Since I know a thing or two about school shootings, that image was begging for me to shoot it full of holes.

First of all, like all subjects, there seems to be a diversity of opinion on guns, and that’s fine. Some of those opinions are held by rational people, and that’s even better.

The problem is, there are some people out there with extreme opinions, who think and behave irrationally. Those are the people who bother me. They poison the well. They’re so extreme that they make it impossible for rational people in a rational society to have a rational national discussion on the topic.

There are several topics that seem to attract a disproportionately-massive share of the lunatic fringe. Abortion is one. Guns are another. I don’t know which has the craziest crazies, but I do know which are the most dangerous. Never combine irrational extremist emotion with firearms.

(BTW, just so you know where I’m coming from, I don’t like guns, but I have no desire to repeal the Second Amendment. I do question the sanity and/or logical capabilities of the most rabid of the gun supporters.)

Let’s start with the logic of the argument expressed in the above image.

Problem #1: Correlation ≠ causation. For example, CBS began broadcasting color television signals in January of 1950. Joseph McCarthy began his witch hunts less a month later. Therefore, color television caused McCarthyism!

Problem #2: Children did not take machine guns to school. Therefore, the “fact” that they could, in theory, purchase the gun had no bearing on the safety of their school.

Problem #3: It’s just plain incorrect. There were numerous school shootings prior to 1934! Where’s your machine gun now, Charlton?

For example, the earliest known school shooting was the Enoch Brown school massacre (a.k.a. Pontiac’s Rebellion school massacre) on July 26, 1764.

Wikipedia mentions a few shootings in the 1800s. By the early 1900s, school shootings were all the rage. Wikipedia lists eleven shootings between 1900 and 1934. That’s an average of one shooting every three-and-a-half years. That’s not very rare, is it? Sounds a lot like our modern era, doesn’t it?

So tell me, gun nuts: How is allowing students and teachers to pack heat going to keep our schools safe?

BTW, I just wanted to point out one of the especially unpleasant school shootings of the early 20th century. Read the Wikipedia entry for the San Francisco shooting:

February 12, 1909 San Francisco, California. 10-year-old Dorothy Malakanoff was shot and killed by 49-year-old Demetri Tereaschinko as she arrived at her school in San Francisco. Tereaschinko then shot himself in a failed suicide attempt.

OK. Murder-suicide. We’ve seen that pattern play out numerous times. It’s this last part that’s especially disturbing:

Tereaschinko was reportedly upset that Malakanoff refused to elope with him.

She was ten years old!!! WTF!!! I know standards were different then. I know teenagers often got married, sometimes to much older men. But she was ten freakin’ years old!!!

Who the hell did that guy think he was? Mohammed?

Last weekend, I went to the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. It isn’t the sort of event where I expected to encounter the forces of superstition, fear, and misinformation. Oh what a fool I am.

Overall, actually, I was rather impressed. Although ostensibly a harvest festival, the event overall contained all of the images of the season, which includes that most evil of holidays, Halloween. (BTW, harvest festivals are also pagan, so really, the entire event is non-Christian.)

Despite the festival’s pagan undertones, several of the food booths were run by churches. I also noticed that some of the churches in town were decorated with witches, black cats, and other Halloween imagery. It struck me that if this were held in the Deep South, not only would the churches not have evil, satanic, pagan decorations, but all their members would be out picketing.

(That’s right. I live in one of the least fundie regions in the nation, and I run an anti-fundie blog. That’s because if I lived anywhere else in the country, my brain would explode. That’s what happens when you put something filled with matter into a vacuum.)

But, as I alluded to at top, the event wasn’t devoid of superstition.

Park Place

My first encounter occurred as I was driving into town. This event attracts 200,000 people over two days, so I got there early to avoid traffic. There isn’t much on-street parking, so all of the locals seize the opportunity to let you park in their lot—for a fee, of course.

I passed numerous signs advertising parking. “Park here! $5!” (I’m assuming they don’t mean 5-factorial. “What do you mean $120? Your sign said $5!” “Exactly!”)

“Park here! $10!”

“All-Day Parking! $15!”

I was able to get fairly close. Then I came to an intersection and had a dilemma. I saw two parking signs.

The one on the left said “Park at our church! Only two blocks from the festival! $5!”

