William Peter Blatty to sue Georgetown U.

Well, 85-year-old writer and movie director William Peter Blatty says he's going to "sue" Georgetown University in a Vatican "court" because they failed to follow the orders of the late pope John Paul II. Blatty has his panties in a bunch because Georgetown invited the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to speak at the university. The government requires that insurance companies cover birth control and Blatty can't stand it.

I read Blatty's novel, The Exorcist quite a few years ago. It started out okay but got stupider and stupider as it progressed. The movie was a big improvement. It glossed over the stupid elements of the book.

For example, in the book, the priest is talking to the girl to determine if she's demon possessed. Things start moving around the room by themselves. But, the priest thinks, is this a sign of demonic possession, or is it perfectly ordinary telekinesis? She starts speaking Latin, a language she didn't know. But, the priest quickly realizes, this could be perfectly ordinary mind reading. She could be reading the Latin thoughts in his mind and repeating them.

Blatty apparently believes in this nonsense. I saw him back in the '70s on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. There wasn't much to watch on TV at one in the morning back then. Blatty told about some money he won gambling.

The Catholic nuns were running a presumably legal numbers racket. They'd go around. You'd pay them a dollar and pick a number, and if the number was lucky, you'd win some money. Blatty's mother had him pick the number, and they won. The next week, the nun came around again. Blatty's mother had him pick the number again, and again he won.The nun said it was the first time anyone ever won twice in a row. Blatty said that, at first, he thought it was proof he had psychic powers. But now he thought that his computer-like subconscious mind was somehow able to figure out what the winning numbers would be. He didn't consider the possibility that it might be a coincidence, that sooner or later, if they did this thing long enough, that someone somewhere would win two weeks in a row.

The real case The Exorcism was based on

There was a long, interesting article on The Exorcist here:

http://www.strangemag.com/exorcistpage1.html

The Exorcist was based loosely on a supposedly true story Blatty heard about. In the late '40s, there was a fourteen-year-old in Maryland who priests performed an exorcism on. The article is pretty interesting. It's been a while since I read it, and don't read this if I'd be ruining it for you but---

Basically, the kid wasn't possessed. He was just a jerk. His family was Lutheran. It was their old German grandmother who was insisting on the exorcisms. They went through a couple of them in other churches before they got to the Catholics. The mother and grandmother ran around getting the exorcisms while the father came home from work and read the paper. He didn't believe any of it, but let the women do what they want.

The writer of the article spoke to one of the priests who took part in the exorcism and even to the kid who was exorcised. Also talked to the kid's friends.

According to the priest, the kid did speak Latin---sort of---but he was just imitating the priests, making fun of them. The kid did have scratches appear in his stomach, but they didn't spell out any words and the priests made no effort to see if he was doing it himself. The bed did move around while the kid was in it, but there were light beds on wheels with a thin mattresses on bedsprings and they moved a couple of feet every time you turned over. The kid could spit with some precision, but the kid's friends said they did this a lot back then, They didn't have video games in those days so they practiced spitting through their teeth.