Old one, new one

[zultr]

Stuck in the snow with remote in hand. The History Channel runs a show on Nostradamus. Some guy between two unnamed rivers - must be Saddam Hussein! Mabus is a combination of Osama and Bush! Now if they could just figure out how to actaully have some kind of practical application for all his prescience.

Then I saw a new infomercial in the talk show format. Someone referred to as a doctor revealed his medical breakthrough: color code your foods. If you have a heart problem, eat red foods (because your heart is red). Mysteriously, red meat doesn't work for your heart. If you color coordinate your food to your organs, you will be much healthier (for more details about the diet, you have to buy his book). He explained that there are seven colors in the rainbow, but I changed the channel before I found out which are the orange and purple organs.

[Brown]

I saw the Nosta-dumbass show, too. There was a pretty good (but fairly brief) skeptical rebuttal from Shermer and Penn and Teller. Well, from Penn, anyway. Randi's book "The Mask of Nostadamus" was shown, but the implication was that it was one of many books that found merit in the business.

There were a couple of points that I wish had been made. First, the folks who thought that the predictions had merit tended to pick and choose among the writings. There were several quatrains presented with ellipses in them, suggesting that some editing had taken place. Also, two unrelated writings were presented back to back as though they were about the same subject.

Second, there was much forgiveness among the believers when the prediction was a miss... which was often. There was such a desire to tie that "forty-five degrees" piece-o'-crap to the World Trade Center (which was much closer to forty degrees north latitude than forty-five) that someone pointed out that the forty-five degree north latitude line passed through the very northern part of New York State, and therefore, the prediction was a hit.

Some of the "predictions" were laugh out loud funny. The one about the assassination of JFK was a riot. Supposedly, somebody on a roof threw lightning at JFK, and yet, a dead innocent person was blamed, even though the guilty person was in a copse. The Nostradamus "expert" declared this a true prediction because Oswald was innocent (Why? Because he SAID he was!) and because the "copse" describes the grassy knoll perfectly! No one bothered to ask this guy about all this nonsense about the roof (was there a roof in the copse?) and the lightning, which appears in the same quatrain. No, it's much easier to pick and choose, and if necessary, to make up facts to form a hit.

Penn made the repeated point that if the Nostradamus believers had knowledge of certain disasters, then it is immoral of them not to divulge that knowledge ahead of time.