Lemonade From Lemons Week: Day Five

I’ve been pretty depressed these past couple of days as Artificial Intelligence Week turned into a huge flop. My plan to take a permanent vacation while computers churned out content for this blog indefinitely has gone up in smoke.

To answer a question I’ve gotten a few times over email: Yes. Those are the ACTUAL posts that were written by the AI program at Writesonic. That wasn’t me trying to be funny and write nonsense. You can try it out at that site yourself. And no, that’s not like a joke site. Their actual claim is that they can write content for your site with AI.

I will cut them the smallest amount of slack because magic is a bit esoteric as a subject matter, and I didn’t really do them any favors with my stupid opening paragraph that they had to build off of, but still… I wasn’t quite expecting that level of grade-A gibberish. I kind of thought I’d get some regurgitated content that had been scraped off other sites on the web describing some simple magic tricks in a clunky, but at least somewhat understandable fashion. Nope.

But maybe I’m being too shortsighted? Maybe there’s actually a lot of good content in those posts that I just can’t see because I’m too stuck in the old world where tricks had to “make sense” and “have a point” and “be doable.”

Well, that's what we're going to find out. It's been a while since I've had a contest on the site, and it's time for that to change.

The Jerx Artificial Intelligence Contest


I'll tell you up front, this is not going to be a simple contest to enter.

But hopefully the prize will make up for it.

Prize for the Winner

- A 2021 Supporter Slot for the Jerx which includes a copy of the next book. (Value $260)

AND

- A $200 gift certificate for Penguin or Vanishing Inc. or wherever (Value... well, $200)

(If you're already a supporter, I'll simply refund your payment.)

How To Enter

Submit a video of yourself performing one of the tricks described by the AI in Wednesday or Thursday's post.

Those tricks can be:

  • The one under the heading of Amateur Magician (Wednesday's post)

  • The one under the heading of How to Perform Magic Tricks At Home (Wednesday's post)

    Or from Thursday's post:

  • Card Trick

  • Pocket Trick

  • Coin Trick

  • The Best Magic Trick for Beginners

  • Disappearing Coin Trick

  • Vanishing or Appearing Handkerchief Trick

You may choose to do a fairly faithful interpretation of the trick as described in the post. Or you may choose to somehow turn it into a real trick that actually has some kind of purpose. So you can choose to see this as an exercise in making a funny video, or you can choose to see it as a creative exercise. Or both.

Feel free to be inspired by other elements of the AI posts as well.

It can be a performance straight to camera, or for an audience, or couched in some other form. (For example, if I were submitting an entry, I'd do it like it was an ad for a 2010-era Ellusionist release. A bunch of meaningless "artsy" shots of me walking on a railway bridge, interspersed with some performance footage, and then me saying, "I'm Andy Jerxmann, and this... is Pocket Trick." And I'd put the palm of my hand over the lens, blacking it out.)

I will pick the winner based on which entry I enjoy the most. If I can't decide, I'll send out a poll to some of the original supporters of the site and have them vote on it.

There will only be one winner, but there may be some prizes for Honorable Mentions as well.

If you're just thinking of turning on your webcam and stumbling your way through one of the "tricks," you'll probably be wasting your time. Because someone is going to put some effort into this and easily outshine all the low-effort submissions. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if there were only a couple of people who put some effort into it, so if you do have a good idea for a video and you execute it well, you could have a good chance of winning.

The videos may be posted here whether you win or not. You can choose if I use your full name or just a first name or pseudonym.

The best way to get your video to me would be to make it unlisted on Youtube and send me the link. Although we can figure something out if that's not an option.

Deadline: Videos should be submitted by October 8th. I will select a winner soon after.

I've Made A Horrible Mistake Week: Day Four

Okay! Now…NOW I think we’re ready to go. If you’ve been following along, you know the drill. Blah, blah, blah… first magic blog content completely written by AI… blah, blah, blah… last post I’m going to personally write on this site. And so on. Again, other than the first paragraph of the following article, which was written by me, everything else in this post was written by the AI blog writing product Writesonic.

