Is a biscuit cannon related to a potato gun? I was hoping someone would find a way to “bloop” some food at him. If so, good hunting my friend.
Is there any way to encourage flocks of pigeons to roost or poop on the box?
How about the psychological warfare treatment, blasting him with music from a portable PA system? I’m thinking the Alice In Chains song “Man In The Box” for the lyrics:
I’m the man in the box
Buried in my shit
Won’t you come and save me, save me
Dan:
And to give you another example of “honest lying” regarding magicians, I’ll let you in on a magician’s in joke that is going around now.
They are now selling “invisible thread.”
“invisible thread” is the stuff magicians use to make all kinds of magic tricks work.
It’s really amazing stuff.
It got started by Penn & Teller.
You see, all aspiring magicians see tricks done, and they are amazed and they can’t beleive how good the tricks are. They can’t wait to do them. So they go to magic stores or to catalogues and they buy the trick.
You’re always really excited when you buy a trick. You can’t wait to figure out how it’s done. You can’t wait to be in on the secret.
The moment the magic trick arrives and you open it and find out is always one of terrible disapointment [sub]“Oh, that’s how they do it. Big deal,”[/sub] you say with disapointment. It always turns out to be some shabby little bit of misdirection and nevery anything really cool.
As always, it’s the performance that makes the trick work.
Anyway, this was such a common experience for magicians in the learning that Penn & Teller decided to make a joke and do a routine on it.
They were going to show the shabby secret behind so many magic tricks. What they were going to do different though, for one time only, was make the shabby secret cool!
So they started off a show telling everybody what the secret was. The secret was invisible thread.
They held up the invisible thread and demonstrated the strength. They explained how magicians had to be careful because if the lighting was wrong people could sometimes catch a glimpse of the invisble thread. They held it up into the light the wrong way and sure enough quite a few people could see it.
Then they performed all these tricks with the invisible thread, and they showed how they were doing it. They showed how the thread was making all of these impossible tricks that couldn’t possibly be done any other way work.
Teller would illustrate as Penn moved his finger (which would normally be hidden) and a card across the room would pull itself out of a deck.
They did a whole bunch of tricks showing all the aritice and how they had to move around the invisible thread without seeming to be avoiding it, and how not to get cut on the invisible thread… and the whole routine was really quite good.
Except it wasn’t as good as a real magic show because they were showing how they were doing it.
Until… at the end… when you find out there is no such thing as invisible thread!
And now they sell it!
And, if you go and buy the invisible thread trick when it arrives you will find out that there is no such thing as invisible thread!
It’s artifice taken to the Nth power.
On writing that, you many not find that as amusing as I do.
But the gag is that they pull a magic trick on magicians. They get all the magicians and wannabes beleiving in invisible thread so they can perform all these great tricks, and there’s no such thing.
Heh.
If you want it, it’s your’s. Or anyone else who wants it, if you don’t.
Oh, and here’s a good link for a book Blaine wrote on magic. It talks a lot about Houdini, and covers many of the issues I’ve discussed.
“Invisable thread”, “trances”, “black art” and the like are beautifully, deceptively simple (and quite often pretty cheesy) tricks. I had a gig as an illusionist 's assistant for a while working in LV, Dallas and other points in the US Southwest. I found that knowing the “secrets” really can take the fun out of it (unless you happen to get a kick out of knowing secrets just for the hell of it which I do). Yes, it’s a hoax! Of course it’s a hoax, that’s why they call them magic “tricks” (or illusions). Just think of the most straightforward explanation and you will usually be right no Virginia, we really don’t dissapear and materialize within the ether. Mr. Blaine is another in a long line of talented entertainers who mystify and misdirect. Enjoy the performance or ignore the stunts, but please, don’t get all riled up just because he’s a convincing performer. Doing so is tantamount to being angry with Paul Ruebens for not “really” being PeeWee Herman, IMHO of course. And BTW, I think David Blaine rocks.
Why don’t the London dopers gather one afternoon for lunch with a bunch of mirrors and cook Mr Blaine using pure solar power?
good call Seven. then we could all have biscuits.
If one were to land a Victoria Sponge on the plastic surround the cream and jam would stick to the outsides in a rather provocative manner, I would think.
