Talking of pillows...

In looking for the image of the guy sleeping for the previous post, I discovered a whole load of bizarre pillows you can get. For example, the happy looking lady in the picture on the right has on a wearable pillow that could mean you would never lose your pillow again, no matter where you were! Note the matching bow-tie.

A little more subtle is a pillow that has the words "Good Morning Sweetheart"
embroidered in reverse on its surface. This becomes imprinted on your face as you doze, meaning you can bid your partner good morning without having to open your eyes (or mouth).

Perhaps more disturbing are the variety of pillows that come in the shape of body
parts (don't worry, we're going to keep it clean). First up is the lap pillow, in the shape of a woman's kneeling legs. Pay no attention to the fact that the woman on whose lap you are sleeping has had her torso severed from her lower limbs. That will just give you nightmares.

For those of you who prefer to have an
arm round you while you're sleeping, there's the boyfriend's arm pillow. I suppose it doesn't have to be a boyfriend's arm. It could easily be a husband's arm, a girlfriend's arm, or a stranger's arm. Whatever gives you the most comfort. You could even think of it as a piece of material, filled with stuffing,
shaped in the form of an arm and hand, but then that would just be CREEPY, wouldn't it?

It is even possible to get severed-limb pillows for babies. The 'zaky' pillow is the shape of a pair of hands that hold the
baby as though they are being comforted by their parent's hands. The idea of this pillow is to overcome that moment when babies waken just as you take your hands away.

But, if human body parts don't float your boat, you could always go for a severed animal body part. For example,
nothing else quite says, "You're next!" as effectively as a horse's head pillow. Apart from, maybe, an actual horse's head.

But I think the winner in terms of the most bizarre/disturbing has to go to the blood spill pillow (or blood spillow, if you will). This is what might happen if someone was to take away your pillow very quickly, if your bed was made of concrete... and maybe there was spike beneath it. You get the idea.

Pillow talk

Last night I dreamt I was eating a giant marshmallow. When I woke up my pillow was gone.

When I told this joke to a class of my students once, they groaned in unison. One student at the front of the class didn’t seem to realise it was a joke. Or just didn’t get it. “So where was your pillow?” she asked.

The Midlands' Ghosthunter

I watched Eggheads for the first time tonight (BBC2, 6pm). A 30-minute roller-coaster of televisual excitement. I guarantee that if you watched it tomorrow night, you'll be on the edge of your seat within the first few minutes... reaching for the remote.


As I'm sure you know, the show pits challengers against a team of 'Eggheads' who are essentially quiz champions who have won quizzes ranging from Mastermind, to Brain of Britain, to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? One is even 4-times World Quizzing Champion. We're talking quiz freaks here.

Why am I telling you this? Well, by the light of the full moon this morning, I left the house at 6.30 to get to BBC Birmingham for a 9am audition for Eggheads. No, not to be one of the Eggheads themselves (like you were thinking that...). This was as part of a team of challengers.

My friend and erstwhile Most Haunted sparring partner, Richard Felix, had been asked to put together a 'ghosthunters' team for the show. He needed five team members (plus a reserve) who could loosely be described as ghosthunters who were knowledgeable, erudite, well read, etc. So he phoned me... and asked me if I knew of anyone who fit the bill. As I couldn't think of anyone, he settled for me as a team member. Even though, to be honest, I'm not really much of a ghosthunter.

Although we'd need six team members for the show if we were chosen, we got by with four for today's audition. Richard's son, Edd, is also a ghosthunter and leads nightly ghost walks around Derby, and CJ Romer is another expert on ghosts and the paranormal. More importantly, CJ is bit of an egghead himself with an encyclopedic knowlege of the arts and humanities (i.e., the proper clever stuff). I gather one of the Eggheads is also called CJ... something Richard hoped might increase our chances of being picked for the show!

When Richard, Edd, and I arrived (CJ arrived later), we were led into a room where three other teams were waiting. One was a full team of five members, another had three of their team like us, and the other had only two members of their team. It was actually this last team that were the most interesting. It turns out they were a Take That tribute band. Or rather they were a 'fat' Take That tribute band. Yep, they were called Take Fat.

Our first task was to individually answer ten general knowledge questions in 3 minutes. These were not easy. And even the ones I thought I might have got right, I didn't. For example, "For which film did Paul Newman win a Best Actor Oscar?". The possible answers were (a) Cool Hand Luke, (b) The Color of Money, or (c) The Hustler. I was fairly confident it was Cool Hand Luke. But a quick check on Wikipedia tells me it was The Color of Money! (Apparently he was nominated for Best Actor award for the other two movies, but didn't win it.)

Even more worryingly, an hour or so later between us we couldn't even remember half of the questions we were asked! Good job there isn't a memory round. Or maybe there is and I've just forgotten...

The next part replicated (kind of) the format of the show itself. A category is chosen and the team picks one member to answer a multiple choice question on that category. If you got it right then you compete in a head to head with the other teams to win a point. We didn't do too bad in that round (i.e., we did at least as well as the others!).

The final part was a brief team interview on camera. These tapes are sent to the series producer and we were told that the decision of which teams to have on the show is based almost entirely on this footage. I guess the mock quiz rounds are to ensure we're not complete idiots (oh dear...). By this time our fourth team member, CJ, had arrived. Which is just as well as while we were waiting he was able to take the ten question general knowledge test and hopefully get right all the questions we had got wrong (and promptly forgotten). Though I think he went for Cool Hand Luke as well...

