The [REDACTED]
/My collaborator, Dan Harlan, repping the GLOMM on Penguin Live.
30 Jerx Points for Dan!
After last week's post on ways to make your magic un-googleable, friend of the site Stacy Smith emailed in to suggest another option. When you start a trick, call it by some other name. "This is a very famous trick called The Piano Card Trick." But then don't do the Piano Card Trick. Do something else entirely. Maybe some mentalism thing with cards. Or card to wallet. Or whatever.
If you have someone in your audience who is intent on trying to find out the secret, they will, at the very least, waste some time looking through a bunch of versions of the actual Piano Card Trick.
I had a similar idea and that was to refer to the trick by a completely bogus name. But I wanted there to be a search result for the effect if someone was to search for it, so I wrote one up.
Here's how it works. The name of the fake effect is in the photo below. I'm not typing it because I don't want this post itself to come up in a Google search for the phrase.
If you google that exact phrase in quotes you will get one hit. Go ahead and try it.
So lets say you know one of your friends is a bit of a secret hound and just can't stand being fooled and will try and hunt down the method for anything you show him. Next time he's around, introduce your trick like this, "Okay, this next trick is very famous. It's called the C____ E__ M______ [the phrase above]." When the trick is over you mention the name of the effect again. "Hope you enjoyed the C_____ E__ M______." Your friend will stash that nugget away so he can look it up the first chance he gets.
And when he does he'll find a page that suggests the trick would only fool a moron, and that anyone who it does fool will likely be dead in two weeks.
Now, your friend isn't really supposed to believe he'll be dead soon. It's just a little punctuation mark to your effect that happens after you're gone. A way for you to say, "Yeah, I knew you'd be looking that up, you screwball. I'm ten steps ahead of you."
If you're worried it will lead him to this site and then he'll read through 100s of posts and learn the inner workings of modern magic as delineated by me... don't worry... this site doesn't interest most people who have a genuine interest in magic, much less a casual magic aficionado hoping to find exposure videos on youtube.
But if there's some magic wiki or something and you want to put an entry for the C____ E__ M______ on it, go ahead. Or perhaps we can get Vanishing Inc., or Penguin to have a listing of the effect (sadly Sold Out). If that happens, I'll remove the CEM page from this site. But until that time, I'll retain that page