If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Ever hear that? Well it's true, at least when it comes to autograph collecting. Generally as a rule I try not to hound people when I don't hear back from them unless of course there is something funny to it (see Stuttering John article) or ask Craig Gass how I pestered him to get me Benji's autograph. HAHAHAHA Christ, I make myself laugh sometimes… The Stern show could probably paper the studio with all of the envelopes I sent them, but overall I usually send one email or one mailing and wait. One of the best parts of the hobby is receiving an autograph unexpectedly in the mail. Really adds something to the day when besides bills and junk mail a request for an autograph that you sent months, even years, earlier arrives.

One reason that I usually strike quick when someone "Shrineworthy" catches my ear is that Web sites can quickly come and go. Here today, gone tomorrow and an autograph opportunity lost. However, this is not the case with today's featured Howardshrine inductee Yaqi, "King of all Ticklers! His Web site is one of the strongest I've visited, with well over 2 million visitors and counting. But for whatever reason, I didn't get a response the first time I emailed him for an autograph shortly after his first appearance. I saw that Yaqi recently joined the SternFanNetwork and thought, "Hey, why not give it another try?" I emailed Yaqi through SFN's email system and he got back to me the same day. Within a week I had some of the coolest autographed pics in my collection. I particularly like the one of Yaqi and Howard at the studio. Totally rocks!! Thank you Yaqi. He was also nice enough to grant me an awesome interview.

I have always had a strong interest in tickling and when I first got on the internet I perused the tickling websites and decided that I could use my experiences to come up with something that was original and more interesting. Hence yaqisworld.com was born; but in the beginning it was simply another one of my odd projects. I bought some tickling videos produced by other companies and they were so fucking god awful. I had an entire studio at my disposal so I started making videos that were decidedly better than my competition.

You have to understand that the internet tickling community is a reasonably organized collection of some
of the most uninteresting, unfunny, embarrassingly stupid bunch of obsessive, moronic whining, mother fucking loser freaks. Many of them are soooo in to tickling but afraid to reveal this to anyone. So they sit in the internet tickling community and fantasize about kidnapping and tickle torturing Britney Spears, or they "cyber tickle" in chat rooms, or go "OMG VCR ALERT!!! There is a great shot of
Pamela Anderson's feet on TV next week!" or do anything other than go out in the real world and find a tickling partner. Granted there are exceptions to this. www.yaqisworld.com has its own dedicated fans, and the people who come to my site on a regular basis seem intelligent and well rounded. There are some good people out there who do live out their fantasies, but the majority of the "vocal" components of the ticking community (which actually represent a small fragment of the number of people into tickling) are these unclever, sniveling losers. The whole point of www.yaqisworld.com was to say "People, stop living in a dream world! Tickling is cool and not weird so go out and do it!" Unfortunately people are too terrified to do this so they sit on the internet and let their fantasies fester into a giant disease.

Disgusted by this attitude and by all of these pathetic whistle dicks, I decided that I was going to take tickling mainstream and prove it was a viable thing. I produced a half hour documentary on tickling, which won an award in the 2002 Worldfest, (the largest film festival in the world) for best documentary. This award is very satisfying and validating for me.

Yaqi: When I made the documentary I hired a very sharp publicity agent to see what kind of attention I could draw to the film. This was December of 2001, and by this time yaqisworld.com had already gotten the attention of both "Dot Comedy" the British version of Jerry Springer, and MTV, which came to Texas to do a segment on me for a pilot called "Beyond The Classifieds." So I always knew there was going to be interest.

I also knew that Howard Stern was in to tickling. I knew about the tickle chair, so my agent sent a tape to KC, Howard played it and decided I was suitably freakish to be a guest on his show. However, Dick Clark's "The Other Half" was the first big show to actually book me. I have to admit that I wasn't a big Stern fan, but that was really more of notbeing exposed to him since we don't get the radio show down in Houston. Since doing the shows in New York and in Vegas I have really become a huge fan. I think we are kindred spirits in a way. We both like to upset people and we both like to stir the pot.

Yaqi: Tickling Jenna totally ruled, and was a far better outcome than what Stern was planning. Originally he wanted me to tickle Gary the Retard, which certainly had the shock value, but was so unerotic and disgusting. Fortunately I was able to manipulate the circumstances so I got to tie Jenna down and tickle her.

