Do dead people speak English?

Apparently so.

I'm sorry to be blogging about TV two days in a row, it's not that I'm obsessing over TV or anything, it's just that this is so interesting. Bear with me.

I'm watching Fem, a channel that I usually avoid like the plague, except for a movie maybe three times a year ... but tonight it's just too interesting to miss, I have to watch this. Lisa Williams live in Oslo. You know who she is, right? She's one of these despicable fraudsters who pretend they can communicate with the dead and give grieving people closure. OK, I'm sorry, maybe she's not a fraudster. Maybe she thinks she's really doing it. Maybe she's not despicable, just delusional. That would maybe be slightly better. Maybe. But anyway.

She's done a live performance here in town - or maybe more than one, I'm not sure - and this totally shitty TV channel (its primary demographic is stupid women with underdeveloped critical thinking skills) has turned that into a TV show. Pandering to the lowest common denominator. >:-( I'm watching it out of morbid curiosity. Kind of my duty as a skeptic. But it's depressing, it really is. I don't understand how people are falling for this stuff. And I don't understand how someone has the stomach to do something like this to people who are mourning their loved ones. There's a woman in the audience who lost her husband three weeks ago ... ! and Williams brings her forward and supposedly gives her messages and shit. The husband wants her to give the wife a hug. It's sickening.

She makes mistakes but isn't called on them. When did he die, it was two years ago, right? No, three weeks. Oh, OK, but I'm getting something about two years, was he sick for two years? See what she did there? Now that pisses me off. And why does she need to ask ... OK, she says that she's got someone's husband ... on the line, or whatever, and 'I'm in this section here'. (I just hate that woo talk, you know it when you hear it, it's so annoying. Energy and balance. Sheesh.) Then she asks 'who here lost their husband recently?' What does she need to ask that for? If the guy's supposedly right there, then why can't he tell her which one is his wife? That would be SO MUCH MORE IMPRESSIVE if she just picked the woman out of the crowd, instead of making her come forward. There are so many people there, there's bound to be someone who lost their husband 'recently'. Oh, and define 'recently', please.

What she says is so vague, yet people say afterwards that she just described them to a tee. It's fascinating. They want to believe, so they do believe, even with so little to go on. It's really sad, and disgusting at the same time. Don't get me wrong, it's her I'm disgusted at, she's exploiting these poor people. And nobody calls her on things ...

... like my main question here, which is also the title of this post, do dead people speak English? Williams is from the UK, but right now she's in Norway, we speak Norwegian here. In the intro she was shown backstage establishing her connection with the spirit world (using a computer, interestingly enough) and she was saying that she felt like the Norwegian names were difficult, she was worried about getting them wrong. (The only name that's been mentioned on the show was pretty easy for her - Tommy. :-D) So she's not familiar with our language. The first person she brought up on stage was a man, I'd say in his forties probably, who really struggled with English. I'm not saying he can't speak it under normal circumstances, maybe he can get along, but in this obviously rather overwhelming situation - she 'connected with' his father, mother, father-in-law and sister - he really struggled to put a three word sentence together. Based on that I'm willing to bet a pretty significant amount of money that his father wasn't exactly fluent either. In fact I'm quite sure that the father's English skills would have fallen in the category slim to none. So how did he communicate with Williams, since they have no language in common? Hm.

I know, don't tell me - spiritual communication isn't like our helpless mortal speaking! She communes with the dead and they share their minds with her. Aw. They just show her things in images and feelings. Really? She seems to be getting things that are really specifically phrased - information-wise not much, but in the phrasing of them quite specific, if that makes sense; not like she's just relaying vague impressions - and the way she talks, she says that he's saying, she's saying ... Tommy's mother is such a chatterbox, she's constantly talking. Huh?

I also wonder a bit at how fantastic all these people are. They are all so wonderful, she loves them, they're so funny. Why don't these psychics ever connect with all the real shitheads out there, the narcissistic psychopaths, the abusive parents, the bullies? What do they do if they tell someone that their dead father is present, and the two of you had a very special relationship, didn't you? What if the person answers yes, their father molested them for nine years? I mean, that would be a pretty special relationship. Then what would Ms Williams say, I wonder?

Whatever she'd say, of course they wouldn't put it on TV. >:-(