Dustings #94

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For a couple of years now, I’ve had two levels of support for this site. A $10 tier and a $25 tier. The $25 tier is limited in number and there is a fairly long waiting list for spots at that level. If you’re a supporter at that level for the full 18-month season, you get that season’s bonus, a hardcover book of (mostly) new material. The $10 tier supports this site, receives a 20+ page monthly newsletter, is on the mailing list for the stand-alone tricks and books I’m releasing (other than the regularly scheduled supporter bonus book mentioned previously) and gets first dibs on any slots that open up in the $25 tier.

This is not an ad, I’m just setting the table for something, and I realize I never mention this stuff so anyone who hasn’t been around the past 18 months might not have any idea what I’m talking about.

Anyway, when I created these tiers, I called them the Friend-Level ($10) and the Family-Level ($25).

It has come to my attention that Ben Earl calls his membership site The Family.

I don’t know who came first or what. It doesn’t matter, neither of us ripped the name off from the other. It’s the most basic, obvious name for a group of supporters there is. Neither of us put any thought into it.

However, to keep things clear, I’m going to stop referring to the $25 tier as the “Family-Level.” Ben can have that designation. He deserves it more than me. He has a Discord, online events, livestreams, etc. What he is selling is definitely more of a “family” and a “community” of magicians.

I, on the other hand, want nothing to do with you all as a group. As I wrote in this post, I have no interest in creating a community. I’m more than happy to hear from you all individually via email, but I wouldn’t want to hang out as a group. I wouldn’t want to get barbecue with you all. And I sure as shit don’t want to hang out in any sort of online forum with you, which is all the worst parts of getting barbecue with you, but without any brisket.

No thanks. I have not seen any online community that is not dragged down by its dumbest members.

Plus, it just gives magicians something else to do besides actually performing some magic for people. You’ll learn more with 5 minutes of actual performing (if you pay attention) than 5 hours spent in an online magic community.

So that’s not my scene.

The $25 tier is not my family. They are the deep pockets that keep this site afloat. They’re the wealthy benefactors who allow me to create tricks and test out ideas as an amateur. So instead of being called the Family level, the $25 tier will now be known as…

Yes, the Rich Uncle Millionaire level.

Thank you for all your support.

The problem with trying to pull off bigger, immersive tricks is that it can amplify how meaningless smaller tricks are. “Oh, look, a ball changed color.” Unless you come up with a more interesting context for that color change, it’s probably going to fall a little flat if the previous week you were doing a trick for them where you reversed time over three nights.

But those little tricks are still fun. So I sometimes like to emphasize the meaninglessness of them by claiming I am a god.

Recently, I’ve started singing this after those types of tricks…

So matches will penetrate each other, or a card will get sandwiched, and I’ll start bending back and forth at the waist and singing, “You know he’s doing it! God is doing a new thang.”

It says: Yes, I know this isn’t quite at the same level as some of the other stuff I do, but I’m having fun so I don’t care.

Mailbag: Fantasy & Humor

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Just been rereading The Amateur at the Kitchen Table (looking forward to the rerelease by the way) and the section about introducing people slowly and the fantasy analogy (page35) you give reminded me of something. Game of Thrones. My father hates fantasy, D&D, Harry potter, wizards and monsters etc. I’m a big fan and he’s mocked for it my whole life. However he LOVES Game of Thrones. Your analogy really rings true here. GoT started out like a standard historical drama/action series (which he likes) for the majority of the first season, it drew my Dad in so by the time the Dragons turn up he was already invested in the world. Also the characters were reacting as he would rather than just accepting the crazy shit that’s happening, “WTF is that? A fucking Dragon?!?” I think that also makes it easier to buy into.

I imagine at their best the amateur introduces someone in to the world of magic like GoT season one and then reacts along with them as things get progressively weirder in the following seasons

I’m going to keep GoT season 1 in mind with new people in future.—KF

I think that’s a good analogy.

