Psychics

Sure, we all can't wait to play "Halo 2" and "Star Wars Battlefront." But those don't land until the fall. There must have been something new at May's Electronic Entertainment Expo that's out for us now, right? How about a psychic adventure, and one with futuristic robot battles? That'll do. Let's play. Imagine it, do it When you start to play "Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy," you immediately notice how horrible the controls are.

The two-bedroom condominium had been on the market for six months, and no one could understand why. Not in this market, not this condo. Other units had sold for a price similar to the one asked, but there it sat. No offers. Not one. The owners became increasingly frustrated, and finally one of them asked a friend, Bill Burns, to come have a look. Burns is a professional psychic. He walked through the lovely condominium and said it was occupied by several spirits.

It seems as though half the organization is day-to-day, the ones not limping or bandaged only one bad week from thinking about where they'd do this next season.

Ernie Scheuer passed along an announcement that the Bodhi Tree, a metaphysical bookstore on Melrose Avenue, will hold a free psychic reading for animals April 17. What caught Scheuer's eye was the notation, "Pets do not need to be present to receive a reading." The psychic "can also read for pets who are deceased." How about pets that haven't been born yet? Generic star: On a music website, Derek Lovett of Torrance found a listing of a performer with a familiar name (see accompanying).

Psychic advisor Georgina Ritchie never had a scintilla of suspicion that the client sitting across from her on the Sausalito houseboat that doubles as her Marin County office was an undercover agent secretly recording their session. The tale of family dysfunction he narrated included a story of his girlfriend's daughter posing naked on a website and slapping her grandmother. The whole tale was bogus.

Rich Powers was sitting on a folding chair with his eyes tightly shut when something brought him to full attention. "Hey, Ray," he said, "there's a little bit of stuck energy behind you. It's a rust orange color, maybe some family energy. As the translucent blue comes in, though, it's cleaning out the rust." Sitting opposite him, Ray seemed to immediately understand. "It has to do with the growth period I'm in," he explained later.

Spanish artist Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, born in 1746, is one of the supreme anatomists of human struggle, daily event and indiscriminate suffering. As concerned with the eloquence of detail -- a dropped shoe, a bottle of wine, a sidelong glance -- as he is with the deepest psychology of horror, madness and the supernatural, he is in many ways the ultimate realist.

Now that the psychic dogs have spoken, it's safe to cancel the recall election. In an effort to save California $66 million (and put an end to all the whining about "democracy run amok"), we've decided to announce the outcome now. We phoned Jacqueline Stallone, matriarch of the "Rocky" brain trust, and got the official forecast from her clairvoyant canines, Rachel, Hannah and Friday.

Los Angeles attorney Mark Geragos attacked the government's case against murder defendant Scott Peterson on Monday, telling a judge in this Central Valley farm town that police may have used psychics and other "voodoo" tactics to investigate the killing of Peterson's wife, Laci, and the couple's unborn son.

This is no ordinary chat room. When Justine Kenzer sits at her keyboard in Los Angeles to talk in real time with Sadgegirl about her new job, there is another dimension to their virtual space, an otherworldly element that defies the fact that the two women live on opposite coasts and have never met in person.