Tell her Una, the Evil Lesbian Witch of the West, just put a hex on you that mandates you keep the dining room table. Or else your penis will tie itself into a knot, and she’ll get a case of inverted nipples.
Tell her the table is the last horcrux (Harry missed it). It now has unbelievable powers of good.
Or have sex on the table. Now tell her that you got lucky using that table and you must keep it as a talisman of good luck.
Or put a pure white, blessed table cloth over it and tell her it’s the ancient shroud of the druids.
I don’t mind superstitions and I like ghost stories (except the gory ones). I even have been known to knock on wood (usually my head), but I don’t live my life or make decisions based on that stuff. I’d love to go see a fortune teller–just for the fun of it. I cannot imagine changing my life due to something the mystical Seer said. :eek:
Um, since the first two hexes that TroubleAgain linked to were fertility hexes, if you put those under the table, there might be a whole lot of something else going on…
It doesn’t have anything to do with the aunt finding out/knowing we have the table. She moved abrubtly out of state leaving us to empty her apartment full of furniture. Sell what we could, get rid of the rest. The table didn’t sell and I decided we should keep it. She didn’t object, and we discussed it further when I lamented that because we were allowing her father to use it in one of his homes (while we were looking for a house), that he would probably end up keeping it (I would feel rude asking for it back). She still didn’t inform me that she didn’t want it. (She of course no longer remembers any of these conversations.)
But although she doesn’t bring up superstitious nonsense often, when she does it’s not completely light hearted. I think it’s silly, and point out that it’s not logical and that it IS silly.
She sometimes makes noises about: sure, yeah, its not logical. But as I said, its just noise. She still has this kearnal of belief that keeps popping up. It irks me because it seems that she should realize: “Yes, this is silly. There’s no logical reason for my belief. No concrete proof. Just a leftover fantasy from childhood, and like the easter bunny, should have been consciously disposed of years ago.”
Nope. And when she insists on something like not wanting the table, it’s best not to push it. I get enough nagging already.
Heh - I was picturing a virtual Audrey II (Little Shop of Horros), singing “Feed me!”
Trying to trap me in hypocrisy? No such luck. I was raised Christian, but over the years logic and reason took its toll. I will leave it at that so that we don’t start a GD or Pit thread.
She gets this crap from her mother who is INSANELY superstitious, and even my wife gets annoyed with some of her mother’s BS. She’s pointed out to her mother that some of her “beliefs” are obviously just nonsense, but doesn’t seem to be able to see the same in her own superstitions.
houses in my area are snapped up very quickly. still are even now. one house was on the market for over a year… 3 stories, PARKING!, roof deck, did i mention covered parking? over a year! the house around the corner, sold in less than a month. not this one. it is a row home but the corner house, bigger, more windows. did i mention parking??!
my theory? althought it is a corner house the house it is attached to is…a funeral home. yep, i’m figuring as soon as people saw that, they found a way to leave, real fast.
when it finally sold, it was an even more wild and crazy thing. it sold for cash. here’s the money just give us the keys. very opaque shades went up on all the windows. i didn’t think much of it. just thought that they were doing reno, perhaps a super cleansing/de-evil spiriting. months went by, no one moved in, sometimes there would be a car in the parking area, but really no sign of human or other activity.
then in the 7 hours i was in work, there was a hulabaloo. it turns out the house was bought by people in the illegal drug trade. the house was a 4 story (basement +3 floor) pot nursery. they had lined the entire interior with rubber sheeting, brought in huge numbers of gro-lights, had pre-made and built in containers that held large shrubberies. it took the various authorities and fire fighters hours and many trucks to remove the plants. just imagine! every square inch of this house was given over to horticulture.
the only reason they were found out was the house alarm went off and none of the people on the contact list answered the phone calls from the alarm company. the police dept (3 blocks away) responded and the rest is one of the best neighbourhood stories ever.
seems like the plants didn’t mind the neighbours at all!
Busted. My wife just read my post over my shoulder.
At her insistence, I now present indisputable photographic evidence of the haunting of her new office.
:eek: Great Scott! That poor black woman is destined for ann early death. She’s Marked, I tell you, Marked!–by a spot of dust or something on the film.
I once turned in really old film of a canoe trip we took with a bunch of friends in rural Indiana (we hummed the banjo music from Deliverance the whole time). It came back with just such spots (much smaller) scattered throughout the group pics–it looked like it was snowing spots of light.
I suppose that explains so many things: the breakup of two of the couples, my own unhappy marriage; the successful and happy marriage of the couple who got engaged during the trip…oh, wait…
Hey, they’ve already devoured my soul. They’ve got to go for SOMETHING. 
Where? All I see is a woman wearing a big white ball on her head. 
My brother recently went to Gettysburg and came back with all these pictures of orbs. He actually got in a huff when I laughed at the thought of them being ghosts.
Why is it a ghost? Did I miss the class when we learned that photographed ghosts take the form of glowing orbs? Who’s to say it’s not an interdimensional being that likes to check for head lice? Or a unicorn fart?
I kinda like the notion of a species dedicated to the eradication of head lice throughout the universe. We could use more species like that: ones to rid us of dust bunnies, belly button lint (I believe that is called nithnith), smegma, dandruff…
A close friend once cast the “demons” from a computer into a peanut which he then threw out a window into running water. Rebooting the machine had worked before then, and worked this time as well… but after the peanut episode the problem did not come back.
Also: system test engineers that I know talk about getting a “gremlin” board in the shop, which passes all of its tests (but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, only when the moon isn’t full, only when it’s raining outside, only when a female does the testing, etc.). All of them must have rational explanations (bug takes 48 hours to manifest, extra light makes an optical junction marginal, humidity shorts a pin, long hair creates a little bit more static that drives a weak voltage higher) but the explanations are sketchy at best. Easier to lump them together, call the part “marginal” (or “plagued with gremlins”) and fail it for inconsistency.
Tell her it’s bad luck to be superstitious.
Hee hee hee! Absolutely true. As with the original topic of “Hexes”, sometimes its just easier to cast the problem into one lump answer, and deal with it as such, then to delve into the problem and find the root cause.
And I’ve gotten most of our staff to accept the “plagued by gremlins” as an official answer to their problems.
My SO and I are trying to sell our house. It’ve been about 4 months now. Last night, he asked me about burying a statue of St Joseph in the yard. Hello? You’ve never been religious and while you were raised going to church, it certainly wasn’t a Catholic one. You’re the problem solving engineer.
I think that sometimes, when it feels like you’ve done all you can do, it’s comforting to believe in hexes, blessings or good luck charms. Better to blame/credit something like that, then to feel helpless.
The superstitious person believes in cause and effect, just like the rest of us do. She’s just not as clear on how the cause causes the effect.
But of course! I suppose if you ran into one that really didn’t want to accept gremlins, you could say “computers are complex systems, and complex systems sometimes behave in unpredictable ways”. But really, it’s the same as gremlins.
Managers and users who don’t understand that complex systems sometimes just do stuff, and there’s no real explanation- they’re a plague.
Nah, not a haunting. That’s obviously an evil alien from Star Trek about to take over that lady’s body.