The one on the right said “Park at our elementary school! Only four blocks from the festival! $10”

Hmmmmm… decisions… decisions…. I can spend $5 and only have to walk two blocks, but my money goes to brainwash the gullible with misinformation. Or I can spend twice that, have to walk twice as far, but my money helps to buy supplies for a destitute school.

Without even pausing long enough to blink, I turned right and parked at the elementary school.

No Comfort

As I was walking toward the festival, I saw a couple of guys standing on a street corner. They appeared to be handing something out.

Some people have “gaydar”. I have “fundar”. I know that isn’t a good pun, but you try to come up with a funny name for it. It’s actually not a special skill. Anytime you see somebody handing something out on a street corner, it’s virtually guaranteed to be a fundie.

I immediately realized that this could be something I could make fun of on my blog! (I’m always working for you folks, even when I’m doing other stuff!) Sure enough, it was!

“Would you like to have a $100 bill?” one of the fundies asked, holding up an oversized $100 bill.

Woohoo! Jackpot! A giant $100 bill!

That could only mean this is one of Ray Comfort’s fundiebots! I’ve been reading Ray’s emails for quite a while. He always has oversized crap like this to pass out. On the back, of course, is a Bible tract.

I was excited, because I knew these guys were out there. They stake out high-traffic areas, trying to snare the unwary, but I had never seen any in the wild. I was beginning to think they were extinct in Northern California (sort of like the grizzly bear, and just as dangerous).

“Is that Ray Comfort’s tract?”, I asked.

“Yes sir!”, the fundie said.

“Sure, I’ll take it!” I folded up my prize and stuffed it into my pocket, so no one would be able to steal it from me.

If you folks are lucky, and I have time (HA!), I’ll dissect the thing in a future article.

BTW, this thought occurred to me: Couldn’t I take Ray Comfort’s $100 bill and use it to pay for parking at that church up the street? Shouldn’t it be legal tender for them? “Keep the change!”, I’d tell them. I’m so generous at times!

The Twelve Commandments

As I continued my long, four-block slog to the festival, I passed a church (There were quite a few churches along that short stretch of road. What is Half Moon Bay’s problem?).

They had posted the Ten Commandments out front:

Umm… I mean Twelve Commandments.

A-OK Psychic Readings

Wandering around the festival, I happened upon this sign in the window of an alleged psychic:

Obviously, her powers do not extend to spelling.

This, however, is crap. According to one of the message threads on the site, the 4th Horseman of the Apocalypse was seen moving through the crowds during the protests in Egypt! You can see it on the Rachel Maddow show. Skip ahead to about the 10:27 mark in the video. Here is a screen capture:

It’s that green blob in the center. Yes, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are really just blobs. Why are people so freaked out? Just send in Steve McQueen.

You should go watch the video. It really does look a lot like a horseman when you see it moving across the screen. If I believed in this stuff, I’d be a bit creeped out.

To be fair, the original poster admits that it’s probably an optical illusion. To my eye, it is definitely an illusion. They’re probably shooting through a window, so it’s a reflection off of that. The greenishness is likely caused by a heat-reflecting coating on the window (this is freaking Egypt, after all) or maybe an anti-reflective coating in the lens.

Or everything is true, Jesus is coming back, and us atheists will be roasting in hell next week. Bring your marshmallows. (Hey! We could make s’mores! Just put chocolate and marshmallows between two slices of Billy Graham!)

In case you haven’t heard, Bing McGhandi, a.k.a. Bob Blaskiewicz, has officially launched his new blog. It’s called Skeptical Humanities. Go check it out. Stick it in your RSS reader. Give it a few weeks to see if you like it.

The About page tells us that there are lots of skeptical science blogs, but very few skeptical humanities blogs. That’s the niche his new blog fills. It’s not exactly my strongest area of interest, but I’ll read it for a while and see what he does with it.

The new blog is currently the home of two contributors, Bing/Bob and Eve Siebert. The first article is written by Eve, so we still have to wait and see what Bob/Bing does with his half.

That first article is titled “‘Little English and No Sense’: The Shakespeare Authorship Controversy”. It tells me more than I really wanted to know about that problem. I started skimming it about halfway through. OK. That’s fine. I suspect most people skim my articles, too (After all, who really wants to read 1000 words about why Bill Johnson does not have a functioning brain?).

So go scope it out for yourself and see if it’s your thing.

It saddens me greatly to report the demise of my second-favorite blog.

Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes is no more.

