Watching it again, you NEVER see it actually pinned to the jacket fabric. And there IS a high pitched whirring sound when Penn releases the pin. I’m convinced by the more simple explanation.
When I turned up the volume, the zzzing! was clear as a bell. Great catch.
I think it was kind of skipped over earlier in the thread (a couple of comments about camera angles and that was it) so I’ll ask again: how DID those guys put a bowling ball and then a handcuffed person through those metal bars?
The bars are spaced 5 inches apart sideways, but are also staggered front to back. That makes the actual spacing larger.
I need to look again, because I think the handcuffed hands are around a bar.
For me, the crumpled nature of the card is what made me decide that it must have been in his hand and pulled up through his suit.
Pretty disappointing tricks this week, I think - the bars were given away by the camera angle, and the card decks also felt lame (since he never showed that the other decks had the labels broken - if they weren’t, even a non-trained person could do it; if they were, he should’ve shown that!)
How Did He Do It ?
I don’t know, but I do find it odd you lowercased my post and my username. Almost…magical.
I learned a new trick. Write your post in all CAPS and it lowercases everything. Go figure! (HOW DID HE DO IT)
I don’t think the card was ever pulled up through his suit. It is safety pinned to the string, then pulled around his back and between his arm and body into the notebook he carries. When he slides the notebook under his arm, he lets go of the card and it slips around his back. Then he places the notebook into the jacket.
I’m not sure how he does it, but here is what I spot. First off, there is something fishy with the bottle after he has the towel. I think he makes a swap when he first pulls the towel and wraps it around the bottle top. I think he puts a small top into his grip with the towel around it, and does something with the bottle. When he approaches the camera to let us see the top, he is pantomiming. Then when he crushes the bottle, he palms the fake top, displays the towel, wraps the top in the towel, and ditches it.
Where did the bottle go? This is where my guessing is thinner, but notice that he is standing reasonably close to the gazebo behind him. Notice the half column. I think he ditches the bottle there somehow. Possibly he has a confederate reach out and take it and hide behind the column. Or maybe he has a gizmo that does it and retracts. Whatever has to get clear because after the vanish we see there isn’t a shelf sticking out. But that’s where I think the secret lies.
I also wonder what the big bottle was for, except maybe to sell the idea that he was amid cleaning up from the party and just decided on a whim to make the video, rather than he fully staged the video.
Maybe just a lame attempt at a joke. 
Yeah, I noticed the pantomiming thing he did with his fist (with the faux bottle top over it) under the towel, but didn’t notice when he ditched the real one. At first I thought it was tricky that he said he would do it in full view of the camera, but then he comes close to the camera for a second, but it doesn’t seem like he did the switch yet at that point. If he tossed it aside, I’m guessing the trick could only be done on grass then, otherwise you’d hear the unmistakable “tinkle” sound of glass on pavement. Or maybe he somehow hides it in back of his shirt/pants. I guess there’s a lot of speculative ideas.
I’ve tried to type this out a few ways, but I’ll describe it like this. Hold out six fingers. (all five on your left and your index finger on your right, just so we’re on the same page) count up from 3 starting at your left pinky and you end up on you left middle finger. Count up from four starting at your right index finger (going right to left) and you end up on… Your left middle finger.
One two and six all have 3 letters so for those you have some patter and count the letters. Likewise, five has four letters.
Interestingly, we were also told to always pick a woman because women will almost always pick 3 or 4, and the effect “looks” better. In the show, they did, and she did.
Going back to 9/14 episode
Cluck I think you were on to something here…10-15 years ago would be the digital era. I think the magnifying glass has been right in front of all of us the entire time as we look at our computer monitors. At least it is on mine. The "search "box on my computer screen has a tiny little magnifying glass icon. I think this was what Penn was referring to. Somehow they did a search of the dictionary to tell Penn what page to go to in the dictionary. He looked quite busy writing in the note book, plenty of time to do a search. Also the envelope was suspicious. It looks like he drops more then just the piece of paper into the envelope. Maybe an electronic device too?
Thank you for being the only one to reference this post. I think most of the other members were politely ignoring it (as in “don’t look at the crazy person and his off-kilter theories and maybe he’ll go away”). 
There had to be something about that magnifying glass. It seems like Penn HAD to look through it and could only see the word when using it (I notice him going back and forth with it). Some sort of technological thing that they both owned (as well as the pen which transmitted the word in the first place).
**9/28/15 Episode - Penn and Teller “Ring” Someone’s Neck
**
Victor & Diamond: A very theatrical stage production involving fire, birds and handkerchiefs. It felt kind of hacky and clunky at times, although the final birds to bunny transition looked good even in replay. I think this would have played better on Wizard Wars, but P&T were obviously not impressed here.
Francis Manotti: He did the Scrabble/vocabulary trick. I caught a move in which he copped one of the Scrabble tiles and put it in his pocket. I think he also put the pencil in a different page of the Scrabble dictionary (one that already had a circle around “lobster”). He apparently fooled them, but I think by gleaming these two clues, he could have easily forced the end result (we also have no way of confirming that all the letters in the satchel were unique, nor that they were the ones the audience members actually pulled). I’m not sure why there was that whole fanfare about the envelope in Jonathan’s pocket (it just said “HE will fool Penn and Teller” and could have been used on any of the guests tonight), but there you go.