Here it is. I’m going to recommend you get out your notebooks because I’m guessing there’s going to be a ton of killer content you’re going to want to make note of.

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Confessions of an Amateur Magician: How to Perform Magic Tricks at Home

I'm an amateur magician, and I'm going to share with you my dirty little confession about how I perform magic tricks at home. The professional magician has a stage to perform from. That gives him instant credibility. As an amateur, I don't have a stage. I've got the part of my room the futon is in, and the part of the room the tv is in. And then I have the kitchen that I share with Trent. But he doesn't like me performing magic in there. So really I just have the futon and TV area. And I CERTAINLY don't have Trent's room. That's off limits. So here's how I perform magic tricks at home.

Introduction

"Okay, Kavan, let's do our routine. You're the magician." "Yep. That's what I am." I hold the card up and give it a quick close-up look-see for whatever flaw may have been revealed to me during the performance. "Perfect. I want you to show it to me again so that I can figure out how you did it. What do you have up your sleeve?" "I have a piece of paper in my hand. I put it on the table right there. And I hand the card to Trent. But he takes the paper and scrunches it up into a ball. He tosses it away and holds the card in his hand. Okay?" "Perfect. That's pretty impressive. And it's still probably too good for you to be able to do it with some regularity, but it looks like you may be able to do it on a different occasion. Why don't you try again?

Where to Perform Magic Tricks at Home

When I have a few friends over to practice, I always start in the kitchen. Or the futon. This is the stage. You see the magic trick there. You hear me flipping the table over, or the lightbulb turning on, or whatever. Everyone likes watching the magic trick. There's something about watching the magic trick that is hypnotic. Especially if they are really good friends. And I need these friends. Because it takes a lot of "I know, but" excuses to get Trent to practice magic with me. So I need more friends to help me practice magic. Now there is another part of the magic trick. And that is about the time we are done. I need to try to quickly do all the simple tricks in this part of the magic trick that aren't amazing. So my time is better spent trying to teach Trent other stuff I do.

How to Perform Basic Tricks

I started out with simple tricks. I know. If you are an amateur magician, you are probably thinking, "Oh for pity's sake. Don't use Magic Words!" And here's the secret: Magic Words are okay. In fact, you should use them if you are going to do magic tricks at home. They are not magic, but they can confuse people. And give you the opportunity to escape danger. Magic Words, when used correctly, can make your audience see things you do not want them to see. The audience may believe your magic is real. If you don't use magic words, and you use magic, it is real. Therefore you use magic. I started out with a couple basic tricks. They are simple, but they are also extremely difficult to do with my budget. The trick requires a pen and paper. I bought a pen from the dollar store.

Card Trick

I love to perform a card trick. I have a deck of cards and a deck of playing cards. I lay them out like this. Cards on the bottom, then ace up top. The trick is to have your audience guessing which card is the ace. So what I do is turn the playing cards so they don't face up. So the bottom card is the ace, and the top card is a nine. Okay, what I want you to do is count the cards. Here I'll do one on my right hand, but I want you to do it with your left. So all you have to do is count your right hand, then count your left. I'm going to flip them over, you're going to count, then I'll flip them over again. And all you need to do is to say “Oh look. I got another one.” Say that four times, and you'll know which one is the ace. I'll let you go ahead and do this on your own.

Pocket Trick

A classic trick that any magician should know how to perform. Without using a pocket. You could try to, but as my neighbor Trent (who is the only person who gets to use his side of the futon that I don't) will tell you, your not getting this magic trick to work. You can have a pocket, or you can buy a magic pocket. It's all the same. This trick isn't about having a pocket in front of you. This is about having that pocket behind you. You can have a pocket on top of you or in front of you, and if you aren't careful it will change the way your performing the trick. Okay, now watch this video, and we'll take a look at this trick. Trent and I try and teach you a magic trick. It's called a pocket trick. A magic trick where the trick is performed from behind.

