Reading Your Thoughts

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I’m taking it easy today and sharing some of the thoughts and ideas that readers have sent in recently. While I haven’t explored these ideas myself, I think they have some merit…

This first idea comes from Graham P. I’m particularly ill-equipped to comment on it, because I don’t play Wordle. But those that do might be able to take this idea and run with it…

My wife and I enjoy our daily wordle challenge.

I have discovered that if you download Wordle as a webpage complete (plenty of instructions on how to on internet), then change the date on the computer you can play wordle as far forward as you like.

I tried a loose presentation on my wife telling her the strangest thing happened with her niece. I was solving wordle and she pointed at it and kept saying "tomorrow Weird". Don't know what she means.

Then the next day the wordle answer was "Weird". (just an example)

She didn't know what to say.

Hopefully, if it floats your boat, you or your readers can come up with a better way of using this idea.

Couple of Caveats

  • Don't jump too far ahead with dates.

  • If you put in an earlier date to one you have already done, then the program will keep showing the answer to the later date until you catch up to that date.

  • Don't open any other app until you have reset the date to normal.

—Graham P.

Next comes an idea from David S.

I recently purchased Flip by Wes Iseli (force heads or tails on a flip of a coin) and wanted to mention that it works especially well with Stasia's Decision Making Talisman that you previously wrote about. There are certain features of Stasia's Talisman that makes it easier to do the "move" compared to a quarter or half dollar, plus the "yes"/"maybe" or "no" opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for mentalism or fortune telling type routines. —David S.

Sadly, if you didn’t pick up Stasia’s decision-making coin at the time, it’s no longer available. But I know a lot of you did get it then. So this combination is something you might be able use.

The final idea comes from Oliver M. It expands on the suggestion I had for the presentation of the Bounce trick that I wrote about in this post.

Re: Bounce - Love your idea of producing sounds from the ball. You could expand it into a routine/running gag with different objects. So 'Boing's comes out of the ball (maybe written like BIFF and POW in old Batman eps), you 'ding' a glass with a knife a few times, like the start of a speech, and little coin-sized 'ding' discs fall out. Maybe you finished with an unexpected sound, like you drop something and it leaves a 'thud' (bowling ball), or you slap your forehead at something obvious and 'slap' appears there. —Oliver M.

This is such a great idea. Not for any of the types of situations in which I perform. But someone could take this and win FISM with it.

You would want to mix it up a bit. You wouldn’t want it just to be the physical manifestation of sounds over and over. But that’s how you would start it off. Then you could vanish some of the “sounds” and now the objects that made those noises would be strangely silent. Imagine you shake the “jingles” out of a tambourine, vanish them, and the tambourine is now dead silent when shaken.

You could change the sizes of the sounds making them much louder or lower, or softer and higher depending on if you grew them or shrunk them.

You could take the physical manifestations of the sounds and combine them together to create new sounds.

You could also take the “sounds” and reinsert them into the wrong objects. So now the stapler makes a huge CRASH when you use it, and when you slam the cymbals together you get a little click.

It’s a cool idea. Someone should do it.