Slow news day?
OK, I realize the Daily Iowan is a student newspaper and perhaps should not be held to the same standards of journalism as an actual professional paper, but seriously, people.
How many dance on the pin?
By Elaine Fabian – The Daily Iowan
Published: Wednesday, September 28, 2005Four beers, two glasses of wine, 35 shots, and a fifth of vodka in less than two hours might translate into a rough night for most, but for one former Iowa City resident, it caused an out-of-body experience that he said gave him the ability to communicate with angels.
Since being visited by seven angels while his body lay surrounded in vomit on the bathroom floor of a Coralville restaurant almost two decades ago, Mark Patterson contends, he has been able to hear the voices of angels hinting at the right decisions in his life.
“I am guided by inner voices,” he said.
…
“I try to spend time meditating, and it made me study religions to find the common truth among all of them,” said Patterson, who earned an undergraduate degree in psychiatry. “It made me 100 percent responsible for myself.”
…
Barbara O’Rourke, a psychiatrist for Psychiatric Associates, 319 E Bloomington St., said Patterson’s drunkenness during the experiences voids all of his claims.
“It isn’t credible information,” she said. “His brain was put to sleep. If [he] wasn’t drunk, I would take it very seriously.”
Oookay. So a teenage kid (the article mentions that he was a sophomore in high school when this happened) drinks enough to cause brain death in Fat Bastard, claims he saw angels, an actual psychiatrist says, “No, that’s stupid,” and this is somehow newsworthy? I’d be surprised if he didn’t see something wacky as his poor little brain cells were trying their hardest to weave themselves back into some semblance of order.
Also, I can’t think of any institution that grants an undergraduate degree in psychiatry.
On top of everything else, those drink numbers are likely unadulterated bulls*it.
In any case, I didn’t even make it to this story in today’s D.I.; I couldn’t get past the pink locker room brouhaha.
Yeah, I thought it would be pretty much clinically impossible to survive that much alcohol, unless he vomitted immediately. It sounds more like a suicide attempt than a night of partaying. Either that or, as you so astutely pointed out, a total lie.
The scary thing is is that the DI is an award winning student newspaper.
I’ll bet he was only visited by three angels and he just saw the others because he was drunk and his vision was blurry.
And frankly, if someone walks up to me and says, “Hey, angels tell me what to do,” I wouldn’t count on him to tie his own shoelaces let alone remember how many shots he had that one time.
Luckily, the Des Moines Register is staffed by competent professionals who only do things like suggest that Jeff Gannon is actually Johnny Gosch.