Until April...

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This is the final post for March. Regular posting resumes Monday, April 1st. And the next issue of the newsletter will be out Sunday, the 31st of March.

If you ever wanted to purchase the GLOMM “Elite” Membership Kit, I would do so relatively soon, especially if you’re a XXXL. (And no, I didn’t mean that like “order soon before you have a heart attack.” I just meant that that’s the most limited size.)

We are on the last batch of shirts, pins, and membership cards that make up the membership kit, and they are not going to be reprinted again after this.

At this very moment, there are still plenty available in most sizes, and at the rate they normally sell, there should be for a while. But as they sell during the course of this year, they won’t be restocked. So if you’ve ever wanted one, don’t wait too long. You can order here.

The GLOMM will still continue to exist, and there may be some one-time printing of shirts of a completely different design in the future, but this particular shirt with the GLOMM logo is being retired.

Oliver W. writes…

I’ve been carrying around Evoke with me since it was released and performing it regularly. Yesterday I used the“spont” that you posted earlier this week and I just tossed the deck in a mailing envelope I had from Amazon. I showed it to a few people and the reactions were SURPRISINGLY different. Not only did it seem to get a stronger response but the entire interaction felt better in some way. […] I’m hoping you’ll share some more of these sponts or whatever you end up calling them.

That doesn’t surprise me. Evoke is exactly the sort of trick that can benefit from that technique.

I’ve gotten similar emails about almost every extra-presentational technique I’ve written about. Magicians are surprised that people actually notice them. Or that they seem to have an effect.

I promise you, these things are noticed. These aren’t magic techniques as much as they are story-telling techniques. And spectators are much more aware of them than some of the stupid shit we focus on as magicians. (Should I do my Elmsley count from the fingertips or from mechanic’s grip? No layman in the history of the universe has ever noticed a difference.)

The idea of the Spont category is to identify ways that lessen the friction of getting into a trick. Little things you can do to help you roll into a trick more naturally. Spectators feel the difference between abruptly moving into a trick or naturally flowing into it. As surely as they feel the difference between going to the store to buy an apple vs. plucking it off a tree as you pass by.

I’ve heard stories (I believe on reddit) where non-magicians were given gimmicked coins (that a magician had accidentally spent) as change in a store and they were left wondering what the hell they were looking at and trying to make sense of it.

It was funny to read their ideas about what they had found.

A copper/silver coin was called a “misprint.” Look, I don’t know much about the coin-making process, but I’m fairly certain you can’t just “accidentally” have a half-dollar on one side and a Mexican centavo on the other. That’s not like a “whoops” thing.

I read about another person who found a flipper coin, and someone surmised it was for spies to use. They could take secret bits of information. Like codes or something. Write it on tiny bits of paper and put it in the shell, and then put the inner coin back in place. That way, if anyone searched them, they wouldn’t find anything on them besides this innocent coin. (Little do they know the nuclear codes are trapped inside.)

I like that interpretation. And apparently it’s not that far-fetched. Hollow coins (not flipper coins) were used in espionage. If you have a WWII era flipper coin, you might be able to get away with it.

Anyway, I sort of felt like one of those people discovering a gimmicked coin the other day when I was at the library, and on the shelf of books that you could just take and keep for like 25¢ was this book.

20,000 words is, in fact, a book of 20,000 words.

This is the fifth edition, printed in 1965. The first edition was printed in 1934.

Why did they have to put out a 5th edition just a few years after the 4th? Well… to include “new” words like laser, epoxy, and googol.

I spent a couple of minutes examining the book closely, half-convinced I had found some weird magicians book test. But no, it’s a legit book.

The purpose of the book—as the introduction tells me—is that most people use dictionaries to look up the spelling of words, not definitions. So this is a dictionary without definitions. Making it much smaller and more convenient for “stenographers, authors, and proofreaders.”

I still think there’s a trick to be found in here. I’m not quite sure what it is just yet. We have many ways to force numbers in magic, and those numbers could be translated into a page, column, and position in the list. So the book would be a good way to transform a number force into a word force.

I do like using it as part of book test as well. “A normal book has maybe 75-100 thousand words in it. But only about four thousand different words. This little book has 20,000 distinct words and thoughts you could think of.” etc., etc.

There are lots of copies of the book on ebay for just a few dollars if you come up with a use for it.

Have a great rest of your March. See you all back here on Monday the 1st.