The post Know Anybody Like This? first appeared on Intensely Magic.

Sorry, I fell asleep!

The post i/m’s Thoughts On The Craig Petty & Scott Perry Shouting Match first appeared on Intensely Magic.

This was way easier than I thought. The list is not long, but complete. Many qualify under multiple categories which is to be expected. Here we go:

• Those cretins that hurt and abuse helpless, harmless beautiful animals.
• No number two. Just check that we got everyone in the first category.
• Bullies!
• CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and all other three initialed thieves feasting on the misery of those that can’t fight back
• MBAs and CPAs. Sorry, no exceptions.
• Joe F Biden. Maybe should have been first. He’ll probably trip and fall in anyway.

The post Who Do We Toss Into Hell First first appeared on Intensely Magic.

This one always gets i/m.

The post Thoughtful Thursday first appeared on Intensely Magic.

I walk my dog several miles a day. Good for him and good for me. Lots of dog haters out there, so I need to stay alert. Fortunately many of them are addled old women and deranged old men. A wide array of multi colored hair feminists complete the anti-dog army. I hate people that hate dogs!

Anyway, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Most of them stink, but they are, generally, better than nothing. Most are lacking in quality – quality of content and quality of production. Good Grief People. Anyone doing this should be able to afford a decent microphone and set up the guest for success with decent equipment and instructions. I listened to an interview of Magick Balay (not sure why) and apparently he set up his phone across the room and shouted to it the whole time. Pathetic! There are other, more egregious, examples.

Most magic podcasts serve as little more than background white noise while I scoop dog shit. There are exceptions, but they are rare.

There is one I’m always confident in recommending:

The Eli Marks Podcast

This is the serialization of a series of books by John Gaspard, about a magician that solves crimes – Murder She Wrote for geeks. Each episode has an interview with a name magician – frequently a big name, and is the best interviewing available, as they know how to stay out of the way.

Episodes are roughly biweekly and are professionally narrated by John Cunningham

Nothing else comes close.

The post Things To Do While Picking Up Dog Poop first appeared on Intensely Magic.

I was watching a YouTube Video of Nick Locapo showing Nick’s Top 10 Mind Reading Tricks. Sure I know he’s pimping Penguin stuff, after all, it is his job, but I still managed to learn some things. He speaks with rare credibility in this industry of shysters. Actually, I also consider him one of the top 10 performers, along with Terry Ward and Lonnie Chevrie, working today.

Anyway, he goes over 10 categories of mentalism tricks and selects products that he considers the best of breed in each. Not surprisingly, all are available at Penguin, but I have no real argument in all instances where I am aware of the product. It’s a good list. (If you want to see the list, viewing the video in the Penguin site is the best way).

No real arguments about the categories or products until we hit Peek Wallet. This one drives ol’ i/m crazy. As much as I hear about motivation, I’ve never seen any presentation that would fool anyone with even a partially functioning brain. You might as well say Here, put you information in my wallet so I can get a look at it later. Pulling out a bowling ball and have the spectator put the card in the thumb hole makes as much sense. As the Great Ballantine would say, How else?, as he took out the scissors and cut the string on his floating ball trick.

The post Where Nick Locapo Got It Totally Wrong first appeared on Intensely Magic.

There’s a wonderful old book, Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor, published in 1971. The cover describes the book:

A lifetime collection of favorite jokes, anecdotes, and limericks with copious notes on how to tell them and why.

I’m sure there is plenty here to offend those that are into that sort of thing and many of the jokes would probably qualify as Dad Jokes. Despite that, it has held up quite well and his choices of jokes to determine the intelligence of the audience is quite revealing.

The post How Smart Is Your Audience? first appeared on Intensely Magic.

Old joke:

A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that the teller’s name is Patricia Whack. So he says, Ms. Whack, I’d like to get a loan to buy a boat and go on a long vacation.

Patti looks at the frog in disbelief and asks how much he wants to borrow.

