I'm on the road from July 12th to August 17th.
No physical item orders will be shipped until I return on August 18th.
Digital products will still be emailed during this time
-Louie Foxx Dismiss
Never pass up an interesting photo! Last week I was doing roving magic at an event and they had an reptile attraction at it. In my roving set I was doing spoon bending and did it for the people running the reptile exhibit.
I had them put the spoon in the alligator’s foot like it was the mentalist and it ended up being a fun picture!
Stuff like this is good social media content, but also something that the event loved and they used the picture!
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.
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!
What I think it fun about this is that in the middle there’s a display of the deck mixed before they end up back in order. In my stage show when there’s video projection I do a shuffle sequence where the deck stays in order, however I’m currently not doing the mixed display. I think that this is interesting for magicians, I don’t know if non-magicians appreciate the it.
One thing I realized when posting on social media is that a lot of standard techniques that work in an in person show don’t hold up to video. One example is using an Elmsley Count of four of the same cards, but you’re passing one card off as two. You say you have four queens, and count through them, and don’t call out the suits, so one suit shows twice. This doesn’t hold up to repeated watching.
In the trick above at the end you see all four suits, however you I’m only showing three cards. The solution is something that I stumbled on and it’ll be in the February issue of Vanish Magazine.
It’s a small thing and won’t improve or apply to every trick where you’re passing of the same card as two different cards using an Elmsley Count, but it’s a nice thing to be able to add when it makes sense!
I love finding old magic, and recently I found something really cool (I”ll post about it another day), but inside of that there was a folded up piece of paper. This is from the mid 1940’s and it had the typed routine for Elmer Applegate’s The Story of One Card Pete!
This is a routine for a six card repeat style where you have five cards, take away one and still have five. It’s an interesting routine, and the patter is rhyming. Jeff McBride has a really cool version of it and worth trying to track down the video of.
Another day, another Inject 2 outage! We’re just over 3 weeks into 2025 and this is the 3rd time that Inject 2 has stopped working. The first two times it was down about a week each.
Once again, this highlights the problems with internet based apps and sort of apps in general. If a magic app stops working, there’s not much you can do. It’s also hard to run a backup method with an app. You can’t have someone type into Google AND write it on a piece of paper at the same time.
The now frequent outages can affect performances:
I’m appalled that Greg doesn’t immediately let the major magic shops know when Inject 2 is down so they can pause sales. It’s still available at Penguin and Vanishing Inc AND Greg is at MagiFest, where both companies are right now!
Finally, Greg Rostami has talked about this “back up plan” for Inject 2 for almost a month now, but hasn’t started to implement it. He says it will take a month to do, well guess what, if he started it the first time, it’d almost be up and running.
Here’s my theory: If Greg switches Inject 2 to another server or whatever the backup plan is, he’ll have to relist it as a new app. That means current users will have to rebuy it, and he’ll have to deal with refunds from people who just bought it.
I hope that the app does get back up and reliably running as many magicians like it, but it teaches magicians that you can’t rely on technology that’s out of your control.
