I've been keeping a lazy eye on your site for a while now, never realizing that it was literally built over the top of an older civilization. It was fascinating to briefly visit, and compare the modern versus ancient artwork and architecture.
_
[yes, this correspondent's name is an underscore. I would have rendered it "_", but that looks like some kind of emoticon]
I started Dan's Data in late 1998. That small collection of earlier Web pages started in 1997, and couch-surfed for hosting on a semi-random series of servers, ending up on dansdata.com in 2002.
Back in the Nineties, this sort of thing was topical humour:
..."EMPower Modulator" universal electronic magic Good For What Ails You device. (Years later, I got a chance to look inside one, and found pretty much what you'd expect from thesesorts of products.)
A big part of the evidence for the Modulator's effectiveness in curing everything from allergies to rainy days came from an electrodiagnostic device called the "Omega Acubase", an enthusiast about which was not at all happy with me.
Modern industrial society has provided us with numerous nicely standardised massive objects. Batteries. Golf balls. Beer cans (consume beverage, re-fill with concrete).
These bowling-ball and beer-can mortars are being demonstrated during either a very determined celebration of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, or the Battle of Stalingrad.
I find it hard to believe that the person who designed this one's ignition system was sober at the time. (Questions may also be asked about anybody who stands calmly in front of the muzzle.)
At lest they didn't shoot it straight up, though.
(I suppose if that's good enough for the anvil shooters...)
The alarming noises at 1:35 of this video may just be the bowling ball's finger-holes whistling as it spins. Or perhaps the whole thing shattered into a shrieking cloud of polyester shrapnel.
A bit long-winded, but some physics calculations at the end.
The 2011 MythBusters bowling-ball cannon would probably have had similar explanations...
...had this not happened.
Fellow Discovery Channel program American Guns did it in a somewhat less highbrow manner.
And now for something almost completely different:
From: [redacted]
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2012 20:49:46 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dan's Data Page
Hello Dan,
I came across your website, dansdata.com, this evening. I have been considering doing something like this for awhile. I was wondering if you would be willing to share with me how succesful it has been? I am trying to save enough money and invest it so I can live off of dividend payouts. My goal is to be able to be home with my family as much as possible. I have a target of atleast 100k and have managed to to save about 40k on my own thus far. It will takes years however to complete my goal on my own. I need a way to boost my savings. Please help.
Thanks,
[name redacted]
I always wonder how these people come to e-mail me. I've had two this week. I suppose they find my dansdata.com contact-and-donation page, which is titled "Give Dan Money For No Very Good Reason!", and... that's all they read, before clicking the e-mail link.
Perhaps I've got this guy all wrong, and what he wants to do is start a Web site and slog away at it for a decade and make money that way. I suspect, however, that he, like the others who more clearly express their desire that I share my money-making secrets, just reckons I must be some kind of expert Internet panhandler. The contact/donation page scores really high in a Google search for "give me money"; I think a search like that is usually where these people come from.
When one of these correspondents seems to have two brain cells to rub together I direct them to my reply to this letter, in which I explain why people occasionally give me money. But all you really need to do is actually read the donation page, on which can be found subtle hints that it is not quite the only page on Dan's Data.
It'd make more sense if these e-mails were widely-copied scattershot spam, but they never seem to be. (Or, at least, Googling a string from them never turns up copies elsewhere.) Even the ones that include a sob story and ask me to send some of my presumed riches to them on account of how their son only has a burlap sack full of leaves for a body, or something, appear to have been typed in by an actual human and sent to only a few recipients, and quite possibly only to me.
I suppose sending spur-of-the-moment e-mails to someone who might know about getting strangers to send you money for nothing is a better wealth-generation strategy than just visualising money really hard and waiting for your Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet to kick in.
I think you'd probably do better by just sending out PayPalmoneyrequests at random, though.
(The people I get PayPal money requests from almost certainly find me via the contact/donation page, too. Only seldom does someone really put in some effort.)
From: Stephen Sprogis <stephensprogis@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2012 18:04:34 -0400
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Extra money for you
Hi Dan,
I see you would like to recieve some extra money, so I'd like to offer you $10 a day to display an ad banner for Virtual Pilot 3d. I'd be happy to pay you the first 3 days upfront via Paypal, and every Monday thereafter as long as we're in business. Let me know if you're interested.