Obviously, I’m not encouraging anyone to so do - heaven forbid! - but it’s an interesting tactic that might, in combination with the burger van, push him closer to the edge.
You know, I was thinking about this stunt a little more tonight. It seems to me that the days of locking yourself in a box for days on end have passed. Humans have walked on the moon and sent remote control robots to mars. Do people really care about someone locking themself inside a box anymore? By the looks of the people in this thread,. not really.
I mean, it’s a fucking plastic box. Some dipshit locks himself in a box and tells the public he’s going to crap in a diaper for 44 days. This is cool? Is there something I’m missing about this?
This thread is the only news I’ve seen on this topic. Granted I don’t watch the TV and I haven’t seen a newspaper in days, but still. If this was a big deal I WOULD have heard about it for at least one other person.
London_Calling: Perhaps you should get a bullhorn and visit Mr Blaine -tell him to fly his box to mars or something.
When it comes to stunts, I want to be WOWED. Shitting in a diaper in a box for 44 days doesn’t wow me for some reason.
He’ll only crap in the diaper for a couple days. After that all he’ll be doing is pissing through (what I assume would be) a catheter for the rest of the time.
It’s a feat of endurance. Either you find it impressive or you don’t. The fact that so many people seem to be so worked up about something so stupid just seems odd. I mean throwing eggs at Schwarzenegger might have some purpose, somehow, but throwing eggs at Blaine in his box really seems like a cry for attention.
I think once he hits the stage of hallucinations things will pass quickly and most entertainingly for him.
Nah, it’s to make everyone laugh.
would firing hobnobs and custard creams at him also be considered a cry for attention?
i hope its sunny on saturday. i’m going to reflect sunlight off my watch into his eyes, before going to the pub.
i would also be more impressed if Blaines box had no visible means of support, ie hes keeping it floating through magic will power alone. i’d like to see him keep that up through:
a) 44 days of starvation
2) when chocolate bourbons and wafers are exploding all around him
You’d waste bourbons on him?!?! :eek:
Now that’s dedication to a cause.
paulberserker - How does your “patent biscuit cannon” work, then ?
Thanks for the information, Scylla. I’d apparently gotten the erroneous impression that his TV show used tricks like guessing the number between one and fifty chosen by ten people, and only using the footage from the person who chose 37; it’s quite possible I’m wrong on that, however. I’ll do a little more research on him.
Daniel
It seems like a silly stunt to me as well. Others have tested the limits of human endureance and in most of those cases it was involuntary. Those folks are impressive because they managed to survive. Blaine is doing a boring dumb assed trick.
I have no doubt that after the stunt is done we’ll be hearing that it was a trick like his riviting guy in an ice cube trick. Personally I enjoyed his close up magic at least there is entertainment value to that, and he is indeed skilled. But these sitting in a ----- for ----- days is like watching paint dry. At least the people of London are adding the entertainment value through their attempts to torment and ridicule the guy.
If everyone’s tired of David Blaine, you should check out Derren Brown. Now there’s talent, and self-effacing too.
And his publicity-seeking stunt will be short and sweet - Russian Roulette on live TV…
kind of like a big fuck off crossbow, but with a wider adjustable niche for different biscuit types, all the way from mini chocalate hob nobs upto massive Millies cookies. it can be hand held or tripod mounted.
im working on a super repeater automatic version to cut down on reload/snack times even as we speak.
coming soon, the wedding cake trebuchet!
I’m interested in knowing, incidentally, whether professional magicians would as a whole consider it cheating to do cold readings on a bunch of people, film all the cold readings, and only show the successful ones on TV. That was the only method I could imagine working for several of Blaine’s tricks, in which he would (for example) have someone think of a number between 1 and 50, and then a car with that number written on it would drive by. A disproportionate number of people asked to choose such a number will probably choose a nice medium-high odd number like 37, allowing the trick to work.
I could be way off; perhaps Blaine had some sneaky way to force the choice of a specific number on someone (prepping them with a trick that suggested the number? Having someone walk by with a sports-jersey with the number on it? I dunno). However, I got the impression that he was using the power of the edit to do tricks that would be completely unimpressive in front of a live audience: whereas a live audience performance requires pretty much perfect number/card guessing, you can edit out failed guesses in a TV special.
Daniel