Archive for the ‘Magic’ Category

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Annals of “law”. (#1 in a series)

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024

Murray Sawchuck went on “trial” a week ago Wednesday.

I put “trial” in quotes because there was no actual court of competent authority involved. The trial was at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, and the judges were members of the Magic Castle board.

Murray Sawchuck is also known as “Murray the Magician”. He had a gig at the Tropicana until it closed earlier this month, and he’s been on various TV shows.

He also has a YouTube channel. And that’s the problem.

The troubles began in late January, when he and his showgirl wife, Dani, cooked up a new video, inspired by the bickering of Lucy and Desi Arnaz, in which he’d perform a series of tricks for the camera — mostly basic illusions one could purchase off of Amazon. She, playing the role of unimpressed wife, reveals how they’re done.
A bouquet of flowers, for example, is shown to be sucked into the base of the trick table on which it stands. A sword-swallowing act is rendered all the less impressive when she flicks the blade — and it coils up like a measuring tape. The whole thing took 10 minutes to make. Then they posted it to YouTube.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it did make a lot of people in the magic community upset. This, in turn, led to the “hearing”, for want of a better word.

Summarizing Mr. Sawchuck’s arguments, from the article: “teaching magic” is “exposing magic”, “exposing magic” isn’t as black and white as magicians would have it, exposing magic “forces magicians to be more entertaining and charismatic”, and there’s a long tradition of “exposing magic” (including Houdini and Penn and Teller).

Anybody remember “Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed” with the “Masked Magician”? I always thought that was a hoot. And I don’t see where the “Masked Magician” was ever “prosecuted” by the Magic Castle (though Wikipedia says he was sued by some people whose illusions he spoiled).

Obligatory:

I have not seen any follow-up on this, and I have no idea how long it takes for the Magic Castle to rule. If I do see an update, I’ll let y’all know.

Posted in Magic | No Comments »

Obit watch: April 19, 2023.

Wednesday, April 19th, 2023

Tiger McKee, noted firearms trainer. American Handgunner.

I never had the pleasure of taking a course from Mr. McKee, but I did read his AH columns and The Book of Two Guns: The Martial Art of the 1911 Pistol and AR Carbine. (Amazon says I bought that in 2008. Wow.) And I think I knew that he was doing custom Smith and Wessons, but those were probably out of my price range.

This is a bad loss. And 61 seems a lot closer these days.

(Hattip to pigpen51 on this.)

Carol Locatell, actress. Other credits include “M*A*S*H”, “The Pretender”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…

…and “Mannix” (“Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6.)

Almost a month ago, I posted an obit Lawrence sent me for Gloria Dea. Yesterday, the paper of record ran their own obit.

One of Ms. Dea’s last movie credits was in Ed Wood’s notoriously bad “Plan 9 From Outer Space” in 1957. She later sold insurance and then cars before settling back in Las Vegas.

IMDB. She’s credited as “Girl”.

Freddie Scappaticci.

During the Troubles (that is, the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British Army had a deep cover mole known as “Stakeknife”.

Stakeknife had penetrated the heart of the I.R.A.’s internal security unit, known as the Nutting Squad, a macabre sobriquet evoking the unit’s standard operating procedure — the execution of accused informers with two bullets to the “nut,” or head. Bodies were usually then dumped.

Mr. Scappaticci led that unit.

He was accused of overseeing the torture and killing of more than 30 suspected informers. If, at the same time, he was the British mole called Stakeknife, then he was a paid British agent killing fellow British agents.

There are a lot of people who believe he was Stakeknife. He consistently denied it.

Mr. Scappaticci may well have taken some of his secrets to his grave, shielding government intelligence and military handlers from one of the central moral conundrums of the case: Did the British state collude in the killings in order to protect Stakeknife’s identity?
British officials have described Stakeknife as the “golden egg” and “the jewel in the crown” of their infiltration of the I.R.A. They have said that intelligence he delivered alerted them to myriad I.R.A. operations, saving hundreds of lives.

…

In 2003, several British newspapers identified Stakeknife as Mr. Scappaticci. He denied the accusations publicly but then dropped out of sight. Several news reports said the British authorities had spirited him away, first to the Italian town of Cassino and then to a witness protection program in Britain.

There is an inquiry going on into Stakeknife. It’s been going on since 2016.

Mr. Boutcher, the head of the Stakeknife inquiry, promised on April 11 that investigators would publish an interim report on their findings this year. But families of victims greeted the news with skepticism.

