And there you have it, 365 days straight of blogging. Holy crap. I honestly didn’t think I’d make it past March, so if you’ve been following the project’s progress over the course of 2011, thanks a ton. The project itself was accomplished on four different machines (two of which were needed to accommodate the other… (more)

Every month a bunch of people come to the olde blogge through google search results. Some of them are worth looking at. (not provided): Yep, the trend of google blocking search results to websites continues, and with that goes a lot of the usefullness both of google analytics, and this particular column. Ah well. In… (more)

Ever wanted to justify mental magic for kids? Bring a magic hat along. Obviously, it helps if the mentalism contains striking visual information, but if you can get that, you’d be surprised what sort of routines you can get away with that you would have thought were only suitable for adults with longer attention spans…. (more)

This one proved to be a real killer amongst the kids, so you can imagine my disappointment when I saw that Eugene Burger had taken pretty much the exact same approach to his own tossed Three Card Monte on a video that had been released probably a decade or so before I’d even thought of… (more)

Looking for an insufferable and overwrought approach to the 8 Card Brainwave/Chicago Opener combination you saw on Ammar? Look no further! Performer introduces a packet of 10 cards (See? Already it’s different) and mentions that one of the cards in the packet is a special card, and it’s incumbent upon the helper to help locate… (more)

Figured I might as well document this stuff. For a while I was doing parlour-style shows for adolescent Korean kids at an English Village in Seoul, and my act was irresponsibly card-heavy. That said, four routines emerged out of it that I was pretty content with, and if I had to, I could do them… (more)

So, the results of the Ace of Spades Trick Contest are in, and… …well, there were four entries (one of which was my own), so I’m just going to say everybody who submitted was a winner, and everybody else is a poo-poo face who smells like poo-poo. On Christmas, no less! There’s a Minty the… (more)

And that’s really all there is to it. Over the years since I originally tried hashing out this set of archetypes, I’ve been trying to account for exceptions to them — the sort of people who’d be perfect fits for a variety magic show, some sort of collaborative cabaret thing with many acts, but that… (more)

Out of all the titles for archetypes I’ve tried defining, this last one is amongst the least satisfying. In magic, the term “mechanic” is almost always synonymous with the “card mechanic”, meaning a cheat. However, the idea that I really wanted to convey was of a magician who treats his props as tools in order… (more)

This one is essentially a combining of ideas between myself and Tyler Erickson… although, to be fair, I provided the “Oogah-Boogah” part and Tyler provided pretty much everything else that’s of value to it. Now, out of all the ‘theory’ you’ll read here on the olde blogge, this probably comes closest to the “Here’s a… (more)