I may be missing something here
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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I may be missing something here
I would guess Larson wasn't a fan, and thought that "new age" practices were mainly performative and non-productive, leading practitioners to get stuck in repetitive little circles, getting nothing done in the end.
If so, it's a pretty cynical take IMO, and certainly one of his more personal, brassy ones.
Yeah, this one has me totally Cow Tooled. Anyone have an explanation of the joke?
I think specifically "new age" here is referring to water-divenation, this is where some person claiming to be able to detect water gets a divining rod, which is often just two sticks and claims the sticks can show them where to dig a well and hit water (you can look up videos of it on YouTube). They often walk on strange paths, or stagger around and around fields in this process.
So I guess these guys are doing something similar with construction related tasks.
EDIT: I've seen it suggested elsewhere that Gary Larson was particularly annoyed with New Age music, and found it repetitive:
- They are very specifically walking in circles, not staggering around randomly
- Dowsing is not a New Age thing at all, there was a man in my grandfather's village that did it and the practice is a lot older than that
Wicca is also linked to very old practices and considered new age, as is tarot, and the zodiac. New Age doesn't mean new, it's a polite way to say hippie dippy unscientific bullcrap that was revived by new people in the 60s whom had no traditional connection to it.
I mean, if you bend over backwards, sure. But the idea that Gary Larson would expect readers in 1993 to associate the phrase "New Age construction workers" with dowsing practices -- instead of actually using the term "construction workers dowsing", or something -- seems unreasonable. Plus it's not funny at all.
Edit: just for reference, the word "dowsing" does not appear even once in this very long wikipedia article about New Age.
The shape of a dowsing stick is like wheel barrow handles:
https://appleofgodseye.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/dowsing_21.jpg?w=584
(Note how new age that image from google looks, it's from a book cover about dowsing)
They all have wheel barrows, because they're all dowsing.
Dowsing is often done on a specific property, resulting in a circling of the property until the sticks point downwards.
I don't see an alternative explanation for the characteristics of the cartoon.
Why do you think they all have wheel barrows?
EDIT: Here's a Smithsonian Magazine article lamenting that dowsing was being used by "urban New Agers" on things other than finding water: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/urban-new-agers-have-taken-over-the-art-of-dowsing-1-38424068/
That article is from 1996, three years after the cartoon, yet is based on the same premise: new age types, using dowsing for other things.
I think my initial interpretation has now been proven correct.
Also by the way Dowsing is bunkem, practicioners are just drifting to the lowest parts of the property then making their best guesses, or in the case of using metal dowsing rods they're allowing the idiomotor effect (aka the trembling of their hands) to trigger the rods into forming an X shape.
That said, if ritualizing a skill set works for them, then it works for them. I'm just saying the beliefs attached to it aren't explainatory. Having dug wells before (experience), and having your subconscious processes and feet involved in the process (physical and mental feedback) is what's actually pulling the trick off.
Also, most places have groundwater, you don't need a dowsing rod to find it, just a shovel.
I think my initial interpretation has now been proven correct.
Well, I certainly disagree, but I doubt we can find any common ground here. You seem content with any tenuous connection between concepts to fit your interpretation.
I don't see an alternative explanation for the characteristics of the cartoon.
It's definitely cryptic. I've suggested that it's a reference to crop circles elsewhere in this thread, which is still the best interpretation I could find even if that's not particularly satisfactory either.
In 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley took credit for creating a lot of crop circles in Britain, using ropes and planks. It was a well known story and a cultural meme, even if people didn't know about Doug & Dave specifically they knew that the crop circles that New Agers believed were messages from aliens actually were created by pranksters. The construction workers are walking around in circles so that the tracks from the wheelbarrows create...mud circles, I guess.
But as I said, this interpretation doesn't feel satisfactory either, it's just the best one yet. I'd love to hear a better idea.
Yes, agree to disagree, but I will finally and once again note that my interpretation has explainatory power (eg. They all have wheel barrows because they're all dowsing), as well as has an article contemporary to the mid 1990s time period discussing the over popularity of dowsing at that time.
Construction workers push wheelbarrows. This particular feature of the image is not mysterious at all and does not need explaining. In the crop circle interpretation, the wheels of the wheelbarrows make the circles in the ground. That's why they're in the picture.
You have a short personal observation from 1996 which happens to be published in a newspaper. You like sources? Here's some sources on manmade crop circles that make explicit that the phenomenon was connected to new age beliefs in the popular imagination:
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/10/world/2-jovial-con-men-demystify-those-crop-circles-in-britain.html https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/crop-circles-the-art-of-the-hoax-2524283/ https://www.msn.com/en-sg/lifestyle/travel/the-fascinating-history-of-crop-circles/ss-AA1dFqlU https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/files/480768/Meder26.pdf
Some contemporary news clips of Doug&Dave:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzvuqs9Bf7Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XkGbnUXfh4U
Dowsing, however is old folk magic:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/dowsing http://dowsing-research.net/dowsing/articles/Dowsing_from_the_Late_Middle_Ages.pdf https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17532-why-dowsing-makes-perfect-sense/
I could go on, but let's not.
For real, I reckon as long as there have been wells, there have been people claiming to be able to detect water underground.
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I was thinking it was a crystal-dangling thing. Know how they put one on a string and let it swing?
