January 15th
As I have just said to someone in an e-mail, January is a bitch. It just can't help itself. Regardless of whether you try to ignore the festive season, the days and weeks that follow somehow just seem to slowly crank back in to action.
I like to work in January, but seldom is there a deadline to hit. What I do have is time. Time that I should really be getting on with the many things I wish I could get on with when I'm snowed under. I just seem to find all sorts of nonsense to distract me. This year it's selling the house and pursuing a new one. Not exactly nonsense obviously, but a huge distraction none the less.
I have been accused on many occasion of being a workaholic. However I think I'm a binge worker. When I do get going there's little to stop me.
I have started to look at the live tapes of Rapid Eye Movement from '80-'81. This as the band that I was in with Dave Stewart and Pip Pyle. A great deal of the material was never recorded and some of the writing is very good. Having spoken to Dave he's agreed to have a listen to my tweaked version of about 3 tracks, then make a decision on whether to proceed.
Dave from the agency calls about another cat food commercial. A different brand mind and a mad combination of a brief.
This evening we watch a TV show. Not a subject I usually write about, but this is different, as you will see.
The show is on BBC2 and is called 'Trust me I'm A Healer'
This is the second show of the season. Last weeks episode featured a suitably eccentric individual. Greasy hair, thick glasses and living in a council house. We follow a patient receiving treatment from him. She's an older woman who's been diagnosed with liver cancer. Her condition appears to have improved after her first visit. The healer is later seen in his living room summoning up up an anti cancer genie and placing it inside a small bottle of water. The interviewer never appears on camera, you just hear his voice. His approach is even handed, initially anyway. His main technique is to give the healer sufficient rope, then lets him get on with it. The healer asks the narrator if he can pass the bottle with genie in it to his patient. He drives with it to see her, only to find that she has died. The healer seemed harmless enough and maybe he filled her days with hope, when they might have been filled with fear.
Tonight's protagonist is a very different kettle of fish.
Steven Turoff practices psychic surgery.
A previous BBC program 'Watchdog' in an item called, as I recall, 'Britons worst quacks', featured him producing bits of bloody tissue via secret filming. Bits of this 'Tissue' were later taken from his bin, analyzed and discovered to be from a chicken.
Anyway tonight we see him driving in a new luxury car, his wife has one too. We see him in his large detached house with a swimming pool and large gardens and he tells the camera how much he earns. He seems rather pleased with himself.
When he speaks he sounds more like an east end market trader or cabbie. Not that there's anything wrong in that you understand. But he doesn't speak in quiet tones or quote from obscure biblical or philosophical texts. Indeed he claims he doesn't know what he's doing. His surgery is packed full of hopeful people, some who have traveled across the world to get to his clinic in Chelmsford.
During the course of the program we are shown interviews with 2 of his patients. One, a woman in her 60's, tells us that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer and given little chance of survival. She then explains that Mr Turoff opened her up, bent back 3 ribs and then pulled out the offending tumor. When asked to see the scar she said, with great pride, that the beauty of this kind of surgery is that the scar heals completely within 24 hours.
The second interviewee was a young man in his early 30's. He'd been diagnosed with a brian tumor and given a year to live. It was now passed that year and he claimed that the psychic surgery had ridden him of the cancer.
Unlike the previous week we were not told of what happened to these patients. So I don't know what happened to the woman.
I do know, however what happened to this young man. Within a couple of months his cancer came back rather aggressively. He died last summer.
How do I know this? He was my brother in law.
The well healed Mr Turoff's wife seemed rather uncomfortable with the whole thing. As the program progressed the camera began to linger on her face as her husband fielded questions and queries. At one point she felt compelled to leave the room. We also saw him traveling to eastern Europe. Dressed in robes and his words being translated from English the crowd view him as a kind of messiah. One suspects that he's beginning to believe in his own publicity.
I am reminded of a trip that Amanda and I made 5 years ago. We used to fly off to India come Febuary/March time and just veg out on the beach. On this occasion we became rather friendly with a group of guys from Kashmir who would travel down to Callengute for the holiday season to sell jewelry and precious stones. They had a shop just off the high street. They invited us over for diner at their apartment one night. One of the men began to talk about his travels down from Kashmir on the bus every year. He said that in the past 5 years he had met an increasing number of people whom he described as 'White European women of a certain age, who come to india to 'Find themselves'. On his recent trip he found himself next to one such woman. She told him about the Guru she was coming to see. She explained who he was and how enlightened he seemed. Our friend said that he hadn't heard of this guru. He did, however, recognise the man in the picture the woman then showed him. He told me that previously the same man, without the robes and serene look, had owned a couple of fruit and vegetable shops in town, and that last time he saw him he was complaining that they didn't earn him much money anymore.
