Your future is behind you - Botswana Guardian

I’m converted. Despite being a confirmed sceptic in the past I’ve now discovered something that has changed my mind about all that new age stuff and the traditional mumbo-jumbo.

Some of you may have seen on TV the profoundly eccentric Jacqueline Stallone. As well as being the actor Sylvester Stallone’s mother she is also a high-profile Hollywood astrologer and crystal-waving, New Age loon. Go visit her website at www.jacquelinestallone.com and take a look.

Thanks to Robert Carroll, the author of the fascinating Skeptic’s Dictionary (www.skepdic.com), I heard about her latest project.

Rumpology.

There’s no way I can explain this wonderful new science better than Ms Stallone herself. She says:

“Just as a print of your fingerprints, palms, soles and ears tell a story, so does your rump. The lines, crevices and folds of your rear-end can, to the trained eye, reveal your personality, fate and future in luck and love”. Apparently your left buttock represents the right side of your brain and, somehow gives clues to your past as well. Similarly, your right buttock will give Stallone clues about your reasoning ability and language skills. She says that her analysis of your bum “will indicate whether you are going ass-backwards (back in that little closet called the left brain) or are going forward, “taking the plunge” with your right brain God-given tools of intuition and creativity.”

What she asks you to do is to send her a digital picture of your bare bottom and a payment of $125 and in return you get a “personal, condensed, no frills report on the signs and markings on your rear end”, “a condensed one-year prediction in the direction your rear end is taking you” and best of all an A4-sized colour picture of your backside “which you may want to frame as a family keepsake… or give as a gift to a special person”.

Now obviously this is one of the best examples of complete pseudoscientific hogwash I’ve ever seen. In fact it’s such an extreme case I’m not sure it’s even worth trying to suggest it’s nonsense. With reflexology, homeopathy and all the other New Age rubbish there is at least something to get your teeth into. They are expressed in sufficiently scientific sounding language that anyone with an understanding of scientific method can rip them apart. Not so with Rumpology.

So instead of arguing with it I’m going to adopt it completely. I think Rumpology is fantastic.

In fact I’m here to announce my own version of Rumpology. I’ve taken the basic principles and developed them to a new, advanced level. I’m going to set up a new organisation to be called the Applied Rumpology Studies Establishment. For a start we’re doing away with all that business of sending digital photographs around the world. No need for that. At A.R.S.E. we do all the readings ourselves, by hand. At A.R.S.E. we believe that you can’t do a real reading with just a picture. Obviously you need to give it a good feel with bare hands.

So, if you feel that your life is lacking direction, you need a vision of how things can be better and more rewarding pop on over to the A.R.S.E. team for a feeling, sorry a reading. You’ll be impressed with how thorough we can be, how prolonged the reading will be and quite how many volunteers there will be to read you.

If you have a nice one that is.