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Sunday, Mar 18, 2012 - 21:44 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Like Magic


Cards In Sleeve


Abracadabra


Quickly, while hoping the experiments-in-progress run up acceptable results - the reviews on Confessions of a Conjuror and Aces and Kings, mentioned previously.

While they both hint at cards in their design, there is an overriding distinction - even the top card players take (measured) risks, and most of the poker legends covered in Aces and Kings went broke at various times in their careers; not so for stage/table magicians, who keep most everything under control to produce seemingly impossible effects, not too much unlike Cult Leaders - if not for that respectable entertainers seldom claim divine guidance.

To be sure, the most important component in a magician's repertoire may be psychology. Brown, in his quirky style featuring footnotes longer than the main text, describes a plethora of ways in which this can be done, and mentions that kids are often the hardest to fool, because they may not know when to be surprised (though I do remember obligingly falling for the shadow-on-the-ceiling distraction when I was far younger, which was followed by the common needle-through-balloon trick), and are bad at social cues and direction.

While there is much to be said about technique - Brown describes various special shuffles and lifts which surely require hours of practice, nimble fingers (and a fresh new deck - with red backs for good background contrast, and an unmarred "air-cushioned" finish, so often underestimated), there is plenty to be said about more... crude methods.

One striking example is in the area of levitation, a longstanding favourite of Cult Leaders. There are many ways that this seemingly impossible feat can be impressively achieved, with the lever-parallel-to-ground-and-hidden-by-flowing-dress-and-ring-passed-cleverly-around method apparently popular. Old-timer Howard Thurston was more direct - he used thin wires, and asked a child from the audience to confirm that there were none. The wires were, however, not invisible up close, but this proved no obstacle to Thurston, who would whisper menacingly to the kid, "If you touch those f**king wires, I'll kill you". He was, to the best of my knowledge, never ratted out by the traumatized tots.


Nothing that a fast shutter speed won't do
(Source: yowayowacamera.com)


As has been amply illustrated, complex moves and hidden mechanisms (which are still common - magicians supposedly spend lots of time in washroom cubicles preparing their gear) do not necessarily bring about the most startling outcomes, with the presentation - or patter - having a huge influence on how the trick is received.

The best chatterers can probably make something as foolproof as Sim Sala Bim (which is mathematically-based) look wonderful, but then again, they probably realised that joining investment banking and selling dodgy products to suckers would be a far more lucrative use of their talents (wow, it's like the world just realised they had to dump their losing positions onto someone! As the old Buffett poker adage goes, "If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.")

They are certainly good judges of personality and social dynamics, from such tiny cues as whether a person accepts an offer to reshuffle the cards, and seek to take advantage of this quite often, as when asking a belligerent audience member (perhaps resentful at having female attention drawn away) to guess a letter - chances are that he picks the supposedly-rare Q or Z in an effort to upstage the magician, and even if not, the failure will at least help mollify him.

[N.B. Related gambits are predicting seven when asking a subject to randomly pick a number between one and ten, and three for one to four, playing the percentages - even if wrong, a glib talker can make the most of it - and the Clairvoyant Red Hammer, among others]

Myself, I can't help but try to work tricks out (and cheat by watching stuff like the Masked Magician's exposes) and quite often the explanation turns out somewhat tawdry (but it's all in the presentation!) One thing to remember when doing this is that tricks often have multiple layers of misdirection - for instance, when the magician seems to be trying to conceal that he is slipping cards into a box, you can bet that it has already been done, and the act is covering up for something else (which may be in the far future - good illusions, the author says, come in three phases, where the same outcome may be achieved through vastly different paths)


This takes balls
[N.B. When I saw this on TV, the performer had the bad fortune to be shown from an angle, revealing the edge of a half-ball]


Nothing too unexpected in Aces and Kings, other than that there's many ways to skin a cat (expression sponsored by Mr. Ham). Great poker players have won tournaments by being good readers of people, being theoretically sound (in a not-very-intuitive finding, Chris Ferguson [no relation to Alex] calculated that a player with 50 times the big blind will win 40% of the time simply by betting all his chips on every hand, against someone with an equal number of chips - he also earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science after 13 years, which gives encouragement), psyching opponents out by playing like a madman, and just being plain lucky on the draw.

[N.B. This meditation on luck vs. skill was well-covered in Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series, talking of which, isn't The Hunger Games basically Battle Royale rebooted?]

And then there's always being a big enough fish to negotiate favourable personal terms with the casino, which may be the ultimate skill in gambling. While a nice read, I don't foresee myself playing - I would clearly feel bad if I lost, but winning wouldn't necessarily feel good either, especially if the losers are the sort who would fork out S$15k to learn the Martingale and avoid imps, proving the distinction between uneducated and just plain dumb; best not let Mr. Ham get wind of this, lest he get any ideas.


That's The Joke

Well, it was going to happen - barely two weeks into the not-making-nuclear-weapons-for-food deal, Kim Leader, probably displeased by a lack of champagne, is going to set off a rocket, sorry, satellite, until the Dom Perignon arrives on ice. This means that the ghost of Ms. Robo has won the hamster betting pool, with her entry of three months. Congratulations!

Speaking of Mr. Ham, he's been whining about why squirrels get peanut butter smoothies and armadillos get to be World Cup mascots, and even bunnies get their own gorrilas. He was decent enough to look sad when told of an unspeakably cute earless bunny passing away by accident, but recovered quickly enough to email the zoo concerned about producing another one with a "small cosmetic operation".

Which brings us to a possibly apocryphal story about a top-secret joint military exercise between the USA, Russia, China and Singapore.

The four countries disagreed on whose forces were the best, and to settle the question once and for all, it was decided to release a bunny into the forest, giving it a ten-minute headstart. The party which managed to recapture it in the shortest time would be the winner.

The USA went first, and exactly ten minutes after the bunny was gone, they swung into action. Marines heli-rappeled all over the place, satellites scanned the foliage, the CIA listened in on all channels and frequencies, and tons of fliers were dropped. A day later, they admitted that they couldn't find the bunny, but would petition Congress for ten thousand more troops for a shock-and-awe surge, and then prepare for a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year occupation.

The Russians went next. They first played loud warnings to the bunny to give itself up, and when no response was heard, proceeded to firebomb the entire section of the forest. The cleanup crews went in after the inferno had died down and retrieved a vaguely bunny-shaped chunk of charred flesh, but it was so badly burnt that not even DNA analysis could confirm whether it was that bunny.

The Chinese, who had been watching, amused, from the sidelines, sent only a crack team of ten men, who walked calmly into the forest after a new bunny was released. Nothing seemed to happen, but ten minutes later they walked back out with what superficially appeared to be a badly-beaten grizzly bear, which had a large placard hung around its neck admitting that it was the bunny in disguise, and apologizing for its many crimes against Communism.

The Singaporeans were the final victors, however. Before the bunny was released, six separate writs were served against it, its family and the guy who was going to release it, preliminary judgments obtained, and their passports impounded. A court ruling was then passed down that the cage was henceforth considered "part of the forest", and that discretion could be exercised over the definition of "ten minutes". Their official winning time was negative six minutes and one second.


Speaking about Russia, they're out of grant money for the long-running fox domestication study, so close to getting results. Might some of our cash-rich local scientific agencies possibly be interested? Nah, it's blue-sky research.

As for China, Youku's merging with Tudou. Have Baidu join it and have it done with?

Since Mr. Ham is back on the run, no punting this week.



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