Gardyloo #26
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Congratulations to my pal Toby and his new bride Annell, who were married in Dallas this weekend. It was a beautiful ceremony that I may or may not have attended disguised as a caterer.
Toby is a friend I made through this site. He's a filmmaker now but was once the theremin player for The Polyphonic Spree. That detail sounds like a specific that would come out of a writer's meeting as they define the background of some ne'er-do-well loafer.
Writer A: Let's put him in a band... you know... typical slacker gig.
Writer B: Yeah, but one of those bands with, like, 20 people in it, so it's not like he even carries much of a burden of being in a band.
Writer C: Yeah, and his instrument is one you play just by being in the general vicinity of it.
Actually it sounds like a yiddish curse. It's like the opposite of being a doctor or lawyer. "What do you mean you're not going to pay for the damage your tree limb did to my fence?! Ah... may your son be the theremin player for the Polyphonic Spree!"
At any rate, my sincere best wishes to the new couple. I hope you have many happy years ahead of you.
And I'd like to say, straight from my heart (and from this website of "funny wedding toasts"):
May your marriage be so solid it could last through being on a reality show.
hahahahahahahahahhaha... I mean... right?!?!?!...good one, weddings.lovetoknow.com, good one!
I've had some people interact with me over email and tell me that I put too much emphasis on presentation. That magic tricks themselves are inherently entertaining because of the impossibility of the trick.
If you believe that, I would point out that there is a not insignificant audience that watches card magic videos so they can fall asleep.
To put that in perspective, this guy uploaded this video a few weeks ago and it's been watched almost 600,000 times. On the other hand, if you look at something like Murray Sawchuck's youtube channel, the videos he uploaded three weeks ago have about 10,000 views. And Murray is trying to entertain people with magic. More people would rather fall asleep to it than watch what Murray is doing.
But this ASMR guy is whispering and soothing and trying to make people fall asleep, that doesn't mean magic is inherently boring.
I didn't say it was. You're making my point. And by "you" I mean "me, pretending to be you."
Presentation trumps effect, 99 times out of 100.
In this post, in 2015, I discussed my organization habit for keeping track of tricks I'm working on. At that time I mentioned Vesper, as the app I used for note taking on my iphone. And that was true, up until recently when friend-of-the-site, David Kaplan, wrote to tell me it wasn't being supported any longer. He mentioned the Bear app and I've been using that recently and I like it, so if you need a note-taking app, there you go. That's the only significant change to my organizational structure since that post was made.
This tiny little picture is my favorite ad of all time. It's true Don Draper-level genius. It's been halfway down on the Cafe's homepage for years.
It goes to a now defunct link on Diamond Jim Tyler's website [Update: They fixed it]. I like his work, but there are certain words I probably wouldn't use to describe him.
"Cool."