Ken Hurley
YOKI WAS AN obstreperous, peripatetic pococurante whose effulgent skulduggery was rivaled only by his baffo, pugnacious, froward buddy named Yap, whose babble could mesmerize the most seasoned blatherskite. Together they made a great flim-flam partnership. They enjoyed the swindle.
One fine day, Yoki and Yap decided they would start their own religion, claiming to all who would listen that for only $29.95 you would be guaranteed a place in the glorious Heavenly Hideaway. But wait, there's more! For only six easy payments of $69 you'll receive a cushy seat at the big gilded aurous table very close to the Lord of Kings. They called their religion, “We're Right!” Their television commercials were so fast and furiously loud, they made Crazy Eddie and Earl Scheib look like they were Marlo Thomas asking for donations to help unfortunately ill children get well.
To impress the naive and gullible, Yap would spitfire her huckster auctioneer tripe while Yoki would bend silver spoons with his supernatural powers or move a pencil across the table without touching it. They would pass the Fedora, take a collection of moolah, and scat to the next town before anyone got wise.
In a town down the road was a young boy who marveled at how smooth Yoki and Yap were. He decided that he too could enchant, charm, and make a fast cool living if he claimed to have paranormal psychic powers and learned how to bend spoons and slide pencils. He's known to the world as Uri Geller.
But as fate would have it, Uri, Yoki, and Yap encountered one of the most joyous debunkers ever, who, despite his renowned skepticism, had little trouble believing in himself.
Randall James Hamilton Zwinge known to the world as James Randi, became famous for scientific debunking of false claims of supernatural psychic extrasensory perceptions. He considered himself an investigator of charlatans, frauds, and other pretentious wacky quacks.
At a meeting where Randi was effortlessly yet impressively duplicating the performances of Uri Geller, who was now a professor at the University at Buffalo and in the audience, Uri shouted out that Randi James is a fraud! Randi, with the flim-flam quality of Yap, but with a heap of truthiness, retorted quickly, "Yes, indeed, I'm a trickster, I'm a cheat, I'm a charlatan, that's what I do for a living. Everything I've done here was by trickery." The professor shouted back: "That's not what I mean. You're a fraud because you're pretending to do these things through trickery, but you're actually using psychic powers and misleading us by not admitting it."
And so, Uri's reputation as a spoon-bending, pencil-sliding psychic, was faltering right before his very eyes due to the skillful hands and clever but truthful mind of James Randi.
Yoki and Yap scooted from town once again and were never heard from again.
Uri's protest reminds me of a saying I learned in childhood, “I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” Which reminds me of President 45.
Randi never claimed to have psychic powers. He enjoyed a long successful life as an entertaining prestidigitator who also wrote many books about magicians, conjuring, and the art of flim-flam. You might enjoy his 1980 book, Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions.
Meanwhile, there's nothing up my sleeve when I relay that Yoki and Yap are a curiosity courtesy of my recently renewed poetic license.
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