LENNON WOULD TURN IN HIS GRAVE - OR TURN UP FROM HIS GRAVE?
It's all too easy to poke fun at the people who seem to have no critical faculties whatsoever. Shooting fish in a barrel is, by contrast, much harder. The bystander reserves a special scorn for believers in the paranormal, which includes those who think that once you're dead, you spend the rest of eternity in some disembodied state trying to talk to the living. It doesn't matter that there is zero evidence for life-after-death, some folks still want to believe that Aunt Martha is desperate to tell her surviving family all about here new existence. By all accounts, this new existence seems to consist of being "happy," having "no pain," and involve drifting around in some kind of limbo doing nothing other than attempting to communicate with the living.

However, throughout the centuries, some entrepreneurs have always know that fools and their money are indeed soon parted, and that helping that parting is an opportunity. And believers in the paranormal seem to be more foolish than most.

These entrepreneurs tend to call themselves "psychics" or "mediums," presumably as a marketing ploy because calling yourself "that dude who talks with dead people" is likely to have you tagged as a complete loopball and carted off to the safety of a room with padded walls. No, much better to be a "medium" because it pays better.

Now here's the thing about mediums; for some peculiar reasons, they - and only they - can communicate with the dearly departed. Aunt Martha, who may have been your favorite aunt, hasn't a chance in hell of talking to you directly, but has to go through Madam Wisteria, aided by the spirit guide, Big Chief Talks-With-Cactus. Incidentally, I wonder if mediums with spirit guides get to charge double, for their own services and those of the guide?

The problem with hiring a medium to talk with Aunt Martha is that only the family of Aunt Martha are going to pay for the privilege. And once Aunt Martha has revealed that (a) she is happy now, (b) no longer in pain, and (c) Uncle Marty was a two-timing cheating bastard who'll feel her wrath when he passes over, no-one will really care to talk to her anymore. Apart from the tragedy of Aunt Martha now being doomed to an eternity of talking to herself, the greater tragedy is that the medium now has no income.

So here's where the smart medium has to be creative and enter the world of Celebrity Channeling. Yes, if five people want to pay good money to chat with Aunt Martha, how many would be prepared to stump up and listen to such famous people as Plato, Aristotle, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, or Humphrey Bogart?

Well, according to the In Demand cable network, an audience with Princess Diana can rake in a cool $8 million. And that's actually just for a potential audience with her. In 2003, the cable channel ran a pay-per-view special to hear Di "speak" through a medium, and even though the medium failed, folks still stumped up the cash.

If a TV show can generate $8 million for a no-show, what could it get for a guaranteed audience with, say, John Lennon? Yes, that atheist skeptic ex-Beatle himself. For a mere $9.95,viewers could tune in last night (4/24/06) to listen to some barely audible whistling and hissing that was, according to psychic Joe Power, the voice of John Lennon.

And how exactly did John make contact? Well, clearly being a modern guy, he used the latest pseudo-scientific-sounding paranormal method of Electronic Voice Phenomena. This is the use of radio and TV signals by the dead to communicate with folks with terrible hearing. Made more popular by the movie Wavelength, the theory is that if you mis-tune your radio or TV to nothing but hissing, you can hear voices. No, seriously, that's what they say.

In the Lennon case, the EVP message was "proved" to be real by an expert in EVP, a Sandra Belanger, who said it was most definitely the ex-Beatle. Well thanks, Sandra, I feel much better now you've okayed it.

For those who didn't contribute to the estimated $9.5 million subscription, here's what John had to say: "Peace... the message is Peace."

So, all you are saying... is give peace a chance?

And the $9.5 million just goes to show that there's more than ONE born every minute.