Everything revolves around my upcom­ing MZvD lec­ture tour, where I’ll be present­ing my new lec­ture “60/​60 – Best of ARCANE CRUMBS.” Right now, the phones are ringing non-stop, and there’s a lot of nego­ti­at­ing over dates. A list of tour stops will fol­low as soon as possible!

From the Blog

Dive into my pub­lished articles.

• Old Wine in New Bottles
  Where is this mar­ket­place going? A “new” trick is offered: A ver­sion of the “7 Card Monte” (click here). Well, some sort of dis­cus­sion and spec­u­la­tion star­ted in some magical forum. When read­ing this, it really raised my eye­brows. Some people apparently …
• Mul­lica Wal­let Tip
  I love the cat­egory “hacks” on this blog, which deals with fix­ing small prob­lems in our magical life. This is one of those “hacks” that are inten­ded to make a magi­cian’s life more com­fort­able and more trouble-free. The Mul­lica Wal­let is a great thing. …
• The End of The Lad­der
  Jon Allen’s “Par­agon” ist fine. It is a real advance­ment in “Signed Fol­ded Card to Clear Box”. I like it, because my LAGER Switch was instru­mental in that. So I was sort of instru­mental in the exist­ence of “Par­agon” as well. Fine feel­ing, makes me …
• The Non-Con­­ven­­tion­eer
  Q: Are you going to be in Black­pool this year? A: No. Q: Why not? It’s great! Tons of magic … A: No, it’s not all that great really. Yes, there is tons of. But not neces­sar­ily tons of magic that I like, unfor­tu­nately. Q: Why? 3000 magicians …
• The Thrill is Gone
  Again, Seth Godin, who wrote that in his news­let­ter: Of course it is. The defin­i­tion of a thrill is tem­por­ary excite­ment, usu­ally exper­i­enced for the first time. It’s thrill­ing to ride a roller coaster. The fifth time you have to ride it, though, it’s more …
• Strange Move­ments
  Someone pos­ted this clip from the MagiFest 2016 on Face­book and I just could­n’t stop watch­ing and won­der­ing about it: Well, cer­tainly the guys do ser­i­ous, advanced moves and pos­sess skill. Cer­tainly they worked hard and a long time on these moves. But then — watch carefully …
• Pocket Roy­ale
  The UK card man gave me another one of his cre­ations for my humble blog. Thank you, John! Along, here in his own words: Hi Guys, Here’s a prac­tic­ally self work­ing piece that’s a lot of fun to do. Set a royal flush in spades on top of …
• Magic and Act­ing
  Here some­thing inter­est­ing — a stu­dent of mine work­ing together with an actor in a little set. Nice! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_s7n-rHmAw
• End of Script­ing Prob­lems
  In the past weeks I struggled to upgrade my com­puters with a very import­ant soft­ware. I decided from now on to give it a try and get used to the Dragon dic­ta­tion sys­tem soft­ware. At first I thought this is going to be easy, but …
• The Card­pool Con­ven­tion
  I am pon­der­ing all the time whether or not to attend this year’s Black­pool con­ven­tion. I love the Win­ter­garden’s, the magi­cians and I love the Ruskins. I love meet­ing pals, strolling through the deal­er’s hall, watch­ing lec­tures and all this. And the pints, …
• The Lord­ship of Trail­ers
  We have seen it. We see it again and again. If there is a new trick out that the magic mar­ket­place wants us to buy, there are video trail­ers pro­mot­ing the item. It is called mar­ket­ing. Fair. Most of these trail­ers are pro­duced by …
• Wacky Laws
  Inter­est­ing read these days and found out about some inter­est­ing ‘wacky laws’ … Stur­geon’s Rel­ev­a­tion: This was (is) also called ‘Stur­goen’s Law’ by many. It says: “90% of everything is crap.” This one is my favor­ite and there­fore used as a slo­gan on this blog. …
• Dis­as­sembling
  Recently I wanted to upgrade an addi­tional SSD on my 27″ iMac. So I searched in the inter­net for some instruc­tional videos, which I found (see video below). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03Lg4IgJd04 Some­thing dawned on me. With this really excel­lent instruc­tion video, I was able to add the SSD drive. But — and …
• Old but Gold
  This topic has been around for dec­ades and many times you will hear that expres­sion ‘old but gold’. Most of the times there is the recom­mend­a­tion to ‘just dig into the old lit­er­at­ure’, because it is there where you will find …
• 7 Card Monte for Fun
  I found this one and I had com­pletely for­got­ten about it. Some exper­i­ment­a­tion with Ver­non’s Seven Card Monte. The setup is the same as Ver­non’s using a DF-card. Try to fig­ure it out … 
• Erd­nase False Shuffle
  Just a reminder for this nice tech­nique, which is described in one of the Ver­non Inner Secrets of Card Magic Books. I don’t know why we should buy each and every ‘new vari­ation’. This kind of stuff in the books is more …
• Bowly Tip Jar
  Here is some­thing for you guys, who like fid­dling around in the work­shop (although I just did this on my kit­chen table in 30 minutes). All star­ted when I read Cody Fish­er’s bril­liant ‘Bill in Lemon’ routine. His rou­tin­ing is excel­lent, and I love …
• Ed Marlo Foot­age
  Some­times You­tube is good for research­ing and stor­ing his­tory. This clip is a very nice com­pil­a­tion of rare foot­age of Ed Marlo. See­ing it reminds me how good they were back then, espe­cially Marlo him­self. Impress­ive. I have no idea who put …
• The Power of Test­ing
  Won­der­ful thoughts from Seth Godin arrived in my inbox. Most of what he thinks up and writes is very use­ful to me, as a start­ing point for my own train of thoughts. Of course, I tend to see it magic wise (quote): Writing …
• Color Chan­ging Knives DIY
  After years of unsuc­cess­ful search­ing for proper knives sets and not find­ing them, I decided to go for myself and make them up. Here is the pro­ced­ure, which will give you some nice knives and sets in any color com­bin­a­tion you …
• Real Good Magic
  Recently I found again a per­form­ance clip of Spain’s great Cam­illo Vazquez. Still think this routine has ‘some­thing’. Some lovely moves and sub­tleties in there. Amaz­ing what can be done to that ‘Dizzy Dom­in­oes’ trick that Tommy van Dommelen inven­ted and Ken Brooke marketed …
• Radio Magic
  When I saw this, I only asked myself: “Is any­body out there actu­ally per­form­ing it?” I mean, sure, there went quite a lot of build­ing into it, but then? I know Tora is build­ing and invent­ing a lot of stuff and some is really nice made. …
• Lager Switch
  Finally, here is the full ver­sion of my switch­ing concept, using an unpre­pared glass box (you could even use a nor­mal glass for that). Jon Allen has built his ‘Par­agon’ effect on this one. It is the grand daddy of them all … 🙂 A …
• Bill Simon’s Van­ish
  This seems to be a long for­got­ten, won­der­ful coin van­ish. What I really like with it is the concept behind. A nice idea to use the small coin as a reas­on­ing to bring the hands together in order to steal the big coin. A perfect …

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