Catholic Church Down on Saunas

Apparently Vienna's archdiocese has a problem with saunas - at least if they are made from secondhand confessionals.

Bidding on eBay on a confessional at a church undergoing renovation – described on the site as ideal for conversion into a one-person sauna or a small bar or a children's playhouse – was stopped when the archdiocese stepped in.

Spokesman Erich Leitenberger said that auctioning 'objects that were used for dispensing the sacraments is not acceptable.'

Confessionals 'should not be converted into saunas or bars,' he was quoted Tuesday as saying.

It strikes me as kind of silly to impose these sorts of restrictions especially at a time when the Church could use the money. What are they supposed to do with old sacramental items? Dump them? Burn them? Warehouse them somewhere to rot until the end of time? None of that seems particularly respectful.

I mean, Jesus didn't say one single bad word about sitting in a box full of steam or drinking. In fact, given the nature of the eucharist it seems to me that he must have been a fan of good wine.

Here's some advice from a magician - the clergy should perform a ritual to remove any lingering spiritual power that has accumulated in the object. Then they can do whatever they like with it, including selling it raise needed funds.

Octopus Beats Vulture Brains

With the World Cup over, it looks like the vulture brains were completely unnecessary. As it turned out all that gamblers really needed to do was listen to Paul, Germany's psychic octopus.

The eight-legged oracle has become a FIFA World Cup sensation by correctly forecasting all seven Germany games in South Africa and he finished the tournament in style by predicting a Spanish victory in the Soccer City sign-off.

As Paul foretold last week, Spain won their first world title after Andres Iniesta's 116th-minute strike broke the Netherlands' hearts. The tentacled tipster also correctly predicted Germany would beat Uruguay in Saturday's third place play-off.

In the now familiar routine, two boxes were lowered into his tank last week, each containing a mussel and the flags of the two opposing teams. Paul went straight to the correct box both times, wrenched open the lid and gobbled the tasty morsel.

So how does he do it? Luck or paranormal powers? Octopi are highly intelligent, so I don't find it impossible that one could have some sort of low-level psychic ability. When I first heard about this I wondered if it had something to do with the colors on the flags of the various countries since octopi also have highly developed color vision, but what are the odds that in every match the team with the flag that looked most aesthetically pleasing to an octopus would win?

It could just be chance, remarkable as that may seem. In fact, it sounds like a lot of folks were using animals to predict the World Cup and if there are enough of them out there at least one was bound to guess all the matches correctly. For example, a man in Singapore claimed that his psychic parakeet had also racked up an impressive record of predictions and picked the Netherlands to win the final, whereas Paul picked Spain. Paul proved right, but no matter what the outcome was one of the two was going to be correct.

Some fans seemed to believe that the octopus was influencing the games in some way.

But the art of football predicting has become a dangerous job for the English-born clairvoyant. He fell offside with bitter German fans who threatened to turn him into sushi after he predicted a semi-final defeat for the Mannschaft against Spain.

Paul's home, an aquarium in western Germany, has received death-threat emails saying "we want Paul for the pan," said entertainment supervisor Daniel Fey. No less an authority than Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero has called for octopus bodyguards. Spanish Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian has called for the creature to be given an "immediate" free transfer to Spain to "ensure his protection."

Stung by Paul's "treachery" at picking Spain over Germany in last Wednesday's semi-final, some sections of the 350,000-strong crowd watching the game on giant screens in Berlin sang anti-octopus songs.

While I doubt the cephalopod is sitting in its tank casting spells, fans might have a point. Professional sports is played by athletes who are so good that there's barely any difference in ability between them. In that world an elite player is only a tiny fraction of a percent better than a mediocre one. With the amount of media attention Paul got as his predictions proved correct there's no way that the players wouldn't have heard of his picks. If that undermined the confidence of the team picked to lose by even a minuscule amount it may have been enough to change the outcome of at least some of the matches.

A better method for testing the octopus' psychic powers would have been to set up some sort of double-blind test where the prediction was made but not announced until after the match was played. But unfortunately with the short lifespan of an octopus Paul won't get that chance, at least not at next year's World Cup.

His prediction of a Spanish victory is expected to be the last for Paul, who in octopus terms is a pensioner, at the grand old age of two-and-a-half. Octopuses generally live three years at the latest.

