12: Psychics

I'd always like to presume that everyone walking the face of the Earth is essentially quite clever. I sit back and assume that if I'm on a train I can have a 43 minute conversation with the person next to me about topics as diverse as the cause of the recession, the vanguards of American literature in the 20th century and hog breeding. As human beings we have the ability to be incisive, thought-provoking, resourceful and witty.

And yet for all the wonderful gifts that evolution has given us, for all the immense thinking power wrapped up in every single person's brain, for the billions of electrical impulses that one special muscle utilises to drive humanity forward... there are still people that think that psychics have some relevance in the world today.

Why would you want to see the future? I don't. Everyone knows roughly which way that they're headed. If you've worked hard to get where you are then your life isn't really going to take a vastly unexpected turn. Lets say that you spent the last five years working at building up a florist business. If you want to know where it's headed then maybe look back at your records, establish some trends, draw up a well considered business plan and make some projections based upon that. Throw in some intangibles.

Don't go and visit someone who will toss together some generalisations and give you a vague conclusion that you'll then sit on and hark back to everytime something remotely good or bad happens. I would be impressed if a psychic, just for once, didn't throw out a "tall, dark stranger" prediction and instead predicted that we'd all die in a shower of razor sharp broccoli florets.

The same goes for anything else loosely based within the psychic world. Derek Acorah and his like are charlatans, one and all. You know anyone who has ever seen a ghost? No, of course you don't. Because they don't exist. How convenient that something that is allegedly so real cannot be seen by just anyone, nor heard, nor photographed. I've spoken to three different people who have met a drunken Derek Acorah and he's told them that everything he does is made up. Every last thing. He's a trustworthy as a broker at Lehman Brothers. Yeah, that's some fucking satire right there.

Mediums tire me out, especially those that are as believable as the orange faced televangelists in the states. I find someone healing another person by smacking them in the face more realistic than a man in a patterned jumper claiming to know the history of complete simpletons by the means of guesswork and generalisation. It's wrong to pray on the hopes and fears of generally nice people by claiming to be able to speak to their long dead relatives.

The list of people that can talk to dead people is not a long one.

1: Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense"

That is all.

Incidentally, if you decided to read this rant because you misread the title and presume that this is about physics, I apologise for confusing you. But I hate that as well. So, have this bonus rant:

No one uses the words mass or velocity after their GCSEs, fuckers. Stop trying to make us learn them.