What could it mean?

Years ago, Peggy decorated a mug for each of us. Mine has a Valkyrie hollering her war cry (as Peggy understood it):

What could it mean?

It was Fate

There was a hobby that Jack introduced me to that I embraced completely.

For a long time I was fascinated by the paranormal.

Out of the blue, Jack got me an issue of Fate magazine. I guess I really enjoyed what I read. Jack got me a subscription to the magazine!

One of the first issues I got in the mail really got me hooked.

The article "Table Up! or How to Tilt a Table" got the ball rolling. This is a way to get answers to all of your questions.

It was easy. Three people sit at the east, south and west sides of a card table. You then rub your hands together until they are warm then place your hands on the table so that your thumbs are touching and your pinkies are touching the person's pinkies next to you. You then chant "Table Up! Table Up! Table Up!" After a short time the legs on the north side of the table rise off of the floor! The table then will answer your questions. You tell it to dip up and down to give the answers. For example, for a yes/no question, you could have it dip once for "yes" and twice for "no." I suppose you need to give it an option like three dips for "I'm not telling!"

It actually worked! Three of us got out the card table, sat around it, did the chanting, and, miracle of miracles!, the legs on the north side of the table rose from the floor! It did its dipping to answer our questions!

I can't remember what sort of questions we asked. I certainly don't remember if the answers were very accurate. But it was a miracle that the table ignored the laws of gravity and dipped out answers.

This led me to the 130s section of Mesa Public Library. I must have checked out every book of their paranormal collection.

I investigated dreams. I studied the Tarot. I got a Ouiji board. I read about UFOs. I thought about telepathy and psychokinesis.

A weird thing about the Ouiji board was that whenever Peggy was on the other side of the planchette, the board would give very rude or obscene answers. I guess Peggy was channelling unhappy spirits. I hope they have found their peace.

I never got good at reading the Tarot cards. I probably needed a teacher. Like most of the things I learned outside of school, I was self-taught. Book learning about mystical things isn't the best way to go. The knowledge probably has to be passed empathetically from master to student.

But mostly I learned about testing hypotheses.

I never saw that any of these mystical activities were shown to be real through reproducible tests.

Fate had features where readers would send in their proofs of survival (of this plane's life) and of mystic experiences. Most were rather silly. One woman told about waking up one night to see an otherworldly surgeon operating on her chronically sore hips. She woke up the next morning and the pain she had experienced for years was gone! She had scars on her hips that were proof that she had had the overnight surgery! Even though I was trying to be a believer and I was rather young, my eyes rolled and I thought, "Lady, you have stretch marks. Maybe you lost some weight and your hips aren't working as hard holding you up."

I couldn't be a believer. But I still have fond memories of my time trying to find more in this universe than can be experienced by our five traditional senses.

It wasn't the swine flu but...

I uploaded my latest YouTube masterpiece on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday it got a handful of views. The views came mostly from you, my loyal readers. A few people happened to find it by searching for terms like "dehydrator."

Thursday there wasn't a single view of it. I was bummed.

When I checked first thing on Friday morning there had been one more view of it. Before he went to work I whined to Jerry that it looks like dehydrator videos aren't as popular as Blendtec Blender movies.

Then things changed.

I was burning a vacation day Friday (I've maxed out on how much I can accumulate). So I was always near a computer. About an hour after Jerry left for work I checked again. There had been something like 20 new views of the movie. A few minutes later there had been five more. And through the day the view counter just kept rising at a pretty steady rate.

I had gone viral!

YouTube gives us insight into how people discover our videos and where they are watching them. That information shows up the next day. So I was looking forward to Saturday morning to see what had happened and where it was happening.

Nothing.

Sunday. Nothing.

YouTube's Insight feature was broken. Their support page said their engineers were hard at work fixing the problem. Right. They were at home enjoying the weekend. Lazy engineers.

So I had to wait until this afternoon to see what happened.

Sure enough 94% of the views had come from email or other non-web page sources (like instant messages). Somebody found it and told two friends who told two friends and so on till all the world was getting in on it (just like with shampoo)!

Well, not the whole world. It has had 183 views now. It's been seen in at least 40 of the states. There have been only a few views in the rest of the world. And the pace of new views has slowed to a crawl. But there is potential to become the next Numa Numa dance.

Wish me luck!

Happy, hic, St. Patrick's Day!

There seems to be an interest in beer around St. Patrick's Day. There was quite a spike in views of my Making a Black and Tan YouTube video in the days leading up to that solemn occasion.

Here is a graph of the number of times the video has been watched in the past week.  It became very popular on the 17th.

Mmmmmm.  Black and Tan.

What is Chuckbert up to now?

Chuckbert's been up on the roof. The questions on everybody's minds are:

• Why did Chuckbert strap a Guinness can to his weather machine's tripod?

A closeup of the can:

• And why did he strap some paint cans to the chimney screen?

Only time will tell.