Mailbag #184

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I ordered the Lip Balm from SansMinds after reading issue #5 of Keepers.

I have no idea how up to date you are on their customer service, so I thought I would briefly share my experience with them, which other users on the Green Café apparently share.

I have now sent dozens of emails without receiving a single reply. The dashboard they announced in the meantime, which was supposed to provide updates on the waiting lists, still does not work. I have therefore had to open a dispute with PayPal in the hope of getting my money back. Judging by reports online, many others are in the same boat.

Just a heads-up for you. Perhaps the next time you recommend a SansMinds product, you could add a disclaimer that their customer service is not always great for us mere mortals. —MH

Yeah, obviously I can only speak from my own experience when I’m writing up my experience with a product/company. I had no issues getting the trick, but I was ordering it early on, before it caught on.

But, thankfully, no companies ever send me free shit, so I’m perfectly happy calling them out when they need to be.

At the moment, on their website, they say:

Shipping status: waitlist in effect.

We are currently catching up on previous orders. Once we are all caught up, we will be opening orders again.

So at least they’re not taking more orders. But yeah, there’s no reason not to communicate with your customers.

The company folded amidst some controversy a few years ago. You would think that upon their revival—and armed with a product a lot of people seem to enjoy—they’d be doing a better job protecting their reputation. But that would require dramatically overestimating the business acumen of magic companies.

So yeah, I’d definitely steer clear of this company until they get their shit sorted out. Or forever, depending on your tolerance for risk.

For my birthday my girlfriend said we could watch anything I wanted to watch, so I made her sit through the performances on an old Paul Harris video I’ve always loved from the 80s. She hated it. Said it wasn’t funny etc. I thought she was just being difficult so I had some friends watch it with me later that weekend. They weren’t into it either. Some of them didn’t even understand what I liked about it. Am I crazy?—PM

Back on my old blog I was going to do a recurring feature where I had non-magicians watch performers that we, as magicians, tend to admire. I did it once. Then I tried it again later, showing them a bunch of performers—including Paul Harris and Jay Sankey (two guys I love)—and the results were so disheartening I pretty much abandoned the idea.

In the years since, it’s become increasingly obvious to me that a lot of the performers magicians love don’t necessarily move the needle much for laypeople. And vice versa, for that matter.

The problem is, when you watch those old Paul Harris Stars of Magic videos, you’re not just watching the performance in front of you. You’re watching Paul Harris—the guy who created a huge amount of the magic you love. You know the ideas behind the tricks and how influential he was. You’re predisposed to find his whole vibe charming because you already have enormous affection for the guy and his work.

To someone who doesn’t know or care who Paul Harris is, they’re watching a low-energy guy who seems permanently sutured to a script full of corny jokes. Of course that’s not necessarily going to play in 2026.

That doesn’t mean you’re crazy for loving it. It just means you’re responding to more than the performance itself. You’re seeing the performer through the accumulated glow of everything he means to you as a magician. Your girlfriend is just seeing some dude doing card tricks and saying weird shit.

Re: The Impossible Bottle mentioned in last week’s mailbag

I have a collection of genuine impossible bottles in my curio cabinet. They include pieces by Harry Eng, Jamie Grant, Jeff Scanlan, and other creators of impossible bottles. There’s everything from decks of cards and padlocks to tennis balls inside them.

Almost 100% of the time, when a non-magician looks at one of these bottles, they assume, and usually say out loud, that somehow the bottle itself was altered. In the case of these genuine impossible bottles, they’re wrong.

But that assumption creates a real problem if the method actually does involve altering the bottle. It becomes almost impossible to leave the spectator with something that can withstand close examination. There will nearly always be a fine seam or some other telltale evidence. A bottle has a relatively large circumference, which gives someone a lot of surface area to inspect. No matter how fine the seam is, there’s a good chance someone examining the bottle carefully will eventually find it.

One way around that problem is to put something inside the bottle that the spectator would have to break the bottle to retrieve—such as a wedding ring. If you put my $100 watch inside, I might decide it’s worth sacrificing the watch to keep this incredible impossible object intact. But I’m certainly not going to make that choice with my wedding ring.

That distinction is important. If the object inside is valuable or personally meaningful enough that the owner is unwilling to abandon it, breaking the bottle becomes inevitable. And once the bottle has to be broken, the question of whether it can withstand examination becomes irrelevant.—XX

I see the logic here. But there are a couple of considerations to using this approach as well.

