The Tribunal

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I’ve never wanted to do “guest posts” on this site. It felt like a bad habit to get into. It starts with me reluctantly agreeing to post someone else’s stuff. Then, before long, I’m begging people to send me something—anything—so I can take the day off. And eventually I’m posting every dumb thing that lands in my inbox just so I don’t have to write and can spend the afternoon on YouTube watching police bodycam footage of drunk Karens getting arrested.

And, of course, I’d have to pretend I was genuinely intrigued by whatever I was posting. “Today I have a fascinating guest post to share with you. Have you ever wondered what thickness of billet paper holds the sharpest crease when folded? I know I sure have. Well, thankfully, magician and amateur paper enthusiast Geoff Crim has written an in-depth examination of this very subject, which I’m thrilled to share with you today.”

And even if I managed to resist that temptation, I’d end up in an almost worse position: having to tell people, “Sorry, this isn’t good enough for the site.” I don’t particularly enjoy shitting on other people’s ideas. So it was always easier to have a blanket policy: “I don’t do guest posts.”

Last month, while writing a mailbag response to someone asking for advice about starting a “similar project” to this one, I started questioning this long-standing policy. And I realized that most of my concerns would disappear if I simply took the decision out of my own hands. If I had a panel of three people who could read or watch submissions and decide whether they were worth posting, then I could leave all those decisions to them.

So I reached out to a few magicians you know and asked if they’d be willing to serve in this capacity. They agreed. And that’s how things will work going forward.

If you have an excerpt from a book, a trick, or a technique you’d like to share, send it to me. I’ll pass it along to the Tribunal and let them decide whether it’s worth posting.

(One note: I’m not looking for theory pieces. This blog is so closely associated with my voice and perspective that I think it would be confusing to have someone else weighing in with their own abstract ideas about magic.)

If the Tribunal unanimously agrees that your submission is great, then I’ll happily post it.

Wait… it has to be great?

Yes.

But you post stupid shit all the time.

Yes. And this is the outlet for my stupid shit. Not yours.

Look, I’ve spent years building an audience willing to put up with my dipshittery. If you want people to put up with yours, you have to build your own audience. If you want to borrow mine, you have to bring something better.

This is likely not going to happen very often, if at all. But if it does, what I’m trying to do is create a win-win-win situation for everyone.

The readers get a great piece of content from someone whose work they might not have encountered otherwise.

The person submitting gets a chance to share their ideas with 1000s of readers and potentially generate interest in whatever else they might be working on.

And I get to spend the afternoon watching a 53-year-old woman in a leopard-print blouse explain to six police officers that they have no jurisdiction over her because she pays their salaries.

Wrap It Up 2.0

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One of the greatest tricks ever, in my opinion, is Wrap It Up by Jay Sankey.

The first time I saw it, Sankey himself performed it live at a lecture. I genuinely felt like I saw a chewed piece of gum placed on a wrapper, tossed into the air, rewrap itself, and become unchewed. The illusion was perfect. I truly felt like I saw and heard the wrapper snapping itself back around the gum.

And the logic makes sense: You don’t want to have to keep buying gum, so you reuse the same piece over and over.

But is it… you know… adult enough?

Chewing gum is fine for Junior, but what about me? A virile man who doesn’t want to spread his seed?

Introducing… Wrap It Up: Jerx Edition.

After intercourse, pretend to remove your rubber, place it on the open condom wrapper, and restore it.

“I’ve been using the same one since college,” you say proudly, “and it’s still mostly intact.”

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.