Wikipedia entry. Why am I reminded of Whitey Bulger?

Posted in 1911, 1970s, Books, Guns, History, Law, Magic, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Smith and Wesson, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 8, 2023.

Saturday, April 8th, 2023

Today is a busy day. As it turns out, though, I have a few minutes to try and sneak some obits in.

Benjamin B. Ferencz has died at 103. The significance: he was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials.

Fulfilling an Allied pledge to bring war criminals to justice, 13 trials were held in Nuremberg, where Nazi rallies had celebrated Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s. In the first and most important trial, held in 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal convicted 24 of the Third Reich’s senior leaders, including Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, who committed suicide on the eve of his execution, and the military commander Wilhelm Keitel, who was hanged. The chief prosecutor was Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson of the United States Supreme Court.
A dozen subsequent trials at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg put German judges, doctors, industrialists, diplomats and less senior military leaders in the dock in cases supervised by Justice Jackson’s successor, Gen. Telford Taylor. Mr. Ferencz was assigned to prosecute the notorious Einsatzgruppen case, which for its staggering volume of victims has been called the biggest murder trial in history.
It was the case against 22 Nazis, including six generals, who organized, directed and often joined roaming SS extermination squads — 3,000 killers, aided by the local police and other authorities, who rounded up and slaughtered a million specifically targeted people, or groups, in Nazi-occupied lands: the intelligentsia of every nation, political and cultural leaders, members of the nobility, clergy, teachers, Jews, Gypsies and other “undesirables.” Most were shot, others gassed in mobile vans.
They were crimes that beggar the imagination — 33,771 men, women and children shot or buried alive in the ravine near Kyiv called Babi Yar; the two-day liquidation of 25,000 Latvian Jews from Riga’s ghetto, forced to lie down in pits and shot; the spectacle of a barbarian in Lithuania who killed Jews with a crowbar while crowds cheered and an accordion played marches and anthems.
Unfolding in 1947 and 1948, the Einsatzgruppen trial was Mr. Ferencz’s first court case. But the evidence — mostly detailed records of killings kept by the Nazis themselves — was overwhelming and irrefutable.
“In this case, the defendants are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds of miles away from the slaughter,” the court said in a unanimous judgment. “These men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.”
All the defendants were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Fourteen were sentenced to death and two to life in prison. Only four executions were ultimately carried out, however, which was typical of the Nuremberg trials: convictions, heavy sentences and later commutations. Analysts said leniency arose because the new realities of the Cold War with the Soviet Union meant that the Western powers needed Germany politically.

…

After earning his law degree in 1943, he enlisted in the wartime Army and became a private in an antiaircraft artillery unit. He joined the Normandy invasion in 1944 and fought across France and Germany. In 1945, his legal training and war-crimes expertise were recognized by the Army, and he was assigned to General Patton’s Third Army headquarters and then to investigate newly liberated concentration camps for evidence of war crimes.
What he witnessed was seared into memory. At Buchenwald, he said, “I saw crematoria still going. The bodies starved, lying dying, on the ground. I’ve seen the horrors of war more than can be adequately described.”
At Mauthausen, he found incriminating ledgers kept by the Nazi commandant on the number and manner of prisoners killed each day, on starvation rations and on horrific conditions in the lice-infested barracks. Sergeant Ferencz mustered out of the Army in Germany late in 1945.

I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere, or I would have been on it like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation. But Lawrence sent over an obit from Road and Track for Craig Breedlove, land speed record setter.

In a three-year span from 1963 through 1965, Breedlove’s successive conquering of the 400-, 500-, and 600-mph barriers made him a household name. Blessed with the looks of a movie star, his LSR exploits caught the attention of Hollywood and New York where television appearances and cover features in sports and lifestyle magazines and routine newspaper coverage brought him the same kind of fame that elevated fellow racers Dan Gurney, A.J. Foyt, and Mario Andretti to national acclaim.

…

Along with Walt and Art Arfons, Gary Gabelich, and other domestic land-speed heroes and record-setters, Breedlove took pride in defending America’s ownership of all major LSR speed titles. Breedlove’s 600.601-mph blast stood until 1970 when Gabelich’s Blue Flame moved the new standard out to 622.407 mph. As the 1970s beckoned, the country’s fascination with land-speed daredevils started to wane, but that didn’t stop England’s Richard Noble from chasing history at Bonneville in 1983.

Harry Lorayne, memory expert.