Bing McGhandi has announced that his fiery, flamboyant assault on the self-stupid has ceased production.

He is shifting focus and will be starting a new blog under his real name. The new blog will cover a somewhat-related topic.

I wish him well and hope the new blog is as good as the old. If I’m correctly reading between the lines, I fear that the new blog will be toned down a bit. However he writes it, you can be sure it will still be good reading. I’ll post the link when he formally announces it.

I guess at only $2 per session, it will take quite a while for this “psychic” to clean you out. They should learn from Sylvia Browne and charge lots of money for their worthless predictions.

Actually, this sign in Mountain View, California belongs to the two businesses that occupy one building: a pet store and a deli.

They held the 2010 New Living Expo in San Francisco last month. As I previously mentioned, I hadn’t been to one of those in at least six years, so I was overdue. I also mentioned before that there can be the occasional real or interesting thing at these newage fairs, buried in among all the woo. I like ferreting out the real. I also enjoy looking at the crazy.

As is typical every time I go up to San Francisco, the adventure begins as soon as I step off of BART. The newage fair was being held at the same venue that hosted the SF Green Festival the prior month. As you’ll recall from that tale, I encountered some graffiti on the hike there. Somebody had spray-painted “Fear God” on an overpass support. This time, I noticed that somebody had appended some additional graffiti:

Why indeed?

When I arrived at the Concourse Exhibition Center, I saw that a few groups had set up tables out front. Several of them were petitions to get initiatives on the ballot or to sign up for protests against one large corporation or another.

But there was one other thing out front. A stripper! Yes! A stripper!

Well, not a human stripper. A canine one. And she already had some dollar bills stuffed in her collar:

I don’t know where that Tex Avery character came from. I’m sure he wasn’t there when I snapped the picture.

When I got inside, I saw a large sign advertising one of the big speakers of the event, David Icke. Here is just part of what the sign said. I’ve marked a few things for you to note:

If you want to know more about David Icke, just search Bing.

There were lots of vendors, of course, selling all sorts of stuff. Books, for example:

One of those authors claims to have a PhD. Since they’re giving PhDs to creationists now, that degree is clearly worthless.

I wandered around looking at the various offerings. I went up to one booth to look over their stuff, and the woman there took a plastic wand and waved it over me. This wand was pink. Barbie-pink. It was battery-operated and flashed different colors.

I was trying to be undercover. My intent was to just listen to what people had to say and then move on. Somehow words were coming out of my mouth unbidden. I heard myself say to her:

What’s that? That looks cheap. Is that a toy? That looks like some cheap plastic Barbie toy! What’s it supposed to do? Am I supposed to feel something? I’m not feeling anything. I don’t think it works!

Clearly the wand had taken control of my mind! It was making me say rude but truthful things to the ignorant! I must get away before the effect becomes permanent!

I staggered away from that booth. I can only hope I got away in time.

I continued my wandering. Thanks to that gullible creduloid Oprah, The Secret is still wreaking havoc on the minds of the fleeceable:

That sign has an obvious misprint, though. The spacing is wrong. It’s supposed to say:

Law of attraction inaction.

If you wanted, you could always stick your feet into some nasty goo:

I didn’t stick around to watch that. Looking at the full-sized version of this photograph, I can read some of what is on those banners on the wall. I guess you can tell what is wrong with you by which particular nasty consistency and color this nasty goo becomes.

Orange Sticky Substance
• Tissue Acid Waste
• Joint Toxins
White Cheeselike Particles
• Yeast/Fungus
Light Brown
• Cellular Debris from Lungs
Black Brown
• Colon Backup
Reddish Brown Glue
• Cardiovascular Toxins
Dark Green
• Gallbladder
Black Flecks
• Heavy Metals
Red Flecks
• Blood Clot Material
Black
• Liver
Smells
• Metals
• Nicotine
• Ammonia from Kidneys

I did go to a few seminars. Most of them I couldn’t sit through for more than five minutes. I did make it through about 30 minutes of one of them, but that was mostly because it took the guy so long to get to the crazy stuff:

I think he was saying something about UFOs being more common now or something. Anyway, what he was really getting at is he claims there is some super-ancient being living among us. He has been here thousands of years. He previously sent his proxy, some dude named Jesus Christ. Any day now, he’s going to come out publicly by his real name, Maitreya. As you can see in the photograph above, he is a “world teacher”. He’s going to solve all our problems for us, or something. Wikipedia has more about this whole thing, if you want to read about it. I’ve already wasted too much time on it.