Coin Trick

So the coins that I use for this trick are coin bank nickels. My family doesn't need coins for the washing machine and the dishwasher. This is a very, very popular trick. I really shouldn't use coins because a lot of folks find them too small to have the proper amount of weight to be in your hand, but I like them because you can only see their faces. So that's what I do. I pretend I'm not doing it because I know Trent would think that's cheating. But I put a dime and a dime in my left hand and 3 pennies in my right hand. I use my forefingers to grasp the dime and nickel. Then I rub them together and I hold them out in front of me. I tell Trent that I'm going to put them in my left hand, and then I'll change my hand to my right and rub them against my face'.

The Best Magic Tricks for Beginners

The stuff I do are the ones where you don't need to have a lot of experience. I can't teach you how to cast a spell, because I don't know, so I won't. But I will tell you how I perform magic tricks. You will learn a little bit about the science behind these magic tricks. That's how you'll be able to teach your friends and family. We'll start with the simplest of magic tricks. Simple Magic Tricks Many magic tricks use sleight of hand. To perform these tricks, you can use several props, if you have the space. You'll need to have a lot of props. A cigar box, a tube of duct tape, a jewelry box, a pen and notebook, and a deck of cards are all good things to have in your house. Take the jewelry box and use it as a playing card holder. You'll need a deck of cards, a pen, and a deck of cards.

Disappearing coin trick

You know those coins that change color? That's a simple trick, that I perform at home all the time. I bought a metal coin tray that looks like a basket. I insert the coin tray, flip the coin over to reveal the basket. It changes colors. Simple. More at the Princeton Packet. Too many therapists? We can help. I have been seeing a woman named Amanda for many years. My wife and I can't agree on therapy. One of us is satisfied with our therapist, while the other one is unsatisfied with the therapist that we're both seeing. It's a source of conflict. It's hard to be successful at marriage when you're fighting about who gets to see their therapist.

Vanishing or appearing handkerchief trick

I learned this one in my 25th birthday when I had a girlfriend for the first time, (I've got one every year) and we went to a magic show. The magician shows us this trick that would work for the dares. And I have a set up that I do when I'm at home. Step 1: Put a napkin or tissue in my mouth, hold it in there and cough. Step 2: Grab it and pull it out. Step 3: "DID YOU CHEW IT UP!" Step 4: Enjoy the shocked look of the crowd. It works every time. Rainbow effect I read an article about magnetic rainbow effect and I got all excited about it. So I tried it out and I could do it with magnetic bar. Which I was happy about because I already had one. It didn't work. But here's how I did it: Step 1: Take a bar magnet. Step 2: Put the bar magnet in a tin foil holder.

Conclusion

I should quit doing magic at home. But I can't. It's too fun. I've got seven more books to write. And a blog to write. And this site to keep up. And a friend to entertain and pester. I'm too busy. No, not busy. I'm the King of Content. I've got a lot of work to do. But the little tricks are fun, the satisfaction is fast. And nobody sees what I do. The cat seems to have trouble understanding this. She still tries to catch my hand every single time I do a trick at home. Why do cats get it so hard? The only down side of performing magic at home is getting one of Trent's bad habits to rub off on me. I keep forgetting to pick him up before I perform a trick.

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Uhm… okay. So…hmm.

So it looks like this technology might still need a few tweaks before it’s ready for prime time. Or daytime. Or any time, really. It seemed really intent on making Trent the break-out star of this post. It went so far as to suggest Trent and I are sharing a futon. (We’re not. I specifically mentioned in my opening paragraph that Trent had a room!)

I also found it odd there were numerous, obvious grammatical mistakes in the article. I don’t know what to expect from AI, but at the very least I thought it would have a better batting average than I do at using the correct your/you’re.

This wasn’t a total failure, right? I mean, there was that idea to use a jewelry box as a card holder. That’s not a terrible idea. At the very least it’s an idea, which is something that was missing from the rest of the article.

Aw fuck it. Let’s be honest. It looks like I’ll be back writing this site for the time being. See you back here tomorrow.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if you invested a large sum of money—say half a million dollars—into a company that told you they have a product that’s going to make your job much easier, and it turned out their product didn’t even slightly work… is there any way you can get your money back? Just curious.

