Liberals are no less prone to what Campbell calls "solution aversion."  Liberals showed a much lower belief in statistics about violent home break-ins if they were then presented with a solution that doesn't line up with liberal ideology, such as looser restrictions on handgun ownership.

"Logically, the proposed solution to a problem, such as an increase in government regulation or an extension of the free market, should not influence one’s belief in the problem.  However, we find it does,” Campbell said about the study.  "The cure can be more immediately threatening than the problem...  We argue that the political divide over many issues is just that, it’s political.  These divides are not explained by just one party being more anti-science, but the fact that in general people deny facts that threaten their ideologies, left, right or center."

All of this strikes me as kind of bizarre.  Whatever my other biases, I've never thought it was reasonable to deny that the disease exists because the cure sounds unpleasant.  But apparently, that's the way a lot of people think.

But it does give some hope of a solution.   Says study co-author Aaron Kay:  "We should not just view some people or group as anti-science, anti-fact or hyper-scared of any problems.  Instead, we should understand that certain problems have particular solutions that threaten some people and groups more than others.  When we realize this, we understand those who deny the problem more and we improve our ability to better communicate with them."

To which I can only say: amen.

This may sting a little...

At what point do homeopaths and other purveyors of woo non-medicine cross the line into committing a prosecutable act of medical fraud?

I ask the question because of a recent exposé by Marketplace, a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, called Vaccines: Shot of Confusion.  In this clever sting operation, mothers were fitted with videocameras on visits with their children to homeopaths.  The videocameras recorded, predictably, the moms being given lots of advice about the (mostly fabricated) dangers of vaccination, and how little pills with no active ingredients were a better choice.

One mother was even told that "measles is virtually harmless for children over the age of one."  This would have come as a shock to my grandfather's two sisters, Marie Emelie and Anne, who died of measles in 1902, five days apart, at the ages of 22 and 17, respectively.

Not to mention the one million children who die annually from the disease, and the 15,000 a year who are left permanently blind from its effects.

The homeopaths in the video call today's children "the sickly generation."  And admittedly, there are some medical conditions that have increased in incidence in modern times (asthma, allergies, and autism come to mind).  However, it has been thoroughly demonstrated that none of the diseases which have increased are caused by vaccines (nor, by the way, are they treatable using sugar pills).  Further, given that there used to be epidemics of diphtheria, typhoid, measles, mumps, and other infectious diseases that killed thousands of children, you can only claim that this generation is "sickly" if you ignore historical fact.

Know of anyone in the last fifty years who has died of diphtheria?  Nope, me neither.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It seems to me that we have crossed some kind of threshold, here.  We're no longer talking about people trying to treat insomnia with caffeine that has been diluted a gazillion times (and yes, they do that; here's one source to prove it).  We're talking about combining anti-vaxx fear talk with pushing useless "remedies" on gullible individuals, and putting children's lives at risk as a result.

Look, I'm no legal expert.  But I do know science, and I know that (1) serious side effects from vaccines are extremely uncommon, (2) the risk of infectious disease if you're unvaccinated is very high, and (3) it is impossible that homeopathy works, as advertised.  If you doubt the last statement, consider an exhaustive study of homeopathic "remedies" by Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council earlier this year, which found zero evidence that any of them worked.  "Homeopathic remedies contain nothing whatsoever," University College London pharmacologist David Colquhoun said about the study.  "The Americans have spent $2 billion investigating the things... they haven't found a single one that works."

How much evidence do you need?  Do you really believe that "Big Pharma" has co-opted every single study of homeopathy ever done by a reputable scientist?  The level of credulity you'd have to have to believe that is staggering.

Oh, wait.  These are the same people who believe that if you dilute a substance, it gets stronger.  Never mind.

I'm not in favor of rampant government interference, and I do think that people bear the responsibility of being well informed about their own bodies when they receive medical treatment.  But this is hitting people at their weakest point -- scaring them about the welfare of their children.  And ironic, isn't it, that the same people who criticize "Big Pharma" for profiting from medications are profiting themselves from the sale of pills that do nothing at all.  A 2009 report by the Center for Disease Control found that Americans were spending $2.9 billion annually on homeopathic "remedies."

Those are some expensive sugar pills.  Kind of makes you wonder who might be pulling the wool over your eyes for profit's sake, doesn't it?

And it demands that we ask the question of when enough is enough.  The time for controlled studies is over.  The results are in; homeopathy is quackery.  It is now the responsibility of medical oversight agencies to shut these people down, and take homeopathic "remedies" off the pharmacy shelves.

Grist for the mill

Over the Thanksgiving holiday we were in Northampton, Massachusetts visiting family, and we took the opportunity to visit an amazing used bookstore called The Bookmill, in Montague.

