It’s been a few days since my last show on the ship, my next shows are tomorrow. In my show I use a orange for my drawing routine and a banana for my whip routine. You’re not really supposed to be bringing fruit on/off the ship, so I get those two while onboard.
One of the challenges can be that they’ll have something like bananas all week, but then they’re out the morning of my show, and I can’t get them. Typically, a day or two before my show, I’ll go down and grab what I need and keep them in my room. Then on the day of the show, if they have them out at breakfast and they look better than what’s in my room, I’ll upgrade my oranges and bananas.
This is one of the challenges of performing on cruise ships: if you need something or break something, it can be hard to source it. I try to travel with what I need to fix things or backups. For example, I do Promystic’s Color Match in my show, and I travel with a spare set in case one stops working.
In the second issue of The Bat Magazine from 1943 there’s a packet trick called Ah Nertz. Packet tricks didn’t really exist at that point, there were things like 3 card montes or tricks with the four aces, but nothing like post 1960’s packet tricks.
Here’s Ah Nertz as written:
If you think about the effect, this is an early version of twisting the aces.
I wanted to update the trick with a few modern moves, so here’s what I came up with:
One thing that the original lacked was showing all the cards going the same way. To do that I added a modified DM Move/2 for 4 Count. I also wanted a reveal of the one the upside down cards, but where you see all of the cards. That was accomplished with an Elmsley Count.
Here’s a walk through of the updated version of Ah Nertz:
What I think is interesting is that in theory you could theme the trick very easily with customizing the last card. It could be a trade show trick, “all the options for buying X got your head spinning…”. Or a story could easily be attached to it, like a kid who always felt different. Then the reveal on the final card ties it all together!
I think this trick’s premise is one of the hidden gems in The Bat magazine!
Right now, one of the trends in magic (that’s not mentalism) is being edgy. Magicians are trying to get away from the cheesy stereotype of a magic show.
No matter how edgy you think you are, you’ll never come close to this description of a magic show from the late 1700s!
That’s crazy! I’d like to know what it actually looked like.
I did have a trick (I think I published it) where I took a tooth out of my mouth, did a trick with it, and then put it back into my mouth, filling the previously empty gap in my smile. It was a weird trick.
On a TV appearance last week I did The Fortune Teller trick from my 2025 lecture notes. You can watch the appearance here:
What I like about this trick is that the moment you bring out the prop, the audience gets a hit of nostalgia. That makes it a trick that instantly connects with the audience.
Then my card routine with it has a three-reveal punch. The card routine I did in this TV spot is different from my stage routine, which wouldn’t work with this setup, with the host standing next to me.
Last week I popped by the Portland Juggling Festival’s public show. The show was a mix of different levels of performing experience, and lots of styles. Like a magic convention there are a lot of acts that were really arty and not really real world acts. They’re acts that I can’t imagine building a show out of, but could work in a variety show. Then there were the working acts, and you could really tell the difference between them and the acts that aren’t out there performing all the time. It’s a tightness in the show that I notice.
The headliner of the show was Jay Gilligan. He did an amazing act that solved what I think is one of the problems with a juggling act. That problem is that most juggling patterns really look the same to someone who doesn’t know juggling. Jay basically juggled 3 balls (he did more than that), but did them in very novel ways there were very different looking, even when it was just a basic 3 ball cascade.
His closer was juggling three balls in a cascade slowly and it was amazing! I don’t want to ruin the ending for you. It an amazing ending!
What Jay did was take something very standard and figure out a way to make it look very different. How can you do that with magic? They guy who invented the sponge bunnies did it when he turned balls into bunnies. Jonathan Burns did it with his cheese card trick. There’s a lot of room out there to reimagine standard magic. Go and do it!
I’ve wanted to make a snake basket for a long time. I think it’s from when I was a kid seeing Rich Block demo the Collector’s Workshop Kyber Kobra at a magic convention. This is one of the tricks I could never afford when I was a kid, and I honestly don’t think it’s something I could justify buying now when I can afford it.
Well, I wrote some code and made a layout and it works on an Arduino simulator!
