Dealbreakers

I watch most of the online magic lectures that are released. I buy a number of magic books every year. I read a few different magic publications. And in the last week I’ve received 60 emails from magic companies informing me about their new releases.

When there is so much magic material released all the time, it can be overwhelming to try and mentally process it all. I find it helpful to come up with a set of “dealbreakers” so that you can more quickly move through tricks without worrying if you’ve given them the proper consideration or not. If the trick includes a dealbreaker in its premise or methodology, then I can just reject it automatically without having to give it much thought. Just automate it. Make it like one of those machines that uses cameras and little battering arms to sort out the unripe tomatoes.

With so many tricks available, it makes sense to have the highest standards for the material to which you’ll devote your time. I don’t mean every trick needs to be a 100% unfathomable miracle. I just mean why not pick tricks that are built on premises and methods you like?

Today I thought I’d start a series where I share some of my dealbreakers. Not because I think you should have the same ones, but just as examples and inspiration for others out there who might want to generate their own list.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting any of these dealbreakers are things that make the trick inherently flawed. They are just things that I, personally, don’t use. But there are plenty of other magicians who have plenty of success with them.

Dealbreakers

1. Book tests where the magician is holding the book while the spectator looks at the page.

If I wanted you to look at a word in the book, I’d give you the book and have you look at a word. The thing where the magician holds the book open and the spectator looks at a word is not a normal way to do such a thing. And it’s impossible for the spectator to find the word and read it and be certain that you weren’t looking at something or tilting the book a certain way to get a peek at the same time.

The best book test reactions I’ve received are one the person is across the room looking up the word.

2. Peeks using a stack of business cards.

All those peeks where a business card gets buried in a stack of business cards are a no-go for me.

Some of these peeks are very nicely constructed, but in a social situation, people don’t carry a stack of 40 business cards with them.

3. Tricks using a faro shuffle

The faro shuffle is somewhat abnormal looking and requires a level of concentration that is not compatible with the concept of “mixing” (an action that is meant to be unstudied and random).

I’m not suggesting that you’re making a mistake if you use the faro shuffle in your tricks, or that regular people even see it as weird. I’m just saying for my personal preference—where I’m placing a very high value on card handling that looks as normal and unstudied as possible—it doesn’t really fit.

It’s a bummer because I miss out on a lot of great tricks that use the faro shuffle.

4. Tricks that rely on very narrow timing forces

It’s one thing if the person has to stop somewhere within a packet of 13 cards. That’s fine. But the common timing force you see where you get them to stop on the 6th or 7th card (or something similar)—that’s something I tend to avoid. Not because I think it doesn’t work, but because I feel it requires an amount of intensity or focus that I try to avoid in the moment. You need to get them to deal at a certain pace and time your phrasing just right. It tends to stick out when compared to the rest of my delivery.

5. Tricks with more than three moments of magic

I’m a little looser with this rule than with others, but generally, if the routine has a bunch of phases, I skip it. Magic is odd that way. You would think the more magical moments, the more magical the routine would feel. But usually it’s the exact opposite, in my experience.

Dumb Tricks: Ascrabbological Sign

Sure, the trick might be dumb, but that name is…

This is an astrology sign reveal using Scrabble tiles. It’s more of a proof-of-concept idea than anything else. You could likely come up with something similar for another group of words, I just chose astrological signs because I was inspired by a reader who was doing something similar.

I don’t really do astrology sign reveals much. It wouldn’t make too much sense with the people I perform for.

“I’ve consulted my psychic powers, and I believe your astrological sign is… Virgo”

“No shit. We celebrated my birthday together just the other month.”

The way it would work is you would have a bunch of scrabble tiles in a bag and have the spectator shake the bag to mix them up. You’d dump some in their hand and tell them to keep any letters in their zodiac sign and put them in their pocket and to set the other letters aside face-down. You don’t see the letters they keep or discard at any point.

Then you do another round of this. After which you know their sign.

You need to deliver them a certain group of letters each round. You could do that with a force bag or change bag. It wouldn’t even need to have multiple chambers for each round. You could just have the second round’s letters in your pocket and set them up in the bag while the person is looking through the first round’s letters.

Or you could have the necessary letters finger-palmed and reach in and pretend to just grab a small handful of letters from the mixed bag.