Sincerely,
Steve
I ditched Burst Media as my annoying-banner-ad provider on dansdata.com a while ago (they didn't close my account with no explanation, I QUIT, that's my story and I'm sticking to it). So just sticking a hard-coded banner at the top of every page and getting a no-muss-no-fuss seventy bucks a week for it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all.
(DealExtreme showed some interest in running a banner too, which would be a very natural fit for the site, but we had a lot of trouble communicating. Their banner-ad-buying person does not seem to be one of their English-understanding people. Perhaps when they complete their long voyage to the new and improved dx.com, which is now working fine in parallel with the old site, they'll have another go. If someone reading this is from DealExtreme, or anywhere else that is in honest business and would like to buy a simple whole-site ad on dansdata.com or this blog, talk to me!)
I'm not going to stick a static ad on my site if it's promoting a terrible piece of software, though. So I had a little look for reviews of this Virtual Pilot 3D thing, of which I'd never heard.
Those reviews seem oddly thin on the ground. Hit one in my Google search is a press release, hit two is virtualpilot3d.eu, and hit three is a page on virtualpilot3d.eu called, of all things, "Virtual Pilot 3D™ Scam", full of what seems to be machine-translated gibberish.
...As previously noted, a division or segment of society Flightgear was a very special reason. The FG and the Virtual Pilot 3D™ There are major changes between.
Virtual Pilot 3D™ some outstanding features include:
* Enhanced plug and play system running smoothly.
* Very complex and require technical knowledge to start a game without having to perform a quick easy way.
Presumably this was also machine-translated from something else, but I think I get the gist. Why are they so enthusiastic about telling us their flight simulator isn't some other flight simulator?
It would appear that the Virtual Pilot 3D people have, at time of writing, been unsuccessful in getting that Wikipedia article to notpoint out that their commercial product is a rebadged version of FlightGear.
You can't take Wikipedia as gospel about everything, though, and it doesn't have any sources for the specific claim that Virtual Pilot 3D, as opposed to other commercial flight-sims called "Flight Pro Sim, Pro Flight Simulator, etc", is a FlightGear rebadge job.
So let's take another tack.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun covers pretty much everything worth knowing about PC gaming. When some oddball game comes up for $2.49 on Steam and I've no idea what it is, Rock, Paper, Shotgun almost always has a review.
They also have a regular column, The Flare Path, about military strategy games and flight-sims. I wonder...
Well, that was easy. The Flare Path for the 24th of August is, entertainingly, titled "Don't Buy VirtualPilot3D".
My name is Tim Stone. I've been a flight simmer for thirty years, and a flight sim critic for 4369 days, 9 hours, and 37 minutes. In all that time I don't think I've ever loathed a piece of software as passionately as I loathe the game you are currently thinking about buying. If you can spare a moment I'll explain why.
Oh, my.
The Virtual Pilot 3D people didn't just copy FlightGear; they also ripped off demo videos and images from completely different flight-sims, and photos from real life, presenting them all as being from Virtual Pilot 3D.
This isn't the worst case of game "authors" ripping things off from other people and hoping no-one will notice. The worst case would be the point-and-click adventure game Limbo of the Lost, which also scored coverage on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and even has its own wiki. (The wiki is largely devoted to tracing the illegally-copied sources for every component of Limbo of the Lost, including little-known indie oddities like Thief 3 and Oblivion.)
But gee, the Virtual Pilot 3D guys really are trying for the game-scam gold medal, aren't they?
Well, there goes my ten bucks a day. It's normal for annoying Web banner ads to sometimes be for scammy products, but deliberately running a constant ad for known scam-software exceeds the limits of even my highly elastic ethics. If the guy was offering me a thousand dollars a day, then since he's not actually selling fake antivirus software or botnetinfectors or something (as far as we know...), I'd run the ad, take the money, kick half of it back to local charities and sleep the sleep of the just. But I doubt I'd be able to haggle him up that far.
So, until Sir Dolly Santos of the East Umbopoland Embassy To Nigeria comes through with that $US57,144,000 he promised me after I wired him $500, readers are still cordially invited to reward me for my honesty concerning Virtual Pilot 3D by making a small donation.
I wondered whether yesterday's rant might win me some angry accusations of being anti-American. It hasn't really, yet. But do allow me to clarify just the same.
Which, clearly, is far from being what all Americans believe...
...but which, like certain other works, does exemplify what many of us foreigners find objectionable about the USA.
