As a few of you know, the Царица teaches in an inner-city school district, and more than a few of the students are of Mexican descent. Recently, quite a number of them have become obsessed—to the point that the district has taken actions—with a game called Charlie Charlie.

Ostensibly, the game involves drawing a plus symbol (which looks like this: +, ‘Puter) on a scrap of paper torn from a notebook. In each of the corners, you write SI or NO. A pencil is placed across either the horizontal or vertical lines of the plus symbol, and another pencil carefully balanced perpendicular across the first pencil.

Students then ask a yes or no question…sorry, a si o no pregunta, and then gather close to the paper and chant “Charlie… Charlie… Charlie…” A demon child from Mexico (follow us carefully here) pushes the upper pencil to either SI or NO, to the horrified shock of the children.

Obviously it works like this: the ch sound of the kids’ combined chanting pushes the upper pencil—already an unstable equilibrium—to either side. An expert at the game can even subtly blow the pencil into a desired outcome. It takes very little wind, and a few kids can generate a lot.

This is little more than a grossly simplified Ouija board, which itself relies on the combined fasciculation of the participants’ fingers to push the puck in the desired directions to spell words and numbers. If you want to know how a Ouija board works, balance a piece of paper across the five fingers of your upturned palm to see how the paper moves and undulates without your conscious effort. Now imagine three to five kids putting their fingers on the ouija puck and you see why the thing moves so well “of its own accord.”

The dumb thing is that the kids believe it—and why the school district in question banned it. Kids were traumatized and went home crying, and so forth, because they were goofy enough to believe that a Mexican demon wouldn’t call himself Carlito instead of Charlie. People interested in the game have found that it originated right here in America, but was popularized by a YouTube video demonstration that was recorded in Spanish… and probably not even in Mexico. Variants have been around for decades.

The Czar suggested that the District need not ban that game: just identify the kids playing it and call their Mexican mothers at work. Tell them their kids have been conjuring demons on the schoolyard, and watch happily as the mom races over to the school to slap the shit out of the kid’s head in front of the others. Mexican moms are reliable like that.

Anyway, this could be a new craze. Probably by 2018, ESPN will be televising this (provided it centers around LeBron James), and while all sorts of Glenn Beck types will be horrified about demon conjuring, you at least will know that there’s no magic behind it: just old-fashioned bar bet trickery.