ooops ..supposed to be posting these too other thread

[Evoman]

What a waste of a post.

Okay, I'll make it about something.

How much do you hate Sylvia Browne?

[realisticphish]

1. a whole freaking lot

[onager]

2. Immensely, along with all her ilk. And here's one reason why...

On January 12 2007, fifteen-year-old Shawn Hornbeck was found alive after having been missing for four years.

Three years before Shawn was found, his parents - Pam and Craig Akers - appeared on the Montel Williams show to ask Sylvia Browne's help in locating their missing son.

She told them Shawn was dead.

http://www.stopsylviabrowne.com/articles/montel_shawnhornbeck2.shtml

Sort-of on-topic: I recently picked up some light summertime reading, the novel Looking Good Dead by the British writer Peter James.

This is mainly a police procedural. But the main cop character, a British Detective Supervisor, "has an open mind" about psychics. He has a bad habit of taking the property of murder victims to psychics, and has been "reprimanded" for that.

In real life, he would have probably been thrown off the force for corrupting the chain of evidence. And rightly so.

I ended up just wanting to hurl the book across the room, and not just because of the psychic angle. It has a trendy internet-related plot which will have any casual internet user rolling their eyes. (Why would you provide a link to a snuff-film website on a CD? Because the plot requires it, I guess...)

A psychic turns out to be a former cop who provides a dead-accurate reading. (Bad fiction being the ONLY place this ever happens, Grumpy Skeptic must note.) Plotwise, the psychic is something of a convenient deus ex machina.

On Amazon I read that James used to write fantasy/horror, and moved to crime novels due to a current slump in the horror market. Whatever. I won't be reading any more of him. Along with all the other annoyances, he's just not a very good writer, IMO.

[TZ]

3. Here's a story you will enjoy I think

Seems psychics are getting into the medical game it seems..Some guy, I can't remember whom but whom the tv person I heard talking about it said "highly respected" went on the View (yes I know) but told Barabara Walters, among other things that there was something wrong with her white blood cells. ..So Walters gets mad and goes to the doctor...and of course nothing is wrong so she makes snarky comments about the guy on her show. Apparantly the "psychic" is all hurt because he can't understand why she would say bad stuff about him behind his back...and has concluded its "jealousy" because they both had books released at the same time..
:eyes: