Kitty Raises Hell Read Free

need
both
points of view to understand how the world works. Like this—I’ve always wondered, what if it’s not the four-leaf clover that
     brings good luck, but
belief
in the four-leaf clover that causes some kind of mental, psychic effect that causes good luck?”
    “Hey, I like that idea,” I said. “The problem that science always has with this sort of thing is how do you prove it? How
     do you measure luck? How do you prove the mental effect? So far, no one’s come up with a good experimental model to record
     and verify these events.”
    Sometimes my show actually sounded
smart,
rather than outrageous and sensationalist. I was hoping with Professor Olafson on board that we’d be leaning more toward
     NPR than Jerry Springer. So far, so good. But it couldn’t possibly last, and it didn’t.
    “Next caller, hello. What have you got?”
    “I want to talk about what’s going on with Speedy Mart.” The caller was male. He talked a little too fast, a little too hushed,
     like he kept looking over his shoulder. One of the paranoid ones.
    “Excuse me?” I said. “What does a convenience-store chain have to do with magic?”
    “There’s a pattern. If you mark them all on a map, then cross-reference with the locations of violent crimes, like armed robbery,
     there’s an overlap.”
    “It’s a twenty-four-hour convenience store. Places like that get robbed all the time. Of course there’s a correspondence.”
    “No—there’s more. You overlay both of those sets of points on a map of ley lines, and bingo.”
    “Bingo?”
    “They match,”
the caller said, and I wondered what I was missing. “Every Speedy Mart franchise is built on the intersection of ley lines.”
    “Okay. That’s spooky. If anyone could agree on whether ley lines exist or where they really are.”
    “What do you mean, whether they exist!” He sounded offended and put out. Of
course
he did.
    “I mean there’s no quantitative data that anyone can agree on.”
    “How can you be such a skeptic? I thought this was supposed to be a show about how magic is
real.
”
    “This is supposed to be a show about how to tell the real from the fake. I’m going to say ‘prove it’ every time someone lays
     one on me.”
    “Yeah, well, check out my web site and you’ll find everything you need to know. It’s w-w-w dot—” I totally cut him off.
    “Here’s the thing,” I said, long overdue for a rant. “People are always saying that to me—how can I possibly be a skeptic
     given what I am? Given how much I know about what’s really out there, how can I turn my nose up at any half-baked belief that
     crosses my desk? Really, it’s easy, because so many of them
are
half-baked. They’re formulated by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, or by people trying to con other people
     and make a few bucks. The fact that some of this
is
real makes it even more important to be on our guard, to be that much more skeptical, so we can separate truth and fiction.
     Blind faith is still blind, and I try not to be.”
    “Houdini,” Professor Olafson said. I’d almost forgotten about him, despite his occasional commentary.
    “Houdini?”
    “Harry Houdini. He’s a good example of what you’re talking about,” he said. “He was famous for debunking spiritualists, for
     proving that a lot of the old table-rapping séance routines were sleight-of-hand magic tricks. What many people forget is
     that he really wanted to believe. He was searching for someone who could help him communicate with his dead mother. Lots of
     spiritualists tried to convince him that they’d contacted his mother, but he debunked every one of them. The fakery didn’t
     infuriate him so much as the way the fakers preyed on people’s faith, their willingness to believe.”
    “Then he may be one of my heroes. Thanks for that tidbit.”
    “Another tidbit you might like: He vowed that after he died, he would try to send a message back to the living, if such