I Shoot Power! (Reverse Speech)

Just a word on why I chose the photo at the top of Odd Factoids. It is from our ZapDallas show that Chuck Henderson and Ron Barker did with me in 1988. It involved a 2.3 million volt Tesla coil and the picture is me 'shooting' sparks from thimbles with soldered nails to keep from burning my fingertips.

I had met David Oates, founder of Reverse Speech and found out he lived about 6 blocks from my house in Dallas so we hung out. His house had faulty wiring so the lights would dim when he had too many things plugged in, much like the hilarious Lisa Douglas character on the TV comedy 'Green Acres' overloading the generator. We talked of software that would allow people to do speech reversals and the possibility of applying it to EVP (electro-voice phenomena, ergo, talking with the dead).

Now I see David has a killer program for $79.95 that does what the little reversible, adjustable speed tape recorder does, but on the computer.

At the time, I took his novice course with about 20 other folks who paid $1,000 for the course. Since reverse speech HIDES NOTHING, David passed around a tape recorder and asked each of us to state our name, why we were here and what we wanted from this course...he warned us if we had anything we didn't want known, to skip this process. But everyone recorded the information which David played in reverse at slower speeds.

It seems spontaneous speech contains reversals which show up when the speaker hesitates, stutters or stumbles with words. One girl in our class was a bit butch and I suspected she had some sugar in her tank. When David played her statements back in reverse, the tape clearly said, 'I love women!'. We all turned to look at her and she was mortified with a very red face...but Dallas is pretty urbane so it meant nothing to any of us.

When it came time for David to play my statements, again, very clearly, in reverse I said 'I shoot power!'...which David translated as meaning I spread information, which I have always done before the KeelyNet BBS by networking with friends, then with the BBS, now on the Internet. So, I figure this photo is a good representation of shooting power/information. Tada!