Or you could do something like this, where the force letters are in your right fingers holding the top edge of the bag and you’re shaking the bag mixing the loose letters at the bottom of the bag. Then you grab the bag in a way that isolates the loose letters and drop the tiles from your right hand into the bag. They wouldn’t intermingle with the other letters due to the way your left hand would lock off that part of the bag. Then you apparently dump out a few random letters out of the bag. (Here my friend is demonstrating with coins, because he doesn’t have Scrabble.)

Either way, in the first round they get these letters: B, C, P, S, T, U

You don’t have to know what letters they keep, just how many letters they keep. You do this just by looking at how many they discard.

In round 2 they get these letters: B, I, M, O, P, V

In each round you can also include letters that don’t appear in any signs, like D,K,W,X,Y,Z.

By consulting this chart and seeing how many letters they kept each round, you’d know their sign

Now, does it make a lot of sense to do this with astrological signs? No, not really. Not if you don’t have a larger-scale premise for the whole interaction. But, as I said, I’m just using this as an example.

You could perhaps come up with a similar system to determine what word they’re thinking of from the top of this Scrabble box (you’d probably have to eliminate the 2-letter words).

I have to say that it was much more difficult coming up with the groupings of letters than I had anticipated. Every time you change one letter around, it potentially changes everything else as well.

If I was going to use this technique, what I would probably do is first come up with my two groupings of letters, then create my list of words (if they keep 0, 1, 2, or 3 letters in each round, that would give you 16 possible words total). And then I’d put those words onto a Scrabble board and take a picture of some friends around the board like they just finished a game. Then I’d have that picture in my house and I’d be able to use that as a Hook to go into the trick. “Hey, think of any word you see on that Scrabble board.” This way there would be some correlation between what they’re thinking of and the “tool” being used to divine their word.

If you end up doing anything interesting with this idea, let me know.

Monday Mailbag #34

I really enjoyed your Associative Memory Imp post, and I had an idea for a minor tweak I thought you might like.

It could be pleasantly weird to pair the ‘mistaken’ final card with a mistake in reciting the poem. That way, you could confound correcting the recitation with ‘correcting’ the trick, e.g. for that last stanza/ace:

It matters not how strait the gate

How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate:

I am the general of my soul

[I cut to and turn over random card. Seemingly a mistake. I turn it over]

[Pause a beat] No. That’s not right... It goes: I am the captain of my soul.

[I give the “random” card a little one-handed spin on my middle finger, then turn over the card to reveal the last Ace.]

—MT

Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. The only thing to be concerned about is that you don’t want to break the person’s focus between revealing the incorrect card and revealing the correct card. So you don’t want to pull back and have them look up and take their attention off the card. I’ve seen that happen with similar “faux mistake” situations. The mistake breaks the rhythm so they lean back or shift their gaze in some way, and the correction ends up not hitting as hard as it could.

So I would recommend keeping your focus burned on the card in your hand to suggest that they shouldn’t take their eyes of it either.

But other than that one potential issue, I think it’s a great addition to that Imp and I’ll be giving it a shot.

---

I’m going to be moving to New York City next year. I know you lived there for at least a few years so I wanted to know if you had any NYC -specific tricks that are particularly impressive to people. —TY

New York City specific tricks? Hmmm… no. Not really. I mean, I do try to take advantage of the environment as much as possible wherever I’m living, but I’m not sure I did much that could only be done in NYC.

One time I was in Grand Central Station with a couple friends and I sent one of them to stand off in the corner somewhere while another person drew a picture with me about 30 feet away in an opposite corner. That spectator then walked over to the guy in the other corner who was able to tell him what he drew.

I was able to cue him from across the room due to this.

I will tell you the absolutely most impressive thing you can do in NYC. It’s not a trick, but it’s something I would do all the time and receive tremendous accolades from strangers. When you’re on the subway, someone’s going to light up a cigarette or be playing their music really loud without headphones. It’s usually some sort of sketchy/scary looking character. It’s clearly someone who doesn’t give a shit about social norms or offending other people. So most of the train will just sit there and deal with the smoke or music filled car.

A few years into my time in NYC, I just made a rule with myself that whenever that happened I would go up and tell the person to knock it the fuck off. Regardless of how scary the person was, or what my instincts told me to do.

Most often the person would put out the cigarette or shut off the music. They might give me a look, but not much more than that.

Sometimes they’d play dumb like they forgot they weren’t listening through their headphones or that you can’t smoke on the subway.

