November 11, 2011: A Mystically Portentous Date, If You Believe In That Sort of Crap

  
Today—November 11, 2011—is the eleventh day of the the eleventh month of a year that ends with “eleven.” Or, to put it in big orange letters,

11/11/11. 

Kinda neat, huh?

For those who don’t pay particularly close attention to this sort of thing, or have little patience for certain brands of semi-mystical baloney, this is a nifty, neat-looking little coincidence, but nothing more. Sure, time itself does in fact exist,¹ and it is concrete and unchangeable, except of course when it’s not.² But our systems of measuring and recording time are just as arbitrary and subjective as most other human inventions, so there’s no reason to view a particularly interesting alignment of dates as being intrinsically more important than any other day. 

To illustrate this point of view, what follows is today’s date³ according to several different calendars, all of them created by meticulous observation of the sun, moon, stars, and seasons, but nevertheless ending up with different and decidedly non-mystical ways of indicating the very same date:

• Chinese calendar: Cycle 78, year 28 (Xin-Mao), month 10 (Ji-Hai), day 16 (Geng-Wu)
• Coptic calendar: 1 Hatur 1728     
• French calendar: 21 Brumaire an 220 de la Révolution
• Hebrew calendar: 14 Heshvan 5772  
• Indian calendar: 20 Kartika 1933   
• Islamic calendar: 14 Dhu al-Hijjah 1432
• Julian calendar: October 29, 2011  
• Maya calendar: 12.19.18.15.4; tzolkin = 1 Ix; haab = 2 Ceh   
• Persian calendar: 20 Aban 1390   
• YOOB calendar: February 2, Year 3⁴

It’s hard to imagine that the ancient Romans, for example, are all excited about today being October 29, 2011. Granted, the ancient Romans are all long dead, and so aren’t very excited about anything, but we argue that another reason for this is that there’s no more mystical significance to a Julian 10/29/2011 than there is to a Gregorian 11/11/11.

If this doesn’t blow your mind,
try reading it backwards.

 
For other folks, though, this rare coincidence of numbers signals an event no less momentous, certain, and undeniable than the apocalypse that didn’t happen on May 12, 2011, or the next one that won’t happen in late December 2012.

The 11:11 Spirit Guardians, for example, offer an e-mail list to which you can sign up “to receive the beautiful uplifting messages from various types of Celestial Beings.”⁵ Their website also offers a section on poetry related to the 11:11 phenomenon. “Forever . . .,” for example, promises the reader that 

During the time it will take for this poem to be completed,
. . . no animals were either killed or injured in the production
by either this writer, or his immediate friends.

We feel obligated to point out that not once did Shakespeare, Poe, Tennyson, or Maya Angelou promise not to use their poetry to kill animals.

The web page for The N Visible explains that “in May 2004, the 6th Gate Activation turned the Doorway of the 11:11 inside out,” and that “11:11 is a pre-encoded trigger placed into our cellular memory banks prior to our descent into matter.” We can’t pretend to know what any of this means, but we do like that the website features photographs of warm and inviting rituals that could be mistaken for a reenactment of the end credits to The 40-Year-Old Virgin:
 

Definitely not serious.

   

Apparently serious.

As much as we like the idea of receiving messages from Celestial Beings, frolicking on well-manicured seaside lawns while waiting to become part of the emerging universal One Being, or refusing to kill animals with the power of the written word, we’re inclined to take a more practical view of today’s date. According to an online author going by the name paradigmsearch,⁶

Even when taking into account the differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, nothing significant appears to have happened 900 years ago during the year 1111; nothing significant appears to have happened 1,000 years ago during the year 1011; [and] nothing significant appears to have happened 2,000 years ago during the year 11. 

So November 11, 2011, will probably be just as dull and un-momentous as those other momentous dates. Except that we have iPads, because this is the future.

If today does indeed turn out to be as mundane and uneventful as we expect it to be, we hope that the mystical optimists among us don’t take it too badly. We suspect that, rather than despairing, many of these folks will latch onto something that happens today—whether it’s a flat tire, a long look from an attractive co-worker, or a free fourteenth donut in their baker’s dozen—and fill it with an entire belief system’s worth of significance that it doesn’t really deserve, much like they did with the date itself.

On the other hand, Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, is scheduled to be released today, and if that doesn’t make this a momentous, mystical date, we don’t know what does.

Way, way cooler than a
new spiritual awakening: eyelashes.

NOTES

1. As far as we know. We’re not sure if we’d trust us, though, if we were you. Frankly, we’re idiots.

2. Thanks a lot, Einstein.

3. All dates taken from http://isotropic.org/date, http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar, or both.

4. Year of Our Blog. We started on October 10, 2009.

5. Bulk e-mail having been long ago established as the message medium of choice for celestial beings. 

6. Seriously, how weird is that? What kind of oddball uses a fake name?

 

Harry Houdini Drags Out "Return from Death" Trick into Eighty-Fourth Year

Harry Houdini: probably not this creepy in real life.

Harry Houdini—the legendary magician, escape artist, and crusading debunker of pseudo-supernatural frauds —continues to build dramatic suspense by delaying the stunning conclusion to his one-time-only “Return from Death” trick well into its eighty-fourth consecutive year.

Houdini, born Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874, was the master of daring escape tricks such as the Chinese Water Torture Cell, Buried Alive, and the Milk Can Escape, and regularly wriggled his way out of straitjackets, hand- and leg-cuffs, and even, once, the bowels of an adult Indian elephant.¹ His most astounding and still-unconcluded trick, the Return from Death, commenced October 31, 1926, after his appendix ruptured, possibly aided to some degree by a series of gut-punches for which he was unprepared.

In the years since the inception of this greatest of escapes, various individuals—first his wife, Bess, and later other magicians and debunkers—have held séances in an attempt to contact Houdini’s spirit. Given Houdini’s  dedication to exposing psychic charlatans, con men, and all sorts of pseudo-mystical humbug, we are inclined to believe that séances being held in his memory would have him spinning in his grave on at least two separate axes . . . if he were actually dead, that is. His failure to respond from the great beyond strongly suggests that he remains backstage, biding his time for the perfect moment for his spectacular, sensational return.

Reports state that his audience—or at least the paltry few members of the crowd who still survive, and are aware of their surroundings—remain on the edges of their seats.

NOTES

1. Not really.

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.