Mass Hysteria [Dark Roasted Blend]

Vera, who keeps a blog called that canadian girl, has a friend named Simon. Simon recently purchased a house, into which he moved with his family. This new house, while lovely, had a pond on the property; a man-made pond which Simon found loathsome and which he felt presented a danger to his two, young progeny. With this in mind he began the laborious chore of removing the offending pool and wiping the watery blight from the face of the Earth. Many hours later, Simon removed the lining and found beneath it this laminated screed, a testament to the psychic abilities of pond’s builder and a curse upon Simon, its destroyer:

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Before the Allies stumbled upon a winning strategy of just dropping 8 million pounds of ordinance on his home city, we tried everything we could think of to kill Hitler. Needless to say, our history text-books don’t detail our many blunders, only our eventual triumph, but the secret histories of World War II are more illuminating. Air dropping B.J. Blazcowicz into Castle Wolfenstein? Check. League of Nations sanctioned genetic experiments aimed at breeding a race of Nigh-Indestructible Super Jews? Ross is descended from a particularly successful strain. A total trade embargo on pig iron? Yes. We even tried traveling back in time to kill Hitler before he rose to power, but due to a shoddy flux capacitor and a criminally desultory mission briefing to “Kill the guy with the Moustache,” we ended up assassinating Franz Ferdinand instead, ironically setting off a chain of events that would inexorably lead to Hitler’s rise to power in the first place. D’oh.

But perhaps the greatest unrecognized hero of World War II was The Modern Nostradamus himself, The Royal Astrologer Louis de Wohl, Captain of Her Majesty’s Army and self-proclaimed State Seer for the British Empire.

De Wohl — who fled from Berlin in 1935 to escape Jewish persecution — sprang to prominence when a Spanish duchess asked him to reveal Hitler’s horoscope to Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Hailifax. He impressed. Soon, de Wohl was heading up British Intelligence’s newly formed “Psychological Research Bureau,” dashing out horoscopes of Nazi leaders by the ream. In the late 30’s, he was dispatched to America to single-handedly thwart a conclave of pro-Nazi astrologers who predicted that Hitler would win the war and take over the world. He succeeded, stopping briefly in Washington to assure President Roosevelt that he had a “stunning horoscope.”

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