The frog says $30,000.

The teller asks his name and the frog says that his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s OK, he knows the bank manager.

Patti explains that $30,000 is a substantial amount of money and that he will need to secure some collateral against the loan. She asks if he has anything he can use as collateral.

The frog says, Sure. I have this, and produces a tiny pink porcelain elephant, about half an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed.

Very confused, Patti explains that she’ll have to consult with the manager and disappears into a back office.

She finds the manager and says There’s a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000. He wants to use this as collateral” She holds up the tiny pink elephant. I mean, what the heck is this?

The bank manager looks back at her and says: It’s a knick knack, Patti Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man’s a Rolling Stone.

The point here is, if you want to work on some old jokes, plug the punch line into Google. Many times you will be surprised at the variations that pop up.

The post That’s No Knick Knack first appeared on Intensely Magic.

When I was writing yesterday’s post I got to thinking of some long gone blogs and there are beaucoup. Some I really miss. Others I don’t and many I just don’t recall.

Of those in the first category, I fondly remember Jamie Grant’s Magic Friday. Tom Frank and his life adventures, The Magic Whack and a couple of others. Some blogs just quit one day, while others muddled along the reduced content and reduced quality, frequently with a resurrection post which never happened. Eventually gravity won (which it always does) and the blog sunk into the abyss.

This is a list from approximately 2006:

• Ace of Spades Magic
• Annabelle
• At The Card Table
• Bizarro
• Dancing Screws
• Diana Kimball
• Escamoteurettes.com
• Forces Unseen
• Gordon Meyer
• House of Mysteries
• I, Magician
• Japanjin
• Jeff Stone
• Jim Sisti
• Lazy Magic
• Magic Conversations
• Magic Friday
• Magic Whack
• Mark Raven
• Meir Yedid
• Michael Ammar
• Paul Daniels
• Poolside Reflections
• Quicker Than
• Richard Kaufman
• Richard Osterlind
• Scoundrels Magazine
• Shawn Farquhar
• The Clog
• Tom Frank
• Unexpected Wonders
• Wizard’s Ball

My favorite was Ye Olde Magick Blogge, which is no surprise to long time readers. This took me on a journey into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine – never any fun. It’s glacially slow, probably, in part, due to crawling nearly a trillion pages (over 860 billion web pages and 99 petabytes of data). Also, the interface was designed by the same person that gave us Microsoft’s Bob.

I did manage to capture a post from the Blogge, just for an example of the quality of content. (Warning – sometimes the link works, sometimes it doesn’t. I dunno.) This happens to be his review if It’s The Rules by Bob Sheets. He didn’t like it at all, an opinion which I don’t share. That’s really not the point, it’s the clarity of thought and writing that I wanted to show.

Enjoy the trip………

The post This Way Mr Peabody first appeared on Intensely Magic.

It’s early, I’m the only one up and, for some reason, I was looking back on some of the old posts here. Actually, I’m pretty proud of what I did over the years. Sure, there are days when, obviously, I had nothing to say but still made a post. Sometimes they hit, but mostly they were a waste of everyone’s time (mine and the readers).

In the Golden Age Of Magic Blogs there was some good work. Readers of The Jerx may be surprised to know he was originally The Magic Circle Jerk. He did his best work then. One day, he just quit, obviously to be reincarnated years later as The Jerx. Hopefully, over time we can exhume some of these early, pioneering blogs. Both the good and the bad.

A personal favorite was The Weekly Magic Failure. While it strayed from the original premise, nobody worked harder than the author, Roland Henning, to bring cmpelling content. In March of 2016 he wrote the obituary for the blog. There was a small spattering of aditional posts in the subsequent months, but inconsequential. I believe Roland found keeping the intensity that he had can totally wear you down. Fortunately, it was on the Blogger platform and it is there to see. Worth a look.

The post In Days Of Yore – Part 1 first appeared on Intensely Magic.