Today’s card – James van Praagh
August 21st, 2008 Posted in Game CardsToday’s ‘fraud, idiot or loony’ is James van Praagh, a man whose name sounds like he was stabbed in the middle of it. Van Praagh is, of course, a psychic spirit medium, which means he is one of the very few people on Earth lucky enough that the deceased souls in the spirit world have deigned him worthy of earning lots of money by selling books about how they whisper to him indistinct consonants, obscure medical or genealogical information and suspiciously generic platitudes.
Van Praagh, just like all other spirit mediums, relies on the skill of cold reading to achieve his ends.
Praagh has got an almost uniform sevens across all the categories. Despite his many agonisingly painful misses, he’s probably not quite as evil and egotistically selfish as Sylvia Browne. He has published a few books, but I doubt he’s made as much money as John Edward. He’s funnier than either of them because, despite the fact that he’s lying to the recently bereaved, he is at least doing it in a hilariously camp manner.