Making Contact In This World And Beyond!

So tonight last year, a pal, he calls me up and he says to me, “Ted,” he says, “Ted, you’ve got to see this [then] new program on TLC – ‘Long Island Medium,’ it’s called. A more lively and compelling show you’re unlikely to see!”*
*Until “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” debuted ten months later.

Like you, I’m fascinated with the bizarre and the unexplained, the weird and the eerie. I just can’t get enough of all that, despite already spending half my time in thrift stores and the other half in dollar stores.

As you know, it’s just over three four years this month that I lost Marni to chronic inner thigh chafing. (My God, I begged her not to wear wide wale corduroy – the not-so-silent killer.) A day hasn’t gone by when I haven’t wanted to talk to her again, if only for a moment – long enough to find out where the hell she put my goddamn flat-jaw Vise-Grips. (She used to straighten her hair with them.)

Anyway, while said pal and I passed the time of day on the phone, I divided my attention precisely in half and the part that wasn’t distractedly muttering “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh. Uh-huh. I see. Mm. Okay. Mm-hmm.” was busy dicking around on the internet looking for more details on this show. Could this “Long Island Medium” be for real? Could she, at last, put me back in touch with the ol’ Marnster?

What I discovered was startling:  I found a short article on a website called “Channel Guide Magazine,” where the writer describes her experience speaking with the star of Long Island Medium Theresa Caputo.

Isn’t that freaky?!

I guess I should be more specific. The puff-piece article itself wasn’t all that startling. What was astonishing was that of the (then) 90+ comments below it, over 70 of them were directed to Caputo herself, as though she has anything to do with the website!

Inexplicably, scores of people somehow decided that posting a message below an article about the Long Island Medium was the best way to get in touch with her.

Once someone over at the “Channel Guide Magazine” website saw what was happening, a link labeled “Information on contacting Theresa Caputo” was added below the article. Click on the link and you’ll read:

Below this bit of helpful information…? Well over six thousand comments, the most recent one as of this writing, posted around 3:30 p.m., Friday October 19, 2012. Judging by the sampling I looked at, they’ve been coming in steadily every single day. Nearly all of them completely ignore the information above, and yes, address Caputo directly in the comments section.

By the way, Channel Guide’s tagline is “Watch Smarter!” I guess it’s good it doesn’t reference reading comprehension.

Many of the 6,795 messages are pretty sad. You’d have to be a complete heartless bastard not to feel for some of these people who are desperate for specific closure, real or manufactured, regarding someone who died. (And believe it or not, I’m not a complete heartless bastard.)

But mostly, it’s a fascinating contrast of communicative abilities that are light-years apart. On one extreme, we have a woman supposedly gifted with the remarkable capability to contact the dead. And on the other: thousands of her fans who are clearly in way over their heads just getting to the right website to send an electronic message to her.

As for me, I’m not about to get in line behind 6,800 people and wait two years for an audience with the psychic. I’ll avoid all of this nonsense and use Marni’s life insurance money to buy a pair a new pair of Vice Grips. I don’t need Theresa to tell me she’d have wanted it that way.

Posted by Ted on October 19, 2012, 4:15 PM.