More specifically, I have a problem with many of the USA's domestic and foreign policies and actions, because they do a lot of harm to both American people and the rest of the world. These policies do not, of course, all grow out of the above-depicted conviction that the USA really is God's own country. A stronger factor is that the USA is powerful enough to do terrible things outside its borders, and the USA's government/corporate rulers are powerful enough to do terrible things inside its borders, which I'm sure any number of other countries would also do, given the chance.
The most important part of my objection, which is particularly brought to mind by that incredibly jingoistic movie, is based around the horrifying fact that an awful lot of the world's leaders - certainly not just the American ones - are clearly guilty of war crimes, most notably crimes against peace. Many of these leaders have gone on national television to boast of their war-making achievements, after previously going on TV to persuade the populace to support a new war in the time-honoured fashion.
Major war crimes, of which crimes against peace are the very worst, are the only offenses which I think actually should carry the death penalty. Preferably with those sentencing the offender to death putting their own lives on the line - if the offender turns out to have been innocent, the judge and/or jury are executed. (This'd pretty much solve the USA's own death-penalty problems, don't you think?)
Anybody who drapes a patriotic flag over war crimes is an enemy of humanity, and the higher you go in various nations' governments, the more this happens, and the less forgivably. Random yahoos who believe God sent George W. Bush are one thing; if you honestly think Saddam was responsible for 9/11 then you sadden me, but I don't think you should be punished for being ignorant and/or gullible. But people like Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara knew exactly what they were doing.
(It has long been my opinion that we should offer John Howard lifetime imprisonment instead of execution in exchange for his testimony against Cheney and Bush. I also find it difficult to argue against just assassinating a bunch of these guys. Everybody knows they're never going to see the inside of a courtroom, and they made speeches and published books proudly declaring their guilt, so I think it's pretty cut and dried, don't you?)
Movies about tankcrews and fighter pilots and Special Forces badasses can be horrifying and entertaining, both at the same time in the very best examples. But I find it unnerving that the USA now gets in wars so interminable that books, movies and video games about those wars exist while the war's still going on. We've now given up on waiting a few years after the end of the war before turning it into entertainment products, for the sake of common human decency. Nowadays the wars are on abstractconcepts or thingseverybodylikes, and there's no particular prospect of matters improving until all of the USA's arable land blows away into the ocean and the US dollar falls to about one jiao.
On a marginally happier note, here are some more good-war-movie recommendations, all about events that happened a decorously long time ago.
Clint Eastwood's siblingfilmsFlags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are extraordinary. The second is a brutal war movie about the Japanese soldiers trying to hold Iwo Jima in 1945; the first is about the American side of the story, with a heavy emphasis on the patriotic-bullshit factory a few American Iwo Jima heroes find themselves working in.
If you haven't heard of it, that ought to give you the idea.
Act of Valor features elite US soldiers playing themselves, and has the whole-hearted backing of the US military. Who, with their usual deftness, have once again managed to create propaganda that causes foreign viewers to cheer whenever one of the Americans in the movie gets shot.
Us foreigners aren't the target market for this film, of course. Young American men are. The purpose of Act of Valor is to get kids to enlist, and join the Warrior Brotherhood That Always Does The Right Thing No Matter The Cost and if you think that sounds hokey then you're not going to enjoy this movie's script. The stuff in between the firefights is sufficiently painful to watch that I'm glad I didn't pay to see this movie. It might justify a two-dollar rental fee.
I'd heard about this film, so I was expecting jingoistic bullshit with awesome action scenes, and that's pretty much what I got. Spoilers follow, but the plot's so formulaic that it's almost impossible to spoil. The Expendables is a plot-twisting masterpiece compared with Act of Valor.
(The Expendables also has more laughs. It is impossible not to enjoy Terry Crews' shotgun as much as he does.)
The great problem you have if you're making a movie about how US Special Forces badasses keep Americans safe from terrible people is that US Special Forces badasses almost never actually do that. They may keep other soldiers safe, and they may do nifty headline stuff like finally allegedly killing Osama Bin Laden (it's weird to me that there's so little interest from the conspiracy-theory types about how no actual public evidence that they really killed Osama was ever presented...). But guys like this can only actually directly protect civilian Americans if someone comes to America to attack those civilians.
Which hasn't happened for rather a while.