Fleet of mind and fleet of mouth, Mr. Lorayne was a sought-after guest on television shows and a particular favorite of Johnny Carson’s, appearing on “The Tonight Show” some two dozen times.
Mr. Lorayne had begun his professional life as a sleight-of-hand artist and well into old age was considered one of the foremost card magicians in the country. As both magician and mnemonist, he was a direct, gleeful scion of the 19th-century midway pitchman and the 20th-century borscht belt tummler.
By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine. Such feats were born, he explained in interviews and in his many books, of a system of learned associations — call them surrealist visual puns — that seemed equal parts Ivan Pavlov and Salvador Dalí.
Mr. Lorayne demonstrated his act on the night of July 23, 1958, when, in his first big break, he appeared on the TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret.”
While the host, Garry Moore, was introducing members of the show’s panel, Mr. Lorayne was at work in the studio audience, soliciting the names of its members.He was then called onstage. Mr. Moore asked the audience members who had given Mr. Lorayne their names to stand. Hundreds did.
“That’s Mr. Saar,” Mr. Lorayne began, pointing to a man in the balcony. (The transcriptions here are phonetic.)
“Mr. Stinson,” he continued in his rapid-fire New Yorkese, gathering speed. “Miss Graf. Mrs. Graf. Miss Finkelstein. If I can see correctly, I believe that’s the Harpin family: Mr. and Mrs. Harpin; there was Dorothy Harpin and Esther Harpin. Mrs. Pollock. And way in the corner — it’s a little dark there — but I believe that’s Mrs. Stern.”
And so it went, through scores of names, each impeccably recalled.

…

Absent the time constraints of television, Mr. Lorayne often said, he could handily memorize the names of 500, or even a thousand, people in a single outing. Over the years, he said, he had met and recalled the names of more than 20 million people.
To naysayers who contended that he routinely seeded his audiences with friends, Mr. Lorayne’s reply was unimpeachable: “Who’s got 500 friends?”

…

At the height of his renown, Mr. Lorayne traveled the country demonstrating his prowess on theater stages, at trade shows and in corporate training seminars.
During the 1960s, he ran a memory-training school in New York. In later years, he starred in TV infomercials for his home memory-improvement system. His scores of books were translated into many languages.

Maybe this is a silly thought, but I like to think of Mr. Lorayne pulling up a chair and joining the conversation at the table with Ricky Jay, Harry Houdini, and all the other greats.

Ethan Boyes, cyclist. He was 44.

According to USA Cycling, Mr. Boyes was the reigning masters track world champion in the men’s 40-44 age group for the time trial and sprint events, and he held several records in his age group, including from a flying start race (when cyclists start already in motion as opposed to from a standstill) in Aguascalientes, Mexico, in 2018, at a high-altitude track.

He was struck by a car and killed while riding in San Francisco. (I apologize for using the NYT obit, but the SF papers are virtually unlinkable without a subscription.)

For the record: Bill Butler and Nora Forster.

The Hello Deli. At least in current form.

“Dave always joked that whenever they were out of ideas, they’d come to the deli,” he said.

Posted in Cycling, History, Magic, Nazis, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 22, 2022.

Friday, July 22nd, 2022

Great and good friend of the blog Joe D. let us know about the death of Al Evans.

Al was one of the old time Austin BBS people, and a personal friend of mine from back then. The Facebook post is a nice tribute to someone who was a good person, and whose passing leaves a hole in the world.

Taurean Blacque. Beyond “Hill Street Blues”, it seems like he had a pretty active theater career, and other credits including “The Bob Newhart Show”, “Taxi”, and “DeepStar Six”.

In 1982, Blacque received a supporting actor Emmy nomination for his work as the toothpick-dependent Washington on Hill Street but lost out to co-star Michael Conrad. Amazingly, the other three nominees — Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — also came from the 1981-87 series, created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll.

Nostalgia is a moron, but man, wasn’t that a heck of a show?

Shonka Dukureh passed on at 44. She was a musician, and also plays “Big Mama Thornton” in the current “Elvis” film.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Alan Grant, comic writer (“Batman”, “Judge Dredd”).

Werner Reich. He survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen (and the “35-mile death march in snow and ice” between the two). He also learned a card trick from another prisoner, Herbert Levin (aka “Nivelli the magician”) while he was in Auschwitz.

Mr. Reich, who became an engineer after his immigration to the United States, never lost his love of magic, performing close-up tricks with cards and coins for small groups of other magicians, at temples and at his sons’ birthday parties.

