TVSquad

Almost a year ago, Bob linked to a segment from The Tonight Show in 1973 in which professional "spoon bender" Uri Geller was exposed on national television by Carson and frequent Carson guest and professional debunker James Randi. The clip, via YouTube, was part of a larger documentary about hoaxes.

Recently, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Geller's company, Explorologist Ltd., demanded the clip be removed for violation of copyright. YouTube suspended the account of the user who posted the video.

Professional bullshit artist psychic and non-clipper of fingernails Sylvia Browne will be appearing in a three-episode arc on the daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless starting December 7. Browne will be playing herself. There's no word on what exactly her role will entail, and I won't know afterward either, because I'm not going to watch the damn thing. Still, I have to say that placing Browne in a fictional setting does kind of make sense, considering everything that comes out of her mouth is fiction anyway.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed in this post are solely those of the author, and not those of TV Squad's parent company AOL, which conducts all its business deals with the dead through the new AOL Instant Crop Circle Messenger and Digital Ouija Board. Remember, just because you're dead doesn't mean you can't stay in touch.

[via James Randi]

I only watch Montel when psychic Sylvia Browne is on, because I like to study her and hopefully improve my own psychic abilities. So far I can bend spoons with my mind and talk to animals, though bending the spoon with my mind means I just press a spoon against my forehead until it bends, and while I can speak to animals, I can't actually understand what the animals themselves are saying. I've been trying to combine both of my psychic abilities into one by headbutting a cocker spaniel across the room, but so far no one is that impressed.

I haven't caught ol' Sylvia in awhile, but I did find a couple clips on YouTube that help to prove one very important rule for psychics: never, under any circumstances, admit you're wrong. In the first clip, which I placed after the jump, Sylvia tries to convince a grieving couple that their deceased daughter, who passed away five years ago at the age of seventeen, was shot in the chest. Actually, the girl just collapsed in her room and the autopsy revealed nothing. Undeterred, Sylvia changes "shot in the chest" to "something hit her in the chest," which, when you think about it, is really the same thing. Just the other day somebody punched me in the chest and then later somebody shot me at pointblank range with a .44 and I couldn't tell the difference at all.

USA Network is so proud of its new comedy Psych that it has decided to order up three more episodes for its freshman season. Including the 90-minute pilot that would make a total of 15 episodes for the series. In addition, AOL Entertainment News reports that the show is expected to be picked up for a second season in the near future.

The premiere of Psych drew 6.1 million viewers, a record for a cable series debut this year. Since then it has retained most of the audience of its lead-in program Monk. That series, which stars Tony Shalhoub as a compulsively obsessive detective, is averaging about four million viewers a week. Psych is averaging about 3.9 million per week.

Psych, which stars James Roday as a detective who dupes the police and the public into believing his keen observation skills are actually psychic powers, will most likely follow the split-season pattern of Monk. This means that new shows will run until month's end and then return with new episodes back in January.

Yesterday was Wednesday, and that can only mean one thing: Psychic Sylvia Browne was on Montel once again. Montel started the show as usual, giving a plug to Sylvia's book, If You Could See What I See. I've actually considered writing a book as a response to her book titled I Can See What You See Because You Don't Actually See Anything, but I can't seem to find a publisher for it because the title is also the complete text of the book. So it's really less of a "book" and more of a "sheet of paper with a sentence written on it," but whatever.

Sylvia begins the show by saying that through her work as a person who makes stuff up off the top of her head that she's come to realize that people are very "off kilter" these days, worried about the economy and their personal relationships. I actually found that  statement to be quite profound. She's absolutely right, this specific moment in human existence is nothing at all like before when everyone in the world was perfectly happy, financially secure, and had found the love of their lives. And who could forget all the dancing and singing? And the joy? And those little mushroom houses? Wait, I'm thinking of an episode of The Smurfs.

If we've learned anything from television psychics, it's that the "other side" is a very vague and confusing place. When loved ones contact us from that realm, it's never to say anything direct, instead they toss out random names, or, in the case of medium John Edward, they like to only give the first letter of a name, which is especially helpful for those of us who know people whose names begin with a letter, though somewhat unfortunate for my deceased Aunt 76875, who was named after the barcode on a box of Fiddle Faddle. Psychic Sylvia Browne has said that the "other side" has the exact same geography and topography as our world, which I can only assume means that world is populated by beings who lead the same day-to-day lives we do, but that it's frustratingly difficult to actually get anything accomplished:

Sometimes I think to myself there must be more to this world than what my eyes see, a spirit world which mingles clandestinely with us lowly terrestrial beings. But how do we get in contact with the "other side," and more importantly, how can we use this knowledge to instill absolute terror in young children? This is why I watch psychic Sylvia Browne on Montel every Wednesday. If you missed yesterday's show, here's some highlights:

The first guests were a mother and a daughter who was probably in her late twenties. The daughter's sister, who was her twin, had passed away at a party without explanation. Using her conduit to the spirit world, Sylvia asked about a set of earrings. Yes, the mother said, she did sometimes buy things in sets of two for the girls, and sometimes she bought earrings. As much as I wish I had the kind of grip on the spirit world Sylvia has, I could only come to the same conclusion by noticing that the daughter was wearing gigantic earrings, that twins always receive gifts, usually similar, because they share the same birthday, and that every mother in the history of mankind has at one time or another bought earrings for her daughter(s).

I'm trying to imagine being in Allison Dubois' shoes, trying to feel what she would feel. If my husband thought me a danger to my own children. If I came home disconnected from reality, having let my groceries melt in the back seat as I smoked, watching a girl, seeing her through the eyes of the killer. If my children were whisked away one night to friends' and relatives' houses, out of fear I might injure them. If I, so entranced, spent hours writing over and over again on a pad of paper, It was ME. It was ME.

The fact that I can see this so clearly is testament to the continuing spell that Medium has me under. That I never saw the ending to the story, until the very ending, is testament to the writers' skill and creativity. That I couldn't watch some of the scenes, though, is worrisome. Medium has such a strong audience, it's clear, in my demographic - the 25- to 55-year-old women, or some such. Must the show also appeal to the men in that age group, and then reach out to the younger demo, with all that blood, gore and horror?