Word: magical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...entire book seems to indicate that religion works its magic best when it evidences itself in a conversation between two people searching to learn about each other. One would hate to see this spontaneous spiritualism traded in for a designated time of quiet. It is equally discouraging to see it so quickly forgotten or belittled by Coles in his eagerness to have school prayer legalized...
...ploy continues to sell perfume, the smells may branch out even further. Imagine if advertisers, in their search for more vivid copy, began running scent strips, say, for Aqueduct Race Track. Or Magic Johnson's Converse ERX 400 high-tops, or Macanudo, the ultimate cigar. It would be enough to make some readers wish they had a cold...
While eking out a living performing magic and escape acts, Randi kept an eye on the world of the paranormal, which had boomed during the years of the flower children and the counterculture. Then in 1972, two scientists at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) announced that they were testing an Israeli psychic who could apparently cause objects to levitate, spoons to bend and electron beams to change direction. Their subject, Uri Geller, quickly became a celebrity, but Randi, watching him perform, was < unimpressed. "The tricks were very simple," he says. "There was nothing you couldn...
What Randi recognized much earlier was that magic was sometimes misused. Hearing about miraculous happenings in local spiritualist churches, he decided to see for himself. Disaster. Watching the preacher divine the contents of sealed envelopes handed him by his parishioners, Randi, then 15, was outraged. "He was using the old 'one-ahead' method," Randi explains, still indignant. Striding to the pulpit, he fished one of the opened envelopes out of a wastebasket and accused the preacher of cheating. An uproar followed, and Randi was arrested for disturbing a religious meeting. At the police station, he vowed that he would someday...
Building his reputation as an escape artist, he wiggled out of ropes and straitjackets, as well as handcuffs, sometimes while in a coffin submerged in water. At 27 he was invited to appear on a CBS television show, It's Magic. "They hauled me 110 ft. above Broadway with a crane, hanging me upside down at the end of a cable in a straitjacket -- and I escaped from the jacket. It got me on the front page of the Herald Tribune." It also launched his television career, which has included 32 appearances on the Tonight show alone. Randi's formula...