After a few highly theoretical posts I thought I’d get back to some more hands on conjouriffic creativity, while also devising utterly pointless things.
You know, classic Stacy.
This post is about telephone cords as they existed 20 years ago, a modern fashion trend, and how if those two things had lined up closer there would be an absolute miracle at our fingertips.
This story begins with my favourite routine from the Paul Daniels show.
When I submitted this for the Pentacle Clubs video night the truncated title of the video “Cigarette through…” Appeared on screen and the club treasurer audibly groaned with disappointment “Cigarette through coin? Really?”
But it was actually cigarette through card, an altogether different concept because unlike cigarette through coin, which you might see done in the modern world with a crayon or a pencil or a rolled up banknote, the cigarette through card routine required the lit cigarette to burn a hole through the card which was then restored. Twice.
I’ve spent hours poring through the specifics of how thos routine works You couldn’t perform this effect in any commercial venue in the UK because it requires a lit cigarette¹.
I was recently going through some old DVDs and happened across the routine Son of Cellophane Surprise, which is another effect done with a lit cigarette. Relatively modern effect, but totally inappropriate for the modern world.
I wrote at length about how changes to currency is swiping methodological premises from modern conjuring and, while its the same concept, a smoking ban for the good of public health and the resulting reduction in tobacco addiction is probably a net positive despite the magical losses which come with it².
It makes me wonder though how many tricks would have been absolute bangers 50 years ago but because they weren’t invented back then, they will now never happen.
More to the point, how many magic tricks are trapped in a time paradox – unperformable in the modern world but reliant on a modern product for the method?
Well my friends, I discovered one.
Telephone Line
Several months ago I went for my biannual COVID vaccination booster at a local pharmacy and saw a rack of hair accessories which included these items:
I was looking at the hair accessories display because I was still seeking the perfect hair ties for my purse strings opener, so I already had magic on the brain. What stood out to me however was the shocking similarity between these hair ties and telephone handset cords.
Ah, for my younger readers³, its worth pointing out that before everything went digital and wireless telephones looked like this:
It pains me to my soul to call this an old timey telephone but I know in my heart that this is how many people will see it.
The interaction of these two items should be fairly obvious, the only problem being the mismatch in colour.
A quick glance online however reveals that these are available in a plethora of colours, including the ever coveted household phone beige:
So if you know somewhere that still uses a corded telephone and you get a coiled hair tie in the same colour, you can do a miraculous cut and restore, a variant on Paul Harris’s strange-os or simply twist the cord in a knot which you can then pull off and open into a loop.
If you don’t know anywhere that uses a corded telephone, this is entirely useless knowledge, unless you happen to invent a form of time travel, in which case why not grab a few of these hair ties before you set off. It could be the far less impressive equivalent of those movies where someone with knowledge of upcoming solar eclipses convinces a primitive culture that they have the power to block out the sun⁴. But… You know… Not as good.
¹ No one has really looked into the possibilities of vape based magic, other than the fact that most portable magicians smoke generators are basically the guts of a dismantled reusable vape. How long until Lloyd Barns does a DIY tutorial on turning an elf bar into a vapr watch?
² I am personally very happy that my mother has quit smoking, even though it now means I will never be able to perform any borrowed cigarette magic for her. I guess I had plenty of time to learn some before she quit and never did, but still.
³ Do I have younger readers? Probably not. Do I have any readers? Also no. But this means that I have a roughly equal spread of age demographics here, so why not cater to non existent gen-alpha readers to the same degree as non existent millennials? I’m totally skibidi with the rizzler. Ohio.
⁴ The prevalence of this exact occurrence in television and films from my childhood convinced me that solar eclipses are far more common than they in fact are. It’s like the old joke about quicksand not featuring as heavily in adult life as we were led to believe. In reality the chance of our intrepid colonialist heroes being captured and scheduled for a sacrifice on the exact right day and part of the world for a solar eclipse to interrupt proceedings is so slim, all those people would be dead. Sorry, Tin Tin.