The funny thing about these seminars is they all have something to sell. It’s usually books, sometimes DVDs or CDs. This guy was selling a handprint. It was Maitreya’s magical handprint. Even though Maitreya hasn’t identified himself publicly yet, this guy managed to get a handprint from him. He said we could buy a copy of it for only $10. Ten bucks! That’s cheap! And what can it do for you? Why, it’s a magical healing handprint, of course! All you had to do was stick your hand on it, tell Maitreya what you wanted healed, and it would happen! This guy told us that he has used the magical healing handprint to get healed lots of times.

Apparently Maitreya’s healing powers don’t extend to baldness.

The local skeptics’ group had actually infiltrated this event. They had planned to set up a table out front for the first two hours, to talk to people as they waited in line to buy tickets. I’m not sure what they hoped to accomplish with that. Anyway, around noon, the plan was to abandon the table and actually go inside and talk to the vendors. I was there for kicks. I’m not sure what they hoped to accomplish.

I had arrived too late to see their table out front. I did see this guy inside. He might have been part of that group:

My advice to them is to stay away from the lady with the Barbie wand. They might say something inappropriate.

There were posters hanging in the seminar rooms listing the upcoming speakers, what time their talk would be, and which booth they were in if you wanted to go buy their crap. Here’s a detail from one of the schedules (Sorry for the back-lighting. It was hanging on a window.):

I think if the people in Booth 1017 just take a look at Booths 715 and 118, they’ll have their answer.

Wrap-Up

Overall, I was severely disappointed. This newage fair just wasn’t as fun as the last one.

For one thing, I couldn’t find anything that had any legitimate value. One of the hypnosis vendors who was there last time used to sell CDs for relaxation and the like. This year, all they were selling was hypnosis CDs for astral projection and past-life regression. The legitimate, clinical uses have been replaced by illegitimate and worthless mumbo jumbo.

It also seemed like there were more scientific buzzwords in use. “Quantum” and “tachyon” and “neutrino”, etc. I guess the public has gotten wise enough to not fall for snake oil when you call it snake oil. But if you invoke some scientific words that most people don’t know the meaning of, they’ll just accept on faith that there is some science behind it.

The place was lousy with “psychics”, maybe even more than last time. I was unable to get any free readings, though. Very few booths offered them. The few that did had a line (I hate lines. I wouldn’t stand in line for the first coming of Christ.).

So it wasn’t such a fun time. Are these people beginning to bore me? Or has my underlying disgust with what they’re doing overwhelmed my sadistic ability to laugh at the self-deluded?

I may not return.

[In Part 3, I told you about my continuing adventures at the 2004 New Living Expo. Among other things, I had a past-life regression. But earlier in the day, I agreed to try a $50 aura-healing pendant, in exchange for getting a Kirlian photograph made.]

Toward the end of the day, it was time to go back to the snake-oil peddler, return the pendant, and get my Kirlian photograph out of hock.

I had been thinking about that photograph during the day. They pass an electrical current through your body and onto the photographic film. The corona that appears corresponds to the areas the current was able to escape through. Obviously, then, if you have a better electrical contact between the skin and photograph, you’ll get a better corona. If you have a worse electrical contact, the corona will be less distinct.

What could improve the contact? Maybe oil? Like fingerprint oil?

So what would happen if I washed my hands thoroughly right before making the next photograph?

So I did.

Then I went back to the booth and told him that I had been wearing the pendant all day, and I was eager to make the After photograph to find out how effective it was.

He had me stick my hand back into the tube and press down onto the Polaroid film. Then, once again, he put his hand on top of the tube and pressed down on my hand to make sure contact was solid.

He pressed hard. A lot harder than he had this morning. It’s almost as if he wanted to ensure a better photograph!

Now all I had to do was touch the exposed electrode, so we could—

ZZAAAAPPP!!!

Jesus F—ing Christ! That hurt! I don’t think I like making Kirlian photographs.

The vendor then pulled the Polaroid film out of the Kirlinator and waved it around for a bit to assist the developing. I waited in anticipation. Would I be right? Does the skin oil facilitate the effect? Would my hand-washing sabotage work? Would his extra-hard pressure counteract my sabotage? Hell, would the stupid pendant actually have an effect? (OK, that last one wasn’t really a contender.)