And maybe 10% of the time it would escalate a little. But the secret here is, while everyone on the subway is acting like a big pussy initially, once you make the move to confront the person, you’ll immediately have back up if it escalates. Even if a person won’t confront someone doing something wrong, they’ll usually be quick to support someone who does confront them. So you’re never really alone.

And you’ll become the hero of the subway.

(There’s also a small percentage chance you’ll get shot. So maybe don’t do it.)

---

I was eating out with a friend and some new acquaintances the other night and the conversation turned to tv magic. My friend decided to mention that I did magic and so of course everyone rounded on me and started asking me about magic etc.

At one point one of the guys asked me if I knew how Dynamo walked on water. I answered honestly that I did. This of course led to the inevitable ‘so how did he do it then?’ When I politely declined from divulging I didn’t need to be a magician to predict the next question; ‘But why can’t you tell me? It’s not like you’re going to do it anyway...?’ Of course I started to explain that it wasn’t mine to give away, hey maybe I will do it one day, and anyway it would ruin the trick if you knew how it was done.

Well it got them off my back, but later that night I was thinking about it and I realised I don’t think any of that adequately answers the question. I mean, why not? Why can’t I tell them how it’s done? I’m not convinced that them knowing the effort and thought that goes into these kind of tricks would decrease their appreciation of magic; au contraire! I think they would walk away with a newfound appreciation of (what can be the art of) magic. Also I’m not really clear on the ethics of revealing secrets in this context. Is it even wrong at all? Perhaps so, but if so I’m not clear as to why. When all is said and done, possibly the best answer really is that from a business standpoint if I may do it in the future I should hold back, but come on, let’s face it. Even if I do get my own tv show I almost certainly shan’t be doing the tricks they were asking me to reveal.

All in all I suppose my query is this: what - if anything - would you recommend answering, and in general what are your thoughts on the matter? Perhaps the best answer would simply be to lie and say, ‘hm, wow, I have no idea!’?

Anyway, I’d be interested in anything you have to say on the matter. —YG

I don’t think there’s much to be gained by telling them. But it’s a matter of personal conscience.

Here in the U.S. we haven’t really had a standout performer like that in some time, so you don’t get those questions much. (Or maybe I just don’t hang out with people who watch magic on tv.)

Here are the sort of things you could say/do in a similar circumstance.

1. “I have no clue. The rumor in the magic circles are that there are only 2 people in the word who really know. So anyone who says they do is probably full of shit.”

2. “I used to think I knew how he did it. I thought what he did was [here you’d accurately describe what he did]. But then one time I was at a magic convention and he was there, and we were both in a group of people who went out walking later at night once things had shut down for the day. And as we were walking he genuinely just skipped over the top of a fountain that was 25 feet across. And it was a completely normal fountain and he was completely unprepared. So I guess my theory was wrong.”

3. “Yeah, I know how he did it. But I did some freelance work on that special and I signed a non-disclosure agreement so I can’t tell you exactly. However, if you stop by my place next week I can show you something similar and I’m sure you’ll figure out how I do that and you’ll be able to extrapolate the method for what he did.” If they do show up the following week, show them something similar, but make sure there’s no chance it’s something they could figure out.

4. Explain it to them under the condition that they can’t tell anyone that you told them. A couple weeks later, ask who they told that you explained the trick. They’ll probably say they didn’t tell anyone. Then you show them an official looking letter from the Global League of Magicians and Mentalists (or some other body) saying that your membership is being terminated for exposure. “One of you must have told. Unless they had someone at that restaurant who was paying attention. But that seems unlikely… although they have done weirder things in the past.” Now, in order to maintain your membership, you have to come up with two unique tricks to make up for the one you exposed. And now you’ve set yourself up for a storyline for some future performances.

2020 Horror Movie Month Second Half Report

Apparently there is a big cross-over in readers of this site and horror movie fans, as I got a good amount of feedback and recommendations after the first post on this subject.

There were fewer good movies in the second half of the run. This is due to the fact that I started with some of the better reviewed films and worked my way down. So most of my comments here amount to, “Eh, it was alright.” Next year I’ll do it the opposite way. I’ll pick my 31 movies and then organize them from worst reviewed to best reviewed and watch them in that order. That way the movies won’t be getting worse as I’m becoming a little burnt out on horror movies.