Nash Fung: Driver’s license in Coke can trick. Okay, I’m not sure how he does the swap in full view of P&T. Penn references both “lap” and “two cans” so I went back and noticed that he put the first can under the table right after lighting the fire and pulled the rigged can out. (Earlier, when he’s putting the “license” in the envelope, I noticed it looked very thin and flimsy, not like a laminated Nevada driver’s license, so obviously he swapped it by that point.) My question is: Why did he ask for Penn’s credit card at the beginning? That must have been the point of misdirect when he switched the license. No idea how it gets in the can (I guess it must already have a slit in it), but Penn comments that it was doused in soda, so it had to have been partially full.
Chad Juros: Rope tricks. Teller seemed kinda bored by it. When he’s looping the first two loops, he only has Teller pull on the bottom one, so the tricked knot is obviously on top. The only “real” trick comes at the end when it becomes one length and apparently has to do with magnets. “We enjoyed your magnetic personality” can also translate to “Your trick sucks.”
The P&T act was another one of those audience participation gags in which we’re aware of everything that’s going on, similar to the great knife toss gag.
With the Scrabble trick, Manotti made a show of telling P&T they could look at the tray and the book but not the green tile holder. He did it in kind of a jokey way,* “but not this!”* and putting the holder away and moving in front of it while making a funny expression. So the tile holder must be key, right? And why was it green? Even if the tile holder in England is green, so what? He’s in America and he didn’t provide any reason for using a green or English one over the traditional American one.
Any ideas?
Yes, it’s pretty clear that the green tile holder was gimmicked in some way to hide the tiles actually selected and it said “Lobster” all along. It being green and from England just made it even more obvious something was up. It was also pretty clear about the book force to the certain page that already had Lobster circled. Circle a random word from underneath, really?
The only part I can’t figure out is how he knew exactly ONE audience member would pick an “L” tile. Even if the bag were stacked with all letters L-O-B-S-T-E-R, how could he know for sure that one would pick an “L”? And if there were only one “L”, how could he know it would be chosen with so many tiles still in the bag?
When Jonathan was drawing a circle from underneath, it seemed obvious that he wouldn’t be circling “a word.” It would probably be a somewhat circular scribble that encompassed more than one word and parts of words. So it fell flat when he looked and he had circled “lobster” so clearly that they didn’t hesitate when reading it.
As for the L tile, I was thinking that maybe all the tiles in the bag were L. He confirms with one of the audience participants that his tile said L, and the others didn’t have a chance to say “Wait a minute, mine said L too! You can’t spell lobster that way!” That would require him switching out the tiles they pulled with tiles that have the needed letters, but that seems simple after watching a guy pull a whole flock of birds and a couple rabbits from his coat.
The scrabble trick: what I thought was that the ‘pencil’ given out was not actually a pencil, its core was something that looked similar but wouldn’t leave a mark. The circle was drawn upside down so that it couldn’t be seen that it wasn’t drawing anything. Then he takes back the book, secretly flips to the page with Lobster already marked before he holds it back to the guy to initial the page. Whoops, then the pencil was writing at that point, so I guess he must have swapped the pencil, too.
I think the bag of tiles had multiples of ALL the letters in Lobster EXCEPT for an L. The guy that said he had the L was a plant – he actually had another O or R or whatever. That way when the magician asked “Who had the L?” there was no chance that a second or third person would say they did – and the others weren’t given any chance to announce their letters or compare them with each other, but if they looked at the letter they’d drawn, it would indeed be something from ‘lobster.’ Since the magician was apparently right that one person got the letter he asked about, we’re all supposed to assume the others each got the single instance of the other letters.
And then the magician somehow swaps the letters the audience drew for ones that spelled out lobster. I think you guys are right about being suspicious of the rack. Maybe a flip down rack that hides the audience letters and reveals the prepositioned ones.
When Teller was examining the dictionary I think he was trying to find a second circle, the one the guy must have drawn, but assuming the pencil wasn’t a pencil there would be nothing for him to find.
So you’re saying his “index” was electronic? Plausible. Might be easier than having paper pages, just an iPad.
I’ll have to go look again. I’m not sure a magnifying glass that displays the answer would work - too easy to verify it doesn’t match the actual page. But a coded reference to a search engine is plausible, as is a misdirect for the pen.
Haven’t seen this week yet.
I think it’s something like that except for the planted L. Could have been a plant, but then he didn’t have to mention it either if no one picked the one L in the bag. He does hide the rack from us a lot, it could be rigged, but that could have been a distraction. Seems easier for him to simply switch in a few different tiles to spell LOBSTER. He’s counting on several of those letters to get drawn and he only has to swap out the duplicates that were drawn. If he gets lucky he’ll have all of the words. I think the page was forced, he might have one or two other pages prepared with circles. The pencil could easily be rigged, if he didn’t swap it out entirely he may have just removed a false tip so that JR’s initials could be written. There’s an obvious move with the pencil between the circle and initials.