Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Witches Brewing

For some reason, teenage girls in upstate New York have started freaking out with seizures and fainting spells:
Environmental activist Erin Brockovich is launching her own investigation into the outbreak;...However, a doctor treating many of the students is confident that they are suffering not from poisoning, but from mass hysteria, also called mass psychogenic illness and other variants. Typically, symptoms—which can include Brownell’s Tourette’s-like movements, along with nausea, dizziness, cramping, and more—start with one or two victims and spread when others see or hear about them. Victims are often accused of faking it, but more often they are suffering real physical symptoms that are psychological in origin. The phenomenon has been observed for centuries, with the blame shifting to whatever specific anxieties are culturally pervasive at the time. But one theme has remained consistent: The victims are overwhelmingly female.
In other words, biches gonn' be bitches!! But seriously, perhaps someone should maybe ask Goody Brockovich if a Haitian housekeeper has been brought into the community to show the girls voodoo?

On a side note, just yesterday I saw this, which should serve to provide some sense in our own day & age of creating entire wars because we like little school girls when a mouse walks into the room:
The take-home from the trials shouldn’t be that poisonous plants can make you hallucinate, but that a perfectly capable, religious, and law-abiding community that laid the roots for American justice legally and conscientiously executed 20 of its own innocent citizens; that over 150 people in Salem that year who were charged as having consorted with the Devil. In [the jimsonweed] theory, the girls went crazy. In [historian Mary Beth Norton]’s, the town went crazy.
BONUS: Brockovich's connection could lead to a sequel of Hollywood's best cleavage film?

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