A few days ago I posted a video of a packet trick where 4 one dollar bills turned into 4 two dollar bills. It’s essentially a packet card trick with dollar bills. Turning $1’s into $2’s is alright, but I got to playing with a slightly different arrangement that I like more:
The bills changing into different bills makes the trick feel a little less like the same trick four times. Also the ending with the hundred dollar bill seems like more of a finish to the trick.
A few weeks ago we went to see a silent movie with the music played by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. This show was sold out and it was a ton of fun.
When watching the movie one of the things that surprised me was the length of time that the title/dialog cards were shown for. It felt like they were either shown way too long or not long enough to read them.
When I was a kid in a high school journalism class we were told that you were supposed time yourself reading the words and add two seconds and that was how long you displayed them.
What does this mean for magic?
Well when you talk, especially telling jokes you need to make sure the whole (or most of) audience has caught up to the end of the set up before you do the punchline. For a magic effect, you need to display at the end long enough for the whole audience to realize what happened and process the magic effect.
We bought a house a few weeks ago and are moving. One of the fun things about moving is finding things that I had forgotten that I had. This tie clip turned up!
This tie clip belonged to Joseph Dunninger! I have that a few other things that were his. I need to figure out a way to display it, for now it’ll sit on my desk!
For fun I’m working through the book Packet Tricks by Jerry Mentzer. This was published in 1982, so kinda when packet tricks as a trend were becoming really popular.
It’s really interesting to see where these tricks and techniques came from. The Phil Goldstein stuff is intesesting as I see the roots of some of his later stuff in the two tricks he has in the Packet Tricks book.
I’ve been posting some of these of TikTok, and you can see them and other vintage magic tricks and routines there. Plus I post some other stuff I think of on there.
If you’re not on TikTok, here’s some of the videos from the book Packet Tricks:
These are fun to learn, and I think it’s important to learn things for fun. It can be a challenge balancing my passion for magic with the job of performing magic.
Yesterday I posted about a thing I was playing with using money instead of playing cards for packet tricks. I’ll give a walkthrough of how to do it, but first here’s the video of the routine:
Needed: Three one dollar bills and three two dollar bills. These must be crisp, and the fake movie money works great for this.
Set Up: From the top down: A single one dollar bill, then the 3 two dollar bills and the remaining 2 one dollar bills.
Working: Show the packet of bills face down and then turn them face up. Do an Elmsley Count to show what appears to be the faces of 4 one dollar bills.
For the first change you will do another Elmsley Count to show that one of the one dollar bills has turned into a two dollar bill.
Repeat that, doing another Elmsley Count for the second one dollar bill to change into a two dollar bill, but this time put it the final bill bottom instead of the top of the stack.
For the third change you will do another Elmsley Count, however this time when you get to the single one dollar bill outjog it about an inch. Set the final bill (two dollar) on top of the stack.
Strip out the one dollar bill with your right hand and show it on both sides. As that his happening your left hand buckles the bottom bill creating a gap between it and the rest of the bills above it. Your right hand puts the one dollar bill into this gap above the lowermost bill in your left hand.
For the final bill to change, simply do a modified Elmsley Count to show four two dollar bills on both sides. Do the first two counts Elmsley Count, leaving you with the block of bills in your right hand and 2 two dollar bills in your left hand. Your left hand spreads its two bills and turns over to show both sides. The left hand then puts the two bills UNDER the bills in your right hand. The whole packet of bills is then flipped face down and Elmsley Counted to show four backs.
That’s it, a change of 4 one dollar bills to 4 two dollar bills. Nothing really ground breaking there, but I think this will be a stepping stone for something better…I hope!
This isn’t a new idea, but doing packet tricks with money seems like a good way to get away from card tricks while still doing card tricks. I’m aware of a few of packet style tricks that use paper money that have been sold or published in the past.
I bought a pack of the fake “movie” money on Amazon and started playing around with what can be done. Here’s the first thing that I learned, the modern US currency has color variations on most of the bills, so it’s really hard to do anything because anything hidden hast to be perfectly squared. Also, unlike cards the different amounts of money doesn’t all have the same back. Then there’s the problem with the bills needing to stay crisp!
The solution to the first problem is was easy, use $1’s and $2’s as they have the same color edges. Emotionally changing a one dollar bill to a two dollar bill doesn’t hit as hard as turning a one into a one hundred. However two dollar bills are interesting as people thing they’re rare, so there could be something there.
Well, I can’t say that I’m surprised that this has happened with Inject 2. Here’s the latest from Greg Rostami about Inject 2:
Greg is going a good job of spinning the issue with Google on a competitor reporting him, when the bigger issue is how fake Google page will work going forward. Blaming a competitor on something he was doing that technically he shouldn’t have been doing is like getting made at someone turning you in for a crime you committed. The fake Google page was always not “legit” and the very least (in my opinion) it infringed on Google’s trademark.
Supposedly Greg has this backup plan that he says he hasn’t implemented because it would take a month to put up. If he had implemented it at the first time that Google pulled Inject 2 over a month ago, we’d be up and running. However running it on another server or whatever doesn’t solve the problem with the fake Google page infringing (in my opinion) on their trademark and still open to being shut down by Google even if it’s not on their server.
Inject 2 can do a lot more than just peek what someone Google searches, however those take a bit of work to get set up (or at least they used to), where the Google Peek was a plug and play thing and probably what most were bought for as it’s easy.
I’m very curious what the future holds for Inject 2. I find this whole thing very fascinating and it highlights the HUGE problems with internet based apps, which is you can’t control if they work or not. Apps that live on your phone are a bit more reliable, but still have some issues that are out of your control, like your phone’s OS auto updating and your app is not longer compatible or has a lot of glitches.
If you use apps, you need to figure out your backup plan for what to do if the app stops working, or worse yet stops working mid trick!
On this episode we welcome all the way over zoom from France, Etienne McGinley. Etienne talks with us about his path to performing and how watching Bill Irwin and David Shiner changed his view on how he wanted to perform.
We talk about his evolution as a performer and how the grind of cruise ships wore on him. We also discuss how a chance encounter led him to getting accepted into clown college. A really great and in depth conversation with a fantastic performer
