Comment by lxgr
1 year ago
A great example of Teller's observation that "sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."
1 year ago
A great example of Teller's observation that "sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."
My favorite of these was a trick where someone picked a card out of a deck and then Teller revealed a large version of that same card in an unexpected area in the vicinity, It turns out that what he had done was hide a complete set of large cards in the area before the trick and memorized the location of every one of them so, e.g., the king of hearts would be at the top of a palm tree, the three of spades under a drink tray, etc.
The best part is that that kind of trick usually becomes more, rather than less, impressive when its inner working is revealed. I recently got to see them perform live, and my favorite trick by far was one of that kind.
Penn only agreed to the "Red Ball" trick after Teller hit on the idea to tell the audience how it works at the start.
https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2008/nov/20/man-ball-hoop-be...
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/619/transcript
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhnATlPdG6A
Here they are showing how they do ball & cups by using clear cups and it's no less amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8osRaFTtgHo
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Watching Teller do the cups and balls trick with transparent cups is mesmerizing.
Yes, you can see everything. No, you still can't follow it.
Sure, you can see that "something changed" after the fact when it is stable. However, Teller is so damn smooth and fast that any active change looks like teleportation.
There was a video of a magic trick I saw where the trick was almost certainly accomplished by false shuffles. I know how to do a few false shuffles, in theory, but, the magician (Ricky Jay, I think?) was just so good at the false shuffles that I was more impressed than if I didn't know how it was done.
> Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
-- Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Thanks for this reference to one of my favorite books of all time, out of one of my favorite series of all time
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as the saying goes.
But the Terry Pratchet quote above indicates that magic is only skin deep
We might then interpret Pratchet to be commenting on the floor and mode of "sufficiently advanced" ("skin deep")!