Dec. 22: Psychics

There was a time in the early 90s when psychic infomercials were all the rage on late night television. Some of them had celebrity hosts like Philip Michael Thomas, Dionne Warwick, or Billy Dee Williams. They all promised that their army of psychics would help answer questions about money, their love life, or family grievances. At the bottom of the screen was this caveat: FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.

On one of them, a psychic visited Alcatraz to psychically find out what happened to three prisoners who had broken out of the maximum strength prison in June of 1962. The psychic stood on the island and waved her hands at the water and determined that the three men had drowned in the San Francisco Bay.

Miracle, I tell ya.

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Those infomercials were fascinating in how terrible they were. The acting was awful, the scripting was even worse, and the so-called psychic miracles could be explained away by an intelligent eight-year-old. Still, these silly psychic hotlines made a pretty penny and some of them received upwards of 2,000 calls a day in its heyday.

Wow, I thought. Are people really that stupid?

Then the answer came to me.

These infomercials tended to be shown late at night on television when people would be coming back from the bars. They'd be drunk, feeling good, and would be susceptible enough to call the psychic hotline and pepper some clueless psychic dolt with a whole of ridiculous questions.

As PT Barnum said: "No one ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public."

I guess that explains OnlyFans.