Word: randiness
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...have just seen is a demonstration of "psychic surgery." The blood had been donated by a volunteer before the show; the "diseased tissue" consisted of shreds of lamb heart, hidden in a tray behind the table and manipulated by the facile hands of a master magician: James ("the Amazing") Randi, 59, conjurer, showman, crusader and America's most implacable foe of flummery. The props and the techniques are those used by the so-called psychic surgeons of the Philippines, who promise miraculous, painless, lifesaving surgery to lure desperately ill people to their clinics. But what the sufferers get is sleight...
...exposes of faith healers, channelers, spoon benders, assorted psychics and others who prey on the gullible that Randi in 1986 became the first magician to receive a prestigious "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation. The $272,000 that came with the honor has enabled Randi to step up his travels. He has logged 45,000 miles in the past few months alone, traveling far from his home in Plantation, Fla. In March he was in Australia, demonstrating the fraudulence of channeling, which involves a supposedly long- dead sage uttering words of wisdom through the mouth of a modern-day proxy...
Everywhere the irrepressible Randi goes, usually in a flowing tweed cape and a brown, broad-brimmed hat, bewildering events occur: spoons bend, watches stop, wallets disappear, pencils move mysteriously, minds are read. And everywhere, Randi's message is the same: the remarkable happenings are simply magic tricks, not psychic or out-of-this-world phenomena...
...James Randi barely made it into this world. Born prematurely in Toronto in 1928, he weighed only 2 lbs. 3 oz. Despite that precarious debut, Randall James Hamilton Zwinge soon took center stage. At nine, he invented a pop-up toaster; by his early teens he had taught himself trigonometry, calculus and hieroglyphics...
Disenchanted with school, Randi often played hooky and one afternoon found himself in Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theater, where Magician Harry Blackstone Sr. was performing. For Randi, it was instant addiction. "What I've since recognized," he says, "is that it is the kids who don't quite fit the social picture who go into magic...