Dustings #126

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The GLOMM needs help from Jerx: Belgium.

I don’t want to throw around names without confirmation, but I assume the Belgian magic scene isn’t so vast that someone there wouldn’t know. Can anyone there confirm that there’s someone behind a magic club in Belgium who is also… this fuckup? A guy whose excuse for raping an 11-year-old was that he “fell in love” with her.

(BTW, “love” requires emotional and intellectual reciprocity. So saying you “fell in love” with an 11-year-old is not the justification for having sex with a child you might imagine it to be. It’s like saying, “Hey, I’m not just some monster. I’m also a fucking moron too.”)

Anyway, I’d like confirmation that this is definitely the same guy before I tee off on him more. From the one person who tipped me off to this, the Belgian Magic Federation is well aware of this guy’s past, and yet he has also been “coaching children” for them. So I’m having a hard time reconciling this information.

No, Really Fool Us

I had an idea for a tv show. It would be like Fool Us, but instead of Penn & Teller, the judges would just be two reasonably intelligent adults. The goal would not to be just to fool them, but to perform a trick that left them with no workable theory about what you might have done. So they wouldn’t be able to write it off as sleight-of-hand or gimmicked objects. I believe this would be significantly more difficult than fooling Penn & Teller.

A number of people have written in to suggest something like this for the Twickle trick from Tuesday.

Sets like these can be found on Amazon for just a few dollars, and you could easily melt or glue the hands into the positions needed.

I think it’s a good option. Part of me prefers the visual of the full arm creeping out, as in the Little Hand effect. (You don’t need five of those gimmicks, because you don’t need the embedded magnet and coin. You just need five doll arms, which must be available though some craft store or something.)

But the nice thing about these is they’re readily available, and the number of fingers pointing out would be more immediately obvious than the small doll arm.