He pulled the backing off of the Polaroid…

…to expose…

Nothing!

Actually, it was almost nothing. You could see a couple of weak deci-circles from two of my fingertips. The others were completely M.I.A.

Yes! In your face, you fraud! I out-tricked the trickster! Science triumphs over psuedo-science! Explain that result, you defrauder of the gullible!

He looked at the Kirlian photograph. He picked up my Before picture and stared at the better (but still imperfect) coronas partially encircling every fingertip.

Every fingertip in the Before picture.

Only two in the After picture.

And he said to me:

“You have a healing crisis! Your aura is in much worse condition than we thought. You’ll need to wear the pendant for several weeks to completely heal your aura!”

You slick charlatan! You have a line for everything, don’t you? You’d make P.T. Barnum proud.

Anyway, I told him that I wasn’t convinced and I wanted to return the pendant. He took it back without complaint. He then handed me my credit card slip and both Kirlian photos and let me go on my way.

At least he was an honest charlatan.

When I got home, I looked at both Kirlian photographs again. Now that I had gone through the experience of making them, they didn’t seem mysterious at all. I always knew there was some sort of scientific principle behind the imaging, even if the interpretation of those images by the psychic crowd was ludicrous.

I was let down. Again. There is always so much less to this UFO/ESP stuff once you actually look into it. It’s usually desperate people searching for something to give their desperate lives a little meaning, or a little wonder, or a little excitement.

But why make this stuff up? Why create a cheap, shallow self-delusion?

We live in an amazing universe, filled with real wonders and truly marvelous things! Just open your eyes to the real world! It will blow you away!

So I looked at my cheesy Kirlian photographs. The true wonder here was the physics of electricity. The chemistry of photography. The marvel of our ability to study the world around us and figure out how it all works.

That was the wonder here. Not some ignorant misinterpretation of the resulting image.

I took one last look at the photographs, sighed with disappointment, and threw them in the garbage.

[Tomorrow: I go to the 2010 newage fair.]

[In Part 2, I told you about my adventures at the 2004 New Living Expo. I had a Kirlian photograph made, but it (and my $50) was being held hostage at one of the vendor booths.]

I wandered around the newage fair for the rest of the day. There were panels on UFOs and ghosts and aligning your chakras and astral projection and just about anything else you could imagine. Likewise, there were vendors selling stuff on all of those topics, and gobs more. How could I not be entertained?

I remember the presentation given by the woman and her angel advisor. Both were on stage. Allegedly. The woman stood just a little bit to the right of center stage, so her angel advisor could stand next to her. As the presentation went on, the woman would sometimes stop talking and look a little bit to the side (as if she’s listening, you see), and then she would tell us what her angel just said. I’d never been to a lecture by an angel before.

There were lots of alleged psychics at the fair, of course. All of them were offering psychic readings, for a fee. A few of them offered short free readings, in the hope that you would then plunk down $20 to hear more.

Well, heck, if they want me to have it for free, I wouldn’t want to insult them by not taking it, would I? I’m ever so polite, you see.

There weren’t many free readings, but I managed to find two. One was some sort of assembly-line gang-reading being done by a Berkeley psychic school. They had 10 or 12 chairs lined up in two rows, facing each other. One row was occupied by “psychics”. The other row by suckers patrons. There was a short line, so I got into it. All you had to do was wait your turn. Then when one of the chairs opened up, you’d sit down in front of the “reader” and get psychically violated.

I sat down in front of a spacy-looking karma-dharma-spouter. I was determined to be as poker-faced as possible, just to mess with her. Since this was a cold reading, I figured she’d be trying to read my face. I was wrong.

She said she had to go into a trance, so she closed her eyes for the entire reading. I didn’t think I was that hideous. I don’t remember much of what she said. She was mostly firing blanks. You know, lady. Cold reading can make you a lot of money. You should learn it.

I continued my wanderings, hoping to find, among other things, a much better cold reading. I found one at the other side of the hall.

It was a tiny booth off in the corner. It was probably cheaper there. The woman stood alone in her booth, watching people milling past. I saw the sign for the free psychic reading, so I stopped and inquired. She told me that she offered a free five-minute reading, so I took her up on the offer.

I sat down in front of her. She asked if I wanted a love-life assessment or a past-life regression. Since I didn’t want to be responsible for her dying of laughter, I chose the latter.

