Mocking of Reality (20 points)
When rating how hard a book laughs in the face of everything we know to be true, I will be using the cultural definition of reality, not the scientific one. Or to put it another way, I'll be operating under the assumption that there's probably a God, almost certainly a Bigfoot, and odds are you're a disguised robot. Using this reality barometer, a book about alien abductions may score lower than one about Amway success stories.
Author's Sucking (20 points)
This category is reserved for personal attacks against a book's author. He or she will receive points based on failure, laziness, and unlikability. It might be mean-spirited, but the crappy have had it too good for too long.
Danger to Self (20 points)
Knowledge isn't always safe. Watch, I'll show you: You can make a throwing knife by throwing any regular knife. Seven people just died. And in their memory, this category measures how hard a book is trying to kill its reader. In the case of a 15 or higher, I'll leave this section blank while I'm bleeding somewhere else.
Menace to Others (20 points)
There are all kinds of things done in the spirit of self-improvement that have no respect for others. Anything from the proper neck-punch technique to the best way for an elderly person to prolong an orgasm could have a tremendous impact on the happiness and safety of your community.
Accidental Awesomeness (20 points)
Terrible things often have an ironic value that is impossible to measure. And yet this category measures it on a scale of 0 to 20. In your face, universe.
Normalized Insanity Rating (100 points)
Getting this final number is not as simple as adding up the five others. After the tallying, I have the authority to modify the score up to 20 points. Why? Because due to the very nature of insanity, a rigid standardized test isn't always effective at spotting it. For example, a firearms license application doesn't have a box to check if you were sent by talking bats. Similarly, I don't have a box to check if a book happens to be printed on human skin, yet I think that would be an important thing to consider when numerically expressing its batshitted-ness. This adjustment will help in situations like that.
Mocking of Reality: 16/20
One major way you can mock reality is to claim you're responsible for all of it. Joseph Murphy was pretty sure he was. Every single thing that ever happened to him and the people he counseled was because he controlled the universe. He thought the words "coincidence" and "effect" were both foreign words that meant "mind rays." When a waitress brought him food, he tipped himself for conjuring her. If he's right, then the only reason his book sold 73 copies was because he willed 73 baseballs to hit children in the head before they entered the consumer market.
Being certain that you control the universe with your mind is a double-edged sword. For instance, how do you explain when bad things happen to you? Did your enemies wish harder than you? Did you not know that you had to specifically ask the universe not to flood your basement? Did your mind spell erectile dysfunction wrong? Did your spectral form eat undercooked dream chicken?
Author's Sucking: 13/20
Joseph's system is based on faith and magic, so it's hard to scientifically prove that it doesn't work. However, if focusing intensely and positively on a mental image caused it to manifest in your reality, then between the ages of 12 and 14, I would have had sex with the real Wonder Woman over 3000 times. Batman and Robin would have been there too, but only to clap.
Joseph tells dozens of stories that support his beliefs, and these range from completely fabricated to probably fabricated. Let's listen to one:
“A young nurse recently planned on taking a flight, but the night before the departure, she had a vivid experience. In a dream, the saw the plane hijacked, and an inner voice spoke to her and said, 'Cancel your trip.' She awakened startled, but she followed the inner instruction and cancelled the flight. Incidentally, the plane she had selected was hijacked.”
Aside from half a page of Bible quotes, that is the beginning, middle and end of the story. So was it proof of precognition or a woman winning the lottery of paranoid overreactions? Neither. That didn't f**king happen. What kind of story about a hijacking doesn't include a single detail? No flight number, no departing city... what the hell happened to the passengers who didn't have the luxury of magical mind powers? The only thing this story proves is that if 300 people ever get rerouted to Cuba and tortured to death, some Telepsychic bitch will use it as an example of how great she is.
Danger to Self: 9/20
It's a book about sitting around and hoping nice things happen. Aside from constant disappointment, what could go wrong?
“Some months ago, I listened to the story of a woman in Honolulu who said that she had married outside her race and religion and that, since her father was a Kahuna (native priest) and had magical powers, he was determined through sorcery to break up her marriage.”
Here's a quick way to tell if you're crazy. When people ask for tips on defending against divorce spells, do you have some? Joseph did. He told this woman that evil sorcery is foolish and ignorant and that if she believed in God with enough enthusiasm, her father's curse would backfire. Let's see how the woman's story ended.
“Shortly afterwards, she wrote me, saying that her father continued to hate her and her husband and had written her that his sorcery or black magic would destroy the both of them. She paid no attention to his threats and, in a few weeks, he dropped dead on the street.”
Holy crap. In a battle of wizards, Joseph Murphy played to win. Whoever did the autopsy on that Kahuna probably wondered why his brain smelled like leather. I'll tell you why-- Joseph Murphy's astral projection stomped his mind to death and he wore cowboy boots to bed.
Menace to Others: 19/20
If you suddenly had the ability to get everything you wish for -- and with this book YOU DO -- it's going to be great for everyone else, right? Not necessarily. For one thing, all these people are going to have to buy new bras to accommodate their sudden and gigantic breasts.
In this example from the book, a woman came to Joseph after claiming his system wasn't working. No matter how hard she concentrated and prayed, she still had problems. Joseph told her she was doing it wrong. She needed to focus on NOT having problems, not on the problems she was having. Let's see how it turned out:
“After a few days her fear thoughts lost all momentum and she had a sense of peace. Her relative, who had been contesting the will in court and who had been deliberately lying on the stand, dropped the case abruptly and a few days afterwards passed quietly on to the next dimension in her sleep.”
Oh, s***! She passed quietly on to the next dimension in her sleep!? I don't like it at all that every testimonial for Telepsychics ends in a medically unexplainable death.
Accidental Awesomeness: 11/20
When you reach out to the universe and ask it to solve all your problems, it's not always predictable. If a Telepsychic is late on rent, she doesn't know if the universe is going to give her landlord a heart attack or simply explode him. It's not always elegant, but the last the universe heard, dead men can't cash checks. That's actually the memo line on every check a telepsychic writes.
“Your conscious mind cannot perceive of the way your prayer will be answered, as the workings of your deeper mind transcend the intellect and bring about a solution in their own way.”
I think my conscious mind perceives EXACTLY how Telepsychics solve problems, Joseph. Which is why I'm very, very sorry for everything I said.
Normalized Insanity Rating: 68/100
After seven decades of sculpting destiny with his thoughts and leaving a trail of mysterious corpses with his thought knives, Joseph Murphy, D.D., D.R.S., Ph.D, LL.D. may have been corrupted by his own metaphysical power. This book is almost confrontational in how little sense it makes. Either the author was insane, or this book is a series of inside jokes a hitman was making to his clients. That being said, I'm not ruling out the possibility that Joseph Murphy turns his magical revenge towards me and I wake up tomorrow as a shrieking ghost trying to scare away the raccoons eating my body.
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