Gullible School Officials + Psychic Babbling = Trouble For Ontario Mom

  Colleen Leduc, of Barrie, Ontario is a single mother, raising an 11 year-old autistic daughter. She sends her daughter to public school, because that's all she can afford.

  On May 30th, she received a call from her daughter's school, asking her to come in right away. When she got there, she was informed that there were suspicions that her daughter was being sexually abused.

"The teacher looked and me and said: 'We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of "V." And she said 'yes, I do.' And she said, 'well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'"

  Based on this ridiculous cold reading trick, school officials called the Children's Aid Society, which launched an investigation into the allegations.

  Luckily, Leduc was able to satisfy CAS that the abuse was entirely imaginary.

[A] case worker came to the Leduc home to discuss the allegations of sexual misconduct, only to admit there wasn't a shred of evidence that anything had ever happened at all. They labelled Leduc a "diligent" mother doing the best she could for her child under difficult circumstances, closed the file and left, calling the report "ridiculous."

  This, right here, is why belief in spooky mind powers isn't harmless fun. These baseless allegations wasted the time and resources of the school, the CAS and most significantly of Colleen Leduc. She's only lucky that the "psychic" didn't blame her for the non-existent abuse. I hope that Ms. Leduc sues the crap out of the "psychic," and every school official who was involved in perpetrating this farce.

Random Internal Soundtrack

  Ever since I managed to wash my iPod in the pocket of my jacket, the soundtrack of my commute has been a collection of overheard conversation, transit engine noise, and the tinny buzz of music from out of the headphones of the future deaf community. On days when I forget to bring something to read, my brain often fills the background noise with snatches of poorly remembered songs. I can usually only recall a few bars or so, and that short bit invariably lodges in my brain like a tumor with ninja training, repeating on an endless, maddening loop until I get involved in some task or other.

  This morning, for some unfathomable reason, I got brain-smacked by the opening verse of the showtune Big Spender. I haven't heard it in years, but that's de rigueur for these random songbombs. What made it notable was that my stunted, malformed psyche managed to conjure up a version I've never heard before. I was hearing it sung by bathhouse-era Bette Midler. Loud, brassy, lungs that could power a small wind farm. I didn't even know that she'd recorded the song; thirty seconds on Google revealed 2005's Sings the Peggy Lee Songbook, containing Midler's recording of the song, a version arranged by her old bathhouse piano player, Barry Manilow.

  I haven't ever heard this version of the song, nor do I plan to, so I guess I'll never know how similar it is to the one my brain vomited up. I just found the whole episode mildly disconcerting, and I thought I'd share my disquiet with the Internet. Isn't this the kind of thing that convinces the credulous that they're psychic?