5 Cheap Magic Tricks Behind Every Psychic

[realisticphish]

Yet another article from our (apparently) aggressively skeptical friends at Cracked


http://www.cracked.com/article_18553_5-cheap-magic-tricks-behind-every-psychic.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CrackedRSS+%28Cracked%3A+All+Posts%29

[lazarus]

1. beat me by 26 minutes

I'm loving Cracked.

[realisticphish]

2. it's one of my favorite humor sites

i can spend HOURS reading their lists, even ones I've read before

[EvolveOrConvolve]

3. I love, love, LOVE cracked.com

When I have free time, I just browse through all their articles and watch the videos (which are actually pretty funny).

[charlie]

4. That's funny, because Randi says Uri Geller only knows 6 tricks

And the 6th trick is suing everyone who annoys him. So, I guess Randi and Cracked concur.

Randi has a nice bit of footage that catches Geller putting on a prosthetic thumb right in front of everybody and getting away with it. One of the most galling things about him is that he's a crummy magician:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siDy1o9-swk#t=01m00s

[onager]

5. Ditto for the Psychic Scumbags....

As Penn & Teller called them on the Bullshit! show - John-Edward and James Van Praagh.

Both use cold reading and both suck at it, though I'd say John-Edward is a little better than Van Praagh. V-P is just hopeless. You can occasionally see the flop sweat, when someone doesn't play along and feed information back to him.

That makes him fun to watch, until you remember why he's there.

"I'm getting a 'J!' Do you have a departed loved one whose name starts with 'J'?"

Oh, like John, only the commonest male name in the English language? Or maybe you meant "jagoff," spelled "Van Praagh."

[charlie]

6. Ooh, thanks

I've never seen this Van Praagh guy before. He's fucking awful. He looks and smells like a guy who knows if he blows this gig, he goes back to working at Ace Hardware. Here's a wonderful video of him getting bumblefucked by an audience of Australian ladies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t07UzTcApMI

They're not hostile, they just don't know what to make of him, and apparently don't know that if you don't "help" the psychic, nobody goes home happy. The reaction shots of the lady in the middle (who reminds him ALL Catholics have a picture of Mother Mary around somewhere) throughout the program are hilarious.

And here's a pissed off Barbara Walters, who got ambushed by the little dink ("I see something wrong with your blood"):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4B8tD0ey8k

[Orrex]

7. I've said this before, but I HATE cracked.com

Every page has five links to other pages that I simply have to read!

And each of those has five links, and so on, and so on.

When I finally come up for air, I find that 70 or 80 hours have passed!


I hate cracked.com!

[EvolveOrConvolve]

8. OMG, you're right, it's like electronic crack!

It MUST be a conspiracy - see how they named their website with a subliminal message so that we would all become hooked?

[Orrex]

9. I'd have replied sooner, but I only got off the site just now

Damn you, cracked.com!

[EvolveOrConvolve]

10. Dammit, me too

Just finished with "The 7 Most Horrifying Things Ever Discovered In a Human Body".

Awesome! http://www.cracked.com/article_18470_the-7-most-horrifying-things-ever-discovered-in-human-body.html