Gardyloo #21

I'm off next week. As I mentioned when we were gearing up for year two, there will be new content 48 weeks out of the year. Next week is not one of those weeks for me. Next week is my spring break from this site. Imagine me in Lake Havasu drinking vodka off a slalom down some co-ed's asscrack. That's not what I'll really be doing. In reality I'll be doing my taxes and taking naps. 


In the April issue of The JAMM (coming out tomorrow), I review Michael Murray's effect, The Solution

Soon I will be releasing a short pdf with a variant of the effect called the SOLOtion. It's a one-on-one version of the effect that is really killing people I've performed it for. It's not the identical effect but it's very heavily inspired by Michael's trick so I will be giving it away as a free pdf to people who own The Solution (similar to the pdf I release for Marc Kerstein's Wiki Test).


A somewhat Distracted Artist moment on The Flash. (Although I think this guy oversells it.) As spotted by reader M.K.


Reader F.A. writes in to say,

I really love the Transgressive Anagram concept and have been using it fairly frequently since you first wrote about it. One of the nice things about it that you haven't mentioned yet is that it's very easy to practice because Yes and No responses come at you in equal measure. So you can practice the anagrams just by flipping a coin to simulate getting a yes or no response. With traditional anagrams the only way I found to practice would be to run through the full anagram in my head, but I wouldn't be able to practice dealing with actual responses in real time unless I was doing it live for a person. But with TAs you can just flip a coin and that mimics the actual 50/50 responses you will get for every guess in those anagrams.


Here's another idea I've been using for a context for Tenyo tricks. It's very similar to the ideas I've mentioned in the past in that it's a context that distances you from the prop. Rather than showing up with your little plastic gizmo like a goofy little schoolboy, you discover the prop with your friend and work through it.

I do it with this bad boy.

And I tell my friend that, in this one village in Japan, boxes of cereal are showing up on store shelves with a free magic trick inside (I point to the yellow and red oval and say that's what it says there). I tell them it's become a real phenomenon over there because the tricks seem like children's toys but nobody can figure them out. And the the boxes are only on the shelves in one small area of Japan. I tell them I have a friend who is teaching abroad and was able to snag me a box and how I'm lucky because otherwise they're going for a couple hundred dollars when they show up on ebay. 

"And the weird thing is, at first, Kellogg's in Japan was promoting this and retweeting a lot of the hype it was generating, but then a couple weeks later they deleted any mention of it from their social media, and now they're paying to have any reference of it removed online. The latest is that they're telling people not to eat the cereal in these boxes because it isn't from an actual Kellogg's production facility as far as they can tell. So nobody knows what's going on."

We open the box and dump out the cereal and there's a sealed plastic bag with a little trick and some instruction cards inside. We open it up and follow the instructions and the trick unfolds leaving us both baffled. It's a seemingly innocuous trick where a ball penetrates into a sealed clear plastic box. But the presentation makes it so much more interesting to people. The reactions far exceed what they are when I just perform it as a standard trick. They're not even comparable.

And then, later that night, we can make "Sausage Mix" from the back of the box. So it's a win-win all around.