John Michael Greeg?

[ecosophia]

Okay, this is genuinely funny. 

Listverse, one of those clickbait sites that does posts like "The Ten Most Unusual Things I Found In My Belly Button Lint" and so on, posted something a few months ago titled "10 Bizarre Spiritual Groups You Can Join." Yes, it's as lame as you might expect, and yes, its accuracy is only a little better than the output of a random-text generator, but I'm amused to note that I made it into their list. 

Or, rather, one John Michael Greeg made it into the list. Entry #5, which purports to be about geomancy -- which isn't a spiritual group, of course, bizarre or otherwise, and which they describe in the sort of word salad that a very, very finite group of chimpanzees could produce quite readily -- ends as follows: "One of the best known practitioners is American author John Michael Greeg, also known for being a druid." 

So I've finally achieved my fifteen minutes of fame. Or, rather, the mysterious figure of John Michael Greeg has done so.  You can read the whole thing here. 

Comments

[jpc_w]

They've got you mixed up with the "earth grid" some dowsers talk about.

Their writers should look at being wrong as something to strive for.

[ecosophia]

Yep. They literally don't know the difference between divinatory geomancy, feng shui, and ley lines -- about on a par with insisting that a wall calendar can tell you the distance between orange and democracy.

[(Anonymous)]

I think that congratulations are in order! Well done sir! Best wishes that this is your last taste of that flavor of Fame!

[ecosophia]

Thank you, but it's not the first and I doubt it will be the last.

[(Anonymous)]

Could have been worse, I guess. Apparently, when Swami Vivekananda arrived in Chicago in July 1893, he made quite a ‘splash’ but the newspapers managed to mangle his name into ‘Sivanei Vivcksnanda’!

Of course, if you find your real ancestry to be rather drab, you now have the golden opportunity to claim that you are related to the famous Norwegian pianist/composer Edvard Grieg and that your grandparents’ name got misspelled by the customs officials in New York when they got off the boat from Norway…

All the same, congrats on making it onto Listverse. I wonder if you’ll end up fielding emails from bewildered masses wanting to join your ‘geomancy spiritual group’?

Ron M

[ecosophia]

Clearly somebody in 1893 had sloppy handwriting!

A few months ago

[tunesmyth]

“A few months ago”— actually, that’s seven *years* ago! How time flies when you are famous and misspelt...

Re: A few months ago

[ecosophia]

You're quite right, of course. I noted the day and month but not the year.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm... They didn't count dogmatic religions as "bizarre spiritual groups".

[ecosophia]

Of course not. "Bizarre" in media-speak means "not large enough to be a significant target audience for our ads."

[(Anonymous)]

I still like Listverse. I use it to find subjects that might interest me, and then I go read what really happened.

[ecosophia]

Hey, if it turns your crank, by all means.

[avalterra]

Well, at least they didn't connect you to Hitler. I once went to a Raelism presentation. It was fascinating. The young and rather pretty woman admitted that she has no idea if any of it was real, but she really hoped it was. The film she showed had imagery spliced from various sci-fi TV shows and movies. It reminded me of the time I went to a lecture on psychic phenomena and I saw one of the lecturers had this book under his arm.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Psionics-Handbook-Advanced-Supplement/dp/1560760540

Smile emoji here

[degringolade]

I can only hope that you remember us "little people" now that you have hit the big time.

Re: Smile emoji here

[ecosophia]

;-)

A new alias!

[(Anonymous)]

Ah the nefarious Mr. Greeg, uncovered at last!

I was thinking about how to pronounce this new alias. Like a long drawn out Greg? No, like the composer Grieg, because then I can imagine the strains of the mischief and chaos of "In the Hall of the Mountain King"; fitting I think, considering their garbled take on earth magic.

BoulderLovin Cat

Re: A new alias!

[ecosophia]

Mr. Greeg sounds to me like a character in a Dickens novel, and yes, it should be pronounced like the composer's name. That would make fine theme music!

Greeg

[(Anonymous)]

Greeg sounds like some gremlin character like Gollum 😂 Congrats, sir. You're now worthy of an appearance in some fantasy novel.

Re: Greeg

[ecosophia]

Greeg the Gremlin -- hmm. I like it.

[(Anonymous)]

Just about everything on that list is a well-known alternate religion of long standing. And they went out of their way to find some way to stigmatize them either as dangerous (Asatru) or ridiculous or "oooh, Soooo weird, man!"

Clueless. Or, as propaganda, clumsy. Very, very clumsy. As subtle as a whoopie cushion. And as knowledgable as a middle-schooler who has just discovered that there are other beliefs out there than what the parents think.