I think we did ok with the team interview. Apart from fact that I was asked who my favourite Egghead was. This was a problem as I'd never watched the show! Fortunately, I had remembered that one of the Eggheads was Judith Keppell the woman who had been the first person to win the million pounds on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? "Yes, she's my favourite!" I enthusiastically told the researcher. I also felt a bit of a fraud shouting in unison, "we're the ghosthunters from the Midlands!" Not only am I not much of a ghosthunter, I'm not from the Midlands.

Anyway, we'll see if we get chosen to be on the show itself. If you really want to know more about the Eggheads quiz programme, Wikipedia has an astonishingly detailed page, which is probably more interesting than the show itself, which you can watch on BBC iPlayer here.

Cosmic!

I guess it is no coincidence that, two months into what I find myself referring to as 'operation freefall', my interest in cosmic ordering is returning. As some of you will remember, cosmic ordering was the subject of a certain book that, ahem, found its way into my possession. (But we don't talk about that any more...)

Cosmic ordering refers to the idea that to make your dreams become a reality you can effectively place orders with the cosmos. The cosmos then dutifully delivers your order, much like any other delivery service (other than the Royal Mail, I guess). There seem to be dozens of books devoted to the subject of cosmic ordering out there (and more than 17 million hits on Google!) but the book that is typically regarded as inspiring the rising interest in cosmic ordering is Barbel Mohr's book The Cosmic Ordering Service. It was this book that Noel Edmonds cited as introducing him to the concept and that led to his return to TV in Deal or No Deal.

Well, if it worked for The Edmonds, could it work for me? Has anyone else here tried cosmic ordering? Or is it a load of twaddle?

The Big Apple

My brother got married on Friday last week. The happy couple have this week gone on honeymoon in New York. So this is for them... I love this song (you didn't have me down as a Jay-Z fan now did you?):



Bright Lights, Big City, New Tork Times 1 and New York Times 2 tell of my and Rachel's visit to the Big Apple (for what it's worth). Ant, Lisa... hope you have as much fun as we did. x

From TV History to TV Burp

In case you missed what Derren Brown regarded as being an "anus-invertingly unpalatable" idea and what the Guardian called "the worse single hour of television produced in 2009", here is the first part of Michael Jackson: The Live Seance:



Those willing to risk your anus being inverted can catch the rest of the show on YouTube.

It turns out they did, indeed, have a parapsychologist on as an observer. A rather pallid young man who sat in the background on a bar stool and, well, observed. He seemed kind of lost for words as he watched Derek Acorah lead four sequined (and perfectly well-balanced) Jacko "superfans" through the seance. At the end of the show he seemed genuinely concerned, along with many of the viewers no doubt, for the emotional wellbeing of said superfans. One superfan in particular, himself called Michael, had sobbed uncontrollably as his idol (or rather, Derek) spoke to him.

I guess both Derek and superfan Michael have recovered... I gather they are to appear on Harry Hill's TV Burp on Saturday night.

Television history

Tonight, the medium Derek Acorah will attempt to contact the spirit of Michael Jackson in a live seance to be broadcast on Sky1 at 10pm. Here's the trailer:



I wonder if they'll have a parapsychologist on there as an observer...?

Midlands' Best Medium

If I'm being honest, I had pretty low expectations regarding Midlands' Best Medium. I'm not saying that I had any reason to believe that the mediums from this part of England were likely to be a load of rubbish, it's just that I imagined the kind of folks that might enter such a competition may not have been the best judge of their own ability. (So, yes I suppose I'm saying I did think they might be rubbish.) So I was pleasantly surprised when, having negotiated the turmoil that is Derby's inner ring road, the nine individuals who had made it through the auditions seemed to be fairly balanced people with some hold on reality!

The contestants' first task was psychometry. This usually involves giving someone a reading based upon holding a personal item of theirs, like a ring. The idea is that the object supposedly 'absorbs' the energies of the wearer, and it is from these energies that a psychic or medium is able to pick up characteristics of the owner. At least I think that's the theory. On this occasion, the task was made even harder as each contestant was asked to give a reading on a 'mystery object'. This was an ancient bracelet retrieved from an archaeological dig, and thought to be around 3000 years old! A difficult test to say the least, even if there is something to psychometry. All nine contestants gave it a try, and came up with some interesting 'facts' about the object much of which was unverifiable. None really came close to identifying how old it was.

Round two returned to more familiar territory for the mediums. Each contestant was required to give readings to members of the audience much like you would typically see when mediums give stage performances (or when giving platform readings at a Spiritualist church). The main difference was that the people for whom the readings were intended would be chosen at random (by throwing a soft toy into the audience if you must know). Contestants would have only about 5 minutes to give a reading. This round was a mixed bag of general vague readings that could perhaps apply to most people but there were one or two good hits in which a couple of contestants seemed to give accurate information including names and so on.

After each contestant did their bit, the panel of judges, which consisted of Richard Felix, Ian Lawman (both also former Most Haunted contributors) and myself, would give our comments. (That's right, it was the paranormal world's answer to Britain's Got No Talent!) But then it was up to the audience to vote for who would go through to the final round.

The three finalists were set the task of having to each give me a reading with the audience watching... I'm not sure who found this the more uncomfortable, them or me! Again a mixture of relatively vague statements that I imagine would be true of most people with a sprinkling of hits. But we were able to eventually choose one medium as the overall winner (as in they won the title of Midlands' Best Medium, not that they won a set of overalls...).

I believe future regional competitions around the country are being planned as we speak.