I Blame Myself Week: Day Three

The big day is here! What follows (below the robot emojis) is the first magic blog post written using AI (artificial intelligence)!

The company that created this technology is called Writesonic. Their marketing material says, “Say goodbye to writer’s block. With Writesonic's AI-powered writing tools, you can generate high-performing Ads, Blogs, Landing Pages, Product Descriptions, Ideas and more in seconds.”

A “high performing blog” is precisely what I’m looking for. After 6+ years of the middling performance blog I’ve churned out, I’m happy to turn this over to the computers to run.

Here we go! As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the first paragraph was written by me, but everything else is going to come from the AI as it sifts through all of human knowledge on the internet and crafts what will undoubtedly be a compelling piece of writing. My only concern is that it might be too brilliant for our mere human minds to comprehend. But hey, that will just force us to evolve our thinking faster, right?

If this goes as well as I’m expecting, these words I’m writing now might be the last words typed by human hands on this blog. I want to thank all of you who supported this site up to this point, and I’m sure you’re going to love Jerx 2.0.

What comes next is genuinely what the AI provided to me as a blog post about magic tricks and performing as an amateur magician. I haven’t read it yet myself, I’m going to read it along with you….

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Confessions of an Amateur Magician: How to Perform Magic Tricks at Home

I'm an amateur magician, and I'm going to share with you my dirty little confession about how I perform magic tricks at home. The professional magician has a stage to perform from. That gives him instant credibility. As an amateur, I don't have a stage. I've got the part of my room the futon is in, and the part of the room the tv is in. And then I have the kitchen that I share with Trent. But he doesn't like me performing magic in there. So really I just have the futon and TV area. And I CERTAINLY don't have Trent's room. That's off limits. So here's how I perform magic tricks at home.

The Amateur Magician

Stand in one of two corners of the room. Stand in one corner, in the vicinity of a chair or couch. Put your hands down. Raise your hands to your face. Have an expectant smile on your face. When you get a look from your neighbor, immediately lower your hands. When you can look back up, proceed to show them the trick you just performed. The Professional Magician Stand in one corner, not too near a chair or couch. Stand on a chair, or a table. Put your hands down. Relax into a smiling look. Ask your neighbor if they mind if you perform a magic trick. Have an expectant smile on your face. When your neighbor says no, have your hands down again. If they do want to see the trick, it's yours for the taking. The Amateur Magician Lay flat on the floor face up. Get comfy.

How to Perform Magic Tricks at Home

The first thing I do is grab my pocket knives and attach one to my arm and one to my belt loop. I then I load a pair of jingly keys into my pocket. I know how to do the quick change so I can undo my pants and put on my pants and tie my boots back up. And then, since I have jingly keys in my pocket and jingly keys in my pocket, I can easily and quietly remove my pants and boots. So I do that. And this time I don't jingle my keys because I don't want to ruin it. But if I need to jingle the keys I can do it in a safe, quiet place where no one can see me. I don't know why I decided to remove my boots instead of my pants but that's what I decided to do. I do the quick change and then I stand at the bottom of the stairs. I'm holding my pocket knives and jingly keys at the bottom of the stairs.

Conclusion

This doesn't sound like it's going to work, but it works. But like all good magic, it's not easy. I can do this in front of Trent, but only if I'm comfortable with his reactions. And that's tough. He has these great, sharp ears and they pick up the slightest change in me. So I have to use it. I'm going to be in front of him with my own recorded video and I'm going to ask for his reaction. Then I'm going to walk away. I'll ask him to be honest and tell me if he thinks the thing I just did is magical. Or if he thinks it's boring and isn't worth paying attention to. Then I'll wait. And I'll start performing the trick again. This time I won't hit pause. I'll have him keep his eyes on me. And he won't be able to see me on the screen. So I have to have a good visual on him.

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Huh…

Hold on everyone. I have to check something.

Okay. I’m back. So, according to the doctor, I’m not having a stroke.

