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.
This is just a heads up to let you know that I’ll be out of town from March 18th, 2024 to April 8th, 2024. While I’m away, nothing will be shipped and nothing will be built/worked on until I return.
This week I started working on routine using some giant safety pins that I came across (read about them here). My initial plan was to see if I could make my close up linking pins routine work on stage with the the giant pins which are about 14 inches long.
The routine works onstage, but it needs more. It’s hard to justify the time it takes to bring someone onstage for a quick trick. I needed to build out the routine and add more.
I think that adding a thumb tie to the trick adds time and texture to the trick. The idea is after my normal linking pin routine, I would add the thumb tie using the giant pins as the “ring” that would normally go on and off my arms.
I’m thinking of using electrical tape for the tie as it’s easy to get almost anywhere. Method wise I’m thinking of using Irv Weiner’s Red Tape thumb tie, as I have all the stuff for it.
Here’s a packet trick from the 1980’s that I came across.
I think Nick Trost’s Mexican Monte is a pretty solid routine. Here’s me doing the routine and my thought on how to improve it:
It’s really a small change at the end, and I think Nick really nailed it with this one. I’d change the patter, but it’s good and worth checking out if you find one at a magic swap meet!
