TAKING IT EASY - CARDOPOLIS 29

Simple Solutions to Tricky Problems

Hello and welcome to the first Cardopolis Newsletter of 2024. We begin the New Year in relaxed mode with some effects that don’t require much in the way of sleight of hand. There’s a Ring on Cord stunt, a puzzling dealing trick, a Red Black Ace Transpo, a baffling card location, and a set of recordings by Luis Zingone.

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THE SLADE EXPERIMENT

In 1979, I published Cabalistic Cord in Talon issue 6. This was a handling of the ring on string trick called Sefalaljia III by Charles Nyquist and J. G. Thompson Jr (The Phoenix, January 8th, 1943). There’s a long line of Sefalaljia tricks, the first originated by Stewart James. My minor contribution was having both hands above the handkerchief as it is moved from the cord. It does make for a very clean finish.

I came back to the trick recently when I discovered that natural wood curtain rings were perfect for this and any similar effects. It means you can have the ring signed to prevent any thought that a duplicate is used. These rings are extremely cheap and can be bought from Amazon.

Henry Slade was a notorious psychic charlatan who fooled many people including scientist and psychic investigator Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner. One of the experiments resulted in Slade linking a wooden ring to a table leg. Naturally, the linking took place under the table and out of sight. This is a good story to tell while doing the trick.

SLADE’S ENIGMA

Whenever I video a trick for Cardopolis I get a chance to think about it again and maybe add another refinement. I wondered whether Slade’s Experiment would work without the handkerchief, the linking achieved below the edge of the table, similar to some versions of Paul Curry’s Linked. The Curry trick came to mind because my friend Richard Wiseman debuted a show devoted to Paul Curry last year at the MagiFest in Edinburgh, and a version of Linked was included in the programme. See Phoenix 123 or Paul Curry World’s Beyond (2001) for details of Curry’s linking trick.

LUIS ZINGONE RECORD

Speaking of Richard Wiseman, I worked with Richard last year on a presentation for The Magic Circle History Day. The topic was magicians and sound recordings. This gave me a chance to research Luis Zingone and the set of interactive magic recordings he produced in 1939.

You can listen to the recordings at Archive.org. The tricks work because of some secret preparation of the deck that the spectators aren’t aware of. I did find a flaw in The G-Man Card Trick. It doesn’t work 100%. The trick is actually Lu Brent’s who published it as U-Find-It in Five Super Card Mysteries (1932) and neither he, nor any of the people who republished it, mentioned the mistake. For example, U Find Your Card and Get Thee Behind Me Satan in Hugard’s Encyclopedia of Card Tricks (1937) See if you can spot it and find a solution.

CALL MY NAME

Nick Trost has a nice trick in Subtle Card Creations volume 9. It’s called The Queen of Diamonds and uses Colm Mulcahy’s Low Down Triple Dealing Principle. I wasn’t overly keen on the amount of dealing required but then I remembered the legends about calling someone’s name multiple times, to make the Lucifer, Beetlejuice, Bloody Mary or Candy Man appear. A theme like that would help explain away the dealing procedure. And if you divide the dealing up between people, well, that makes it a bit more interesting. The handling here is not much different from Trost’s but it leads to a different finish.

You can learn more about Colm Mulcahy’s Low Down Triple Dealing here. The main point to remember is that the number of cards in the packet must be between the number of letters you want to spell and twice the number of letters you want to spell. So, if the card you want to spell has, say, 10 letters. Then the packet of cards must have between 10 and 20 letters. One interesting aspect of this routine is you have no idea of the name of the card until you begin spelling it.

ACES ALLEGRO

In Cardopolis Newsletter16 I published a version of Daley’s Last Trick called Black Red. This is an alternate handling similar in its essential mechanics to Hamman’s Gemini Count. It’s very simple so I wouldn’t be surprised if others have arrived at the same solution. As with Black Red, the goal is consistency of action.

Aces are usually used in this trick but you can do it with any four cards as long as two are red and two are black. Seems an obvious thought but you might want to try it with cards chosen by the spectators, so they play some part in the trick other than simply watching.

TWO CARD TALLY

A couple of years ago, Bob Farmer sent me details of his Spread Sunken Key. It is an interesting handling of Scalbert 26th Location which Bob later published in his manuscript Homer’s Odyssey (2022). One problem for me was that in Bob’s version, unlike the Scalbert effect, it was the magician, not the spectator, who divided the deck into packets.

I sent a video of a revised handling to Bob, giving it a more care-free air that allowed the spectator to decide how the deck was divided. To illustrate the process, I also added a trick, Two Card Tally. The trick turned out to be a reinvention of John Bannon’s Karmaholic which was published in Jon Racherbaumer’s Sunken (2020). However, the handling is different, and, I think, worth sharing. It all makes for a very deceptive combination.

FINALLY

Here’s a bit of last-minute news. Jerry Sadowitz tells me he is preparing a new book called The Half Pass. It is a hard back book limited to 100 copies. If you are interested, you can email Jerry for details at jerrysadowitz@hotmail.com. But you should do it asap. I’ve already put my order in.

Belated Happy New Year

David