Word: magician
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What millions of people 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...
...resources, to create something that can exist only in the movies. Check out, for instance, Beetlejuice's vision of the afterlife -- it's hell as a strangled bureaucracy. In the waiting room, where the exit signs read NO EXIT, the dead still carry scars of their demise. A magician's assistant, who has been fatally sawed in half, occupies two seats on a couch. The social worker who runs the place is clearly overworked; she has an alarm on her wristwatch that plays Chopin's Funeral March in ricky-tick time...
...mistaken identity is that my very existence has to remain a secret to keep the government scientists off my case. I have managed it through a brilliant scam: practically everyone thinks I'm a puppet! Sustaining this conspiracy takes a few collaborators. My main partner is a onetime comic magician named Paul Fusco. He actually claims to have invented me. Sure, he talks like me, laughs like me, jokes like me, even sort of looks like me. But I'm 230 years old and he's 35, barely old enough to have a bar catzvah back home. Also important...
After Zippy's introduction, the man in theyellow hat joined the rest of the adults inenjoying the bounty of three open bars andnumerous buffet tables in the the balloon-bedeckedCharles Hotel ballroom. Groups of children andadults scattered about were entertained by aclown, a magician, a make-up artist, and otherperformers...
...magician, by myth, found himself, while performing one of his most famous escapes, trapped underwater in an icy river. He found air bubbles between the hard ice and the water's surface, and they were enough to sustain him until he broke through. The Pet Shop Boys are on to this trick. They know, like Houdini, that the cold helps set the legend...