Maybe next year scientists could try testing that parakeet from Singapore. Birds live a lot longer.

Zimbabwe Goblin Attacks

In the comments on the Colorado leprechaun incident reader Giania brought this article to my attention. It seems that rural Zimbabwe has been hit by a rash of goblin attacks!

Villagers said the goblins attacks came at a time when nurses were busy with a malaria programme aimed at reducing malaria related deaths, which are prevalent in the area.

Villager Edmore Mukapa of Kadziro area said, "we were not expecting goblins to attack nurses who are trying hard to reduce malaria outbreak here. It’s unfortunate for us."

A teacher at Makande primary school said school children were also causalities of attacks daily.

This seems to be a valid question - why would goblins bother attacking nurses working to reduce malaria? Is it because there's some connection between the two? Maybe the goblin eat mosquitoes and don't want their numbers reduced or something. The villagers seem to believe that the attacks are part of some sort of complicated extortion scam.

"Attacking nurses with goblins leave us vulnerable. Goblins owners do not accept payments to their demands. You can not force them to accept the payments because of the Witch-craft Suppression Act. It’s a complicated issue," said a teacher who refused to be named for fear of victimisation.

Currently the Witchcraft Suppression Act makes it criminal to label anyone a witch or wizard.

What the article fails to mention is anything about the demands of the "goblin owners." Apparently they don't want money if they aren't accepting payments, or they want more than the villagers are willing to offer. Whatever their demands are, Chief Musampakara has reportedly hired his own magicians (tsikumatandas) to drive out the goblins.

Villagers hailed the move to hire tsikamutandas to "clean up witchcraft" although Chief Musampakaruma was not available for comment.

Nyaminyami council chief executive officer Isaac Mackenzie confirmed that traditional leaders hired tsikamutandas following complaints by victims of the attacks.

Although tsikamutandas are accused of sowing divisions among families and villagers, in Makande rural their presence is a reprieve.

"The attacks on nurses was unwarranted. Nurses are the last line of duty to combat malaria which is common here. Traditional leaders believe hiring of tsikamutandas will clean the area." said Mackenzie.

Maybe this is the scam right here. If a tsikamutanda happens to own some goblins, he can set them loose and then offer to come in for a fee and exorcise them. It's kind of like the protection rackets run by organized crime, but using obnoxious fortean creatures rather than big guys with baseball bats.

Let me suggest a better business model - sell the goblins! Can they be shipped overseas? I know that I'd be interested in ordering some and I'll bet I could find plenty of other magicians who would love to assemble their own infernal legions of the night. Since Zimbabwe's economy is such a train wreck at this point I know that American currency is especially valuable, probably much more so than anything that could be extorted from a village clinic.

First Vampires, Now Leprechauns?

Something funny is going on in the state of Colorado. Only days after the roadway vampire incident police are looking for a leprechaun that was spotted harassing customers outside a supermarket in Boulder.

Either Colorado is now home to a crack in the universe that amplifies paranormal phenomena or there's a guy out there with more than one costume.

Police in Colorado are looking for a man dressed as a leprechaun who was seen jumping around a car park pretending to shoot people with his fingers.

Police in the city of Boulder were called after the man was spotted in the parking lot of a local supermarket, jumping out from behind cars, doing gun-fingers at shoppers, and reportedly making obscene gestures.

Sergeant Fred Gerhardt of the Boulder police told local newspaper the Daily Camera: 'I think that's why they called us. He was acting bizarre.'

Well, that, and it's not every day you see a leprechaun in a parking lot, making obscene gestures or not. True to form, though, the creature vanished before law enforcement could arrive and steal its pot of gold.

Officers who arrived on the scene were, unfortunately, unable to locate the leprechaun, who remains at large.

According to Gerhardt, this is the first time Boulder police have had to deal with a complaint about a leprechaun.

So far there is no word on whether or not alcohol or drugs were involved this time around. In related news, a photographer in Finland has finally succeeded in finding the end of the rainbow. Perhaps this discovery prompted the leprechaun's appearance, though why it showed up in Colorado instead of Finland remains a mystery.

Colorado's Roadway Vampire

Could the undead be on the prowl in Colorado? At least one woman thinks so.

She claims to have been startled by a vampire standing in the center of the road, prompting her to drive her SUV into a canal.

