“You have to move beyond logic to connect with the Master,” says a wide-eyed Petrus, who is very alert after an evening of meditation. “If you rely on your intellect, you end up doubting. You ask, ‘Is she really a God? That little woman from Vietnam? Naaaah. No way.’ ”

He points emphatically at a laminated photo of Ching Hai that hangs on his kitchen wall. She is smiling beatifically beneath a gold-sequined chapeau. “But I don’t care what anyone says! She’s God!”

At Rochecotte, the house of his much younger companion Dorothée de Dino, he enjoyed even simpler pleasures, sampling peaches from his own grafts, which he ate with Brie, the “King of Cheeses” (”the only King to whom he has been loyal,” said one of his many detractors).

One disciple is believed to have bought a pair of used sweat socks for US $800 because “when the Master leaves the physical world, at least I will have her socks.”

A war of words then erupted between Gallo and film critic Roger Ebert, with Ebert writing that The Brown Bunny was the worst film in the history of Cannes, and Gallo retorting by calling Ebert a “fat pig with the physique of a slave trader.”^[6] Paraphrasing a statement attributed to Winston Churchill, Ebert responded with, “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny.” Gallo then claimed to have put a hex on Ebert’s colon, cursing the critic with cancer. In response, Ebert quipped that watching a video of his colonoscopy had been more entertaining than watching The Brown Bunny.^[7] Gallo subsequently stated that the hex had actually been placed on Ebert’s prostate and that he had intended the comment to be a joke which was mistakenly taken seriously by a journalist. He also conceded to finding Ebert’s colonoscopy comment to be an amusing comeback.^[8]

As I return home from Moon World, the sun is already starting to set in the western sky.

Results from more than 90 countries represented in the World Values Survey show that conditions associated with a high level of female relative to male happiness and life satisfaction include a high proportion of Muslims in the country, a low proportion of Catholics, and absence of communist history.

Originally intended to be just a short story about an eager, hardworking Toronto-born teenager and a sarcastic, gifted Quebecois teenager becoming NHL players and lovers, that one little story has since then spawned a 11-chapter series, at least six spin-off series focused on different character casts and plotlines that occasionally overlap with one another, and a Tumblr account containing extensive character info and backstory not revealed in the main series.

Any child who did not say that this action was “perfectly OK” was removed from the study and replaced by another child.

The difference between humans whose DNA has been spell-checked and normals is likely to be large.

It was bold, to say the least, when in 1976 Jean Baudrillard sent his essay Forget Foucault to Critique where Foucault was an editor.