For those without that book, in The Amateur At the Kitchen Table, I wrote:

If you had never read a fantasy book, and weren’t even sure what they were like, and then you picked up a book and on the first page an elf is talking to a dragon or whatever, you might not be able to get into the book. You might not even really understand how you were supposed to appreciate it. But if you had a book that eased you into the world of fantasy from a world you already know, it would probably be a transition you could more readily adapt to.

For most people, the magic tricks they’ve seen in real life amount to no more than puzzles and brain-teasers. They may not know how they’re done, but they’re not really “magical” in any way. When you’re doing more high level tricks, that’s a completely different animal. So you want to, essentially, ease them into your world of fantasy. Once they realize the stuff you do is unlike what they’ve seen anyone do in person, then you can open the door to all sorts of effects. Once they’re acclimated, once they understand this is a world where dragons exist, then you can do anything else you like.

The type of magic I enjoy performing and advocate for on this site is one where you create a fictional version of the world and reality, rather than just a fictional version of your own abilities (which is what amateur magic has almost always been for centuries).

In general, I like to gradually take people into more and more unbelievable premises.

But I have also found a pretty sure sign that I have a person with whom I can progress into unreality more directly, and that is to see how they respond to silly or absurd humor.

I was at a party at my friend’s beach house a couple of weeks ago, and I was talking to this woman there who I had just met. And she was mentioning how she likes trash reality shows like 90 Day Fiancé, and she asked if I had ever watched it. I furrowed my brow a little and said dismissively, “Hmmm…no. That’s not really my scene. I’m more of a bibliophile. I like to curl up with the Canterbury Tales or maybe Beowulf.”

My friend who was in the conversation with us rolled his eyes and said, “Uh-oh, here he goes again with Beowulf.” As if it was something I’m always talking about.

Now, the woman we were talking to understood immediately that we were kidding around and that I was just feigning my intellectualism. But that’s not always the case. I’ve had plenty of situations in the past where I’m screwing around in a similar manner and people act as if I’m being serious.

When I meet someone with a “playful” sense of humor that meshes well with mine, I usually find them more willing to go along with an unusual magic premise and not feel the need to question it as if I’m being 100% sincere. So if I introduce a fantastical concept that also is humorous in some way, I can “skip the line” with them and get straight to something crazy because the absurdity of the premise tells them the spirit in which they should go along with what I’m saying.

So if you find someone whose sense of humor matches yours, and you present them with a humorously “out there” presentation, you can quickly advance to a more unbelievable effect without alienating them.

I was comfortable enough with this woman that later on in the evening I leaned into her and whispered, “This is going to sound like bullshit, but God has been texting me about stuff five minutes before it happens,” which was my premise for a prediction effect I showed her. She went along with it happily and without thinking I was legitimately crazy.

However, if she had not latched on earlier in the day humor-wise, I probably wouldn’t have jumped into something with such an odd premise.

So while I’ll normally take things slow, if the humor connection is there, I’m sometimes comfortable pushing things along more quickly.

Peeking: A Quick-Start Guide

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After Monday’s post I got a number of emails saying that sure, while peeking information may have some benefits over something like Enigma, there’s just no rationale for having someone write something down and putting it in a wallet or envelope or something like that. So how do I get around that flaw?

It’s a little frustrating to have people who read this site ask me that question, given that it’s something I’ve talked about in the past. And yes, I know new people are finding this site all the time (despite my best efforts) and it’s maybe unreasonable to ask people to go back and read all the posts, given that takes months to do. But that’s my new policy. Just go back and read the whole site. Take notes this time. Not that everything I write is brilliance. But if you like the site enough to email me about something and get my thoughts on it, then you must resonate on some level with my ideas. And even if only 5% of what I write is worthwhile to you in some way, you can still easily fill notebooks with the ideas you find here.

But because I got so many emails about it, I’m going to explain what I believe to be the basic elements of a successful peek. This information is elsewhere on the blog, but it’s now here too in this very clearly titled post. Please, I beg of you, after this, stop asking me “how can you justify writing a word down if it’s supposed to be mind-reading!”

Get Out of Your Fantasy World

Every form of “mindreading” has some sort of conditions involved. Reading someone’s mind of any thought-of word or picture (as peeking allows) is going to require that word or picture is manifested outside the spectator’s head. They’re going to have to write it down, or search for it online, or speak it aloud at some point. This is the trade-off that comes with the freedom of allowing them to think of absolutely anything.