As I have just said to someone in an e-mail, January is a bitch. It just can't help itself. Regardless of whether you try to ignore the festive season, the days and weeks that follow somehow just seem to slowly crank back in to action.
I like to work in January, but seldom is there a deadline to hit. What I do have is time. Time that I should really be getting on with the many things I wish I could get on with when I'm snowed under. I just seem to find all sorts of nonsense to distract me. This year it's selling the house and pursuing a new one. Not exactly nonsense obviously, but a huge distraction none the less.
I have been accused on many occasion of being a workaholic. However I think I'm a binge worker. When I do get going there's little to stop me.
I have started to look at the live tapes of Rapid Eye Movement from '80-'81. This as the band that I was in with Dave Stewart and Pip Pyle. A great deal of the material was never recorded and some of the writing is very good. Having spoken to Dave he's agreed to have a listen to my tweaked version of about 3 tracks, then make a decision on whether to proceed.
Dave from the agency calls about another cat food commercial. A different brand mind and a mad combination of a brief.
This evening we watch a TV show. Not a subject I usually write about, but this is different, as you will see.
The show is on BBC2 and is called 'Trust me I'm A Healer'
This is the second show of the season. Last weeks episode featured a suitably eccentric individual. Greasy hair, thick glasses and living in a council house. We follow a patient receiving treatment from him. She's an older woman who's been diagnosed with liver cancer. Her condition appears to have improved after her first visit. The healer is later seen in his living room summoning up up an anti cancer genie and placing it inside a small bottle of water. The interviewer never appears on camera, you just hear his voice. His approach is even handed, initially anyway. His main technique is to give the healer sufficient rope, then lets him get on with it. The healer asks the narrator if he can pass the bottle with genie in it to his patient. He drives with it to see her, only to find that she has died. The healer seemed harmless enough and maybe he filled her days with hope, when they might have been filled with fear.
Tonight's protagonist is a very different kettle of fish.
Steven Turoff practices psychic surgery.
A previous BBC program 'Watchdog' in an item called, as I recall, 'Britons worst quacks', featured him producing bits of bloody tissue via secret filming. Bits of this 'Tissue' were later taken from his bin, analyzed and discovered to be from a chicken.
Anyway tonight we see him driving in a new luxury car, his wife has one too. We see him in his large detached house with a swimming pool and large gardens and he tells the camera how much he earns. He seems rather pleased with himself.
When he speaks he sounds more like an east end market trader or cabbie. Not that there's anything wrong in that you understand. But he doesn't speak in quiet tones or quote from obscure biblical or philosophical texts. Indeed he claims he doesn't know what he's doing. His surgery is packed full of hopeful people, some who have traveled across the world to get to his clinic in Chelmsford.
During the course of the program we are shown interviews with 2 of his patients. One, a woman in her 60's, tells us that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer and given little chance of survival. She then explains that Mr Turoff opened her up, bent back 3 ribs and then pulled out the offending tumor. When asked to see the scar she said, with great pride, that the beauty of this kind of surgery is that the scar heals completely within 24 hours.
The second interviewee was a young man in his early 30's. He'd been diagnosed with a brian tumor and given a year to live. It was now passed that year and he claimed that the psychic surgery had ridden him of the cancer.
Unlike the previous week we were not told of what happened to these patients. So I don't know what happened to the woman.
I do know, however what happened to this young man. Within a couple of months his cancer came back rather aggressively. He died last summer.
How do I know this? He was my brother in law.
The well healed Mr Turoff's wife seemed rather uncomfortable with the whole thing. As the program progressed the camera began to linger on her face as her husband fielded questions and queries. At one point she felt compelled to leave the room. We also saw him traveling to eastern Europe. Dressed in robes and his words being translated from English the crowd view him as a kind of messiah. One suspects that he's beginning to believe in his own publicity.
I am reminded of a trip that Amanda and I made 5 years ago. We used to fly off to India come Febuary/March time and just veg out on the beach. On this occasion we became rather friendly with a group of guys from Kashmir who would travel down to Callengute for the holiday season to sell jewelry and precious stones. They had a shop just off the high street. They invited us over for diner at their apartment one night. One of the men began to talk about his travels down from Kashmir on the bus every year. He said that in the past 5 years he had met an increasing number of people whom he described as 'White European women of a certain age, who come to india to 'Find themselves'. On his recent trip he found himself next to one such woman. She told him about the Guru she was coming to see. She explained who he was and how enlightened he seemed. Our friend said that he hadn't heard of this guru. He did, however, recognise the man in the picture the woman then showed him. He told me that previously the same man, without the robes and serene look, had owned a couple of fruit and vegetable shops in town, and that last time he saw him he was complaining that they didn't earn him much money anymore.
posted by Jakko's blog at 8:48 AM
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