The woman said that she was driving her SUV along a dirt road in Colorado's Grand Valley region on Sunday night when she saw a vampire standing in the middle of the track.

Startled by the appearance of the undead fiend, the immediately put the SUV into reverse, with the result that she drove straight into the canal.

Oddly enough the vampire did not feed upon the poor woman, which makes one wonder what the point of standing in the middle of the road really was. All things considered standing in the road is a pretty good strategy to make motorists stop or crash, especially if you happen to be undead and don't run the risk of normal injuries should someone decide that they would rather just hit you. But running off as soon as you've disabled someone's car kind of defeats the vampire's usual purpose of hunting for fresh mortal blood.

The woman was not injured in the accident, or subsequently ravaged by the vampire, and her husband arrived to take her home.

There were no other witnesses who reported seeing the alleged bloodsucker. Troopers who arrived at the scene found the woman's vehicle in the canal, but were unable to track down the vampire.

One thing I will say is that of all the claims made in the article this one is the hardest for me to believe:

Police say they do not believe drugs or alcohol played any part in the vampire incident.

So far the Vampyre Nation has released no comment regarding the accident.

Anubis in Denver

Anubis has come to Denver. As part of the traveling exhibit of the treasures of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun at the Denver Art Museum an enormous statue of the Egyptian god has been erected at the Denver International Airport.

While the statue is impressive, some controversy has erupted over whether or not the airport really needs a likeness of the god responsible for carrying souls into the afterlife, especially given that many people hate flying because they are afraid of the sort of air disasters that might require Anubis' involvement. Others are of the opinion that to have a god associated with death and funerals welcoming visitors to the city is simply in poor taste.

The Egyptian god Anubis was constructed earlier this month at the airport to welcome the new King Tut Exhibit, which opens June 29 at the Denver Art Museum.

In early Egyptian history, Anubis was a god of the dead and a god of funerals.

This has created controversy among some residents and has a few of them, like Millie Lieberman of Denver, asking why this would be the piece that welcomes people to the city.

"The black on it represents the decaying body. To me it's a very sick and poor representation of what we're all about here in Denver," Lieberman said.

My guess is that Anubis was selected when the exhibit was first put together because the treasures of the Pharaoh were intended to follow him into the afterlife, making the psychopomp Anubis a pretty good choice as herald of the exhibit in terms of Egyptian theology. Anubis did not cause people to die, but when they did his job was to conduct their souls into the next world. But modern people see "god of death" and fail to understand the nuances of the Egyptian pantheon - or just ignore it altogether.

The Denver Art Museum stands behind its piece and says that is not what it is supposed to represent.

"There's absolutely a literal interpretation of what that figure represented in ancient Egypt. It's definitely not what its intended representation is in 2010. It's just a piece of art to celebrate the King Tut Exhibit to the museum," said Andrea Folton, director of communication at the Denver Art Museum, said.

One wonders what Anubis thinks about being referred to as "just a piece of art." As a magician I know that spiritual beings have an existence above and beyond the aesthetics of any particular culture, and while the naysayers do not understand what Anubis really represents his supporters should be careful not to dismiss the thousands of years of tradition and belief surrounding the Egyptian faith.

God's Been Busy

Lightning has been associated with the Almighty from time immemorial. The flow of Mezla down the Tree of Life from Kether to Malkuth is called the lightning flash. Some anthropologists believe that the deity from which the Judeo-Christian God evolved was originally some sort of storm god. And it seems likely to me that the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel was probably created to explain the common-sense observation that if you build a tower in the middle of a desert it will be struck by lightning as soon as the next storm rolls in. Given all that, it may very well be that humanity's greatest invention in terms of thwarting God's will was in fact the lightning rod.

Over the last two weeks God seems to have been throwing his thunderbolts around more than usual. The first casualty was a young Tennessee woman who was tragically killed by lightning as her boyfriend was about to propose to her.

A young Tennessee woman was struck and killed by lightning on one of her favorite North Carolina mountain trails only moments before her boyfriend was about to propose to her, the Asheville Citizen-Times reports.

Richard Butler, 30, said he and Bethany Lott, 25, both from Knoxville, had ignored the rain and kept heading up Max Patch Bald, a spot that Bethany had longed to show him.

In his pocket, he had his own surprise -- an engagement ring.