In my opinion—based on 500 days of testing—having someone write something down is one of the least invasive conditions for mindreading. But magicians have this fantasy where the spectator will be able to think of anything just in their mind and the magician will be able to name it out loud without any other steps. That’s not a thing that exists. “But I saw Derren Brown do it. The person just thought of a word and—” He was fucking with you. I promise you. Derren Brown can’t do this. Nobody can do this. This is off the table.

First Write, Then Explain

“I’d like you to write down the name of a stuffed animal you had in childhood… Great. I don’t want to see what you wrote, so let’s just put it away for now, and we’ll get back to it later if we need to.”

That’s all there is to it. The word is written and peeked before the subject of mindreading even comes up. I break down a slightly more detailed version of this set-up in the same post linked above. It goes into why each sentence is important. Read that for a further breakdown.

This is the first key element to peeking. Don’t explain what you’re going to do and then have them write down their thought. Have them write down their thought. Make it clear that you don’t want to see it. And put it away for later.

This is all just “set-up.” It will be frequently be forgotten in the long-run. And it is almost never questioned. It’s not questioned in the moment because it happens before you’ve said what you’re going to do. But in my 500 days of testing, it was rarely questioned afterward either—even when asking people for weaknesses in the trick. When people look back on the totality of the effect, the idea that a target thought might be recorded in writing before a demonstration of mindreading is not illogical to people. So it’s not something that needs to be overly justified or explained.

Enter the Process

The nice thing about the new Enigma app is that people are seeing that having a process doesn’t diminish the impact of mindreading. The negative about Enigma’s process is that it involves the length of the word, letter shapes and vowel position and things like that. These are things that humans never actually think of when they’re thinking of something. When you think of a baseball, you think of the weight and feel of it in your hand, and the stitching, and the way your hand grips it, and the sound of a bat hitting it or maybe being in the stands watching a game on a summer day. You don’t think, “Ah yes, good old baseball. That eight-letter word, with a first letter made up of straight and curved lines. Yes, yes, just thinking about how the first two vowels are in the 2nd and 4th positions makes me feel like I’m back in old Yankee Stadium!”

The trade-off for Enigma’s strength (that the word is never spoken or written) is a process that is sort of bland—focusing on the least interesting aspects of a word (its spelling rather than its meaning or its emotional relevance). But even this dull process doesn’t detract from the effect.

When it comes to a peek, a process isn’t necessary. But at the same time, a process is necessary.

What I mean is, if they write something down and 12 seconds later you tell them what they wrote down, they will assume you somehow saw what they wrote down.

So you need a process (even though you don’t need a process) to put some temporal distance from them writing down the word, and to give them something else to focus on.

So if I just had you write down the name of your favorite stuffed animal, I might have you imagine saying the name out loud. Then I might have you picture yourself back at a young age walking into your bedroom, noticing details about the room and then picking up the stuffed animal and saying its name. When that doesn’t work, I might ask you to imagine a man dressed in black breaks into your childhood bedroom at night and pulls your stuffed animal from your arms and hops out the window. You chase after him and come to a cliff with a raging fire down below. The man in black stands at the edge of the cliff and tosses this stuffed animal—was it a bear? oh… an octopus—he tosses this stuffed octopus over the cliff. You run to the edge and look down and see the octopus growing smaller as it falls into the flames. And you say its name. No, you shout its name. Tears rolling down your face. Imagine seeing that and shouting that name for me as the octopus falls into the fire. You’re shouting… guh...Gigglepants? No… Mr. Gigglepuss??

Now, maybe you don’t want to traumatize the imagined childhood version of your spectator like that, but you can see how giving them a process—in this case one of ratcheting up the emotion tied to the thought of word—would give them something else to focus on and consider beyond just, “I guess he saw what I wrote down.”

Those, I believe, are the two fundamental concepts when you want to peek something a spectator wrote:

  1. Get the writing and peeking out of the way before going into the details of what you’re going to do.

  2. Have an interesting process to walk them through.

I’ve found that to solve most of the issues with peeking information.

