Science versus performance art.

Behold: The Blood Lamp.

Honestly, if your goal is to make people think about energy usage, wouldn't razor wire light switches work as well? And be less wasteful?

Doom-o-meter: 23 September 2009.

It seems almost laughable to check the gauge on the Doom-o-meter these days, since I've been praying to be eaten first for a long time now, but I've seen a few interesting things lately, and I'd say that we're really only at level "Slightly Unsettling, But Not Too Alarming" -- despite my protestations.

Let's start with a little sunshine amongst the usual grey detritus. Kate Harding recently presented a beautiful dissection of celebrity-death apophenia in her Jezebel piece criticizing the "Summer of Celebrity Death." We can be assured that common knowledge is often wrong, of course -- though I am still somewhat relieved to be non-famous at this time...just in case.

In the other news, devout Christians can now make sure their pets are taken care of after "the rapture" by atheists -- who at least love animals, even if they are godless heathens, and whatnot.

And finally, a red panda escaped from a zoo in the UK, proving that the pandas are in fact coming -- though not the kind that can hide in an Oreo cookie factory, sadly.

See, we're practically safe as houses these days. Except for all the doom, of course.

Robots.

Robots: Killing humans since 1979!

Just wait ’til we have Skynet. Am I right?

"Nightmares...become reality."

“In this world, there is real evil: in the darkest shadows, and in the most ordinary places. These are the true stories of the innocent and the unimaginable. Between the world we see and the things we fear there are doors. When they are opened…nightmares become reality.”

I started watching “A Haunting” on Discovery last summer. I like old school reenactments (the badder the better, as my long-lived affair with “Unsolved Mysteries” proves) and I love stories of the paranormal — so the show seemed a natural fit. I tuned in, thinking I would get a couple of “boo” scares and a few belly laughs.

It turned out that I got something else altogether.

At first I was put off by a Christian bias in the stories. It seemed that most of them involved possession or “demonic” type entities. In fact, I started writing a piece about that, but I saw several more episodes and came to conclusion that I just saw a few similar shows in a row — the Christian/demon thing wasn’t the predominant theme. Oh, it’s there — don’t get me wrong. But it seems to me that the religion aspect is actually part of the show’s blue collar bias.

You see, “A Haunting” isn’t really about religion — it’s about social class.

People who purchase haunted homes are usually in a difficult financial position. They ignore the fact that even their realtor won’t enter the house, or the creepy feelings they have initially. They focus on the fact that the house is a bargain, or the perfect size — and they move right in.

It’s only later that they realize what a terrible mistake they’ve made.

I would estimate that a good 80% of the families featured on “A Haunting” are lower middle class, or working class. They’ve had stories with single mothers who scrimped for years to make a down payment, people juggling school and multiple jobs, and even the occasional haunted renter. These people had few options when it became clear that their homes were haunted.

More than one person on the show has admitted that they were so financially strapped that they couldn’t even come up with a deposit for a place to rent. They were trapped.

And it’s just that feeling that pervades many of the stories on the show. Dream homes become nightmare homes, and any existing problems become vastly magnified. As the haunting situation spirals out of control, other (sometimes preexisting) problems follow the spiral in tandem. In fact, some of the hauntings could be seen as metaphors for existing domestic strife — abusive spouses, out of control teenagers, poor money management.

They don’t show stories about haunted penthouse apartments or demon-infested McMansions in gated communities, though. Oh, I’m sure that sort of thing happens, but having access to money makes a big difference in how these things are handled. If you’re wealthy and you buy a new home that happens to be haunted, you move on as soon as trouble rears its ugly head. You rent it, or flip it — whatever it takes — but you have the means to leave at the first sign of the unexplained. And you certainly wouldn’t chat about it on national television — even on basic cable. That would be unseemly.

Plus, dismissing the paranormal as superstition and moving at the first sign of trouble doesn’t make for a good campfire tale, anyway.

Working class homeowners, with their stereotypical tendency to superstition, have just the right blend of intense pressure, financial woe, and access to older fixer-uppers that will keep “A Haunting” churning out low-rent demonic docudramas for the foreseeable future.