There’s a wonderful old book, Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor, published in 1971. The cover describes the book:
A lifetime collection of favorite jokes, anecdotes, and limericks with copious notes on how to tell them and why.
I’m sure there is plenty here to offend those that are into that sort of thing and many of the jokes would probably qualify as Dad Jokes. Despite that, it has held up quite well and his choices of jokes to determine the intelligence of the audience is quite revealing.
That’s No Knick Knack
Old joke:
A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that the teller’s name is Patricia Whack. So he says, Ms. Whack, I’d like to get a loan to buy a boat and go on a long vacation.
Patti looks at the frog in disbelief and asks how much he wants to borrow.
The frog says $30,000.
The teller asks his name and the frog says that his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s OK, he knows the bank manager.
Patti explains that $30,000 is a substantial amount of money and that he will need to secure some collateral against the loan. She asks if he has anything he can use as collateral.
The frog says, Sure. I have this, and produces a tiny pink porcelain elephant, about half an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed.
Very confused, Patti explains that she’ll have to consult with the manager and disappears into a back office.
She finds the manager and says There’s a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000. He wants to use this as collateral” She holds up the tiny pink elephant. I mean, what the heck is this?
The bank manager looks back at her and says: It’s a knick knack, Patti Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man’s a Rolling Stone.
The point here is, if you want to work on some old jokes, plug the punch line into Google. Many times you will be surprised at the variations that pop up.
This Way Mr Peabody
When I was writing yesterday’s post I got to thinking of some long gone blogs and there are beaucoup. Some I really miss. Others I don’t and many I just don’t recall.
Of those in the first category, I fondly remember Jamie Grant’s Magic Friday. Tom Frank and his life adventures, The Magic Whack and a couple of others. Some blogs just quit one day, while others muddled along the reduced content and reduced quality, frequently with a resurrection post which never happened. Eventually gravity won (which it always does) and the blog sunk into the abyss.
This is a list from approximately 2006:
Ace of Spades Magic
Annabelle
At The Card Table
Bizarro
Dancing Screws
Diana Kimball
Escamoteurettes.com
Forces Unseen
Gordon Meyer
House of Mysteries
I, Magician
Japanjin
Jeff Stone
Jim Sisti
Lazy Magic
Magic Conversations
Magic Friday
Magic Whack
Mark Raven
Meir Yedid
Michael Ammar
Paul Daniels
Poolside Reflections
Quicker Than
Richard Kaufman
Richard Osterlind
Scoundrels Magazine
Shawn Farquhar
The Clog
Tom Frank
Unexpected Wonders
Wizard’s Ball
My favorite was Ye Olde Magick Blogge, which is no surprise to long time readers. This took me on a journey into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine – never any fun. It’s glacially slow, probably, in part, due to crawling nearly a trillion pages (over 860 billion web pages and 99 petabytes of data). Also, the interface was designed by the same person that gave us Microsoft’s Bob.
I did manage to capture a post from the Blogge, just for an example of the quality of content. (Warning – sometimes the link works, sometimes it doesn’t. I dunno.) This happens to be his review if It’s The Rules by Bob Sheets. He didn’t like it at all, an opinion which I don’t share. That’s really not the point, it’s the clarity of thought and writing that I wanted to show.
Enjoy the trip………
In Days Of Yore – Part 1
It’s early, I’m the only one up and, for some reason, I was looking back on some of the old posts here. Actually, I’m pretty proud of what I did over the years. Sure, there are days when, obviously, I had nothing to say but still made a post. Sometimes they hit, but mostly they were a waste of everyone’s time (mine and the readers).
In the Golden Age Of Magic Blogs there was some good work. Readers of The Jerx may be surprised to know he was originally The Magic Circle Jerk. He did his best work then. One day, he just quit, obviously to be reincarnated years later as The Jerx. Hopefully, over time we can exhume some of these early, pioneering blogs. Both the good and the bad.
A personal favorite was The Weekly Magic Failure. While it strayed from the original premise, nobody worked harder than the author, Roland Henning, to bring cmpelling content. In March of 2016 he wrote the obituary for the blog. There was a small spattering of aditional posts in the subsequent months, but inconsequential. I believe Roland found keeping the intensity that he had can totally wear you down. Fortunately, it was on the Blogger platform and it is there to see. Worth a look.
WooHoo! I’m a consultant to David Blaine AND a Creator!
Who isn’t!?
Craig Petty’s Evoke
I’m drowning in a sea of “spectator connection” and “making magic memorable”.