Now, there are still bad peeks and bad peek wallets and stuff like that. That’s a conversation for another day. I’m just pointing out that I don’t believe the concept of peeking itself is flawed.

Spex Mix: A Minor Tweak

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There’s a mistake I see magicians make quite frequently, and it goes like this…

They need to get a card or cards in a specific position, but they want to have the spectator shuffle the cards first. So the spectator shuffles, then hands the deck back to the magician. The magician spreads the deck in front of himself and says, “Okay, these look pretty well mixed.” And in that process he culls out the card he needs or otherwise manipulates it back to the top of the deck.

This is fairly standard technique, and I’m sure it flies by a lot of people. But from some old “suspicion testing” we once did, I also know that it can pique people’s suspicion.

You can see Craig Petty doing what I’m talking about at 1:20 in the video below. (I find myself often referring to a Craig Petty video when I have something to comment on. This isn’t because I take issue with what he’s doing any more than I do with most magicians. It’s just because Craig puts himself out there performing more than any other magician—so he provides more content to comment on.)

Here’s the thing, you can’t have the spectator shuffle the deck and then take it back and spread it towards yourself. This is antithetical to the point of having them shuffle in the first place.

Yes, but what I’m doing is looking to see that they’re well mixed.

Okay. But that’s not your concern, so why would you be looking at the cards?

If my goal is to demonstrate that I can deal a royal flush from any mixed deck of cards, I don’t have to assure myself that the cards are well mixed before I start. I shouldn’t give a shit whether they are or not. But I need you to know they’re well mixed.

So when I need to spot some cards and get them in place, I need to do it under the guise of showing you the deck. Are you happy that these are well mixed?

But there’s a problem with this. Asking if you are “happy that the deck is mixed well” or something like that is a bit of a nonsensical question. What does it even mean to a spectator? If someone asked you, “Are you happy the Yahtzee dice were well mixed in the cup?” You would think, Yeah. I mean, I guess. What are you even talking about? You asked me to shake the cup and I shook it 🤷‍♂️

The question itself is a little strange, so you end up drawing attention to the moment in a way that can feel odd.

Here’s what I do instead. After they shuffle, I take the deck back, turn it over and spread it to them (although I can still see the cards, of course). “Does that look well mixed now? It’s not like… the aces are all gathered together in one area or anything like that, yes?”

You see what I’m doing? At first, I’m asking them if the deck seems well mixed generally. But then I’m giving them something specific to look for as an example of a deck that wasn’t well mixed.

“Is your salad well-tossed, sir?”

Huh, what? I guess.

“Like, the croutons are evenly dispersed, yes?”

Oh, yeah. They’re fine, thank you.

By giving the spectator something specific to look for, I’m empowering them to answer the question with confidence.

This reinforces that the deck is really mixed, gives a reason for me to spread it in front of them, and occupies their mind with a little task, so they’re not focusing on what I’m doing.

If you’re looking to see that the aces are dispersed throughout the deck, I can easily cull the diamonds out without you noticing.

Of course, if I was doing a trick where I needed to cull the aces, I wouldn’t direct you to look for them specifically. Instead, I’d say something like, “And you’re happy the cards are well mixed. There’s not, like, a big string of diamonds right in a row or anything like that, yes?”

I know this probably seems like a “little thing,” but powerful magic is all about accounting for these little things.

Mailbag: Enigma Thoughts

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Hey Andy, there's a huge hype about this app. I don't have it yet, but I'm familiar with the method. I read the whole thread on the Magic Cafe.

And I believe you don't have it yet either, but when you do, I'd like to suggest a test, maybe between Enigma and Wikitest, that is: a thought-of word vs. a word searched + thought of.

Or perhaps Enigma vs. Billet Peek: A thought-of word vs. a word that was written down, but with good presentation like yours, it'll sound like a thought-of word after a week.

Or it can be whichever test you think makes more sense. Even in my country, they're discussing whether this is only amazing for magicians and that regular folks wouldn't notice a difference. —DM

It’s something I’ll consider. Because of the expense of testing (it’s $2000 for the smallest test size we do, and closer to $5000 on average) we try not to test just one trick against another, but more-so one concept against another. So if we’re lucky, we can come up with some conclusions that are more broadly useful.

