Well, Dear Ones, it's been two weeks since I blogged, and now I find myself in a brand new year, at least if you're going by the Gregorian calendar.I was seriously considering doing one of those painfully clever Year In Review posts outlining the best and worst of 2008 from my Whirled view. After all, 2008 was an eventful year in the New-Wage/selfish-help arena; we had everything from a benevolent, bearded New-Wage guru who turned out to be a genocidal war criminal, to the usual shenanigans of your garden-variety hustledorks and amateur quantum physicists. Scientist Bob Proctor disavowed one of his major fame tickets, The Secret, while pushing the latest in a series of his own
Indeed, the ocean of 2008 runneth over with snark chum.
Alas, I quickly realized that I am far too lazy to do a Whirled Year In Review. I'm even too lazy to do a personal Year In Review, even though it was a significant year for me, in that I became a country girl and finally learned how to use Twitter.
So I'm going to take the easy way out and hand you over to Dave Barry, who, of course, concerns himself with a much broader range of topics than I do. Just in case you haven't seen it yet, here is Dave's review of the year that was. And remember, he's not making it up. At least, not all of it.
PS ~ Don't worry. I'll get back to snarking...well...probably tomorrow!
PPS added January 3 ~ That "tomorrow" I mentioned above is now yesterday, and threatening to turn into the day before yesterday. But don't worry, I am preparing to snark...
9 comments:
Connie, happy, healthy -- and snarky, why not:) -- 2009 to you and Ron.
P.S. To help the snark along a bit, see this:
Hypnotherapist, 75, jailed for sex attacks
By Matthew Cooper
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
The Independent
A 75-year-old hypnotherapist was jailed for eight-and-a-half years today for committing a string of sex attacks on young girls during massage sessions.
Peter Knight was told by a judge that the offences were a breach of trust aggravated by the fact that his victims were targeted because their mothers were "vulnerable and credulous".
Knight, who claimed to be healing his victims, was convicted of 16 counts of indecent assault and three other sex offences last month following a two-week trial at Birmingham Crown Court.
The court heard the pensioner, of Selsey Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, committed the offences against young women and girls over a 10-year period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s after billing himself as a spiritual healer who specialised in positive thinking. [emphasis mine]
Full text:
http://tinyurl.com/7kpety
WV: wirlins :)
Thank you for the good wishes, Eliz, and thank you for being Whirled Musings' first commenter of 2009! Your verification word for your second comment was...well, what can I say that we haven't already concluded in our conversations on SHAMblog? The Blogger 'bots are smarter than we have been led to believe. :-)
The story of the 75-year-old "healer" who turned out to be a sexual predator is, alas, all too common, and not just in the UK, of course. But this one was, I admit, an extreme example, given the fact that many if not most of the victims were children. Who knows how many other "hypnotherapists" and other "therapists" are out there being "the-rapists?" It's kinda scary...
Serendipity/Syncronicity at its finest:
The "failblog" people (who are also the lolcats/loldogs people) just put a "commercial fail" on its site--a television ad for the "Wunder Boner".
I kid you not. If this doesn't bode well for the new year, we skeptics are too far gone to EVER get self-helped....
http://failblog.org/2009/01/02/commercial-fail/
(It's worth a click just for the boingity-boing-boing music in the background!)
My pleasure, Connie.
As to the untold number of therapists who are the-rapists, I can say with unfortunate certainty that it is always larger than we think. But this guy must have been really special, because the mothers of the abused kids stood by him to the end, defending his "methods"... Some really positive thinker, he.
Another Dave Barry classic. My favorite:
Barack Obama, having secured North and South America, flies to Germany without using an airplane and gives a major speech -- speaking English and German simultaneously -- to 200,000 mesmerized Germans, who immediately elect him chancellor, prompting France to surrender.
...and the ingenious (and quite plausible) explanation for how Sarah Palin got into the race.
Cheers, happy 2009!
Great link, Mojo. I'm going to order a Wunder Boner for every fisherman on my gift list!
Elizabeth, it's beyond sad that mothers of abused kids would defend the abuser. It just goes to show how much damage a master manipulator can do.
Hi, Volly! Yeah, that is a Barry classic. You can see why I have supported a Barry presidency for every election since he first began running. Not to take anything away from Barack Obama, but maybe Dave will finally have his chance in 2012. Of course even if elected he won't get to serve, because the world will end on December 21 of that year, but at least he'll have the satisfaction of finally getting elected.
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