The Dawning of the Age of Equuleus

Mark Honeychurch - 16 September 2024

A couple of weeks ago I talked with a journalist about psychics, as she was looking into a story that Kelvin Cruickshank appeared to have muscled his way into. As well as giving her some information about how psychics work, and a little about Kelvin, I had also suggested to her that she should visit a psychic to get an idea of how they operate. A day later she let me know that she was planning to visit a psychic fair that weekend, and I suggested that I could meet her there to brief her on what to expect. So, on Saturday morning two weekends ago, Bronwyn and I headed to Upper Hutt and met with Virginia.

I’d sent Virginia an email the previous night, in case we didn’t find her at the fair, giving her a few ideas of what to look out for:

The first thing I’d recommend is to audio record your reading and listen back to it carefully later on. Also one decision when getting a reading is whether you try to play hardball and refuse to answer any leading questions, or just play along like a normal customer and give them any information they want from you. If you’re too cagey, they might get weirded out as this is not usually how their customers act, but I’ve seen psychics handle unresponsive people pretty well in the past so it doesn’t always result in them refusing to do a reading.

When it comes to tricks, one that I really love is where they ask a question that works both ways. For example, the question “your father didn’t like boats, did he?” works both ways. If you answer “yes”, they respond with “I thought he did - I can feel water around him”. And if you answer “no”, the response would be something like “no, I thought not. He says he really didn’t like being on the water”.

Think about how you dress, and what someone might intuit from that. How old are you, how wealthy do you look? Their initial questions will basically be cold reading, so all they have to go on is your appearance and the small amount of interaction you’ve already had with them.

Watch for them subtly changing their original idea as you give them more information, so that rather than a miss just being a miss, as you give them more details they’ll massage their miss into a hit.

One psychic who gave me a reading full of misses, with no hits, covered himself whenever I answered his guesses with “no” with a response of “you will”. So, for example, when he said “I feel that you like to write a lot” and I said no, he answered with “well, you will do in the future”. All of his failed attempts to guess my past turned into predictions for my future, which of course couldn’t be falsified.

In the end we were able to brief her in person as well, and both Virginia and Bronwyn paid to have readings done - a psychic reading and an astrological reading respectively. My 10 year old daughter, who had tagged along with me, was kind enough to buy me a $3 lump of unpolished fluorite for Father’s Day - apparently it should help with my intelligence. Virginia’s article came out in the Sunday Star Times, and was a well-written piece where she did a good job of asking relevant experts, rather than just talking to psychics about their supposed abilities. It’s great to see a critical stance taken by the media once in a while, as a lot of what gets printed these days is entirely too credulous.

In this week’s newsletter, Katrina has looked into Elle McPherson’s recent alt-med claims, and inadvertently uncovered an icky fact about her and vaccine denier Andrew Wakefield. Brad has looked into a horse-related product I investigated a few years ago, although since then it appears that their branding, and their ingredients, may have changed somewhat - when I looked into it, the active ingredient was hippo sweat!

Bronwyn has looked into the history of astrological software, and talked a little about her own reading - although it sounds like there will be more to come at a later date, when the predictions she was given either do or don’t come true. I’ve had a brief look into what makes these pieces of software tick, at least from the perspective of the kinds of text predictions they can spit out. And, finally, Katrina’s found that, as is often the case (I’m thinking cannabis and magic mushrooms here), research into using recreational drugs for medical treatment is a bit of a mess, and sadly not rigorous enough to be useful.