Rather than comparing Enigma to Wikitest—which have enough differences that it would be difficult to necessarily pinpoint which specific difference is responsible for any measured change in spectator reaction—we might want to do something like comparing Enigma to Enigma. What I mean is, we might test Enigma in a standard way and then test it for a different cohort of people where they think of their word, write it down, it’s placed aside in a wallet, and then we perform Enigma on them with that word. So we’d be going through the steps of using a peek wallet, but doing so unnecessarily. This could give us some data about how much (or how little) the act of having them write a word down diminishes the impact of a mind-reading effect.

We could do it the other way as well. Perform a peek wallet routine for a group, then for a different group perform a peek wallet routine, but unnecessarily put the Enigma restrictions on that performance: the magician knows the type of the word, the general length of the word, where vowels are in the word, and potentially other details about letters in the word.

We could then determine what is more destructive to the impact of a mind-reading routine—the spectator having to write the word down or having limitations to the type of word they’re thinking of and having to elicit other details about the word?

This is more theoretical at this point. Because we’re now talking about four different groups of test subjects. Each would have to be at least 40 members per group to draw some good conclusions. And mind-reading routines are best tested one-on-one—so now we’re talking many days of testing, closer to $7,000 for test subjects alone, and most magicians would still shrug their shoulders.

One thing I can say without testing is that if you haven’t been able to pull off impressive mindreading with some kind of peek, that’s a flaw with your abilities and performance, not with the concept of peeking. Buy Enigma because it’s another tool that gives you alternative ways of performing and presenting mindreading. But if you buy it thinking, “Well this is the thing that will finally get me good reactions with my mindreading,” you’re going to be disappointed. You’re just going to fumble around and fuck this up too.

Don’t forget the Green Grass Test when looking at a new method to achieve an old effect. What if Enigma was the way we had been reading minds for 50 years? What if peeks didn’t exist? Then one day someone said, “Guess what guys, I’ve come up with a way to allow the spectator to think of ANY word, large or small. It can even be something personal, a nickname, or a made-up word. You don’t have to know how long it is or where any vowels are. Or anything about any of the letters. In fact, you can do it with a full name or phrase or even a picture. There’s no fishing. And you don’t need a phone. All they have to do is write the thing down to cement it in their mind and you can tell them what it is.” That technique (the one we all pooh-pooh as tired and dull) would be the exciting one. So just keep perspective on these things.

I’m going to get Enigma, and I’m going to use the shit out of it, I’m sure, but I’ll note one final thing… I have two friends who got in on the pre-sale of this and have been using it. In discussing it with them, I was saying how one of the reasons it’s so powerful to magicians is because we’re not used to this sort of mindreading where nothing is written down. But laypeople (if they haven’t seen much mindreading) won’t appreciate that difference. So maybe it would make sense to use Enigma as a follow-up to a traditional peek.

Both of my friends started doing that. And both independently came to the same conclusion: it’s the wrong way around. You do Enigma first. Then, maybe immediately after, or maybe some days later you try a “more advanced” version of the idea. Here they can think of any word, or movie title, or friend from grade school or whatever your presentation is. Now you can go into a process that is much less “letter-focused” than Enigma is, you can dip into emotions and visuals related to the thing they're thinking of. Because now the process is just smoke.

That’s likely how I will use Enigma in the future. Not instead of a peek. But as a layer of a larger “story” about mindreading.

You also might want to save it as an “out” for a peek. If someone says to you, “You must have seen what I wrote down.” You insist you didn’t.

“You think I saw what you wrote down? You think that mindreading is about secretly just looking at what someone wrote? Wow. That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Okay, sure, we can do it without writing anything down. But the process takes a little longer. Especially with someone whose mind is as jumbled as yours. If you don’t have something concrete to focus on—like the word you wrote down—I’m going to need to have you focus in other ways. But sure, let’s try it….”

Until September...

