Are you having a good time?

When we put on events, we want everyone around us to be having a wonderful time. It turns out it's very hard to do and takes a lot of work. Or does it?

It turns out that for the cost of a payphone call you can dramatically improve someone's perception of how their live overall is going. One of my intellectual heroes, Professor Daniel Dennett of Tufts University explains;

(Yes, that is a rather prestigious group assembled around that table. This was a conference organized in 2012 and there are a few days worth of their conversations scattered around.)

But the lesson to take is that when it comes to making people happy in the moment (in the long term is much harder) a lot of it hinges on details which would seem from an outside observer to be insignificant and trivial. Putting on a successful event means extraordinary attention to detail. It does, in the end, turn out to be a lot of hard work. But when you pull it off, the results are magic.

Chris Westfall and the Porcelain Princess

My specialty has always been "magic for grownups" but I'm often asked about doing things for younger kids and for families which usually leaves me recommending my friends who do a much better job with that sort of thing.

Coming up in a few weeks at the Paper Mill Theatre in Toronto, there is a wonderful family show for kids and families. A good friend Chris Westfall has teamed up with circus artist Bella to create Chris Westfall and the Porcelain Princess. The show toured around Ontario just over a year ago and received some very nice reviews. If you're looking for an amazing and fun (and amazingly fun) family activity, it's in town for just two nights in July.
 

Chris Westfall & The Porcelain Princess
Thursday & Friday, July 19 & 20 @ 6:30 PM
The Paper Mill Theatre - 67 Pottery Road

 

““Chris Westfall... & The Porcelain Princess is a true magic theatre experience. It brings the arts of illusion, circus, improv and comedy together in one amzing show perfect for the whole family. It will baffle and amaze. Keep you on the edge of your seats at the top of your imagination. Watch Chris Westfall make people appear, diappear and float while laughing the entrie way through.””

Tickets start at $29 and you can use the promotional code secrets to get an extra discount when you reserve online. 

And the Award goes to....

“The Allan Slaight Awards recognize outstanding achievement in the pursuit of the impossible. The Slaight Family Foundation established the awards in 2015 and has pledged to give $50,000 a year, over five years, to celebrate exceptional work in five distinct categories. Each recipient receives not only a cash prize, but also a specially engraved iPad to commemorate the achievement.”

— Magicana.com

The Allan Slaight Awards are distributed every year, celebrating extraordinary talent and accomplishments in the world of magic. This year, the recipients are being announced online, spread out over a week. The first award was announced this morning is the Canadian Rising Star:

The recipient is absolutely one of my favourite performers on the planet, Nick Wallace. His 2016 show Séance remains one of the finest live productions I've ever seen. When I was hosting Magic Tonight, Nick was a welcome guest many times. I once described him thusly:

“He may pretend to look all sweet and inocent, but I am starting to suspect that he may, in fact, be the devil. Pure evil wrapped in Mr. Rogers’ sweater.”

— Me, ca. 2015

Congratulations, Nick, on this well-deserved award. Stay spooky. 

Masters of Misdirection

"Misdirection" is an oft-used, but mostly misunderstood term of art in magic. Here is an explanation from the masters themselves: Penn & Teller, the longest running headliners in the history of Las Vegas. 

Magic with Physics

The extremely popular YouTube channel Numberphile (popular among nerds at least), they often tread into magical territory. Here one of their frequent guests Tadashi, explains an amusing technique for levitating a pingpong ball (and the physics behind it.)

When I was the host of Magic Tonight in Toronto, the comedy magician extraordinaire Wes Zaharuk used to use this as a bit in his show to great effect: 

Wes Zaharuk

Space is Big

As the saying goes:

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

— Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy

[A note for North American readers, the "chemist" is a pharmacy.]

This clip from BigThink by NASA Scientist Michelle Thaller tries to put that bigness in perspective:

These numbers are hard to imagine. VERY hard to imagine. That's one of the reasons I'm such a strong proponent of math education for everyone of all ages (beyond my own personal bias as a math major shining through.) The only way to learn to cope with these kinds of numbers is through training. Otherwise you'll be caught in the paradigm of JBS Haldane:

“My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

— JBS Haldane

Math becomes the key that allows you to do all that hitherto impossible supposing. Or, if you'd rather think of the world in terms of awe and wonder, it gives you access to entirely different domains in which to be astonished.