The first is a practical one. It may be that the preparation of the bottle becomes obvious when it’s broken. Meaning, maybe it breaks along a seam in some odd way. So instead of destroying the evidence of the method, you've just exposed it.

The second consideration is an artistic one. Putting an object in a bottle is particularly interesting because it’s a piece of magic that gets frozen in time. It's a permanent impossibility. Turning that into something that has to be destroyed five minutes later feels like throwing away one of the best things about the effect.

Now, you could try to frame it as some profound philosophical dilemma. Like, “Ah, now we’re faced with a question. Will you leave your wedding ring in the bottle, preserving this impossible object for eternity? Or will you shatter the glass, reclaim your ring, and consign this little miracle to the fragile realm of memory?”

But of course, that's not a real dilemma for anyone. They're going to want their shit back. Nobody's sacrificing their wedding ring to preserve the profound artistic statement you think you've made when you were fiddling around with your special bottle in the bag.

Dustings #152

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How to respond to your wife after she finds out you bought a $2500 Impossible Bottle in Big Bag trick.

GLOMM Lodge #6, The Demon Horses, has now been established in Denver, Co.

Here is a potentially valuable resource (as long as they maintain it), that some of you who aren’t AI fans may find valuable. It’s a list of magic books that use AI for the covers and/or content.

(Thanks to Aaron S.)

If Justin Flom ever wants to destroy his career in a way that’s perfectly on-brand, he should post a video of himself drilling a hole in a bathroom wall, then walk us through the hidden camera system he’s installing to watch women take a shit.

Justification Judo

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  • “Why do I have to write it down?”

  • “Why do I have to look at a word in a book?”

  • “Why do I have to choose an image from one of those cards?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, why can’t I just think of a word or a picture and you tell me what it is?”

“Okay… so, just like one word floating around somewhere in your head? Not a specific one you saw or wrote down?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, that's not really a thing. I mean, you see that in comic books and movies, but that's just pretend. That's not how this stuff works in real life.”

This is an easy way to take the energy out of any challenges you might get with mentalism.

You’re not explaining why you can’t do the impossible version. You’re explaining that the impossible version is the fake one. The version without any procedure isn't more impressive. It doesn’t actually exist.

Once you label the cleaner, more impossible version as “fake,” the procedure you use stops looking like a weakness. The fact that they have to write something down, look at a word, or choose an image is now framed as evidence that you’re doing something more legitimate, not less impressive.

If they say, “I saw someone on TV do it,” you can just shrug and say, “Oh sure. There are a million ways to fake that stuff. Mostly they're just using actors. But I'm not really interested in that. I'm more interested in trying things that feel like real mind reading but use more genuine techniques.”

This takes the air out of the idea that you should be able to read their mind without any procedure at all. And the nice thing is, saying you’re doing something that feels like mind reading but uses “more genuine techniques” is a completely honest description of doing magic. You’re not lying about anything. And if someone wants to imagine those “more genuine techniques” involve something psychological, scientific, or occult rather than a little pencil lead stuck to your thumb, well, that’s their interpretation. So be it.

Smartass

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Imagine

“The thing is, you know, you can obviously take in information with your five senses. And then, when it comes to magic, we talk about mind reading. Or picking up on information beyond our five senses. But why would it stop at the mind? Maybe other parts of your body can pick up on information too.”

I’m sitting on the couch in my living room with my friend, Alina.

“I’ll show you. Uhm, name any part of your body. Like, not your head or your hands or anything normally used to gather information.”

“My ass.”

“Okay, of course. Fine. Focus on your butt. Inhale. Exhale.”

“Through my butt?”

“Funny. No. Seriously, settle in for a moment and just focus on the pressure of the cushion against you.”

We sit quietly for a few moments.

Softly, I say, “Now I just want you to name a color. Like a common color.”

“Green,” she says.

“Great. Now name a number from 1 to 100. Don’t name a favorite number. Just let a number come to you.”

“66.”

“Okay, good, good. Let’s see…”

I tell her to stand up, and I remove the couch cushion she was sitting on.

Under the cushion, we find a ChapStick, a crumpled receipt, a peanut M&M, and some change.

“Green,” I say, picking up the M&M. “Just like you thought.”

