When Sylvia Browne met James Randi

Ever wonder what would happen if mendacious fake "psychic" Sylvia Browne ever met The Amazing Randi?

Now you know.

Sylvia just has to watch out for science.

More like this

Congratulations to Robert Lancaster, purveyor of the fine website Stop Sylvia Browne, a site dedicated to documenting the misadventures and misdeeds of the phony "psychic" known as Sylvia Browne. Apparently she has noticed him. In fact, between Robert, The Amazing Randi, and Anderson Cooper piling…
What a lovely way to start the New Year, catching up on all the blogging I missed while I was on vacation. While doing so, via Skeptico, I came across a most worthy project: Stop Sylvia Browne. In this site, Rob Lancaster has accumulated in one easy stop a lot of useful information that helps to…
I know! He's dead! But that's one corpse that you know isn't going to rest easily. First, the ghouls are out in force. "psychic" ghoul James Van Praagh says he's been having conversations with Jackson's ghost; ghoul enabler Oprah Winfrey has quickly snatched him up to appear on her show and make…
"Fake Psychic Get's Girls." That's the subject line of my favorite piece of spam. Every now and then one slips by the email junk filters and I get a chuckle, and not just because of the punctuation error, either. So amused was I the first time I got this particular piece of spam that I actually…

My question is why she had to ask, who's your friend?

Questions to ask Sylvia;
Does Sylvia answer knock knock jokes with, who's there?
Does Sylvia have an answering machine?

On and on and on........

By Uncle Dave (not verified) on 23 Oct 2007 #permalink

Wouldn't she be required to know the person's questions in advance? If they have to ask, how can she be psychic.

I bear her no ill will, but only because the line is much too long.

By Watt de Fawke (not verified) on 23 Oct 2007 #permalink

Ever wonder what would happen if mendacious fake "psychic" Sylvia Browne ever met The Amazing Randi?

...well, no, because it's already happened. With much the same results, actually.

Today's The Guardian has a story--including a short interview--with Brown, Is She for Real?:

Sylvia Browne is famous for telling distraught parents where their missing children are - but she gets it wrong. A lot. So why does she still have such a massive following? Jon Ronson took a cruise with America's most controversial psychic to find out

It's rather good, mentioning stopsylviabrowne.com; discusses cold calling and some of the other tricks Brown uses; Randi (but doesn't mention the million dollar challenge); several examples (both on the cruise and from the past) of Brown getting being astonishingly mean, nasty, and/or making abusrd claims; and so on. For instance:

[T]here is no doubt that she makes a fortune saying very serious, cruel, show-stopping things to people in distress, especially, it seems, when she's in a grumpy mood.