WATERFORD, Calif. -- Phil Stine is not crazy, or possessed, or even that special, he says. He has no idea how he does what he does. From most accounts, he does it very well.< "Phil finds the water," said Frank Assali, an almond farmer and convert. "No doubt about it." Mr. Stine, you see, is a "water witch," one of a small band of believers for whom the ancient art of dowsing is alive and well. Emphasis, of course, on well. Using nothing more than a Y-shaped willow stick, Mr. Stine has as his primary function determining where farmers should drill to slake their crops' thirst, adding an element of the mystical to a business where the day-to-day can often be painfully plain. [...] Scientists pooh-pooh dowsers like Mr. Stine, saying their abilities are roughly on par with a roll of the dice. But witches have been much in demand of late in rural California, the nation's biggest agricultural engine, struggling through its second year of drought.
WATERFORD, Calif. -- Phil Stine is not crazy, or possessed, or even that special, he says. He has no idea how he does what he does. From most accounts, he does it very well.<
"Phil finds the water," said Frank Assali, an almond farmer and convert. "No doubt about it."
Mr. Stine, you see, is a "water witch," one of a small band of believers for whom the ancient art of dowsing is alive and well.
Emphasis, of course, on well. Using nothing more than a Y-shaped willow stick, Mr. Stine has as his primary function determining where farmers should drill to slake their crops' thirst, adding an element of the mystical to a business where the day-to-day can often be painfully plain.
[...]
Scientists pooh-pooh dowsers like Mr. Stine, saying their abilities are roughly on par with a roll of the dice. But witches have been much in demand of late in rural California, the nation's biggest agricultural engine, struggling through its second year of drought.
I'll swap lessons for beer keep to the Fen Causeway
Back in '91 my wife and I went exploring in the then just recently former GDR for 2 weeks. In one place we came across a gang of workers who were assigned to repair a water main, which they didn't know where it was.
So one of the guys was quartering the area holding two pieces of coathanger bent at right angles loosely in his fists so that they pointed ahead of him. Whenever he walked over the pipe (or at least some underground water) the pieces of coathanger would cross.
It never works for me but it does for my wife. Go figure. The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
