This Just In!

At press time, authorities had unearthed nearly 2,500 more potential victims,
and are on the lookout for suspects dressed in black and described as “sad.”

This Just In!

We’re not quite sure why this is news. The only reasonable conclusion to
come to is that this headline was supposed to read “after she died.”
Because that would be news.

This Just In!

Shit! My horoscope was right!

The 24-Hour News Cycle Finally Fails Us

But what did he eat? For the love of God, man, WHAT DID HE EAT???

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

There’s a chance that the author of the article shown below—or the editor that wrote or approved its headline—is a deep thinker making a sly reference to a famous Zen kōan:

Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?

—Hakuin Ekaku

This kōan, after all, was referred to in a 1990 episode of The Simpsons, which in this part of the world¹ may be the only sure way for your average centuries-old philosophical tradition to get any sort of publicity.

Lisa: No, Bart, it’s a 3,000-year-old riddle with no answer.
It’s supposed to clear your mind of conscious thought.
Bart: No answer? Lisa, listen up! [Pat pat pat]

So, sure, we’re willing to admit the possibility that the author is slyly opening our narrowed Western minds to broader and livelier veins of thought. Our sources, however, suggest he’s just a bit of a dope:

NOTE
1. Excluding Boulder County.

Evidence That the Human Race is Weird, but Worth Saving

On Saturday, July 7, 2012, Denver’s Highland neighborhood reenacted for the second consecutive year its own version of the Running of the Bulls, an event that has been a tradition in Pamplona, Spain, for nearly eighty-two thousand years.¹

Everything about this looks fun. Educational, too—this photograph
gave us good reason to look up the phrase “carotid artery.”

While the Running of the Bulls is held in many other Spanish cities and also in various other parts of Europe, Mexico, and even (oddly enough) Nevada, the spectacle did not gain worldwide attention until the 1926 publication of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and—of far more cultural significance—the 1991 release of Billy Crystal’s enduring classic City Slickers.

The event, which is a prelude to a series of bullfights in the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, has garnered quite a bit of negative publicity in recent years and even protests from the kinds of folks who, for weird reasons they probably can’t even articulate, object to living creatures being stabbed to death for our entertainment.

What the Denver event lacked in injuries, violent deaths,² and Billy Crystal’s buttcheeks, it more than made up in terms of fishnet stockings, wheels, and blind terror,³ as the bulls in this case were not actual bulls but rather members of the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls, who chased participants around a one-kilometer course with wiffle-bats in hand and, without a doubt, murder in their hearts.

Fool—never look behind you! This was almost certainly the last thing this man ever saw.
Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post.

Proceeds for the event are to go to the Tennyson Center for Children. If we were forced to decide between risking getting killed by an angry 2,000-pound bull to get an adrenaline rush, or getting bopped by a pool noodle for charity, we know what we’d pick. But, of course, both options involve running, which is stupid—so screw ’em both, we’re staying right here on the couch.

It beats being trampled and gored to death, for any number of reasons.
Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post.

NOTES
1. All numbers approximate.
2. Fifteen bull runners have died in Pamplona since 1910. But that number reaches into the thousands or even hundreds of thousands if you count all the bull runners who have died in Pamplona of other, non-bull-related causes, such as fright, cancer, old age, and death. So, really, running with the bulls is horrifically dangerous.
3. Possibly nose rings, too.

Aflac Duck Not Insured against Stupidity

Abrasive comedian Gilbert Gottfried has been fired from perhaps his most recognizable job—providing the voice of insurance giant Aflac’s frustrated talking duck—mere hours after tweeting a series of jokes that made light of the destructive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011.¹ As of this writing, more than 1,500 people have died, and that number is almost certain to continue to rise.

Now, to be fair, the idea of “laughing in the face of death” is an old and venerated one. No less a writer than William Shakespeare illustrated it memorably in his gory and generally messed-up tragedy/revenge fantasy Titus Andronicus, in which the protagonist—we forget his name—having witnessed the last of a long series of horrific indignities and evils done to him and his family by his enemies,² bursts into not sorrow but laughter, stating “I have not another tear to shed” before starting to act crazy and getting down to some truly awful business.³ His laughter is jarring, even shocking, but it reveals a man not callously indifferent to suffering and misery, but one overwhelmed by it.

Duck (bottom), and dick.