I tell her to pull out the change and total it up.

It’s 66¢.

“Dammmnnn!” she says and looks back at her ass, giving it a little smack.

Method

After I wrote up last month’s post on the Z-Fold Couch, I began thinking of using a couch as the centerpiece of a trick rather than just a methodological tool. And from that, this idea came together relatively quickly.

It uses Greg Wilson’s Exact Change gimmick. This is behind a pillow on your end of the couch. You have all the time you need to get the required total as you talk with your friend: “So… is there a tingling in your butt at the moment?”

You get what you need in your right hand finger palm, get them to stand up off the couch, and, as your right hand pulls up on the back of the couch cushion, you drop the items from your hand down the crack of the couch.

The first few times I did this, I used just the change. I added the M&M because I wanted it to feel like she was picking up on what was under her cushion, rather than simply naming a number that matched an amount of change that happened to be under the cushion. If that distinction is clear.

I did the M&M part with the five M&M colors (in rainbow order) in the crack of the couch behind the pillow on my end.

I just grab the one I need before picking up the Exact Change gimmick.

You don’t have to do the M&M bit, but I think sensing a second thing really adds to the experience. You could use a playing card, a bill, or a watch set to a certain time. I’d just choose one. Two hits make it feel like she’s sensing what’s under the cushion. A whole inventory starts to feel like you’ve stocked the couch for the occasion.

How do you make them choose their butt?

I don’t. But I’ve taken away their head and hands (which also makes them unlikely to say their arms), so they’re geared toward naming something on their lower half. In the times I’ve performed this, I’ve had two butts, one vagina, and one pair of feet named. With the person who named her feet, I told her to sit on them.

If someone were to name something around their torso, I’d have them lie on the couch with their legs over my lap so their torso would be above the section of the couch on their end.

I don’t worry too much about it. The premise—“Other parts of your body can pick up on seemingly unknown information as well”—isn’t something that demands to be taken too seriously.

GLOMM Industry Standard #4

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The GLOMM Industry Standards were introduced in this post. Today I’m introducing a new standard.

GIS #4—Examinable

Don’t advertise your trick as examinable if the item in question is only examinable after it is switched out. This is a meaningless statement. It applies to every trick in existence.

“So you’re telling me that if I take the completely gimmicked, tricky item and secretly exchange it for an identical normal version of the item—without anyone noticing—I can then let people look at the normal item?”

Yes. Of course. This isn’t fucking news. It’s essentially built into the definition of a switch: the dirty thing goes away and the clean thing takes its place. This statement can be true for every trick.

It’s true of Cigarette Through Quarter.

It’s true of the Invisible Deck.

It’s true of a Metamorphosis Trunk.

If you forge the Mona Lisa and then secretly switch it for the real one, congratulations: your forgery is now “examinable” too.

“The pen goes through the bottle cap, and the bottle cap is examinable.”

For this to be a meaningful statement, the bottle cap the pen actually goes through has to be examinable. We already know a bottle cap you secretly switch in afterward is examinable.

What you can say is something like, “Includes a matching ungimmicked bottle cap.” Or, “Routined so you can end clean.” Or something that suggests you’ve given some thought to the examinability issue and have a solution for it. But you can’t say it’s examinable unless the actual item in question is.

Saying something is examinable because you switch it for something examinable is like saying your Rubik’s Cube is edible because you can switch it for one made of cake.

Mailbag #183

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Do you have an upper limit you would pay for a magic trick? I’m considering picking up Impossible Bottle, but it’s $2500. Do you cap your spending at a certain amount? And would this trick make the cut? I guess maybe I’m looking for someone to talk me out of buying it.—ZD

I don’t have a set limit that I won’t exceed when I buy magic. Generally, I’ll take a chance on anything under, say, $75. Around $75–$250, I need to hear good reviews or have a lot of faith in the person releasing the product. And above $250, it would have to have incredible reviews and a wide variety of uses.

So no, I wouldn’t pay $2500 for this.

Object in bottle is a classically beautiful, impossible effect. Object in my special bottle that I brought with me in this giant bag is a little less romantic.

Remember, you’re not buying 100 times better reactions than you’d get from a $25 trick (as you can tell from the demo). You’re buying an expensive methodology.

I asked two people I was with earlier today how they thought this trick might be done, and both of them independently landed pretty close to the general idea of what’s happening inside that bag. That’s not ideal for such an expensive trick.