The whole Vegas experience was phenomenal. Meeting all the Howard fans, which I felt were a great bunch of fun loving, interesting and polite people. Having them all come up to my hotel room after the show. Watching Yucko the Clown chain smoke, tickling this beautiful blonde girl(who I later brought down to Texas to do a video)... those were all very magical moments.

Doc: What has been your most memorable tickling experience?

Yaqi: I get a lot of mail from people with some very unusual propositions. I have this guy in Israel who wants to pay my way to fly over there to tickle his wife. I have this girl who is starving herself until I come tickle her. She had vowed to lose 10 pounds a week until I relent. Last she wrote to me she said she was down to 50 pounds. Then there is the doctor in NYC who was so outraged that Howard was calling me a "professional tickler" that she sent me an 8 page email demanding to know my "professional" credentials and was going to report me to the better business bureau for charging people $5.00 a pound to be tickled. If anyone was in need of my services it was certainly her!

The weirdest experience by far was in Vegas when I was
having a tickle fight with Jenna Jameson on top of a
shackled and very befuddled Gary the Retard.

The best tickling experiences have been with people
who I am emotionally involved with. Right now I am having some great tickling scenes with a girl I am dating. Tickling can be a very exciting form of foreplay. Many of my tickle models find the experience to be fiercely erotic and I have tried to bang as many of them as I can and that has always been a thrill.

Yaqi: Now days I do all the website work. I used to have a great webmaster, but I'm sort of a control freak and looked over his shoulder long enough to figure out how to do the html programming myself. And I get a lot of emails from "professional" web designers who want to give my site a slicker look, but I like the raw homemade look of Yaqi's World and I feel a slicker look would just make it look like every other site.

Doc: What do you do for a living?

Yaqi: I tickle girls and sell the videos. That has been pretty much all I've done for the last year.

Yaqi: I had a blast being in Howard's studio. I completely enjoyed the experiences although, at times, it got a bit juvenile for my tastes. I though Artie was hilarious, and Howard really did a great job of imitating me.

I think that out of all the media I have done, Howard's show was the one that gave the audience the best flavor for tickling. Not so much because Howard and the gang asked insightful questions, but they did let tickling saturate the studio for over an hour and the best way to understand tickling is simply to see it in action! It was also great to teach Howard a trick or two about tickling and to see Stuttering
John's dubious tickling techniques in action.

I'm one of Howard's biggest fans now. What he does is
great. Of course he'll never win the Nobel prize, but he stirs up the pot, and that is something I always have believed in doing. You have to break up the status quo sometimes. Shake up the moribund cows, chewing their cuds in the pasture. That's always been my motto, and apparently Howard feels the same way.

Yaqi: I am working on some new projects that are not tickling related. I would love to do the Stern show again, but I think I've done enough mainstream work to prove my points about tickling. Also, there are many aspects about being on TV that I have found unappealing. I used to be a very private person, but now that I am recognized wherever I go, this is an
impossibility. That has really shied me away from going back on TV. The only other show I would be interested in doing would be Letterman, and we did get some interest from the Letterman people earlier this year, but we will see.

Also, I'm really sick of providing mainstream tickling
material for all the jack offs in the internet tickle community. They all whined when I was on Stern: "Is Yaqi giving us a bad name???" but of course they all listened to the broadcast and faithfully watched the E! shows and made mpeg clips for everyone. And then some of them whine about how my tickling Jenna Jameson was a waste of time because I did not touch her feet! Of course these kinds of comments are from idiots who have and probably never will have any actual
experiences with tickling. Some of those people have forced themselves into an obsessive erotic corner, where they can only get off by seeing something as selective as nyloned feet being tickled! Bunch of fucking hypocrites: people whose lives seem to revolve around tickling forums and chat rooms.

I'm also still producing tickle videos and since appearing on Stern I've tried to incorporate some of the aspects that Stern liked into the tapes. I did one with a very ticklish girl who is a great Stern fan. The most interesting part of my tickling videos (to me) is the communication that I have with the person I am tickle torturing. Now days they always ask, through hysterics, when I'm going to murder them and place them in a shallow grave with socks on their wrists.

Doc: Thanks Yaqi. Nothing but continued success. Hope to see you on the show again soon!

Yaqi: Thanks Doc and remember, Tickle them all!!