I believe both of those are considered types of dowsing
Those New Age kids and their circle pits
I was thinking it was a crystal-dangling thing. Know how they put one on a string and let it swing?
Seems plausible, maybe the rocky components of concrete aggregate are causing the circling.
Maybe it's meaning that the construction workers are just going around in circles and not getting anything really done?
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Me too. Damned if I can remember what people associated with "new age" in 1993 other then crystals and Enya.
No one seems to get this one, at least on the internet. The most likely interpretation I could find anywhere is that he's referencing crop circles. Which kinda works, but also not...I'm not sure that's it either.
They all have a wheelbarrow
I too don't know what this means. After much searching I believe this could be a reference to the whirling dervishes of Sufism. More likely than dowsing in my opinion.
Found an article from three years later which strongly suggests the basic phenomena that was being commented on:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/urban-new-agers-have-taken-over-the-art-of-dowsing-1-38424068/
If you ever happen to be around people who construction related to water lines, etc, and want to start a fight, bring this up.
I have seen people with masters degrees in civil engineering defend this. It's just this weird holdout of insanity for some reason.
Heard a story the other day about a plumber who dowsed to find a water leak in an outdoor pipe.
Had to bite my tongue to stop myself from pointing out that the teller of the story unconsciously mentioned that the water leak also happened to be in the exact spot where the grass had been growing faster than the rest of the lawn in recent weeks.
I forgot all about this but everyone I know who has a well had a dowser find the location for them, even if it took two or three tries.
I know a utility locator that swears by it and demonstrate it. It worked for them, not me. My powers of skepticism kept the witchcraft at bay.
I have had just the MOST frustrating conversations with people I know to be incredibly intelligent lol.
Im normally very live and live. Like so long as your not convincing/have been convinced to go for reki as a substitute for cancer treatment... Whatever makes you happy. You feel happier holding a quartz rock? Then technically it is working, cool rocks make me happy to, you do you.
I have no idea why dowsing just gets under my skin lol.
It's the difference between "this (placebo) makes me feel better" vs "this is real factual (magic)".
One is a lie they tell themselves, the other is a lie they tell you.
Good dowsers have pretty well developed skills at spotting signs of underground water, and a good understanding of where civil engineers put pipes
Lol, that's actually what I've read. In cases was someone was enough an "old timer" it's likley they'd been to the site before, or had worked enough or had enough intuition. In those cases the chi squared was decent with the rods compared without.
... In a new site built specifically for testing, not so much.
So that's interesting from a psychology perspective, something giving someone "permission" to focus, but water divining it was not.
Yep. Good dowsers do terribly at tests where water pipes and empty pipes have been run through a test area at random.
I suspect they already knew where the utility was, and were fucking with you.
It was pvc and they only locate power and other cables, so it's not like we had any confirmation. I stay skeptical.
They don't do that either. If they did that you couldn't walk around with a pacemaker.
No, people swear by this, honestly. It's not like asking someone for a "left handed smoke shifter" as an initiation right. People rural and metro genuinely think this is a real thing. At a few hundred a pop I would wager there's ~$50k in these things that will be purches by various contractors out of the new infrastructure build in the US. It's wild.
I tried it once and it was a neat experience. I could feel some sort of force crossing the rods as I slowly walked along. Almost felt like horizontal gravity.
To me it is the misframing of it that is the problem:
IF a person holds 2 bent wires, or a pair of sticks, or a y-shaped piece of willow, or whatever, & they walk around & to them it feels like something's going through it when they're over moving-water or moving-electricity ( I've a relative who tells me he can't tell the difference between the 2, from the dowsing: they give him identical signal )..
THEN you can't claim that it is some property-of-matter-divorced-from-their-unconscious-minds!!
THEY are the ones doing it: THEIR unconscious-minds are immersed in all they are doing.
If their unconscious-minds can somehow make accurate determinations, and communicate that determination through the "feelings" they feel when holding their dousing-rods .. how is that pseudoscience?
Scientism's falsely pretending to be Science bugs me.
The prejudice encoded in "matter cannot produce that result, & OF COURSE their minds have no validity, ESPECIALLY THEIR UNCONSCIOUS MINDS.. so therefore NO kind of mind can possibly have any place in the scientific understanding of anything.."
..prejudice isn't Science.
IF a phenomena is produced by a mixture of mind & matter, especially a mixture of unconscious-mind & conscious-mind & matter,
THEN correct science has to study each of the dimensions of the system, correctly, & the way they're interacting.
Prejudice, however ideologically-"proper" or currently-fashionable, isn't Science.
Anyways, I'll never expect to see the "skeptics" do proper science, when their physicalist-existentialist ideology can "solve" everything much more conveniently, to them..
Ideology & prejudice are inseparable: they're opposite sides of the same "coin".
How does guys pushing wheelbarrows in small circles equate to dowsing?
They're all holding wooden handles that converge to a directional point. Same as what a dowsing stick looks like - it's a forked stick.
This also explains why they all have wheel barrows.
The connection to dowsing rods is a big stretch, I really don’t think that’s the joke at all. Them effectively doing nothing is a closer connection to homeopathy I think, but I don’t think that’s the joke either.
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Wow thanks, I would not have got that
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