A couple people asked me to write a more about the plot of each movie, but:

a) That would require me doing more writing when you could just find that information with a google search.

and

b) I prefer to know as little as possible when going into a movie. I think that’s the best way to experience a film. So I end up telling you no more than I would want to know.

By the way, a good site for horror movie recommendations is thrillist.com. I got a lot of ideas for what to watch this October from their Best Horror Movies of 2019 list.

And if you’re a general horror fan, the-line-up.com is a great site for info on horror and true crime movies, books, podcasts, and tv.

Here we go…

Oct. 18 - Daniel Isn’t Real - This was pretty good but didn’t quite do it for me. It actually deals with a premise I like quite a lot for magic tricks: the return of your childhood imaginary friend. Stars Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son and Tim Robbins/Susan Sarandon’s son. If that matters to you. (Shudder)

Oct. 19 - Sweetheart - A girl is shipwrecked on an island and there’s something malevolent in the water. Again, another okay movie. The premise felt different, but it didn’t blow me away in its execution. (Netflix)

Oct. 20 - The Curse of La Llorona - A couple decent jump scares. Perfectly watchable, but also mostly forgettable. (HBO Max)

Oct. 21 - The Prodigy - Another creepy kid flick. Better than average, but not remarkable. (Amazon Prime)

⭐️ Oct. 22 - The Perfection - It almost felt like a 45 minute movie followed by its 45 minute sequel. I thought the first half was genius. The second half was pretty good as well, but didn’t live up to the first half. But still, I definitely enjoyed it. Another one you should go into without knowing anything about it. (Netflix)

Oct. 23 - Brightburn - This was pretty good. An interesting combination of two genres. (Starz)

Oct. 24 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - One of Renny Harlin’s first films and a highlight of the NIghtmare franchise, but not exactly a great movie by any other standard.

Oct. 25 - Child’s Play (2019) - Okay movie. Child’s Play is a movie that somewhat warranted a remake, given how much children’s toys have progressed in the past 20 years. So I don’t begrudge them making it. But it wasn’t anything special. (Amazon Prime)

Oct. 26 - Nightmare Cinema - An anthology movie consisting of five short films. None of the pieces were bad, a couple were pretty good. Overall fine.

Oct. 27 - Halloween (1978) - A classic. If you’re a younger person seeing it for the first time after seeing numerous other films that have been influenced by it, then maybe it’s not that impressive. But I’ll always enjoy rewatching it. (Shudder)

Oct. 28 - The Banana Splits Movie - Pretty much the only movie I watched all month that I actively disliked.

⭐️ 💀 Oct. 29 - Eli - A creepy setting and a bunch of jump scares made this good and then the movie going in a direction I didn’t anticipate pushed it into the top tier of movies I watched in October. Not a great movie, but one I found pretty entertaining. (Netflix)

Oct. 30 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child - A relatively low point for the franchise.

Oct. 31 - Kindred Spirits - I kept on expecting this to veer off into a more supernatural sort of story. But because it stayed in the “real world” I couldn’t quite make sense of the main antagonist’s motivations. A quick, easy watch. But not great.

There you have it. See you next October.

The Juxe: Discography - Oranger

Oranger was an indie-rock/pop/neo-psychedelia group out of San Francisco, from around 1997 to 2006. Great hooks, great harmonies, and some interesting and off-kilter melodic elements made them one of my favorite bands of the time.

The closest thing they had to a “hit” was this cover of Mr. Sandman, as featured in the video game, Stubbs the Zombie.

It’s a fine cover, and people who played that game tend to love it, but it’s nowhere near their best work.

Below are some favorites of mine from their full discography.

Eggtooth from Doorway to Norway (1998)

The earworm organ part and trading off on lead vocal made this the first track on their debut album to really grab me.

Suddenly Upsidedown from The Quiet Vibration Land (2000)

The album title comes from a Who song, it was recorded on a tape machine once owned by the Beach Boys, and it features a number of Beatle-esque touches. This album definitely showed their influences throughout. This song has a bit of an ELO influence and features a flanged guitar sound, bopping beat, and some great harmonies.

The Writer (H.F.) from Shutdown the Sun (2003)

Hard to pick a favorite from this album. I went with this song to mix it up a little. There is something of a southern twang to it with some nice pedal steel guitar thrown in. And, again, great harmonies. I think it’s about a guy who kills himself? That’s either really obvious, or I just made it up. I’m not sure.