I went back and read the article and I’m honestly a little confused by some of it. A lot of it actually. I’m not sure if it’s the situation where—as I mentioned previously—it’s just too advanced for my mind to understand. But I don’t think that’s it.

You know what? I blame myself. In yesterday’s post I mentioned how I was given the option to choose which outline to use for my AI generated article, and I chose the most open-ended one. That was a mistake. Of course AI is going to require a little more guidance in order to give us the really good stuff. What was I thinking? Haha. Okay, my bad.

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Take two.

Tomorrow is when the dawn of a new era in magic writing truly begins and the AI tackles this outline…

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This looks like it’s going to be a much more fruitful article. You’re going to get a card trick, a pocket trick, a coin trick, a disappearing coin trick, a vanishing or appearing handkerchief trick. Just by looking at that outline I can tell that this material might almost be too good for the free site and should maybe just be for supporters. But I think I’ll throw you a bone and give everyone the goods. (You’re welcome.)

See you back here tomorrow when the real future of magic content begins!

Cautiously Optimistic Week: Day Two

Okay, so we’re continuing on the journey to transition this site so that it is completely written by artificial intelligence. The first step was signing up with the company that has created this incredible technology. (I’ll give you more details on the company later this week.)

One of the services this company provides is if you type in any subject, it will give you ideas for different “listicles” you can write on that subject.

So, the first thing I did was type in “magic tricks” and here are the ideas that it gave me.

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Hmmm… okay. Well…, I’ll be honest. That’s not the most inspiring start. I mean, for being automatically generated, I guess they’re alright. But it seems like they couldn’t even really crack five ideas with this. Are the five best tricks to amaze my friends really that different than the five best tricks to impress my friends? The first and the third idea also seem kind of similar as well. It seems like it’s just about plugging adjectives and an arbitrary number of minutes into a sentence. The last idea is fine, but there’s no chance of me sifting through youtube videos to write such an article.

So I wouldn’t call this the most scintillating start. But that’s okay, this was like a free bonus feature on the site. What you have to pay for are the actual fully formed articles.

To do that, you start by buying ten article ideas. Here’s what we got:

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Now, I admit that nine out of those ten article ideas sounded very similar. Again, it seems like they just swapped in different numbers and descriptors. If I’d known that’s all it was going to be, I wouldn’t have paid for it. I feel like I can do that much myself.

  • A Dozen Magic Tricks to Amaze the Stupid

  • 5 Magic Tricks to Steal your Dad’s Girlfriend

  • 20 Tricks To Make Your Aunt Ask If You’re Involved In Some Weird Devil Shit

That’s fairly easy to do. I was hoping for some ideas with a little more substance. But I did find one topic in that list that was made for this site.

Confessions of An Amateur Magician: How to Perform Magic Tricks At Home

Perfect! That’s an idea that’s right in line with the ethos of this site. “Confessions” suggests the same candidness that I try and bring to this site. “Amateur Magician” is the perspective I write from. And “Home” is one of my primary performing venues. Amazing!

The next step was determining which artificial intelligence-generated outline I wanted to use for the article. Here were the options they gave me…

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Now, while I was intrigued by some of the more detailed options, I thought it might be interesting if—for our first go around—we went with the most open-ended choice. Which is clearly choice number 5.

There was one more step before the article could be generated. I needed to write the intro.

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So that’s how it will begin. Tomorrow I will roll out the first in what I’m guessing will be 1000s of AI-written articles about the subject of magic. We are about to enter a golden-age of magic content and/or the beginning of the dullest Walter Gibson novel ever created. Cross your fingers.

This Just Got Easy Week: Day One

This week is an experiment. There will be new posts every day, Monday thru Friday. And if this experiment works, there might be a lot more posts than that.