[image courtesy of photographer John Phelan and the Wikimedia Commons]

The Bookmill is sited in an old mill house on the Sawmill River, and bills itself as "books you don't need in a place you can't find."  We found it anyhow, and spent a diverting couple of hours wandering around its maze of little wood-floored rooms and creaking, narrow staircases, and (of course) came away with a box full of books, which we did too need, thank you very much.

For my son Nathan: a book on quantum physics and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy.  For my wife Carol: several books of poetry and essays.  For me, on the other hand, three masterpieces:

• Ghosts Among Us: Eyewitness Accounts of True Hauntings, by Harry Ludlum
• UFOs and How to See Them, by Jenny Randles
• How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy, and Clairvoyance, by W. E. Butler

All of this elicited a great amount of eye-rolling on the part of various family members.  Myself, I was thrilled, and these books will now occupy a nice spot on my bookshelf next to Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life by Ivan T. Sanderson.

But not, of course, before I entertain you with a few excerpts.

From Ghosts Among Us, we read the following, in a story called "The Council House Horrors:"

A family of four, a couple and their grown-up son and daughter, living in a post-war council house in Swindon, Wiltshire, were rehoused when it was feared they were heading for nervous breakdowns. 

First, Mrs. Gladys Tucker saw the shadow of a man standing on the landing.  Then all manner of strange things began to happen.  Objects moved themselves mysteriously; windows that should have been shut were found open; door handles raised and lowered themselves.  Apparitions of animals were seen.  The daughter saw strange lights on her bed and bedroom walls.  The son was held pinned to a wall by an unseen force. 

The daughter was driven to seeing a nerve specialist, while the son was so shaken that he left home to live with a relation. 

When their father, Mr. Herbert Tucker, a storekeeper, now deeply concerned for the health of his wife and daughter, called on the council for help, police went over the house thoroughly and the local electricity board inspected wires and lights, but they found nothing.

Because that's a logical thing to do if your kid is "pinned to a wall by an unseen force."  "Well, Mr. Tucker, your son may have been thrown against a wall by an evil spirit, but your wires and breaker boxes look fine.  I'll leave you with my bill, shall I?"

We are told that the Tuckers moved out, but were followed by other tenants who had bizarre experiences, including seeing the ghost of a dead window-washer who had fallen and broken his neck, and a specter of a headless girl.  But eventually the whole thing died down, presumably because the ghosts got bored and moved to somewhere nicer than a "post-war council house."


Now, let's turn to my second find, UFOs and How to See Them.  My first thought, on picking this one up, was, "How can you write an instruction manual on how to see UFOs?  It's not like they come when called, or anything."  But this is exactly what Ms. Randles has set out to do.  In it, we read such tantalizing hints as:

• UFOs are often sighted near geologic fault zones
• UFOs are more likely to be seen after cold fronts pass through an area
• Crop circles are left behind by aliens as an intelligence test
• William Shatner got lost on his motorcycle in the Mojave Desert, and was guided to safety by a "silvery UFO"
• Ezekiel's visions in the bible were UFO sightings
• "City folk are largely unobservant.  A giant UFO could drift overhead and many of them would never see it!"

So there you are, then.  To her credit, Ms. Randles does give a lot of information on "IFOs" -- "identified flying objects."  She tells you how to recognize known phenomena, so you are less likely to be fooled if you see a weather balloon, a distant jet, a bird, or the planet Venus.  So that's all to the good, although I do sort of wish the aliens had left William Shatner out there in the desert.

Then we have the amazing How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy, and Clairvoyance, the book that was thrown across the room in disgust by my brother-in-law after reading the following:

The etheric vision is sometimes called "X ray vision" as it allows its possessor to see through physical matter.  In the early days of mesmerism it was developed for the medical diagnosis of diseases, and since the etheric clairvoyant can, in some cases, apparently see into the interior of the human body and closely observe the working of its various organs, it is easy to see how very helpful this form of clairvoyance can be.

My sense is that it wouldn't be so much "helpful" as "disgusting," but that's just me.

Of course, I was curious about auras, and so I turned to the chapter called "What is the Aura?" to read the following:

... (T)he aura is defined as "a subtle invisible essence or fluid said to emanate from human and animal bodies, and even from things; a psychic electro-vital, electro-mental effluvium, partaking of both mind and body, hence the atmosphere surrounding a person..."  The aura is usually seen as a luminous atmosphere around all living things, including what we regard as inanimate matter.

So, living things, including non-living things.  Got it.

Nathan's comment about the above was that if you're experiencing an electro-mental effluvium, you should probably see a doctor.  I replied that he only thought that because he had a puce-colored aura.


Anyhow.  If you're ever in northwestern Massachusetts, you should definitely visit The Bookmill.  You probably won't find books as entertaining as the three I bought, but I'm sure you'll come away with something awesome.