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To supporters: Remember that thing I talked about in the email I sent to you at the beginning of the month? You have until the end of this month (August) to sign up for it.

This is the final post of August. Regular posting will resume on Monday, Sept. 4th. The next issue of the Love Letters newsletter will appear in supporter’s email boxes on the first of next month.

By the way, as you might have noticed from the previous paragraph, there is a slight change in the posting schedule that will be starting next month. Rather than new posts starting on the first of the month, they will start on the first Monday of the month.

There will still be the same amount of postings (three weeks a month) but those posts will start on a day (Monday) rather than a date (the 1st).

A note from Allan Kronzek inspired by last Thursday’s Big Game Fishing post:

When you first posted your fix to AK-47 (based on my Think of One) I started using it in my original routine.  And still do.  But here’s another approach to the red/black fish.  No card is put on the table.  I simply say, “It’s a black card.”  If correct, continue as usual.

If not, I continue, “Really?  Not a black card?  Not a club?  Not the Nine of Clubs?”  I seem genuinely puzzled and ask them to picture the card or repeat it silently. Then the answer comes to me.  “Oh, geez, no wonder.  I’m surprised. Nobody ever thinks of the Six of Hearts!” or whatever their card.  This comes as a complete surprise—especially since you’re naming the suit and value—and pretty much negates what came before, making it seem like an intentional tease.  I find it as strong as a direct hit. 

This is similar to the idea discussed in Big Game Fishing (and the original TweAK-47 post), but without the physical commitment. I can see this going over well too.

I think the interesting—kind of counterintuitive—idea with both of these concepts is that normally with fishing, you try to brush past any NOs you get. But for these techniques to work, you need to double-down on your mistakes and draw attention to them. And by doing so, in retrospect, it will look like, as Allen says, an “intentional tease.” But it only looks intentional (and not like scrambling) if you play into your mistake.

Think of it like this, imagine you came downstairs in the morning and your wife said, “What’s your plan for tonight?” And you said, “Oh, nothing really.”And then she said, “Nothing?” And you replied, “Nah, just watch some TV.” And she said, “You don’t know what today is?” And then it hits you, it’s your anniversary. If you immediately say, “Oh, of course, it’s our anniversary. No…right…I remembered… we’re going to do something for our anniversary.” Then it seems like you forgot it, and now you’re trying to pretend you didn’t.

But if you realize what day it is and say, “Hmmm… I mean… it’s August 21st. So what? There’s absolutely nothing special about that day. If I listed the top 1000 moments in my life, I bet that none of them happened on August 21st. Oh, no… wait… what am I thinking. One important event in my life did happen on August 21st. That was the day I got a free bookmark from the public library. But besides that bookmark, I can’t think of ANYTHING good that ever happened on this day.”

By leaning into it, your small miss seems like the beginning of a premeditated misdirect. I’m sure there are other uses for this principle as well.

There’s a thread on the Magic Cafe that’s stirring up some drama about a new trick called OCEAN. The issue seems to primarily be with this statement from the trailer…

Now, as it turns out, the card the spectator names is forced.

So some people have an issue with the statement that the card is “freely named.”

Which… of course they do. Because the card being forced is the opposite of what “freely named” means.

“Freely named” doesn’t mean, “not at gunpoint.”

There are some people who try to defend this statement by saying that magic ads are written from the spectator’s perspective.

This is not really true and has never been true and suggests a complete flawed understanding of magic advertising.

Sure, the basic description of what the spectator experiences is from their perspective:

The magician covers the silver ball with a cloth and just by repeating the magic words, the ball magically floats in the air!

Now, we all understand the ball doesn’t “magically” “float” “just by repeating the magic words.”

But we accept these things and put them in the proper context because they’re describing the effect.

But when you start describing the conditions of the effect, then you’re speaking to the magician’s experience, not the spectators.

If I wrote an ad for the zombie ball which said:

  • Ball really floats!

  • No little stick connected to the ball!

And then you got it and realized the ball appeared to float because of a little stick connected to it, I couldn’t fall back on the idea that ads are written “from the spectator’s perspective.” That would make me an asshole.