Circle Gets the Square from From the Ashes of Electric Elves (2003)

Packaged with the previous album was a 34 track collection of b-sides, live songs, and other unreleased material, including this song, one of my all-time favorites. The cascading vocalizing at 1:25 just always gets me.

Sukiyaki from New Comes and Goes (2005)

For their final album, they ditched some of their sunnier psychedelic influences for a crunchier power-pop sound with some Weezer and Pavement influences. And, while I’m usually a little bummed when a band I like changes up their sound, in this case they went from one genre I like to another, and they nailed it. This is perhaps their most solid album top to bottom.

Here is Sukiyaki, a great 2 minutes indie pop song with driving piano and drums.

Squared Anagrams

Okay, so continuing on from yesterday’s post. I’m going to talk about Squared Anagrams. This is a way of getting a lot more information from seemingly fewer questions. Today I’ll describe it as you would use it with a Ouija board as your oracle, and then probably next week I’ll explain how you’d do it with no props and a more typical mind-reading presentation.

Back in 2004ish, on my old site, I wrote about using a Ouija board as the source of the letters in your anagram routine. And I gave the basic information on a routine I use with a hand-drawn Ouija board and a pen as the planchette. At the time I wrote:

“This will take some thought, but you can finagle it so that when the pen points to a letter it is slightly askew so that a miss on that letter can be explained away by your own misinterpretation of where the pen is pointing. For example, if the next letter in the progressive anagram is an T, the pen can point to it in sort of a cockeyed way so a hit will be taken at face value, but a miss can be corrected by stating, "Maybe I'm wrong, perhaps it's pointing to the G behind the T. There must be a G in your word." So when you figure out the construction of the board you can make it so any miss will point in the general direction of a letter that IS in the word that a miss would indicate what the thought of word is.”

The idea was that you could build your anagram and draw your Ouija board in such a way that you could do an anagram without any apparent misses, because a miss could be explained by the inexactness of where the pen was pointing.

15 years ago, I didn’t like the idea of getting a “No” response. I’ve come around on that completely. Now I like “No” responses because they feel like they’re not giving me information and they give me an excuse to change tactics.

Once I stopped caring about NOs, I realized that each move of the planchette that covered more than one letter could give us four pieces of information. Not just two.

If the planchette is split between A and B and I say, “It looks like it’s indicating an A… or maybe a B.”

I can find out :

• There’s an A in your word

• There’s a B in your word

• Both letters are in your word

• Neither are in your word

By doing this twice, we get 16 options rather than just the four you’d get with two purely binary guesses.

By adding another “clarification” type of question on top of that, we get 32 options from just two movements of the planchette.

There are a few other ambiguities a Ouija board allows, insofar as the orientation of the letters compared to the orientation of the planchette (which can change) and the orientation of the letters compared to each other (which doesn’t change). By using these two different orientational ambiguities, I can suggest the board is working uniformly in both letter guesses. (This will make more sense if you dig into the the details later on.)

So I’d have you look at the poem (the one posted yesterday) and have you think of a word. Maybe I say that this poem was written by a guy who passed on, and one of the ways to connect with his spirit is to concentrate on one of the words in the poem and repeat the word in your mind until it becomes a metaphysical doorway for his spirit to walk through. Or whatever.

So you think of the word “lasting.”

I tell you that the way it works is that the spirit moves the planchette while we touch it gently, whatever the hole is over is the letter the spirit is trying to send us. “Restless spirits—the kind that are contactable on a Ouija board—usually communicate in something known as ‘devil’s tongue.’ They will jumble up the order of the letters in the word. So that makes it a little more complicated.” When people use a Ouija board, they expect it just to spell out the words. You need some rationale as to why it’s not doing that here. I say something like, “That’s just how it works on TV.” The implication being that that’s fake, but this is real.

So you’re thinking of one of the words, the first move of the planchette is here:

Let’s say we’re both facing the board and I’m on the right.

“Hmm… it’s kind of between those two. From my perspective it’s an S. Is there an S in the word?”

“Yes.”

“And a T?”

“Yes.”

The planchette then moves to here.

“Okay, again it’s kind of splitting those letters. I mainly see an L. Is there an L?

“Yes.”

“And an M too?”

“No.”

“Okay, so this seems to be drifting to the right a bit. We’ll keep that in mind go forward.”

I now know your word is either “constellations” or “lasting.”

“Let’s try something different. Is the word you’re thinking of an object you can picture in your mind? Or is more of, like, a concept?”