But we would give Gottfried—probably neither the first nor last person to be given the nickname “America’s Creepy Uncle”—entirely too much credit by comparing him to Shakespeare,⁴ and there is significant difference between an imaginary character’s barking out mad laughter at the horror surrounding him, and a real live human’s making cheap jokes about real-world death.⁵ 

There’s much to be said about timing, too, and timing—despite generally being crucial for comedy—does not appear to be one of Gottfried’s strengths. At a Friars’ Club roast of Hugh Hefner, Gottfried famously joked about his concern that his flight out of town “had a connection at the Empire State Building.” He told this joke in New York City, mere weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The crowd did not respond well, but Gottfried managed to salvage the evening with a particularly inspired rendition of perhaps the most famously offensive joke ever told,⁶ and clearly left the building without having learned a lesson about things he shouldn’t say, and when and where they shouldn’t be said.

Gilbert Gottfried appears to have been unaware that laughing in the face of death is only noble—or even halfway human—if you’re laughing at the prospect of your own death. Laughing in the face of other people’s deaths is, almost without fail, disgusting.⁷ We don’t know the point in time at which it will become acceptable to make jokes about what has happened in Japan over the last week, but we’re very sure that that point doesn’t happen while rescuers are still searching for bodies.

NOTES

1. In the interest of good taste, those jokes will not be repeated here. In the interest of questionable taste and a desire to keep our readers informed, however, a link to a short list of them has been provided. If you can find it.

2. Among them: Titus kills one of his own sons for defying the Roman Emperor; the new Empress, wishing revenge on Titus, allows her sons to violate and mutilate Titus’ daughter; Titus later cuts off his own hand to spare the lives of two of his remaining sons, but they are executed anyway and their heads (and his hand) returned to Titus to mock him. After that, though, the play gets kind of messed up.

3. If you’re not interested in watching Julie Taymor’s intriguing but weird and exceedingly grim Titus, check out the South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die.” You’ll wish you hadn’t, but if you can filter out the weirdness, the Hannibal Lecter references, and the guest appearance by Radiohead, you’ll get the gist of Titus Andronicus.
4. A reasonable comparison between Shakespeare and Gilbert Gottfrield would involve their height: Gottfried is 5'5", and Shakespeare lived four hundred years ago, so he was probably pretty shrimpy. Also, Shakespeare, having acted in his own tragedies, probably died on stage plenty of times, and we suspect that Gottfried has too.
5. We’re basing this statement on the tenuous evidence that Gilbert Gottfried does, in fact, exist.
6. We would prefer that our readers do not attempt to look up this joke for any reason, especially readers that are, for example, our mom. That goes for “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” too.   
7. Eddie Izzard successfully joked about Hitler’s death, but of course that’s an easy exception to make because Hitler, as Izzard correctly understated, “was a mass-murdering fuckhead.” Exceptions to the rule against joking about others’ deaths are few and far between.

Millionaires, Billionaires Decide that Financial Suicide is the Best Option

National Football League owners surprised nobody on Earth on March 12, 2011, by failing to come to an labor agreement with the NFL Player’s Association—after sixteen days of mediated talks and “months of stop-and-start negotiating”—and subsequently locking out the players,  beginning the league’s first work stoppage in almost twenty-five years. This lockout signals that the owners are—or at least hope to appear to be—willing to scuttle the entire 2011 season, lose billions of dollars of revenue, and potentially alienate the hundreds of millions of fans that have made the NFL the financial juggernaut it is today,¹ simply to squeeze a paltry couple million more dollars out of their employees and fans.

Those fans—whose almost embarrassingly enthusiastic support has transformed professional football from an early-twentieth-century novelty act into a pervasive $9 billion-per-year industry—now face the sobering prospect of having to pay attention to their jobs on Monday morning, instead of checking their fantasy football scores; having to talk and even listen to their spouses, children, and friends for significant parts of Sundays, instead of just during halftime; and perhaps worst of all, having to survive the weekend with no more than the measly ten to twelve hours’ worth of college football coverage they get on Saturdays.

No one can predict what the future holds for the NFL—although we suspect it will involve offensively rich people casually dismissing quantities of money that would make regular fans faint of heart, while at the same time squabbling endlessly over almost nothing—but needless to say, we think that bringing an almost obscenely lucrative industry to a dead stop is a brilliant move.

Wait, no! Just kidding. Actually, we think this is a complete load of shit, because we are not, in fact, money-hungry idiots. Instead we’re regular everyday, run-of-the-mill idiots with small bank balances, common sense, limited vocabularies, hairy knuckles, and protruding foreheads: you know, football fans.

As actual adults, albeit ignorant ones, we at Bowling in the Dark find it hard to accept that the thirty-one NFL owners²—sixteen of whom are billionaires, which one would think implies some tiny degree of business sense—were unable to find a way to split nine billion dollars per year in a way that kept everybody happy.