There seems to be no reasonable explanation for her death, unless one subscribes to the Gnostic idea of the Demiurge - a God who simply is not that fond of human beings. I mean, I don't find the contention that had they married these two would have spawned the Antichrist or something even marginally credible. In fact, taken along with the next two stories one is left to wonder what the Lord's intentions might really be.

God's next target was a BP oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico that was in the process of siphoning oil from the leaking Deepwater Horizon well.

A drill ship resumed siphoning off oil gushing from a blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday after a bolt of lightning struck the vessel and ignited a fire that halted containment efforts, the company said.

BP PLC spokesman Bill Salvin told The Associated Press that the drill ship called the Discoverer Enterprise resumed processing oil Tuesday afternoon, about five hours after the fire caused an emergency shutdown. Engineers on the ship have been siphoning about 630,000 gallons of oil a day through a cap on top of the well.

He said there was no damage reported to the containment cap, and the Coast Guard approved BP restarting the system.

While God's anger with BP over the catastrophic spill is understandable, couldn't he have picked a better target for his anger than one of the ships working to prevent further damage to the Gulf? Like, say, the BP or MSS executives who approved cutting corners on safety equipment that might have prevented the disaster in the first place? Maybe they were too well-protected by lightning rods, but it still seems counterproductive to halt the cleanup effort if God is indeed angered by the spill.

God's final target seems the least explicable, at least on the surface - a 62-foot statue of Jesus in Ohio.

Lightning and a subsequent fireball Monday night destroyed a 62-foot-tall "King of Kings" statue of Jesus with arms stretched toward the skies, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

The only thing visible this morning is the charred frame of the plastic foam and fiberglass statue, the newspaper says, citing police in Monroe, Ohio.

"It burned to the ground. The whole statue is gone," said Kim Peace, a police dispatcher.

It could be that this is simply a case of God enforcing the real Second Commandment - the one most Christian denominations pretend doesn't exist by splitting "Thou Shalt Not Covet" into two separate commandments. That commandment prohibits the making of graven images of anything in Heaven or on earth, and the Ohio statue probably qualifies.

Maybe the lesson here for anyone wanting to build a sculpture of Jesus is to use better materials than fiberglass. I'm guessing that the enormous statue of Jesus that overlooks Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is struck by lighting all the time, but since it's made of stone and concrete it has survived for almost a century.

Granted, this is probably all a big coincidence. Natural disasters happen, and I don't really believe that God - especially the Christian God - is behind all of them. Nevertheless, three strikes in two weeks is pretty unusual and might imply that some sort of spiritual or magical process could be influencing the odds in some way.

Smoking Vulture Brains?

The World Cup means it's time for more soccer magick.

I've heard stories about people taking various drugs in order to access psychic powers, but this is the oddest one yet. World Cup gamblers in South Africa have taken to smoking vulture brains, which they believe give them the power to see into the future.

Gamblers seeking to beat the bookies are smoking dried vulture brains, believing it will give them the power to predict match results, it has been claimed.

As the brains in question are those of the endangered cape vulture, conservationists are alarmed rather than amused by the rise of this practice.

Conservationists believe the growth of ‘muti’ magic in South Africa ahead of the World Cup has seen a surge in poaching of Cape vultures, already at risk from lack of food and poisoning.

‘The harvesting of the bird’s heads by followers of muti magic is an additional threat these birds can’t endure,’ said Mark Anderson, of BirdLife South Africa.

Steve McKean, from KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife, who has been studying the decline of vultures due to muti magic, said: 'Our research suggests that killing of vultures for so-called "traditional" use could render the Cape vulture extinct in some parts of South Africa within half a century.

I'm thinking that this would be pretty easy to test if one had access to enough vulture brains to go around. All you really need to do is compare the betting results of "smokers" versus "non-smokers" and see if there's any statistical difference. Unfortunately gamblers tend to be a superstitious lot, and if a practice seems to work for them once they will usually repeat it regardless of the overall effect on the odds.

Much of muti magic seems to be based on the scarcity of the materials used. Albino body parts seem to be prized by unscrupulous practitioners simply because albinism is a rare condition and few such parts are available. Similarly, the cape vulture is endangered and as a result its brains are going be hard to come by. One wonders how much of the muti tradition is rooted in the "just world" assumption that anything hard to find is intrinsically more valuable and how much of it is based on empirical testing and observation by practitioners over many generations.