…

Mr. Levin’s card trick stayed with Mr. Reich the rest of his life.
“We loved anything that could take us away from Auschwitz for even a moment, that could take our minds off our memories and the horror around us,” he said in the 2017 interview.In England, he immersed himself in magic. He bought a deck of cards, then some magic tricks and books, and still more tricks and books.
“There’s a very, very thin line between a hobby and insanity,” he joked during his TEDx Talk.
Mr. Reich never saw Mr. Levin after Auschwitz and did not know that he had also emigrated to the United States, resumed his magic career and lived in Rego Park, Queens.
Mr. Levin died in 1977, but Mr. Reich did not learn of the death until nearly 30 years later, when he read an article in The Linking Ring, the monthly magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, to which Mr. Reich belonged.

Posted in Magic, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

The world is still a smaller, colder, lesser place…

Tuesday, October 19th, 2021

…and Sotheby’s is going to be auctioning off part of Ricky Jay‘s collection starting October 27th.

Link to the auction. Sotheby’s video.

NYT article tied to the auction. It’s worth reading, if for no other reason than the story about Siegfried and Roy’s tiger at the beginning. (Alternative link.)

Not that Jay was a hoarder. With the help of assistants, he photographed and cataloged every item in a digital database. His books were arranged by category — magic, circus, eccentric characters — and his file drawers were labeled, which made it easier, say, to find that handbill for “Prof. William Fricke’s Original Imperial Flea Circus.”
Under “flea bills,” of course.

There’s a punchline at the end that I won’t spoil for you, because Mr. Jay would haunt me in the afterlife.

I don’t think I’ll be placing any bids, as I expect anything from the Ricky Jay Collection will be way out of my price range.

Posted in History, Magic, Urine | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: January 14, 2021.

Thursday, January 14th, 2021

Siegfried Fischbacher, the “Siegfried” in “Siegfried and Roy”.

You may remember Roy Horn passed away in May of last year.

Mary Catherine Bateson, cultural anthropologist (and, for the record, daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson).

Posted in Geek, History, Magic, Obits | Comments Closed

James Randi.

Thursday, October 22nd, 2020

He was 92. NYT. James Randi Educational Foundation.

The rest of Penn’s Twitter feed is worth reading, too. I love the lead of the NYT obit:

James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 92.

But in later years, Mr. Randi was not so much an illusionist as a disillusionist. Using a singular combination of reason, showmanship, constitutional cantankerousness and a profound knowledge of the weapons in the modern magician’s arsenal, he traveled the country exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others.
Their methods, he often said, were available to any halfway adept student of conjuring — and ought to have been transparent to earlier investigators, who were sometimes taken in.
“These things used to be on the back of cornflakes boxes,” Mr. Randi, his voice italic with derision, once told the television interviewer Larry King. “But apparently some scientists either don’t eat cornflakes, or they don’t read the back of the box.”

…

Though his pursuit of Mr. Popoff was a consuming passion, Mr. Randi’s white whale was indisputably Mr. Geller, who had been famed since the 1970s for feats like bending keys and spoons, which he said he accomplished by telepathy.
Not so, said Mr. Randi, who explained that these were ordinary amusements, done by covertly bending the objects in advance.
In 1973, Mr. Geller made a disastrous appearance on “The Tonight Show” in which he was unable to summon his accustomed powers: On Mr. Randi’s advice, the show’s producers had supplied their own props and made sure Mr. Geller had no access to them beforehand.

…

Though he remained a dyed-in-the wool rationalist to the last, Mr. Randi did have a contingency plan for the hereafter, as he told New Times in 2009. “I want to be cremated,” he said. “And I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller’s eyes.”

The world is a smaller, colder, lesser place today.

Randi, responding to someone who compared psychic debunking to “the machine-gunning of butterflies”:

That writer never saw the distraught faces of parents whose children were caught up in some stupid cult that promises miracles. He never faced a man whose life savings had gone down the drain because a curse had to be lifted. He never held the hand of a woman at a dark seance who expected her loved one to come back to her as promised by a swindler who fed on her belief in nonsense. “Nothing is funnier…?” Tell that to the academics who lost their credibility by accepting the nonsense about telepathy that came out of the Stanford Research Institute. “The machine-gunning of butterflies?” Explain that to those whose spent their time and money trying to float in the air because a guru said they could. Are the “dangers of mass popular delusion” not “so menacing”? Mister, go dig up one of the 950 corpses of those who died in Guyana and shout in its face that Reverend Jim Jones was not dangerous.

—Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

Posted in Geek, Magic, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 19, 2019.

Tuesday, March 19th, 2019

Reason has a nice obit up for Dick Dale.

“…We’re like Johnny Appleseed, crossing the country and sowing the seeds of survival.”

Johnny Thompson, aka “The Great Tomsoni”,

…a pompous caricature of a magician. His act, full of deadpan humor and often performed with his wife, Pamela Hayes, as his indifferent assistant, left spectators laughing so much that they might not have fully appreciated that they were also seeing expertly executed tricks.

He was more than a magician, though: he was a consultant and advisor to other magicians (including Penn and Teller, who he worked extensively with) and an expert magic historian.

“Johnny had a profound way of taking an idea and creating an illusion that worked,” he said by email. “When I called him and asked, ‘How do I make a guarded car vanish from inside of a dealership?,’ without missing a beat he said, ‘We don’t, we vanish it from a tent outside, just like the vanishing elephant illusion,’ ” a reference to a classic trick performed by Houdini and others.
Mr. Jillette said that this knowledge of history had also come into play in a less visible role that Mr. Thompson filled: that of informal mediator when one magician thought another might be stealing material.
“If two people felt they were doing material that was too close, Johnny knew the provenance of everything,” Mr. Jillette said. “He could adjudicate that.”

You should read all the way to the end of this obit: there’s a story involving Mr. Jillette that I won’t spoil for you here.

Posted in Magic, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Ricky Jay.

Sunday, November 25th, 2018

He was a personal hero of mine, but I never met him or even saw him perform. Somehow, it seems like he never came through Austin. (A friend of mine told me a great story about seeing him live: I hope that person will post that story on their own blog.)

I’ve said before that my three favorite magicians are Penn, Teller, and Ricky Jay. But I admired Jay as a magic historian as well.

NYT. The legendary New Yorker profile.

It is the Daileys’ impression—a perception shared by other dealers in rare books and incunabula—that Jay spends a higher proportion of his disposable income on rare books and artifacts than anyone else they know. His friend Janus Cercone has described him as “an incunable romantic.”
“Probably, no matter how much money he had, he would be overextended bibliomaniacally—or should the word be ‘bibliographically’? Anyway, he’d be overextended,” William Dailey has said. “The first time I met him, I recognized him as a complete bibliomaniac. He’s not a complete monomaniac about books on magic, but within that field he is remarkably focussed. His connoisseurship is impeccable, in that he understands the entire context of a book’s emergence. He’s not just interested in the book’s condition. He knows who printed it, and he knows the personal struggle the author went through to get it printed.”

I don’t know what else I can say, except that the world is a smaller, colder, and less interesting place today.

Posted in Books, Magic, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Important safety tip (#21 in a series)

Friday, July 20th, 2018

Don’t let yourself get bitten by an Egyptian cobra.

Posted in Magic, Reptiles, Safety, Snakes | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 22, 2018.

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2018

Murray Newman, over at Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, has a nice tribute up to Judge Frank Price, who passed away on Sunday.

Judge Price was not someone I knew, but I wish I had known him: he sounds like a good and genuinely fun guy.

…he was among the greatest practitioners of sleight of hand and close-up magic, performing routinely as a professional magician at Magic Island and many other venues. Training his hands to betray the closest scrutiny took the kind of discipline that was his forte. He took immense pride in the craft of magic and considered it a noble art, his “other” profession.

(Oddly enough, I was just refreshing my memory of the “Blood and Money” story Sunday night: I had no idea that Judge Price had died until I saw Mr. Newman’s post yesterday.)

Posted in Law, Magic, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 18, 2018.

Wednesday, April 18th, 2018

Carl Kasell. NPR.

I don’t listen to NPR much these days, but I did kind of like Kasell. And:

He loved magic tricks, and at one memorable company holiday party, he sawed Nina Totenberg in half.
“We laid her out on the table, got out that saw and grrrr … ran it straight through her midsection,” he recalled. “She said it tickled and she got up and walked away in one piece.”

Right away, I knew that Carl had far more up his sleeve than his inimitable gravitas and the random playing cards he keeps there for his magic tricks (if you ever want to know true joy, ask Carl to do magic for you).

I have this mental image of Carl and Harry standing around in heaven, trying to top each other with card tricks.

Barbara Bush, for the historical record. WP. (Edited to add: Lawrence.)

Posted in Magic, Obits, Radio | Comments Closed

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