The US national-security bureaucracy and its various allied "terrorism experts" insist that there are many terrible plots that they have thwarted, and would no doubt make thrilling movies, but they can't tell us about any of them for reasons of national security. After Obama promised the "most transparent" administration in history, he has continued, and expanded, the Bush policies of classifying every document in sight and refusing Freedom Of Information requests because they're asking for "state secrets" (or giving you a document with everythingredacted, or just lying and saying the requested document doesn't exist). The reason why you can't see the document, or learn about the many serious terror plots, is as secret as the documents and plots themselves. Even documents that are already public can now be retroactively re-secret-ised, which is a bit of an own goal as it lets the public see how innocuous classified documents now often are.
So sure, maybe a great and secret war is being waged against terrorists, or evil aliens, or demonic Nazisfrom the moon; who can say? I'd feel much happier if I could think that this is a good explanation of why the only thwarted plots that're ever made public are so totally lame.
You know the ones. FBI informant or agent encourages idiots to consider terrorist attack. FBI agent or informant provides plan. FBI agent provides fake explosive. FBI arrests freshly-minted "terrorists". Meanwhile, the TSA spends a lot of money and pisses off a lot of people and catchesno terrorists at all. But they've got a big old list of people who are so dangerous they shouldn't be allowed on a plane, and also so cunning that no evidence to justify their arrest can be found; clearly, this system is for your own good, citizen!
Back in the real world, as I've written before, if you actually have a domestic terrorism problem, you damn well know about it. The USA does not have such a problem. So it's a little difficult to come up with an enemy for the brave soldiers in Act of Valor to fight.
Worse yet for the poor scriptwriters, if the bad guys actually managed to get across the US border, then deploying Special Forces badasses to kill them is illegal, unless you declare martial law. If you want to make a movie about that then the enemy has to be aliens or North Korea, aliens of course being by far the more probable.
You can get away with deploying soldiers within the borders of your non-totalitarian country if those soldiers are building sandbag walls in a flood or protecting black children from racist idiots in 1954. But just whacking dudes in the street while the police stand there slack-jawed remains, for some reason, unacceptable, even if the dudes being whacked are Muslims.
If I were writing the film I'd just set it in Ficteeonistan and have our heroes striking terrorist training camps or something, but I suppose even 18-year-old American boys must by now have noticed that people trained in such places only ever go on to kill Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, not in Florida. So the poor Act of Valor scriptwriters had to come up with a threat that was almost at home. You know, not at home quite yet, but... heading in that direction.
So in Act of Valor, you've got these Filipino Muslim suicide bombers. (Total Muslim suicide bombings in the Philippines since 9/11, and possibly ever: One. Total Christian suicide bombings: Also one - possibly accidental. The Philippines have seen quite a lot of other bombs - generally used by Muslims against Christians - but no bomb-vests to speak of.)
Act of Valor has two main bad guys, one a cartoonishly evil hardcore Chechen jihadi and the other a wealthy, vaguely Bond-villain-ish international drug smuggler who, for no reason other than that they've known each other for a long time, is cooperating with this other guy who wants to blow up a bunch of Americans. Perhaps the drug smuggler reckons that having the US populace stuck at home terrified of going out and getting blown up will... increase demand for cocaine...?
Anyway, the drug dude decides to lie low for a while because he's discovered the CIA are after him, but he doesn't mind if his known associate goes on to become Public Enemy Number Minus Ten Million for the entire population of the USA, because how bad could that be?
Bang bang bang, blah blah blah, this soldier's wife's got a baby on the way, gee I hope he doesn't suffer a glorious and honourable death in the single most clichéd way any soldier can do that, and now the suicide bombers are going to be smuggled into the USA through tunnels created and controlled by Mexican drug smugglers. Who for some reason go along with the plan, too, because Catholic dope-dealers who want a lightly-guarded and porous US border have so much in common with Islamist terrorists who want to turn the USA into a full-blown police state.
Being charitable, one presumes the Mexicans don't know what the stuff being smuggled into the States through their tunnels is. If they did, then they'd be the ones killing all the jihadis, and the Special Forces badasses could stay at home.
The good guys go on to stop the bad guys in a series of really quite good action scenes that kind of look like a few rounds of Call of Duty 9. Along the way, various soldiers playing themselves have to read lines that would drop to the floor like lumps of lead even if Daniel Day-Lewis read them. And then the credits roll.