And these negotiations weren’t even with other savvy businessmen, but with football players. Athletes, most of them with communications degrees—gentlemen physically gifted and driven to succeed, but so feeble of mind that they have managed to earn mere tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Practically children, really.³

As longtime football fans, we find it hard to accept that the only way do come to a satisfactory conclusion to these negotiations is to eliminate an entire football season.

More importantly, as longtime Denver Broncos fans, we find it hard to accept that the NFL and the NFLPA couldn’t have found a way to eliminate last season instead of the next one.

Thanks a lot, assholes.

NOTES

1. Or, at least, was up until March 11, 2011.

2. There are in fact thirty-two teams in the league, but the Green Bay Packers are publicly owned, so for that reason I’m leaving them out of this.
3. If we are found dead, covered with cleat marks, your chief suspect should be a football player with no understanding of irony. We’re sorry that this is not likely to narrow the field down very much.

Psychic Frauds and the Denver Post

Months ago, if I’d had a little more focus and determination, I would have cobbled together a few words to say about the regrettable decline of newspapers in the United States of America. As the saying goes, a stupid country is a shitty country,¹ and I believe that newspapers, while far from perfect, overall have a net positive contribution to the public good, and do an admirable if basic and occasionally spotty job of informing their readers and providing them with a voice against the corrupt, the powerful, the greedy, and the dishonest.

Or at least that’s what I would have wanted to write, had I done so a few months ago. Lately, though, thanks in part to the Denver Post, I’m starting to wonder if they’re really on our side after all. Please don’t take my word for it, though; check it out for yourself: the article that has me second-guessing myself—and, more importantly, the Post—was published on February 1, 2010, and I’ve linked to it here. If memory serves, the headline was “Malicious, Conniving Fraud Exploits the Vulnerable.”

(Please take your time reading; we’ll enjoy some pleasantly upbeat intermission music²—click below if you want to join in—and we’ll be here waiting for you when you get back.)



Let me be clear on this: I’m not going to tell you there’s no such thing as psychic abilities, and I’m definitely not going to tell you that they do exist, either. To make either statement would require a lot more proof than I have on hand. I am prepared to say, though, that I’m pretty sure that no self-proclaimed psychic has ever given a scrap of indisputable evidence to back it up—not one—and countless numbers of them³ have been exposed (some by good folks such as Harry Houdini and James Randi, others by their own incompetence or arrogance, or regrettable twinges of honesty and conscience)⁴ as swindlers and con artists.

Which is what, by all appearances, we have here with Rebecca Rosen. My problem is not that the Post decided to cover this story; my problem is with the wide-eyed credulity with which the reporter treated what, to me, appears to be an obvious fraud. Keep in mind, I’m no James Randi—I’m not a professional (or even amateur) debunker—but nothing in that article gave me reason to believe that Rosen is even remotely supernatural. Some examples:

Vicky and Charles Dinges believe they have somebody up there with lots to say. Their son, Jason, died in 2007 of hantavirus. He was 20 years old, an aerospace-engineering student at the University of Colorado, Vicky Dinges said.
. . . A friend suggested that she contact Rosen. About eight months later, the parents went to see Rosen at a public appearance.

If—as the article and Rosen’s own website both state—Rosen has a three-year waiting period for appointments, it’s safe to assume that Vicky and Charles Dinges contacted Rosen (and would have given her, among other things, their names) long before meeting her at the public appearance. Now, even the least clever of us can find out a lot about somebody in eight months, especially if you start with (1) their names and (2) the assumption that, if you claim you can speak to the dead, most people who contact you will have lost somebody close to them. If right now you’re saying “well, duh, it doesn’t take a mind reader to figure that one out,” that’s exactly my point.

One acting on that assumption could, for example, take almost six seconds to type “Vicky Dinges” into a search engine and come up with this article. That’s just what I did, and I’m not even psychic.

Minutes into the event, Rosen was standing in front of the couple, saying she was getting a message. . . . “She looked at me and said: ‘This was your son. He died close to your birthday, and he is sorry about it being so close to your birthday,’ ” Dinges said. Jason died two days after her birthday, Dinges said.

You can find the date of Jason Dinges’ death in the article linked above. And if I’m not mistaken, birth dates and dates of death have been parts of public record in this country for several years now. Is it easier to look something like this up in easily accessible public records, or get the answers from beyond the grave?⁵

“Then she said, ‘Who is Chris?’” Dinges said. . . . Chris is the couple's older son; Jason had plenty to say to Chris as well, Dinges said.

The trick of knowing Jason Dinges had a brother is significantly less mind-blowing if you remember what you just read mere seconds ago and conclude that his birth, just like his brother’s and mother’s, is part of the public record—for con artists and regular folks alike, far more easily accessible than the netherworld.

