Gardyloo #37
/It's Gardyloo #37. Which means if you were thinking of a two digit number, under 50, with both digits being odd, and both digits being different... then there's a decent possibility you were thinking of this edition of Gardyloo. What a miraculous feeling that must have been to have me guess your freely thought of number! That freely thought of number between 1 and 50 with just a few simple restrictions that only eliminated a scant 42 of the possibilities you could have been thinking of.
Speaking of shitty forces, when prepping for the forcing focus group from a few weeks ago, I was reading 202 Methods of Forcing by Annemann for the first time in a long time. There's a lot of garbage in that book. I think he had 22 methods of forcing and there was a typo in his pitch to the publisher that he was afraid to admit to.
This, for example, is the second force listed in the book.
I'm kind of curious how that would play out.
"What you are about to witness is a miracle that is only possible due to the stunning powers of my mind! Please, name a number between 1 and 20.... Two? Okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Oh crap, I screwed up counting to a number. There's nothing suspicious about that. Here, you count to the number instead. That's too much for me to handle. AHHH!! What's this thing in my hands! Oh... it's just a deck of card. Phew. I was confused for a minute. I should mention, most of my brain has rotted out due to syphilis."
I've mentioned in the past about using a bloody nose as a Rep for any effect that supposedly relies on mind power. I've done it in the past, but it's not really my style any more.
However, it's halloween time so now it's very easy to buy what you need to do this. Just get blood capsules with a top that breaks off or that you cut off. Have the top off and have the capsule hidden in the bathroom or another room away from where you're going to perform.
After your routine, immediately start sniffing and maybe rubbing your temple or something. You'll be needing to sniff later, so it's important to establish it now. Go to the bathroom to (supposedly) get yourself a tissue.
When you're in there, squirt the capsule up your nose. You now can keep the liquid up there by snorting it back in. Like you would if you had a particularly runny nose.
Walk back out to where everyone is. At some point, start talking so the focus is on you and just stop holding the blood in. It will come out in a nice stream.
You can use a plastic syringe with fake blood if you want a larger stream, but you don't really need that much.
Here's what it looks like.
Is there a way to do it where you don't have to leave the room? Yeah, probably. But keep in mind this isn't "The Trick Where You Make Your Nose Bleed." The nose bleed is intended as a repercussion of the trick. You don't want it to feel like part of the trick. "And look, there is nothing in my hands and nothing on my face, but if we just wait a moment... now my nose is bleeding!" That's not what we're going for. Reps are meant to be a post-trick event that occupies a space between reality and fiction.
In fact, you could get much of the benefit of this by just excusing yourself to the bathroom, leaving a bloody tissue conspicuously in their wastepaper basket, and then coming back a few minutes later, like, "Sorry about that. My noise started bleeding." They wouldn't need to see anything. Seeing that bloody tissue sometime later would be enough to mess with their head a little.
When I stopped writing the Magic Circle Jerk blog, I had about 30-40 posts still half-written. And I swear to god this was one of them, Ellusionist Presents: Black Sponge Balls for the badboy magician. And holy shit if Ellusionist didn't actually go ahead and do it.
Honestly, the ad copy is much funnier than the mock ad copy I had written up for them.
"When we first explored the idea of carrying sponge balls our first requirement was, as it always is - they have to be cool."
"[W]e knew we had to have something that looked edgy or classy. It was right there in front of us. A color we fully embrace here at Ellusionist. Black. A Black that truly 'pops' and makes sponge balls cool."
Uhm... the guys at Ellusionist are aware of what the word "cool" means, right?
And classy? "Oh, darling, look how classy this magician's sponge balls are! True, they blend right into his suit so the effect is somewhat diminished. But frankly it's a small price to pay for not having to subject myself to those utterly gauche red sponge balls. Honey, don't these remind you of the Rockefeller's sponge balls?"
The only thing the ad is missing is my joke about the black sponge ding-dong having 100% more length and girth than the traditional one.