For $2500, I’d want all four of these things:

  1. Something that left people with no conceivable idea how it could be done.

  2. Something that wasn’t one Google search away from a product page with a demo video.

  3. Something that could be used to accomplish a variety of effects. (And no, I don’t consider “8-Ball in a Corona Bottle” to be a significantly different effect from “Padlock in a Corona Bottle.”)

  4. Something that felt less puzzle-y.

I’m not saying it’s not strong; it just doesn’t feel especially magical. It feels more like an expensive engineering puzzle.

If you perform professionally, you can potentially justify the expense. But if you don’t, you’re eventually going to become the guy dragging a Corona bottle and a comically oversized paper bag to every barbecue because goddammit, you spent $2500 on this thing and people are going to see it.

Just a thought after your latest post. [The Misfire Principle]

You have talked about this concept in the past but misfire got me thinking about how it could be applied to other potential advantages.

Suspicious magic props always pose a challenge.

What if they fail at what they are “supposed” to accomplish, but benefit you in another way during a demonstration? A ruse to accomplish a different setup to your benefit.

A simple use of Quiver, which is a difficult prop to justify these days.

“Can I borrow a dollar?

Thanks.

I have this weird coin purse that my grandma used to carry all of her Susan B. Anthony dollars in. The problem is that every time I put money in, it ends up disappearing. The exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do! I’ve lost enough already, so I am using yours now.”

Try to affect the vanish of their bill a few times, but it keeps failing and the bill just falls to the table instead of vanishing.

“Weird, I guess it must only happen with my money.”

Give them their bill back.

You have switched out their bill for a known SN/prepared for a completely different effect later on under the guise of failure of this weird thing. —LT

It’s an interesting idea and may have some benefits in certain scenarios, but I think in this case you’re probably putting more emphasis on the purse than might otherwise be there.

You’re openly saying, “This is a special purse,” and you’re openly putting their bill in that purse. Even if you don’t end up using the purse in the effect, I think you’ve already spiked their suspicion.

That’s my perspective, at least. But I don’t find the Quiver purse to be inherently suspicious in the first place. Yes, if you’re carrying it around in your pocket as you go about your day-to-day life, then that’s definitely weird.

But if you’re at home showing someone something and you say, “Okay, I need, like, a small drawstring bag or something,” then leave for a bit, come back with your Quiver, and dump out whatever you keep in there—change, enamel pins, guitar picks, etc.—I don’t think they question the purse. They may not own that exact kind of purse, but everyone has a handful of weird little boxes, bags, and containers around the house that have become the permanent homes for specific categories of crap. If you treat Quiver like one of those, I don’t think it comes across as particularly suspicious.

Until October...

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This is the final post for October. Regular posting resumes on Monday, October 5th.

The next issue of Keepers comes out Sunday, October 4th.

Can you believe this guy sexually assaulted a 9-year-old?

Honestly, yeah, that’s pretty believable. This is literally the picture AI would give you if you said, "Generate a guy who just pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a nine-year-old and possessing 1,767 child abuse images."

And that's what Kevin Doig admitted to doing. He's a 66-year-old former teacher and the treasurer of the Bexley Magic Society. He's been booted from the GLOMM and, hopefully, from all of respectable society.

He was the Chairman of the Young Magicians Club for the Magic Circle because… of course he was. And, according to a Magic Circle Foundation report, he was also the Magic Circle's Child Protection Officer.

This is how you know he wasn't some tortured soul suppressing inappropriate feelings all his life. If that were the case, he would have put himself on a fishing boat in Alaska or stepped in front of a bus like a decent human. No, he’s just a pathetic, predatory cunt taking every opportunity he could find to put himself in close contact with kids. Who knows what other horrors he got into over the decades.

Oh…now you're willing to cover your face with a bag? See, you could've been having sex with women your own age all along if you were willing to make that concession.

Post-pedo eyebleach/brainbleach

A little presentation inspiration for your next gambling-themed effect…

A little presentation inspiration for your next math-themed effect…

Marketing tip: Look, I know they say, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but if you're releasing a book on creativity, your cover probably shouldn't look like you typed "creativity book cover" into a stock-image search and bought the first result.

A glowing lightbulb hovering over an open book? Bold, impactful ideas, indeed.

Bye for now. See you back here in October.