She stared into my eyes (See?! Some people are able to do it without retching!). She told me that my soul goes back. Way back! Way, way back! To the time of the Pharaohs! (No way!)

She sees me. I’m standing there next to the Pharaoh! That’s it! She tells me that I am a high-level advisor to the Pharaohs!

Makes you want to treat me with a bit more respect, doesn’t it?

She’s right! I can see it now, too! Yes! I am there! I can hear myself talking to the Pharaoh, advising him. I hear myself saying:

Look, Ramses. Letting Moses and the Jews go was a huge mistake. You’d better send your army out to retrieve them. Trust me. What could possibly go wrong?

[Tomorrow: The end (of the day) is nigh! It’s time to storm the castle and rescue my Kirlian photograph! (and my $50)]

[In Part 1, I told you how I enjoy exploring the fringes. Sometimes I actually discover something that works (Hypnosis. Hubba hubba!).]

The first time I went to the newage fair was in 2003 or 2004. As I mentioned yesterday, it was partly to see if I could find the little bit useful among the very much crap. It was mostly, however, to have a laugh or two.

I used to watch a lot of paranormal TV back in the 1970s. UFOs were all the rage back then, but there was other crap too. One piece of raging crap was Kirlian photography. Allegedly it shows your aura and whatever else its promoters could dream up to con the gullible. Nevertheless, it fascinated me. I wasn’t sure what was really going on there.

Lo and behold, what did I see at the newage fair in one of the vendor booths but a bunch of Kirlian photographs! Sweet! I had to check that out. They had a couple of gadgets there that people were sticking their hands into, then the vendor pulls the Polaroid out of the gadget, waves it around to make it develop faster, and then voila! They had themselves a Kirlian! Me! Me! Me! Do me! I want a Kirlian photograph!

It turns out it was part of a sales pitch (wouldn’t you know it!). The guy at the booth directed my attention to the numerous photographs hanging in the booth. It turned out they were all pairs; a Before and an After. The Before pictures were all poor images. The corona around the fingertips was incomplete or totally missing. The After pictures were all beautiful. The coronas were complete and easy to see.

The guy told me that I was looking at photographs of these people’s auras. The Before pictures showed that their auras were sick (Oh no! I sure hope my aura isn’t sick!). The After pictures show that their auras are all now strong and healthy after wearing his magical pendant for just a few hours (He didn’t call it a magical pendant. He had some pseudo-sciency quantum-mechanical string-theoretical boson-strange-attractor name for it.). Lucky for me, he still had a few quantum-boson pendants left, and I could buy one for the low, low price of $49.95.

But I just want Kirlian photograph! Oh, please, mister, just let me have a Kirlian photograph!

Here’s the even better news, he told me. I didn’t have to take his word for it that the neutrino-quark pendant works. I could prove it to myself! All I had to do was let him take an imprint of my credit card, which he wouldn’t even submit (yet). He’d just hang onto it for the duration of the show. Then we’d make a Kirlian photograph of me (yay!) to use as the Before picture. Then all I had to do was wear his reptilian-hydrocarbon pendant for the rest of the day, then come back by his booth before the show ended. We’d make another (Yay! I get two!) Kirlian photograph of my fingers. The After photograph would prove that the pendant worked. If it didn’t, or if I didn’t want it, I could return the pendant and he’d tear up my credit card image.

I thought about that for a moment. I could easily come by here by the end of the day and return the pendant. If the guy tries to defraud me and runs the charge anyway, I could dispute it with the credit card company. Polaroid film costs about $1 per shot, so I’d actually have to pay someone real money to get them made anywhere else. So I handed over the card.

After I signed the credit card receipt, he took me over to the Kirlianator. It was a heavy metallic box. The top of the box was covered by a long tube, made of some sort of black fabric, flopping off to the side. He placed an unexposed Polaroid into the box through a slot in the side and then pulled the top sheet of the Polaroid off. The bare film was now waiting for me to reach in and fondle it. I stuck my arm into the long, black tube (which protects the Polaroid from stray light) and placed my fingers down onto the film.

It was then that I noticed an electrical cord running from the box. I had never really thought about how these photographs were made. I guess that’s why they seemed so mysterious to me. I didn’t remember any of the TV shows mentioning this part.

He placed his hand on the outside of the tube and gently pressed down on my hand, to make sure it made good contact with the film. He told me to touch a particular piece of exposed metal on the outside of the box, which I did. Reluctantly.