Hey! Maybe that's who wrote the thing!

The Grey Badger, from a silk-padded Florida cage.

[ecosophia]

Oh, such propaganda is usually clumsy as frack. It doesn't have to be subtle, it just has to let everyone know that the beliefs thus marked out are Beyond The Pale.

[(Anonymous)]

It's hilariously bad to the point of parody. Especially the attack on Asatru. And why even mention the Aetherius Society I mean what year is it 1960 LOL

Tidlösa Greeg

[ecosophia]

I admit I was wondering about the Aetherius Society making the list!

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure what a Greeg is but I personally think it should be added to the third column of your Cosmic Oom generator.

Morfran (Sepia Orthogonal Greeg)

[ecosophia]

Hah! Funny.

[walt_f]

If you'd asked me to guess what geomancy was, based only on the name, before I'd read anything about it (and I mean, not even so much as a single sentence), their description is pretty close to what I'd have imagined.

It might be amusing if John Michael Greeg (or just Greeg for short) could fill in for Fido on occasion. Perhaps using some appropriate system analogous to The Cosmic Oom.

[ecosophia]

Yes, but if you were going to put something up on the internet, I bet you'd take a few minutes to learn something about it. As for Mr. Greeg, we'll see. The name definitely has potential.

Greeg

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, “the Greeg” might make for a nice, somewhat imposing moniker.

Not for you necessarily. But for someone. 😜

Re: Greeg

[ecosophia]

It sounds like a landscape feature in Scotland!

[(Anonymous)]

7: "Hitler liked it too"?!

Is Asatru growing rapidly then? I didn't think it was a major cultural force, but that kind of smear suggests it is...

[(Anonymous)]

Odin made me vote for Trump

Almost-random word generators

[https://openid-provider.appspot.com/bryanlallen]

The very odd and disconnected qualities of the phraseology of many of the clickbait sites on the Internet has had me fascinated for quite a while. Some can be explained as having been written by a real person but not in their native language; I think this Listverse entry is one of those.

From curiosity, I Googled the supposed author of the piece: Sabine Bevers. Amusingly, I got an unused Twitter profile with some entries from April Fools Day in 2013 (notice that 2013 is the publish date for the Listverse article), an unused YouTube profile with zero entries or subscriptions, some other fluff, and a LinkedIn profile entry that would make some sense as a likely author of the Listverse article: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinebevers/

The odd odd word salads that seem ubiquitous on the Internet sometimes persuade me that the hypothesized Singularity has already occurred, but that instead of an amazingly intelligent and powerful entity having emerged, we instead got a thought version of viral infection that uses sentient hosts to propagate… nonsense.

Re: Almost-random word generators

[(Anonymous)]

A LOT of stuff out there sounds like the author was writing in a foreign language, or as if it were written by a computer. See botnik.com for even more fun.

[(Anonymous)]

Does that mean your new handle will be JMGG?

[ecosophia]

Nope. I'll spin off Mr. Greeg as an alternate persona. He has possibilities.

[(Anonymous)]

I note there are some fishygods at #1 on the list…

[ecosophia]

Good for the fishygods. Now let's see if the oystergods show up!

[(Anonymous)]

Nice that they showed Mr. Gardner with his clothes on. I also notice they use
the same trick our state newspaper uses when showing pictures of people they
are not fond of; they pick the least flattering they can find.

Heliotrophe Funicular Octopus (also known for being JLfromNH)

[(Anonymous)]

Yes Gardner with his clothes on is certainly unflattering :-)

Tidlösa

So many Greegs, so little time.

[(Anonymous)]

This is all vaguely reminiscent of a book I have heard about:
"The Strange Case of Dr.(uid) Greer and Mr. Greeg" *

* Cliff's Notes available at the Arkham University Bookstore.
(Black Tuna and Hand)

Re: So many Greegs, so little time.

[ecosophia]

Too funny.

You know, I neglected to have a Miskatonic University bookstore in my tentacle novels, alas. That could have been fun.

[(Anonymous)]

I see they trotted out the "if you are a worshipper of the Norse gods you must be a Nazi" trope, which is a common MSM and SJW smear tactic.

[ecosophia]

Yeah. The number of dumb Hitler tropes these days staggers the imagination.

weirdness

[ritaer]

I once met someone who was a member of Raelism--don't recall the context though.

Rita

Re: weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

Me too. Also, a member of the Fellowship of Isis. And I'm a regular commenter on Mr Greeg's blogs. OMG I must be becoming a Nazi!!!

Tidlösa