(The acting of the soldiers-playing-themselves really is dire. This script would always do a miserable job of establishing characters, but... is acting really that hard? They're playing themselves, not King Lear. But never mind; just fast-forward through the talking, definitely through any of the talking when they're wearing civilian clothes, and you'll miss nothing. I find that this technique also turns Revenge of the Sith into a pretty good movie.)
Act of Valor contains a strange mixture of what I presume is pretty authentic military equipment and procedures, and action-movie clichés. Explosions, for instance, tend toward the Hollywood ball-of-fire, and everybody who gets shot, except one dude at the end, dies instantly, unless they are American. And a digital SLR camera with a consumer zoom lens on it somehow takes useful pictures of people miles away, and, more importantly, makes that motor-film-wind noise when it does it, even though most of the target market of young men who want to kill people have never even touched a film camera.
There are also a lot of beepy computer noises and moving-box special effects involved with the use of drones and other high-tech cameras. And a Binocular Shot or two.
The thing that stood out most for me, though, was that nobody, goodie or baddie, ever seems to question the core of the head terrorist's plot, which is that a bunch of high-powered suicide vests blowing up in major American cities will somehow cripple the whole country.
So... you Americans are pussies compared with Englishmen, right?
Because Londoners were famously stoic even when a whole country was trying to bomb them flat every damn night. Or, for a more recent version, England didn't turn a hair when the IRA kept shooting people and blowing stuff up. But suicide-bomb the Mall of America and the Precious Moments Chapel and watch the US... economy... crash... for some reason.
But heck, maybe it would. An awful lot of Americans just sort of lost their minds on 9/11, and many still haven't come back, despite the fact that Americans have to invade countries on the other side of the world to find some more foreign terrorists with an interest in attacking them. Perhaps a bunch of suicide bombers would be just what's needed to finish off the freedom and justice that are supposed to be the USA's hallmarks.
It's a weird sort of... aggressive cowardice. The USA is now so afraid of any terrorist attack or shooting spree that anything with flashing lights on it is treated as a city-paralysing bomb, drawing a picture of a gun gets you suspended from school, and half the country will take your side if you work yourself up into a hysterical frenzy over sharing a plane with some foreigners.
I wonder if the absence of actual domestic terrorists has something to do with the USA's ongoing erosion of human rights. If you'll cut down every law in the land to get at the devil, but there's not actually a devil out there to catch, you'll keep cutting down laws, and making publically acknowledgedhitlists, and imprisoning people indefinitely without charges or trial... forever. There's no end-point.
What really blows my mind is that many of the people who're happy to trade any amount of freedom for alleged security against these un-detectable threats and abstractconcepts, and who want to add "except for Muslims" to a surprising number of laws, also say that the US firearms death toll is an acceptable trade-off for the right to bear arms.
Six Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attacks.
An easy ten thousand a year die in firearm homicides in the USA.
That's unfortunate, say firearms enthusiasts, but it's the price of that right.
Well, yeah.
And the price of not groping, X-raying and partially undressing people getting on a plane is that people will be able to get on a plane with a Swiss Army knife, or a steak knife, or even a gun. But, as has been demonstrated on the numerous occasions when the TSA have failed to prevent someone carrying a gun onto a plane, that doesn't matter at all unless that person actually decides to use the gun, which they almost certainly won't, because the USA does not actually have a domestic terrorism problem.
(Exactly how many weapons the TSA has failed to stop people carrying onto planes is of course unknown. What we do know is that nobody's hijacked any planes with them. We also know that nobody could, since the universal assumption now made of any plane hijackers is not that they just want the plane flown to Cuba, but that they intend to kill themselves and everyone else on board. It doesn't matter if they smuggle light machine guns onto the plane now; when the hijackers have to change ammo belts, the remaining half of the passengers will beat them to death with their bare hands.)
And yet, according to many of the people who say ten thousand homicides a year is just the price of firearms freedom, no imposition on people's rights in the name of the War on Terror (or Drugs) is too great. Because invisible Islamists are lurking everywhere. And you, yes YOU, could be one of the incredible badasses that are all that's standing between Us and Them!
God, listen to me rabbiting on. As a reward for making it this far, here are some movies you can watch that are sort of like this one, except good.
Jarhead; not much action, but that's actually very much the point of the film.
Generation Kill; bleak, funny, actually realistic, and featuring one Marine playing himself who can actually act.
The actual documentaryRestrepo, which has a fair bit of shootin' in it, and allows soldiers to be honest about why they're doing what they're doing, even if their answer is "fucked if I know!"