Rosen said she initially had to be convinced too. During a bout of depression in college—where she was majoring in advertising—Rosen recalled praying for help. One night, as she was writing in her journal, a spirit she believes was her grandmother took over the writing. Her grandmother comforted Rosen, helped pull her out of her depression and even told her whom she would marry. The hint, Rosen said, was, “Ryan will give you a rose.” Grandma was two letters off—she married Brian Rosen.

Even without addressing the fact that Rosen majored in advertising—where one’s job is, in short, to convince people to believe things that aren’t necessarily true, and then spend money on it⁶—it strikes me as more than a little telling that the foundation of Rosen’s psychic abilities is an utterly unverifiable story, with no apparent witnesses, from years and years ago. I’m not going to say this is absolutely impossible, mind you, but it’s considerably less believable than several other options that spring quickly to mind:

1. “I think I’m telling the truth, because I am insane, but it’s that kind of benevolent insanity found only in movies like The Fisher King or K-Pax that allows me to help gullible and grief-stricken people . . . and, incidentally, get them to pay me $500 an hour for it.”
   
2. “I made it all up to make myself feel important, and to make a shitload of money.”
   
3. “I’m lying, but I've found that desecrating the memories of dead people I've never met is a good way of making their vulnerable, mourning loved ones feel vaguely better at least long enough to finish writing me a check.”
   
4. “I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the sink, and when I came to I had a revelation! A vision! A picture in my head! A picture of this! This is what makes time travel possible: the flux capacitor!”

Call me a skeptic if you must, but all of these options—all of them—are more likely than “I received a psychic message from my dead grandmother. Oh, and you’re never going to believe this, but my dead grandmother—despite being only human and, of course, dead, can also predict the future. How awesome is that?” The Post’s article goes on to say that “the human appetite for psychic phenomena, and the desire of many to believe in them, is storied and constant.” That’s certainly true. But it’s also true that the human appetite to make an easy buck is at least as constant and far more storied, and it’s not always accompanied by the ethical guidelines that, in the general population, tend to prevent people from bullshitting one another. Don’t just take my word for it. The magicians Penn & Teller make a healthy living off of tricking people, but the difference is that you know it’s a trick beforehand—and in case you forget that, they even tell you it’s a trick even as they’re tricking you, and half the time they’ll explain how they did it after it’s done. Better yet, they explain how other people do it, like in this scene taken (probably without permission) from their entertaining and spectacularly vulgar Showtime Series Bullshit!:
 

 
While it troubles me that con artists and fakers continue to separate credulous people from their money with ease, more disappointing to me is that the Denver Post not only lets it happen but even publicizes it, essentially providing a free thousand-word advertisement for someone who, to the best of my ability to tell, has no supernatural ability whatsoever. Rebecca Rosen makes $500 an hour (an astounding figure that I may have mentioned once or twice already) by supposedly speaking to the dead. And rather than realizing and pointing out that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of con artists who have preyed on vulnerable people since time immemorial have claimed to do just that very thing, the Post decided to hop right up onto Rosen’s wagon and start selling snake oil right beside her. But don’t just take my word for it. Her own grandmother told me just the other day that Rebecca Rosen is full of shit.⁸

Prove me wrong.⁹  

NOTES 

1. I’m not sure if anybody actually says that, but I think we should start. You go first! 

2. Courtesy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, used without permission. 

3. By “countless” I mean that somebody may have bothered to count them, but I sure haven’t, and I doubt I ever will. If you can find evidence that contradicts the statement, though, I’d be happy to learn about it. 

4. In the mid-1800s, sisters Margaret and Kate Fox claimed that spirits communicated with them through strange “rapping” sounds, and made a living off of this for several years. Later in life, Margaret confessed—and showed—that the rapping was simply the sound her feet (and possibly knee) joints made when she popped them, and she combined this sound with the power of suggestion and shrewd but very natural observation of her marks to fool a lot of people. And people didn’t believe her when she claimed to not be a medium. 

5. If you’re actually debating the answer to this, please slap yourself really fucking hard right now. 

6. I really do need a Swiffer! Pepsi really is the choice of a new generation! Bud Light tastes slightly better than cold urine! You speak to dead people! Do you take cash? 

7. Yeah, yeah, I know. “There goes Some Guy again, doing his Carl Sagan bullshit.” 

8. For purposes of avoiding a libel suit, I’d like to state for the record that I did not write, think, or publish any of the above article, and I have no idea who did. But Rebecca Rosen’s grandmother really did tell me that her granddaughter was full of shit. 

9. My sincere apologies to the Dinges family not only for dredging up their loss, but for trying to use them as an illustration of the unbelievability of something they apparently genuinely believe. In my defense, I'm not charging them an obscene amount of money to dredge up their loss.