12 Things You Didn’t Know About the Amazing James Randi

The New York Times Magazine profiled 86-year-old super-skeptic James Randi yesterday. It’s a good read. Here are a dozen things I learned.

1. Randi started his career working Toronto nightclubs as Randall Zwinge (his real name), an entertainer who could predict the future. Soon, he began planning a very neat if somewhat morbid trick.

Each night before he went to bed, he wrote the date on the back of a business card along with the words “I, Randall Zwinge, will die today.” Then he signed it and placed it in his wallet. That way, if he were knocked down in the street or killed by a freak accident, whoever went through his effects would discover the most shocking prophecy he ever made. Zwinge kept at it for years. Each night, he tore up one card and wrote out a new one for the next day. But nothing fatal befell him; in the end, having wasted hundreds of business cards, he gave up in frustration. “I never got lucky,” he told me.

Randi visits Harry Houdini’s grave

2. Randi has a collection of some 4,000 books about magic, hoaxes, mysticism, and the like,

… arranged alphabetically by subject, from alchemy, astrology, Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle to tarot, UFO’s and witchcraft.

3. He doesn’t take kindly to being called a debunker; “scientific investigator” will do just fine, thanks very much. The difference means a lot to him:

“If I were to start out saying, ‘This is not true, and I’m going to prove it’s not true,’ that means I’ve made up my mind in advance. So every project that comes to my attention, I say, ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to find out.’ That may end up — and usually it does end up — as a complete debunking. But I don’t set out to debunk it.”

4. When he was an illusionist, people would refuse to believe he didn’t really possess supernatural powers, no matter how many times he told them the truth.

In 1949 he made local headlines for a trick in which he appeared to predict the outcome of the World Series a week before it happened, writing the result down, sealing it an envelope and giving it to a lawyer who opened and read it to the press after the series concluded. But no matter how many times he assured his audiences that such stunts were a result of subterfuge and legerdemain, he found there were always believers. They came up to him in the street and asked him for stock tips; when he insisted that he was just a magician, they nodded — but winked and whispered that they knew he was truly psychic.

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