The next step is actually building it, but I’m on the road for another week, so it’ll be at least that long before I can work on it. I have a feeling the moving it from the simulator to a real, physical thing will have some unforeseen challenges!
A few months ago I picked up Henry Harrius’s Refilled vanishing bottle (Corona version). It’s sat on my desk for a while and recently I read Wayne Dobson‘s vanishing bottle routine and kinda liked the idea. So I sat down and wrote out a routine for it.
The effect is: You have a bag and two bottle caps. One is selected and you remove the matching bottle from the bag! You tell the audience you’ll show them how you did the trick, you have two bottles. You take out the second bottle, then put it back into the bag and you crumple up the bag.
Here’s what I wrote:
Two bottle caps, a red coke one and a blue corona one. You’re going to pick one like this is a low budget remake of the matrix
The red cap, everything is revealed, the blue cap and I and you’ll learn nothing, just like high school.
Hold them in your hands and shake them like you’re playing craps, or the baby won’t stop crying. …clearly you don’t have a baby
Now blow on them for luck like you’re in vegas or a kid in the 1980’s who just wants to play super mario brothers
Toss me one.
Red, the coke bottle cap. Inside the bag I have a Coke BOTTLE!
Since you picked the red cap, that means you get to see inside the illusion. you can never go back, your life will be forever changed like going thru puberty or committing murder.
That turned dark
inside the bag I have a second bottle, so it doesn’t matter which you picked, just like voting.
However if you picked the other cap and we needed to keep the illusion, then we would have done it with only one bottle!
It’s not the best script ever, but it’s something to get it onstage and in front of an audience.
One thing I noticed is that I think the trick will play better if the vanishing bottle is the Coke bottle. It makes more sense to have that one disappear in the context of explaining the routine. So I just ordered one of those.
I think this routine could be a good lead into my Signed Coin in Bottle. This was published in Vanish Magazine a few years ago.
Right now is booking season for the summer of 2025 and I’m going a lot of booking conferences and trade shows. My absolute favorite trick to do at these is my Out For Beers trick.
This trick leaves buyers with an item that has been magically altered, that they can show people. More importantly, they trick still works when they bring people over to me who know what will happen in the trick!
This routine starts with a gag and ends with a trick where picture of a full pitcher of beer empties itself!
Out for Beers is $19 and includes free shipping in the USA!
If you order Out for Beers anytime in November 2024, I’ll throw in and extra 25 of the empty beer cards! You don’t need to do anything to get these added to your order, they’ll automatically be included!
I was playing with Joe Berg’s Nickel to Half Dollar and it’s an interesting gimmicked coin. Essentially it’s a coin that turns from a nickel into a half dollar. What I like about it is that the coin expands to the larger size. What I don’t like about it is the strange two handed grip you have to have on the nickel and that there are better ways to turn a nickel into a half dollar.
I came up with little transposition routine that uses the coin.
It’s not much, however I think the clean up at the end where I steal the the half shell off of the card is interesting and then allows me to show “both sides” of the Nickel to Half Dollar gimmick.
This is a video only trick, it really wouldn’t play in the real world as the Nickel To Half Dollar isn’t really practical to set and then properly hold with people watching you.
There’s a levitation illusion going around, and there’s something I don’t like about it. Before I go any further, the illusion is fine, there’s just a visual thing that I don’t like. If you can get past this, than it’s a great trick.
Here’s the style of levitation, I think the two pics below are different makers.
What I dislike is the cloth wrapped around the person floating. Specifically how it dangles on the end. This is also my issue with most chair suspension routines. The cloth really serves no purpose, aside from hiding the method.
I get that you can justify the cloth as it’s a magic cloth that makes people float…but then why isn’t all of the cloth floating and some of it dangling?
Yes, most levitations of a human have do deal with gravity. In my opinion the dangling of the hair and dress make the illusion look better visually. Where the cloth wrap doesn’t look anywhere are good as the person uncovered.
I understand that it’s not real magic, and you have to make concessions to hide the method. That’s a valid artistic choice, to have a purpose in your show for a levitation and due to venue limitations you need to use a method that you might not like to move the show forward.
Personally for me, I’d save the levitation for a theater where it can be done without the trade off of having to wrap the person with a cloth.
