mark lewis wrote:Then he really is a most ungrateful child after me giving him employment. And to me he is still a child. He came up to me at some ungodly Ideal Homes exhibition at the age of eleven and informed he that he knew more about magic than anyone else. I therefore put him to work and got him to sell svengali decks which he did very well and I paid him what he was worth.
His chief selling method was to inform the public that if they purchased a deck they would get a free holiday to Northern Ireland. This was at the height of the bombing campaign. Young Ian always knew how to say the wrong thing and he is still doing so at a much more advanced age.
He was young and cheerful then, always smiling. Nowadays he no longer smiles and looks as miserable as sin. It is almost as if he has just watched one of his own shows.
His chief claim to fame is writing an awful book on "cold reading" which he plainly knows nothing about since the chap has never done a paid psychic reading in his life. A well and intelligently written load of tosh. And Paul agrees with me on this privately. Paul should know since he has himself done thousands upon thousands of readings with or without his shoes on.
Alas however, the barefoot one is prone to flattery and believes every word this chap says to him, nothwithstanding he gives the game away about insincerely flattering people in his own daft book. This volume isn't worth a toss unless the said toss is into a fire.
He came to Toronto recently and for some reason he seemed quite ill to see me but almost proposed marriage to Paul. And Paul almost accepted when Rowland praised his centre tear which he wasn't even watching in the first place.
Anyway to get back to topic the best way of doing the centre tear is MY way. However, I am now in a bad mood at the mention of Ian Rowland so am not going to describe it.
'The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading' is a perfectly serviceable and accurate book on the topic of cold reading. Nor, as many self-professed "psychics" like to suggest, is it particularly aggressive towards said psychics. Rowland is quite clear in his prose that the intention is not to push an "anti-psychic" agenda, merely to provide a detailed account of a system used by fraudulent psychics to make themselves appear to have genuine supernatural powers. He leaves the decision as to whether the reader chooses to believe that there are genuine psychics out there; he merely expresses the opinion, briefly, that there are not and, quite eloquently, provides the reasons he believes that the burden of proof lies with those claiming to be genuine psychics.
Since the publication of the fourth edition Rowland has included a disclaimer on the 'Psychic Baiting' chapter clarifying the tongue-in-cheek tone of the chapter. Though, in my humblebum opinionum, such a disclaimer was unnecessary as anyone who didn't pick up on the prose dripping with irony in that section was either daft in the head... or American.
I would imagine the reason Mr. Rowland has not done a paid psychic reading is the same reason that someone like Derren Brown has not done one; he doesn't believe in psychic abilities (for good reasons) and therefore thinks it ethically unsound to masquerade as someone with such non-existant abilities. What Rowland does do frequently is give demonstrations of cold reading in which an impartial sitter is first introduced to Rowland as though he were a psychic, given a reading and then later told that Rowland is, in fact, not a psychic. I have seen a number of Rowland's cold reading demonstrations both live and recorded and without fail every sitter has left convinced he has some form of psychic insight. So the nitty gritty of whether he's actually sat down and deluded himself into thinking he's genuinely communicating with the dead or that medieval playing cards can reveal insight into someone's future based on a random shuffle seems neither here nor there really.
I mean I've never built a jet engine but thanks to my physics degree I know exactly how one works.