Dustings #38
/Just some administrative stuff to start with. The first issue of the subscriber newsletter went out last month on April 20th. You should have received it then if you’re a subscriber. If you didn’t, send me an email and we’ll sort it out. It likely went to the email associated with your paypal address, so if that’s different than the one you normally use, check there. The newsletters come out every other month. The next one will show up some time in mid-June.
The cover for last month’s April 20th “420” issue featured this scandalous pic of David Copperfield
Just a heads up. I almost never use the twitter account for this site, but people still try and communicate with me there. You’ll get a much quicker response if you email me.
In fact, I use twitter so infrequently that I have now cut my “follows” down to just two essential accounts.
So unless you’re one of those two, I probably won’t see what you have to say if you don’t reach out in a more direct way.
Through A Layman’s Eyes
One of the most useful skills for a magician to have—and one of the most difficult to maintain—is to be able to see a trick from a lay-person’s perspective. You would think this wouldn’t be too difficult, since we were all lay-people at some point in time. But for whatever reason, it’s damn near impossible. I used to think I was good at retaining my “layman eyes,” but it was really only when I started the focus-group testing of tricks and occasionally breaking down tricks with people in my personal life that I really felt I got that strength back to about 90%. (It’s probably impossible to get it back completely). Many magicians seem to have lost it completely.
Through A Layman’s Eyes will be a recurring segment here at the Jerx, where I will remind you of the flaw in magic effects that is obvious to the layman.
Today we have “Between Layers” from the Online Magic Store.
These are stickers of Bicycle card backs that you can use on blank backed cards.
“Between Layer is the perfect gimmick pack for anyone who loves object to impossible location. In particular coin or card corner inside a full size card routine.
For anyone that doesn't want to do the card splitting or are not good at it, Between Layer is perfect for you. Simple put the small flat item on the card and put on the sticker and you are done. It clean and it's fast. No need split cards again and no more mess with rubber cement.”
So they’re referring to the trick where you vanish a coin or the corner of a playing card and it reappears within the layers of the playing card. It’s a fine trick.
Usually it requires you to partially split a card and then have it ready to be reassembled in the course of the trick with rubber cement. The set-up is a little bit of a pain in the ass, but there’s really no way around that.
Until now!
Now you can just use these stickers on the back of a blank card rather than splitting a card and going to all the trouble of the usual set-up.
What is the problem when we look at this through the layman’s eyes?
Laymen are perfectly cognizant of the concept of “stickers.”
It does not require higher learning to know how stickers work. In fact “sticker technology” is really most well understood by girls between the ages of 4 and 8.
So when people see you peel a sticker off a card to reveal their signed coin, they will think, “Oh, I guess he slipped my sign coin under that sticker at some point.”
That is not a substitute for an effect where a coin appears entombed in the paper layers that make up a playing card. That’s a very different effect.
That’s the difference between the impossibility of a dollar bill appearing in a lemon and a dollar bill appearing in a bowl of lemon Starburst. It’s not comparable.
Stickers with a card back on them may have some potential uses, but this ain’t it.
Here is the current leader in the clubhouse for the strangest amalgam of just-barely-Jerx-related minutiae I’ve ever been sent. I received it recently from reader George B.
The building blocks were this post where I recommended learning Morse Code.
And my suggestion that we all get this tattoo to secretly indicate to other Jerx-readers that you know Morse code.
Also this post where I suggested readers hum “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” when at Magic Live to signal to others they read the site. (This was nearly six years ago, when being aware of this site was even rarer than it is now.)
And this video I’ve posted a few times of Craig Petty not doing a great job at acting amazed by a trick.
For some reason—known only to him and his god—George felt the need to combine these elements into one video.
So he drew a picture of Houdini.
And he gave him a face-tat. (It says, “Morse-understood,” (for Morse code) instead of Misunderstood.)
Put it on video with “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” remixed with the audio of “What? What? No” from Craig Petty.
So, on the off chance you woke up this morning and were wondering why such a combination of these elements doesn’t already exist, wonder no more. Now it does.