I watched Act of Valor yesterday. Today I watched The Godfather, because I'd never seen it.
The Godfather is about family, and honour, and power, and killing. So is Act of Valor, and I found the comparison instructive.
Basically, if it's too hokey for a sideshow fortune-teller, or even a televangelist, to contemplate selling it, someone on eBay will put it up in Everything Else -> Metaphysical.
This has got to be a pretty sweet business to be in. Grab random rocks and sticks and charity-shop dolls, make up some incoherent blather about how the objects in question are imbued with the spirits of Nefertiti and Joan of Arc or the chakraenergy of a million sunspots, chuck 'em up on eBay and see who bites.
And people do seem to buy these things. I'm doubtful about whether any of the items that cost more than a house ever actually sell to anybody who isn't a shill of the seller seeking to pump up their feedback scores, but as I write this a "Completed listings" search for "haunted" and "doll" turns up plenty of green numbers indicating an apparent sale.
Now, though, eBay has banned the sale of "advice, spells, curses, hexing, conjuring, magic, prayers, blessing services, magic potions, [and] healing sessions".
This isn't as great as it might at first sound. The LA Times actually talked to eBay about it, and they said all they were doing was "discontinuing a small number of categories within the larger Metaphysical subcategory", their only stated reason for this being because purchases of magic spells and prayers and such "often result in issues that can be difficult to resolve". (You don't say.)
(A complete list of things prohibited on the US eBay site is here.)
I also don't know how much impact this policy change, which happened and was reported on only a few days ago, has yet had.
Most of the metaphysical claptrap isn't in the now-banned categories at all, for a start. So there are still a buggerload of magic tuning forks on offer, and the classic haunted dolls aren't banned, either. I think the haunted doll may actually be the gold standard for eBay paranormal crap; quite a lot of other allegedly magical items, like jewellery, now have "haunted" and "doll" in their description, to make sure anybody who's dumb enough to buy a haunted doll also has the opportunity to buy talismans and wands and who knows what else.
And spells are now supposed to be banned, but there still seem to be plenty of them on sale. These listings include services to help those who've been victimised by other spells; this seller will call upon the Archangel Michael to un-curse you!
(I saved a local copy of that auction here. It's too hilarious to allow it to pass from this world when the auction expires, or is taken down.)
And magic potions are supposed to be banned too - potions are the only physical objects on the new-prohibited-items list - but there are still plenty of them on sale, too.
Perhaps these spell and potion listings were created before the policy change. I also hope eBay's got humans in the auction-removal loop, to prevent auctions for Magic: The Gathering cards, Lego magic potions and other such non-paranormal items from being cancelled. If a human has to click something to kill each auction then it may take a while for the spell and potion merchants to be shut down.
(Having humans cancel listings would be practical, by the way. As I write this, the whole "Metaphysical" category on eBay.com, including international listings, has about 120,000 listings. That sounds like a lot, but it wouldn't take long for full-time workers to sort through. 25 people working seven hours per day and taking one minute per auction could sort through 12,600 auctions a day.)
A blanket ban on paranormal bullshit would probably be a big problem for eBay, because it would cover "mainstream" paranormal bullshit like...
...tefillin, any crucifix or Star of David necklace or ring or brooch or other knick-knack with colourful description text, and umpteen other religious collectibles. Which includes religious items of legitimate historical value, and religious items that people just buy for fun. Many people, for instance, enjoy collecting Catholickitsch, the cornier the better.
I also wouldn't want to be the guy who has to draw the line between Harry Potter movie memorabilia and magic wands that are actually meant to work, between collectible knives and magic ones, or between geological specimens and magic crystals.
Still, even this small change is an improvement over the previous anything-goes policy. People who want to blow their savings on mystic nonsense should at least get a nice flashy tarot reading or personal magic-trick presentation for their money, rather than just read a wall of poorly-written pink capital letters and then pay fifty dollars for a twenty-cent bottle with some discount-store lavender oil in it.
If, of course, you really are in possession of some paranormal object or magic spell, you could make money a lot faster by just demonstrating it to James Randi, and make a million dollars.
Since Randi's advancing age means he now looks like a particularly dangerous emeritus member of the faculty of Unseen Universityand like a little bald wrinkly smiling man, though. the Anti-Randi Marching Band probably find him even more frightening.