Fine dining during the sixties for our moderately pressed middle class family was the IHOP in Panorama City. The only time I have been there in decades was maybe six years ago to take the folks after Mass. Dad could see just well enough he noted a numeral 2 for the location code on the check. How many zeroes led was a moot point, zeroes they were. The chain opened around the time the Panorama one appeared and may well be their number two.

This last visit stores were opening up around it but for several years prior the area of Panorama adjacent was boarded up or torn down and overall scrubby. Not even generous portions of tumbleweeds grew. I visualized the interior as somehow reflective of this; it was an outpost.

No, during the foray with the folks it was clean and carpeted, the smells of caffeine, risen dough and enough sugar to regenerate the area connecting the nose to the menu. An outpost, indeed, but with a viable inside.

Last year as Christmas was on the approach a group of us united as students of a fitness instructor's various classes met at The Hamlet in an area where I also have seen much come and go but not for as long, Sherman Oaks. It was a gathering which has informally met at the happy hour and was attended in its 2012 incarnation by our departed Sarah.

That year Sarah, who during the mid sixties had been in the Peace Corps in India, got to meet a lady who had grown up there and it was so neat to listen and see this taking place. Of course, there is talk of families, the classes, cars, and places seen and to see. The 2013 edition sported some show biz talk and for 2014 we had a psychic.

She was recounting her career as a Patricia Jane---indulge me, please---but she had concentrated on the finance sector for a time, and a marriage to a seeming strong player in that field. He turned out to be a swindler, with her among the victims. Off he went to stir.

Well, there's only so much of the usual tropes I can invoke here without being self indulgent (as Sarah said too many times: "Who, you, Dan?"): drumming fingers, rolling eyes and even more rolling head.

She was telling us, other than missing the script at home, how successful her lighter than air career was before and since; as a matter of fact, the money she lost was a message to get back to That Side. I made a polite interjection, or maybe intrusion: what were her impressions of James Randi and, optionally, Michael Shermer.

"Who?" She did the brushing motion with her hand (reminded me of an end of class stretch by our teacher) and explained to someone else at table, "Oh, yes, the skeptics." She practically fed me a line next with saying she didn't pay attention to them.

I recall a Pat Morrison interview with Kenny Kingston where he said Randi had indeed invited him onto a show to presumably be put on the spot. Kingston asked Randi for as much money as the latter made on the show and implied a backing off. The late Sylvia Browne held him off with another money tactic.

Yes, put the skeptics into the same position the IHOP seemed to me during the 90's and 00's: emphasize what one chooses to see and don't go inside. Randi, now dying from cancer, was recently featured in a New York Times Magazine article and his story was involved, detailed and passionate. The famous card test put together by CSICOP is absolutely brilliant in a high concept manner, a challenge apparently never successfully taken no matter who administers it. The disposition of the huge cash prize was the dispute allgedly keeping Browne from taking this.

I looked up the psychic on Yelp and beside a few ravers also saw a pair of disappointed customers in another state where she lived for a time.

I have to admit the skeptical demeanor has checkered appeal to me but "whoopity do". The preceding expression contains IHOP, in a scramble, but maybe you also notice "pity". Time for a spoonful of syrup to make the debunking go down.