Look, I’m gong to be honest with you, it’s not easy to write this site. And when you add on all the new content for a bi-monthly newsletter and a book every year, you go from “not easy” to “damn near impossible.” If I was writing about the life-cycle of ferns or something like that, I would have blown my fucking head off by now. Fortunately, magic is a fun and multi-faceted subject, so even though all the writing is a bit of a challenge, it’s at least an interesting one. And because of the supporters of the site, I don’t have to write about any one specific thing and I can go from whim to whim and write about whatever happens to be interesting me at the time. That’s great. But regardless, running this enterprise requires a ton of time, energy, and writing.

Until now…

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Guys, I am so excited. My heart is racing, my breathing is rapid, and my testicles are slamming back and forth into each other in my scrotum sack, as happens to all men universally when they’re excited.

You see, I’ve discovered something that’s going to make this job easy as shit…

A company that uses artificial intelligence to produce content for blogs!

Do you know what this means for us? It means I won’t have to write the posts anymore and you can get a lot more Jerx posts than you currently do. Daily posts. Hell, maybe I’ll have them crank them out on the hour for you. It’s just a matter of how good these AI produced articles are. Are they going to be really good? Or are they going to be amazingly good? I’m not sure yet. But it’s definitely going to be in the really good to amazingly good range. It’s not like there would be a business out there that charged money to create AI based articles that were just grade-A gobbledygook, right? Of course not. This experiment is going to be a success. It’s just a question of how much of a success.

Come back tomorrow as we dip our toe into the first AI Jerx content and I—once again—redefine the art of writing about magic, and bring magic blogging into…

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Dustings #50

I can’t believe we just passed the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I didn’t mention it on the blog earlier because it just seems so difficult to really capture the importance and the horror of that day while still honoring all the people who lost their lives during the attack.

I heard a lot of religious and political leaders commemorating the anniversary, but their remarks sort of left me feeling hollow. They didn’t really seem to understand the gravity of that day. Or perhaps it’s just the case that there’s nothing you can say or do that really approaches the significance of that event.

In fact, there is only really one tribute I’ve ever seen that adequately addresses everything that happened that day, and goes some way in consoling humanity for everything we lost.

And that tribute is when—for the month of September—the Magic Cafe puts this at the top of their homepage.

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Wow. Powerful stuff.

I know a woman who was 12 years old at the time of the attacks. She lost both her parents when the towers collapsed. She told me, “Andy… of course I’ll never be happy my parents died that day. But that stunning memorial gif goes a long way to filling the hole in my heart that they left.”

Thank you, Magic Cafe, for doing so much to heal our crippled nation.

Perhaps the only other tribute that would be as moving as that gif is if you created a solemn version of this emoticon…

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where—instead of dancing—the dots are reflecting in quiet dignity on the lives lost that day.


Daniel Rumanos has been kicked out of the GLOMM.

Daniel is a magician, writer of dull science fiction, and a “pro-contact pedohebephile.”

This means he’s into girls aged 11-14. And no, he’s not tortured by these desires. He’s proud of them!

You can read more about Daniel at this site. I especially enjoy the page of deleted tweets which includes this gem.

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You’re damn near braindead when your justification is, “No, no. I don’t just want to fuck a 12-year-old. I want to be in a relationship with one!” Uhm, bad news, that makes you more fucked up. Do I #KnowTheDifference? Hmmm… let me see if i can figure this out. Well, I can at least understand the sexual desire as some misguided biological instinct. Indulging that instinct makes you evil. But wanting to be in a relationship with a 12-year-old makes you evil and fucking pathetic. Generally you’d want a relationship to be with someone who is at least close to being an intellectual equal. If you want to talk about Minecraft or how hard it is to multiply fractions, then I understand why you might want to be in a “relationship” with a 12-year-old. But for a normal adult male with half a brain in his skull, that sounds like a nightmare. So yeah… I mean… I guess I “know the difference.” Although I’m not sure, “Hey, I’m not just a pervert. I’m also a moron!” is quite the defense you were hoping it was.

Here’s another great tweet. He definitely thought he had a really salient point here…

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Okay, let’s give that a shot.

“I don’t think pedophiles should rape children.”

Aha! But would I ever say, “I don’t think Jews should rape children”?