If “the ad is written from the spectator’s perspective” was a defense, then you could claim any fucking thing you wanted in the ad because the spectator’s perspective isn’t supposed to include our methods.

The goal with a magic trick is that, from the “spectator’s perspective,” no card is ever forced. From the “spectator’s perspective” no thread is ever used. From the “spectator’s perspective” all decks are normal.

But you don’t get to put that shit in your ad unless it’s actually true.

“Freely” is a word that describes a condition of an effect. It’s there for magicians. For example, I don’t need to tell a spectator to “freely select” a card, because the concept of “selection” implies freedom.

There is an odd thing in magic where people feel it’s okay to write their ads in ways that are designed to fool the people spending money on the product. That’s weird, right? We’re not selling boner pills or hair growth supplements. The attitude shouldn’t be: What can I get away with saying?

The issue is, most people writing magic ads are terrible communicators and shitty copywriters. So it’s hard for them to write an ad that attracts people without bullshitting them a little bit. And magicians are such pussies that they’ll still buy products from dishonest companies time after time. So what does the company have to lose?

Years ago, I offered the Good Glommkeeping Seal of Approval. I will offer a similar service now for free. If you’re releasing a product, and you’re not sure if your advertising is fair, I’ll take a look at it before it goes live and give you my seal of approval and offer any suggestions on a better way to phrase something if you feel the only way to write about it is to be sketchy. I always thought magic ads having an independent 3rd party verification seal of approval would be a valuable thing in an industry where ads really can’t tell you exactly what you’re buying, however no one ever took me up on it. 🤷‍♂️ But the offer still stands.

Okay, darlings. Bye, bye, so long, farewell

Dustings 93: Douchebag Edition

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On Twitter this week, noted dipshit, Uri Geller, tried to present props from an old X-Files episode as evidence of alien life…

By the way, here’s my take on Uri Geller. I think anyone who pretends to be real is a complete loser. His big innovation in performing was to be so fucking boring that people assumed maybe he was legit. “Certainly no one doing this for entertainment would be such a dullard, right?” His most memorable tv appearance was one where he totally flopped. He’s spent his entire life feeling like he’s not “enough”—something probably instilled in him when he was a child. Any attention or admiration he’s received has been from pretending to be something he’s not—a psychic, an insider to the alien cover-up, etc.—and it likely tears him up inside, if he has the capacity for any self-reflection.

His life is a grim deal. Imagine being an opportunist star-fucker who has devoted your life to chasing fame, and you have 1/20th the Instagram followers as some Z-list chick from the umpteenth season of a cheesy reality show who is most notable for selling her farts.

Almost as pathetic as Uri himself is the weird simping that has happened for him in the magic community in the past few years. “Actually… Uri was pretty good!” No, he wasn’t and isn’t. As a person, he’s a creep. As a performer, he’s a total snooze.

Paul McKee Has Been Kicked Out of the GLOMM

Whenever I read an article about a magician fucking children (which is something that happens enough for me to start this sentence with “whenever” rather than “once” or “both times”) I always search my email box for the name and pray this person isn’t going to be a Jerx reader or GLOMM elite member.

Fortunately, this has never been the case. Unlike the IBM or SAM, I keep sex criminals out of my ranks. And this newest depraved monster posing as a magician is someone completely unfamiliar to me.

The Echo, a Liverpool newspaper and alliteration fan-site, reports:

“Kids' entertainer 'Professor Paulos' unmasked as 'predatory paedophile'“

With typical headline-writer dignity, you can tell they were a breath away from writing something like: Professor Paulos picked a peck of prepubescent prey for perverted pleasures.

Professor Paulos is the stage name which Paul McKee used when performing for children.

McKee was convicted of 13 sex offenses and abusing seven girls, including toddlers, over a 24-year period.

According to the article, One woman left the courtroom in floods of tears saying "I'm going to pay someone to kill him, I want the fucking bastard dead" as the judge passed sentence.

Well, good news, it looks like the check cleared—at least partially— as a couple of weeks later someone kicked the shit out of him in prison, breaking his jaw, ribs, and vertebrae.

Eat shit, Mckee. You’re out of the GLOMM.