Smart Magic for Clever People

You might not know this but when I was a bit healthier, I went on a wild road trip to visit as many of the magic shops in the UK as possible; brick and mortar shops which advertised themselves as selling magic as a main product. I’m explaining that because some of them were kind of 50/50 magic shop and joke shop, magic shop and costume shop, or in one specific case, magic shop and cheap jewellery (you know who you are).
As these visits went on I took more and more footage at each and started making a documentary series about them, until I got utterly fed up of the whole thing and stopped. Still, I made it to about 32 shops, and put out 11 episodes (plus a few minisodes). I still occasionally get people asking if I’m going to put the rest out.
I got backstage access to quite a few places, including the set of the World Magic Shop Wizard Product Review during their live studio audience years.

And recently, while archiving a few Wizard FX DVDs, I put together something that isn’t often talked about.

Continue reading “Wizard Product Revue
or The Alakazam Cinematic Universe”

Recently I posted about coming second in a local magic competition. Obviously I tried to make it interesting but I thought it was quite fair to the winner. Maybe too fair. Anyway, imagine my surprise when the secretary of the club called this morning to ask me to edit it slightly. Normally I resist this kind of censorship, but I did it as a favour to him, and the winner of the contest, since we are technically all friends.

Anyway, the only change he wanted was to take down the photo, which apparently wasn’t public and remove the name of the winner, as the club secretary is apparently a scared little piss baby who doesn’t want a local competition squabble to follow the winner around in case he gets famous. Reminds me of the time this happened before, about 20 years ago, when I posted a very unflattering review of my ex-girlfriend’s academic rigour. My livejournal apparently followed her around for about a decade hindering her medical career because I had written “if you ever find your self with a doctor called S******* N********* the two words which could save your life are Second Opinion.” Seems her name was so rare and her internet presence was so tiny that my blog questioning her future competence was the first thing that came up in a Google search. The last time she called was after I had shortened her name to a four letter nickname and made the page private, because Google’s cached page was still the #1 result for her full name. Really there wasn’t much I could do at that point, so I just told her to take it up with Google under the “right to be forgotten laws” which had come in recently. Obviously what I wrote about the competition was nothing like “this doctor will kill you” but if he does make it big, the tabloids will mine anything for a scandal. Now I’m not saying I’m holding back specifically so that I can cash in like a parasite when the papers are desperate for dirt on this guy, but if I was going to do that, I’d probably do some acrostic shenanigans to hide his name in this post. Good thing I’m nowhere near smart enough to pull off a thing like that.

Spirit slates are a very old magician’s tool. I say that, they’re sort of a mentalists tool really. Or arguably they’re a tool used by fake mediums… which is to say they’re a tool used by mediums. In short it’s a pair of framed blackboards (slates) which are shown blank and placed together, with a piece of chalk is sandwiched in the gap between formed by the depth of the frame itself. These are then held or bound in place and after a little theatrics, the slates are opened up again and the chalk has written the answer to the medium’s or the mentalist’s or the magician’s questions on the boards.

They are a classic of magic. And now they’re back! in pog form!

Continue reading “Slated
or The Spirit Of The Thing”