Word: randiness
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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...
After dropping out of high school at 17, Randi joined a traveling carnival. On tour, he wore a turban and a beard, was billed as Prince Ibis, did a mind- reading act and supervised a "ten-in-one," carny talk for ten attractions under one tent. Among the features, Randi recalls, were Kong Lee, the electric boy, and the 10-ft. indigo snake ("It was only six feet, but who counts...
...walked into the open door of a squad car and got out the other side with the cuffs off." Chagrined, the police challenged him to break out of a locked jail cell. He did, easily, and the next day a local newspaper carried a story headlined THE AMAZING RANDI ESCAPES FROM QUEBEC PRISON. "From that moment on," he says, "I was 'the Amazing Randi.' " He has since legally changed his name to James Randi...
...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 was simple. He would walk into the Manhattan office of the Tonight writers an hour or so before airtime, when they were still desperately scrambling for ideas. "I'd say, 'Would you like to freeze me in a block of ice and see me escape?' They...