“A concept, I guess.”

I now know the word is “lasting.”

“Okay, that’s going to make this more difficult.”

[If the word is something a person can visualize, then I’d have them focus on that image (to justify why I asked the question).]

From here, now that I know the word, I could continue with the Ouija, change it up and go into “automatic writing,” or maybe just become possessed and start screaming the word from deep in my throat.

So that’s how it would work for one of the 32 words. The 31 others would be slightly different. But for the most part, my process would follow these rules.

• If I get a “neither” in the first position, I would stop and say, “Okay, he might not have come through yet. Let’s stop and read the poem out loud as an invitation to him.”

• If I get a “neither” in the second position, I would abandon the Ouija board as “not working” and go into automatic writing (where they hold my wrist and my hand moves in scribbles and the word is found in those scribbles).

• If I get one letter in the first position and one letter in the second, then one of these things will be true:

  • Both letters were on the left side of the circle.

  • Both letters were on the right side of the circle.

  • Both letters were on the point side of the planchette

  • Both letters were on the round side of the planchette.

  Once I determine this “pattern” the ghost is speaking in and how the planchette is oriented, then the rest of the letters (which I now know) can follow the same pattern

I’ve written down all 32 ways this could play out here, so you can see how I’d handle each possibility if this is unclear. You wouldn’t need to memorize what to say (it would be obvious), but you’d need some sort of crib somewhere for the possible outcomes.

But again, this was just a demonstration effect, not one I’d expect anyone to use. I just wanted to explain the concept of the Squared Anagram. (If this idea already has a name, let me know.)

At first I thought it might be obvious to the spectator that you were “double dipping” with each guess, but my friend who has his own routine using this technique says he hasn’t found that to be the case. The planchette stopping between letters might feel more like a truly random happening than something you’re purposely manipulating, I don’t know. Like if you had a poster with the letters of the alphabet on it across the room and you threw a dart at it. If the dart landed between some letters, I think that would feel somewhat innocent, but would still allow you the chance to say, “Well I guess it’s closest to either this one or this one.” And that would seem pretty fair and natural.

I’ve seen my friend use this technique, with a Ouija board and without, and he’s been getting great reactions. At the very least, two paired guesses can’t seem any more suspicious than four single guesses.

The downside of this style of anagram is you really have to generate your word list working backwards from two different letter pairs. You’ll have to establish the conditions and then find things in a certain category that meet those conditions. You’re unlikely to just stumble upon a category of items that would work with this.

This whole thing isn’t quite a polished concept yet, obviously. That’s why it’s here on the site rather than hidden in one of my books. But I think it’s something that has merit. I’ll share some more ideas with it next week sometime, including a way to use it without a Ouija board.

A Really, Really Good Poem, I Don't Care What You Try and Say About it Otherwise

Tomorrow I’ll be posting about a Progressive Anagram technique that came out of a project I worked on with my friend Andrew. Neither of us are encyclopedias of mentalism, so it’s possible something similar to this technique is already in the literature. I’m going to hint at it today, so if we’re on a path that’s already been trod, perhaps someone can let me know. The closest thing to this technique that I know of is something I wrote long ago on my old site.

What it allows you to do is vastly increase the number of potential possibilities for a spectator to think of in a PA, while seemingly keeping the number of guesses very low.

For example, usually an anagram with two guesses would only allow you four possibilities.

Think of a Beatle.
OK
He’s in the rhythm section.
Yes.
He’s dead.
No.
You’re thinking of Ringo Starr.

The technique I’m going to write about tomorrow is limited in certain ways, but it’s a way of to get a lot more options with what feels like just two “guesses.” (Although it’s not quite really.)

As an example of the process, I’ve written this really, really good poem. If you were to pick any word from the poem that resonates with you in some way, I could tell what you’re thinking of with what feels like just two conjectures. (If you think you know how that would happen, write me before the end of the day. If you’re right, I’ll give you $1.75.)

More on that tomorrow. Today, just bask in the beauty of my poetry…

The astronomer sees the stars in the constellation as mystical talismans
Or possibly as balls for the circus juggler
The astronomer's thoughts are of young romance
Glorified misery, lasting eternally
As a match sets his heart aflame
The emotional pressure prompts a look in the mirror
In his heart he is the coyote in the moonlight
yet in the mirror he sees something meaningfully different
He resembles a marshmallow in a latex mask