How It's Used

"She sees dead people. That’s the hook of the Pang brothers’ proficient, often overrated 2002 horror movie about a young Chinese woman, blind since age two, who gets a cornea transplant that gives her sight and second sight."

—Michael Sragow, "The Eye," The New Yorker, October 25, 2004.

"In his famous essay Of Miracles, the great 18th-century Edinburgh sceptic David Hume pronounced: 'No testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof.'

"Hume was not just carrying on his small-arms war with the Christian religion, of which he disapproved. He was also at war with the ghosts, witches, bogles, kelpies, fairies, demons, brownies, second sight, magic, prophecies and assorted spirits that had infested the Scottish mind since before the Reformation."

—James Buchan, "The ghost stories that continue to haunt us," The Sunday Times (UK), August 17, 2008.

"On paper, "Ghost Town" sounds like one of those ghastly high-concept popcorn-delivery vehicles that Millman himself would have disdained: Pincus goes in for a routine colonoscopy (the film's first side-splitting scene, featuring Kristen Wiig as his physician) and comes out of the hospital with second sight. Then, while adjusting to the crowd of spirits who want him to settle their unfinished earthly business, he meets the recently departed Frank (Greg Kinnear), who agrees to call off the supplicants if Bertram will just bollix up the impending marriage of his young widow, Gwen (Tea Leoni), to a too-perfect prig."

—Ann Hornaday, "Wholly Spirited; Ricky Gervais Shines in Charming 'Ghost Town,'" The Washington Post, September 19, 2008, p. C01.

"It was just as bad against South Africa a week ago. When Flood came on he put in three or four chip-kicks in a row. Flood was obviously playing to instructions, but a fly-half has to choose his moment to execute, not just blindly follow a script.

"Unfortunately that sort of instinct is not something you can teach. Carter developed his vision at a young age, when he was a scrawny kid playing against thunder-thighed islanders. At times against England, Carter seemed to have second sight, whereas Flood was just groping about in the dark."

—Mark Reason, "Flood shows how much we need Jonny England fly-half was full of bravery but lacked clear thinking," The Sunday Telegraph, November 30, 2008.

"It is only one of the ironies of James Graham Ballard's life that, although he was to become Britain's finest science-fiction novelist, a futuristic writer some believed gifted with second sight, he was the child of a colonial world so feudal it seems almost medieval. Ballard was at the peak of his powers as a science-fiction writer before he even considered using his own youthful experiences as material for the novel for which he was subsequently to become best known."

—Rosemary Goring, "J.G. Ballard," The Herald (UK), April 22, 2009.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
The Four Flavors
The Fifth Flavor
The Five Senses
Sixth Sense

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on Second Sight