Bay of Fundie

You’re probably aware that abandoned land mines from our species’ countless, pointless wars remain a huge problem throughout the world. The civilized world got together in 1999 and banned these barbaric weapons. The United States, of course, refused.

In Africa, that continent’s numerous civil wars have left huge tracts of land dangerously littered with land mines that continue to kill at random and without warning.

One of the charities I support is officially called APOPO, but they are marketing themselves as Hero Rat. It’s much catchier! They train the African Giant Pouched Rat (which is a bit larger than our buddies here at home) to sniff out land mines. Rats are highly intelligent and have an excellent sense of smell. They’re also too light to set off a mine if they walk over it. This combination of traits makes them ideally suited to this task.

The Economist recently put together a little slideshow about APOPO’s work:

I wonder sometimes if this blog serves any beneficial purpose at all. It probably doesn’t, you know. I should at least try to directly prevent a little misery in the world by occasionally bringing the efforts of this organization to your attention.

They’re a small foreign charity, so donating to them is actually just a tiny bit more involved than it is with larger organizations. If you’re a U.S. resident, donating directly to them is not tax deductible. Blame the IRS and our serpentine tax laws for that one. However, you can donate to them through an intermediate charity, and that is tax deductible.

You have two choices. You can go directly to their website, click the Donate button, and then follow the instructions for your country.

The simpler way is to go to Global Giving and donate to Hero Rat’s Tuberculosis project. That’s the way I do it. That’s also where the link in my sidebar will take you.

Instead of throwing up your hands in frustration at how screwed up the world is, here’s your chance to help unscrew a small part of it.

Mr. Owl, how many stains does it take to get to the lunatic center of the Republican Party?

That’s right, Mr. Owl!

You might recall that three months ago, I discovered that some stain named Orly Taitz was running to be the Republican nominee for California Secretary of State. I hadn’t heard of her at the time, but apparently she was well known as the Queen of the Birthers.

I don’t know if anybody really thought she stood a chance. You might be curious about the election results. Here is a (only slightly-tampered-with) screen capture of the official election results page:

I’m disappointed, but not at all surprised, that she polled as well as she did.

Actually, I am surprised. Surprised that only 25% of the Republican party is batshit insane.

As you’ll recall from my last post, I was trying to figure out whom to bless with my vote for Superintendent of Public Instruction. One of the candidates, Lydia Guitiérrez, sounded like she just might be a fundie. I searched the internet to find out more and discovered ElectionForum.org, a fundie website that was full of suggestions on how I should vote to support the fundie agenda.

I dropped by ElectionForum.org again today to see how well their recommendations fared. They still have the thumb-rating system. The more (white!) thumbs up a candidate receives, the more of a fundie they are:

To this they have added green/pink happy/sad lumps of human tissue, which I can only assume are aborted blastocysts:

So for example, we can scroll down to the Senate race and see what happened to their recommended candidates:

This shows us that on the Republican side, the candidacy of their favorite, Chuck DeVore, has now been aborted. Their abortion of a second-choice pick, Carly Fiorina, won the nomination.

California considers the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction to be “non-partisan”, so all of the candidates were lumped together. Since this is a primary election, the top-two vote-getters will compete in a run-off in November.

Lydia Guitiérrez, dangerous fundie, came in fourth (yay!), which means her opportunity to destroy California schools has passed, at least for the moment. Alarmingly, Lydia wasn’t the only fundie running for schools chief. Let’s check in with ElectionForum.org to see how they did:

Abortions all the way around!

As typically happens, I’m up late studying the ballot the night before the election. I’ve been reading over the candidates’ statements trying to figure out who is worthy of my vote.

I really should do more research than I have, but (like most voters) I have many demands on my time and have to jam what I can into the amount of time I can spare. That’s actually a pretty sad commentary on democracy, and it probably explains why we’re in such dire straights. (How did GW Bush get elected in 2004? Only criminal blindness on the part of voters can explain it.)

In my defense, I pay attention to the major issues for several months leading up to the election, so I am already fairly well informed. Plus, my liberal values are vastly superior to conservative values, so my worst choice would still be better than any conservative’s best choice. (I am normally opposed to the SarcMark, but that last sentence is in great need of it, lest I be quote-mined for the rest of my life.)