He said “You’ll feel a slight shock.”

“How slight is—”ZZZAAAPPPPPP! “Sonofabitch! That freakin’ hurts!”

I then removed my numb, tasered arm from the tube. He pulled the Polaroid out, waved it around, then peeled it open.

It turned out my Kirlian photograph looked a lot like the other Before pictures. The coronas around the fingertips were not fully formed, and they were of varying strength. But at least I finally had my Kirlian photograph! I reached out for it, lovingly.

And he snatched it away from me.

“I’ll just staple this to your credit card slip,” he said. “Then when you come back later today, we can compare it to your After photo.”

But… but… that’s my Kirlian photograph! You can’t take it away from me! I was tortured for that photograph!

Then he gave me one of the pendants. It looked really cheap. I hung it around my neck, but I stuffed it inside my shirt. No point in advertising how foolish I am with money.

I wonder how many people forgot to go back at the end of the day. He probably sold a lot more pendants than he otherwise would have just by that fact alone. Well I sure as hell was going to remember to go by his booth before the end of the day. Not only did he have my money, but he was holding my photograph hostage!

[Tomorrow: More of the fair. And do I remember to get my money back by the end of the day? Do I manage to rescue my photograph from the clutches of this fiend?]

Earlier this month, I went to the “New Living Expo” in San Francisco. In plainer terms, it was a new-age fair. Or, as Penn Jillette would pronounce it, “newage” (rhymes with “sewage”). I had been to one of these before, probably in 2004, so I was overdue to return.

The tricky thing about this newage stuff is finding the wheat among the chaff. Yes, there really is wheat there (or at least there used to be). Several things that we now accept as normal made their first appearances in American society among the aura-oozing, crystal-loving, brain-lapse set. Yoga might be the best example of this, but there are others (which I’m too lazy to look up right now).

I also have a fascination with fringe topics. Since I live an evidence-driven life, I love to check out stuff for myself and gather my own data. This led me, for example, to try out self-hypnosis way back in the ’80s. I discovered that (despite James Randi’s protestations to the contrary) hypnosis is very real and not some cheap stage trick (What passes itself off as stage hypnosis is not hypnosis at all but some very powerful group psychology.).

I’m not sure if hypnosis can actually serve a purpose beyond relaxation, though. There are those who claim you can use it to quit smoking or lose weight. I didn’t need either of those, so I didn’t try it.

The hypnotic state alone can be fun to play with. I’m able to go pretty deep, which I guess not everybody is able to do. I can go deep enough to completely shut down all of my tactile senses. I feel like a brain just floating in space. Trippy, man! Who needs chemical assistance to enter an altered state of consciousness? I can do it with sheer brainpower. (Soon I will be able to shoot lightning bolts out of my eyes! Then the world will tremble!)

You don’t have to be a floating brain, either. You can enter any realm your imagination can dream up. My best experience happened one day when I was trying to reach that ultra-deep state. The common induction techniques have you imagine yourself going down, such as riding down an escalator. You have to visualize yourself descending. If you’re doing it right, this will be accompanied by a sensation of sinking.

On that fateful day, I was lying on my bed and talking myself deeper and deeper. I used the escalator visualization at first, but it only got me partway. Then I noticed that it felt like my body was sinking through the bed. I immediately conjured up some visuals to reinforce that sensation. I imagined myself sinking through the floor, under the house, and then down through the ground. I went deeper and deeper until I hit groundwater. I discovered that I was in an underground cavern, with fresh, cool water, glowing walls, and surprisingly fresh air. And what else was in this subterranean aquatic paradise? The only thing that could make it better, of course. Mermaids!

And these aren’t your crappy TV-censored puritanical mermaids with hooter-shells. No! These were real mermaids! With short hair!

The best part of all was that the fish part started just a tiny bit lower than is normally depicted, if you get my meaning.

As you can see, you never know where your explorations will take you, if you open your mind and follow your curiosity.

I need to emphasize that I suffer no delusions that mermaids exist. They don’t. That entire episode was pure imagination.

[Tomorrow: I go to the newage fair. Six years ago.]

I took a lot of photographs. Those are taking me a while to cull through and crop and enhance. I guess I won’t get that article written until next weekend. I’ll try to post something shorter before then.

In the meantime, enjoy the following, which is one of many great images at Shorthand Hero’s Deviant Art page.