Reading for the holidays

CardsSeveral years ago, for personal and financial reasons, I got rid of most of my paperbound magic books, manuscripts and lecture notes. I’ve never actually regretted it, as it served a purpose. I made a few bucks and I got rid of many things I would never again use.

Of course, there were some items that I wished I hadn’t sold. Among these were the four manuscripts on riffle shuffle technique written by Karl Fulves. Recently, I was lucky enough to acquire a hardbound version of them. Fulves never released any hardbound items to my knowledge, except the Daly Notebooks and a reprint of one of the Hofzinser books. The book that I acquired was from the library of a gentleman in the south and he had the four manuscripts professionally bound. It is absolutely beautiful and in perfect condition. Sometimes you have to get lucky.

My project for the holidays is to begin learning the Stevens” control and to continue polishing my Zarrow shuffle. I actually enjoy this sort of thing and don’t find the practice boring or tedious.




“It just flies past the layman”

No it doesn’t and you probably are fooling as many people as this poor soul:

Sucking_in_gut

Give you audience some credit. They do more than sit around and drool all day!

Take care………

Im21




Magic Trick Marketing 102

SleazySalesman2The Weekly Magic Failure wrote an interesting article recently entitled 10 Rules To Market Magic. Roland was right on point in virtually every instance. It somewhat reminded me of an article I wrote several years ago entitled Fuck Me, I’m A Magician. That article was written towards the end of the Cogitations disaster when I continued to insist that the perpetrator (and we all know who that was) failed to deliver what was promised and so many fools on the Magic Café kept insisting "I got my money’s worth". That was never the point. Anyway, that article seems to have gotten lost in a recent transfer. We’ll live.

I think Roland left out two items which have become somewhat indispensable if a trick is to succeed in the current market:

11. Sell lots of your product on a pre-issue basis and then push the delivery date back month after month, all while promising more and better effects. Even as it becomes apparent to anyone with half a brain that something is seriously wrong, there will be many fools at the Café saying that they are willing to wait for this life changing trick. Obviously, when it finally comes out and is nothing but a stale rehash of an existing trick or a totally unworkable abomination, the same morons will tell the world how pleased they are that they waited.

12. Troll the forums as the inventor/publisher and immediately pounce on any negative or lukewarm review explaining that the reviewer is an ignoramus incapable of appreciating the sheer genius he holds in his unworthy hands. The reviewer will immediately be accosted for having the intelligence of an amoeba by the same group of fools (see 11) that want to just smell a real magicians jock. If Brooks had a scintilla of integrity or desire to keep his forums fair, he would preclude authors/developers from commenting on their own material. Of course, that will never happen!!

So now you have everything you need to go out and make a fortune as a magic inventor.

You are welcome.




Those Dumb Asses at Bing

dumb_assFor those that may not be aware, Bing is Microsoft’s pitiful excuse for a search engine. Bing also supplies the search data for Yahoo. Put these two together and you have a crap pie for sure. Fortunately, very few people that I know use either Bing or Yahoo. For about three weeks this site and several others have shown a “malware warning” in both the Bing and Yahoo search results. In all fairness to Bing, there was a rogue JavaScript that we removed and not only have we checked it daily, but out host has done likewise. It is gone, but they continue to have the warning! Here’s the clean bill of health:

image

I have tried to get them to remove the warning, but the only method is an online form which I am supposed to fill out and if they have not done anything in 30 days I can fill it out again. (Incidentally, Google’s time frame is 2 gays or less – is there any wonder they are kicking their ass?) They won’t even tell you what they see. Their forums are never monitored and are full of spam and other crap. I apologize for the warning, but it’s liable to be there for a long time as this group is that incompetent as any I have ever dealt with and that is a huge statement.

im21

 

 

This has nothing to do with what I just wrote above, but in looking for an appropriate graphic I ran across this. I knew he was a dumb ass, but he’s a serious, industrial grade dumb ass.

Tiger-is-a-dumb-ass




A Magic Conundrum

In the i/m world there are certain truths that we can depend on more than 99% of the time. For instance:

You can bet that the drivers of certain types of cars, i.e. Escalades, BMWs and Jaguars are Road Dicks.

Likewise the drivers of Jeeps and Hummers are Super Road Dicks.

There are enough minor exceptions to keep these from becoming laws. For example, I happen to know a single BMW driver and a Jeep driver that are not in their respective categories. Escalade’s, BMWs and Hummers have a purity Adolf Hitler would admire. If you drive one, believe me, you’re a Richard.

I was thinking about this when I went on the Cafe and the other day. It seemed like every time I said to myself that guy is a moron, he would have thousands of posts. In the brief time I was there I began to look for frequent users of the Cafe to find one that wasn’t an idiot. I struck out. And I missing something? Are all Cafe heavy posters dumb as a box of rocks? Is this a law or is this a truth?




Bless his heart

I see Glenn Bishop is back blogging.

UH, Uh, Uh……..never mind! That fruit hangs way too low.