Hmmm… yeah, actually that’s a perfectly reasonable sentence too. It’s like a Mad Lib, you can fill that sentence with literally any group of people and it still rings true.

If you find it funny when dumb people speak with conviction, I encourage you to check out more of Daniel’s thoughts and writing at the site above. It’s a gold mine.


The Wit and Wisdom of the Jay Brothers

Joshua Jay

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“Henning Nelms said that if you could make a sandwich appear in a hungry man’s pocket, that would be a very powerful trick because it would be magic with meaning.”

Fat Joshua Jay

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“I always carry a sandwich in my pants. And I fill my watch-pocket with ranch for dipping.”

The Future of The GLOMM

Five years ago I created The Global League of Magicians and Mentalists (scroll down this page to June 2016 for a few posts about the formation of The GLOMM). The GLOMM is the largest magic organization in the world because there are no membership dues and you don’t have to apply to be a part of it. If you’re interested in magic, then you’re in the GLOMM already.

Originally, the GLOMM was sort of a joke. You see, the GLOMM had two rules for membership:

1- Don’t be convicted of a sex crime.

2- And don’t be an asshole to me personally.

Anyone who does one or the other gets removed from the GLOMM. You can see them on this list where I didn’t differentiate between someone I think is an asshole and someone who was convicted of a sex crime. That was kind of the joke. (Although it was more of a threat than a joke, because I didn’t end up putting any assholes on there, even when I should have.)

Then in 2017 I made this post trying to find details about an Australian magician who was convicted of raping multiple underaged girls. (For whatever reason, Australia doesn’t (or didn’t at the time) give the names of convicted pedophiles.) Due to some detective work by a reader of the site, we found out his name was David Drowley aka Twister the Clown.

Then in 2018 I received an email from the father of one of the victims of this sack of shit. He wrote:

Thank fuck you banned that cunt from your organisation. Excuse my language. Actually, no, my language is too kind for that pedophile.

My daughter was one he brutally raped when she was a child, and she was too fucking scared to tell me for two fucking years. 18 kids have come forward with information about that fucking cunt. 18 to my knowledge, anyway.

Get the word out there to make sure David the fucking cunt Drowley never touches another child. The problem is he will get out of prison, and will return to birthday parties cos he doesn't know any other kind of work. I want to make sure what my daughter had to endure never happens to another child.

He would visit my house in the middle of the night, completely drunk on bourbon, and I let him sleep on the couch. I had no idea what he was doing. He threatened my daughter to scare her out of telling me or authorities what he had done, I only found out when, at age ten, she decided to run away incase he visited again. Thankfully she returned that night, and police investigated. My daughter told them what happened. We put him in prison.

It was then that I decided that whatever may happen with this site, The GLOMM will continue on indefinitely.

If he’s not already, Drowley will be getting out of prison soon. And when he does—if he’s hoping to continue on with his magic “career”— I’ll make sure his history always catches up with him. He’ll undoubtedly try using a different name, but I trust Jerx: Australia will keep an eye out for him. “But he paid his dues to society!” Well, tough shit. I don’t know what to tell you. He didn’t pay his dues to the GLOMM because, as I said, there are no dues. However there is a rule: keep your little dick to yourself.

Look, I don’t know if there are a greater percentage of perverts in magic than there are in any other field, but that’s certainly the impression that you get. At the very least there is a public perception that magicians/clowns—especially ones who perform for children—are more likely to be creeps. Who knows. But it doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing any “real” magic organization is going to keep on top of. If you expose the thumbtip to someone, you might get kicked out of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. But expose your penis tip to someone? Hey, no problemo. Don’t worry, you feckless dummies, the guy who writes the stupid magic blog will pick up the slack for you when it comes to policing this shit.

(Also, I would like to announce that going forward, profits from the sale of GLOMM Membership Kits will be going to a related charity or charities. (Not sure which yet. If you have a recommendation, send it my way.)

We’re currently restocking a couple different shirt sizes for the membership kit. But that usually doesn’t take more than a few weeks at most, and those orders will ship when the new stock is in. See the membership kit page for details.)