Anyway, the only part of the election I’m still trying to figure out at this late date is some of the lower-profile offices. Take, for example, Superintendent of Public Instruction. In California, there are 12(!) candidates vying for that position. Who the hell are all these people?

Fortunately, seven of them have submitted statements to be included in the Voter Handbook. That rules out five right there! If they can’t be bothered to submit a statement, then I can’t be bothered to vote for them. OK, so then it’s just a matter of reading the seven statements and seeing if one of them jumps out at me as profoundly better than the others. At the very least, maybe I can weed out a few more.

One of the statements that caught my attention was by Lydia A. Guitiérrez. She said a few things I liked. I thought maybe she should be on my short-list of candidates to consider. For example, she says:

Prioritize reading, math, science, and other core academic courses with highly qualified teachers and extended classroom time.

She specifically includes science as a core academic subject! She definitely has my attention. But then she says this:

Affirm accuracy in textbooks in all content areas…

Umm… What exactly do you mean by that, Lydia?

There’s no question that textbooks are imperfect. In fact some of them are quite bad. Richard Feynman talked about that problem when he was on a textbook review committee. But these days, you have to read such statements carefully to understand what the speaker really means. She continues:

…including our Founding Fathers…

Oh! She must mean how many of our Founding Fathers weren’t Christians! I’m sure that’s what she means.

…the Constitution…

Of course! She must be referring to the fact that the U.S. Constitution does not mention God even once. Our non-Christian Founding Fathers and Godless Constitution make it clear that this country was not founded on the Bible, the Ten Commandments, or other religious dogma. Smart cookie, that Lydia!

…and the sovereignty of the United States of America.

Umm… What? The only thing wrong with that statement is it’s usually conservo-speak for “OMG!!!! The United Nations! The New World Order! The One World Government! They’re demolishing the Canadian and Mexican borders! The dollar is being replaced by the ‘amero’! They’re going to vaccinate us! They’re tattooing and implanting RFIDs! The death camps! Everywhere we look we see death camps!”

Surely she isn’t one of those. Is she?

What ever did we do before the internet?

I did some Googling and found a very interesting site, which I have bookmarked. It’s called ElectionForum.org. It’s a fundie site telling you how to vote. All you have to do is look at their recommendations and vote the opposite.

For example, here’s what they say about the Senate race:

Notice how they list Democrats as well, just in case you’re one of those people who accidentally checked the wrong box when you registered to vote and didn’t discover the error until it was too late to change it for this election.

They actually manage to dredge up some tepid support for one of the Democratic candidates, although I suspect that’s just to prevent you from voting for the true Anti-Christ on the ticket.

You’ll notice there is a link there to find out a little more detail about how they arrived at their recommendations. If you click it, you’ll see:

I’m really surprised Quintana managed to eke out even one whole thumb in their recommendation list. The other two Democrats must have negative 100s for their “Conservative Christian” and “Low Tax” scores.

This is all rather amusing, but I came here to find out more about Lydia Guitiérrez. Is she really an ultra-conservative unbalanced teabagging Fox News junkie? Or am I projecting onto her my fears of California schools being taken over by Texas-school-board-style lunatics?

Let’s have a look, shall we?

Nope! Not projecting!

[In Parts 2, 3, and 4, I told you about my continuing adventures at the 2004 New Living Expo. It’s now 2010. Time for me to go again!]

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)]

I’m running two anti-spam plugins on this site, and I’m still getting overwhelmed by it. You might have noticed that I’m averaging two spam comments a day that get through. I delete them as soon as I can.

The worse problem is that I end up with about 80 spams a day in the spam bucket. The filter unfortunately is a little too aggressive and sometimes throws real comments in there. I’ve been scanning the spam bucket at least twice a day, but I’ve been missing some lately.

Even worse, the filter seems to have an agenda against certain readers. Lately, it has decided that everything Jeff Eyges writes shouldn’t see the light of day. Whether you agree with that idea or not, that’s my decision to make, not the spam filter’s.

Reluctantly, I have decided to add captchas. I find them inconvenient, so I didn’t want to inflict them on you guys. Worse, sometimes I come across one that is so hard to decipher that it takes me several attempts to get it right.

Anyway, you can thank the spammers that you now have the inconvenience of passing a captcha test in order to comment. If you have any problems with it, let me know via the Contact form.

[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?]