Reader Richard Rockley – aka Skeptico – can be found at skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico. He informs us:

Bingo

This coming Friday, November 16, Larry King is hosting another hour of credulous guessing games with cold readers John Edward and James van Praagh. To make the show less painful, I developed a John Edward / James van Praagh Bingo card. Check off a square for every lame cold-reading trick you note. I hope you find it amusing.

Actually there is another reason for doing this. It can help explain to believers what is really going on with these cold readers. From personal experience in doing this, I can say that if you explain in advance to believers what Edward and van Praagh are going to do, some can be convinced. Playing Bingo just adds to the fun.

Bingo

Reader Richard Rockley – aka Skeptico – can be found at skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico. He informs us:

This coming Friday, November 16, Larry King is hosting another hour of credulous guessing games with cold readers John Edward and James van Praagh. To make the show less painful, I developed a John Edward / James van Praagh Bingo card. Check off a square for every lame cold-reading trick you note. I hope you find it amusing.

Actually there is another reason for doing this. It can help explain to believers what is really going on with these cold readers. From personal experience in doing this, I can say that if you explain in advance to believers what Edward and van Praagh are going to do, some can be convinced. Playing Bingo just adds to the fun.

Folks, this is a great way of spotting the standard gimmicks – of which regular readers of SWIFT will already be aware, of course. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to spot these methods, and how both Edward and Van Praagh will use the tried-and-true methods described, simply because they have no other way of doing the act.

To top off this dandy little game, watch the video by artist Jose Alvarez. This is a small part of his current one-man show at The Kitchen gallery in NYC, just opened and running through December 22nd. Alvarez was the “channeler” about whom you can read at tinyurl.com/2y52xf – just do a search for “Carlos.” This is one of the most powerful, succinct, evidential examples of the deceit, cruelty, and “formula” gimmicks that these scammers use to convince their victims. This video shows the anatomy of his trickery and the length to which he'll go to exploit people's grief and vulnerability, as well as the media's eagerness to promote it. It should be played in classrooms everywhere, in my opinion – especially for young people still unaware of these tricks.

Of course, if The Boys have their wits about them, they’ll arrange to have their own callers telephone CNN, and those callers will simply agree with everything that John and James offer them. But that would be cheating, wouldn’t it? CNN could arrange to trace each of the calls, and find interesting data there, if they wanted to…