Devious.

I really mean the Paper Crane product.

Is really good.

And lots of fun.

I picked it up when I went to Tannen's after my interview at Einstein/Beth Israel.  I asked for a trick that didn't use cards or really coins.  So they suggested several items of which I boiled down to 2 - Extreme Burn 2.0 and Devious.  Based on a coin flip, I went with Devious.  They did a demo for me, and holy Jupiter, everything was examinable.  So I picked it up, brought it home (along with Tenyo's Card Surgery - lots of problems with this one), and played around with it before I popped in the DVD.

Long story short - it's really cool and I've never added a short bottle routine to my repertoire before.  NOW I CAN AND IT IS GREAT, particularly as a transition between some coin effects, to card effects.

Of course, the key is you need a brown bottle.  Being an American who loves microbrews, I have no shortage of excellent and really cool looking bottles that perfectly fit the bill.  The spectator examines the bottle before and after the effect.

Utter class.  My best spontaneous purchase of the year.

Yes it has arrived!

I just got my Miguel Angel Gea's "Essence" DVD set!

I only got to watch a little bit of the first 2 DVD's, but it's just beyond exciting and Mr. Gea just seems so personable like the other Fat Brothers.

Outside of being able to consistently set up 3 coins in classic palm and dropping them without dropping 2 accidently, the coin stuff is surprisingly doable.  Only a few gimmicks that can be made at home.  Just overall delicious goodness.

Can't wait to watch all 9+ hours of this sexiness.

Update time...

Geez wow I haven't updated this in a while.  Writing in a blog is really therapeutic, especially with all this stress.

Right now residency applications are going out.  The way this works is that basically I send my crap to hospitals, and hope they like me enough to give me an interview.  I can then rank all the hospitals that gave me interviews, and they rank all their own interviewees.  On Match day in March, I get an envelope saying where I matched.  I'm applying for med/psych as well as straight psych, so we'll see what happens.

As far as magic goes, I've been fully absorbed with Elmsley Vol 1, and the Card Magic of Nick Trost.  Both are just dripping with great ideas.  Just having a blast reading them with a little Erdnase on the side.

Man

Edwin Sach's Sleight of Hand is a great book.  Can't believe I never read it before.  Glad I am now, though!

Osterlind Lecture

I have never had time to go to a magic lecture because medical school keeps me from doing a lot of things, worse now that third year is done and fourth year is starting (oh, weekend calls =[ ).  However, I did purchase Richard Osterlind's lecture from Penguin magic.  Man, this lecture is amazing.  I've really learned a lot.  The best part is that I can just watch it in brief, 20-30 minute intervals whenever I have a chance.  It's a lot of fun and I hope I can attend some lectures at Tannen after residency matching is over and before my residency starts.

If you, like me, skipped over Fulves books just because they looked like beginner books, then you, like me, will be that much more impressed when you open those books up.  I have been reading his self working rope/handkerchief/coin/table/mental magic books and wow, there are some gems in there.  I can't believe no one told me how good these books really were.  I'm not saying they're going to be replacing my Al Schneider or Tarbell books.  But I am saying that they are really good, with plenty of ideas and tricks in them.  Not to mention they're really cheap.  I didn't care much for the card book because I have so many card books and DVD's already, but I'm not saying it's bad either - it's actually pretty damn good too.

Noncard magic

So I've decided to take a break from cards and work on nongimmicked close-up/parlour material. Primarily, going back to Bobo, Roth, some Chris Kenner, and some Homer Liwag coin stuff. I've been practicing lots of rope material mostly Colombini and Fiberoptics [Sanders], and of course, the good ol' spongeballs. After taking a bit of a break I've found a lot of the more advanced coin material I had lots of difficulty with earlier are much easier now for me. I guess a pause really does pay off! I'm in the midst of making my first full-on set. It's hard picking out which mentalism material and card material I want to use because there's so much I like!

 In medical news - done with 3rd year...starting 4th year. I think I'm going to go into psychiatry. I'm having lots of fun and learning a ton on the inpatient psych ward.

Larry Jennings

I wanted to make another post today to talk about how awesome Larry Jennings is. I never really learned his material directly until recently, and boy, I'm glad I did. This is challenging but solid material with incredible effect structure. The sleights are beautifully placed, without extraneous movements. The tricks themselves are simple and astounding (they can all pass the Vernon treatment - can you summarize this trick in one sentence?). This surely will bring any magician up a level in skill.

The downside, of course, is that you need to practice these a lot if you want to be able to 1) patter without sounding like an idiot and 2) do everything smoothly but without suspicion (again, the structure of the tricks help with that - see the part in Designing Miracles about timing of occurrences).

I think the next few things I'm gonna get are the Eugene Burger stuff.

The Unfolding

I don't really have that much time to right a really thorough review like I normally would, but I really wanted to get this out there.

Paul Carnazzo's The Unfolding

This is a brilliant mentalism effect. This is exactly what happens: you lay down 3 or 4 pictures perhaps of your own creation or from the ones that came with the package. You ask a female spectator to take one, a male spectator to take another, and the third one will go to you. The backs of the image indicate, 100%, who gets which picture. No force, no annoying equivoque, just 100%.

Now this really does sound too good to be true. There are some language restrictions which Mr. Carnazzo discusses in the instructions. There are ways to bypass this, however, and that's exactly what I do since I usually perform for one person at a time. There are also alternative presentations that almost 100% remove the language barrier and eliminate the need for more than one spectator. For instance, in a murder mystery theme I'm working on, I have laid out 4 different murder weapons, and the spectator tells me which one she or he believes the murderer used. He/she points to one, and it is says on the back "This is the murder weapon used." Every other picture says "This is NOT the murder weapon used." Again, 100%.

The other downside, besides the language barrier, is that the pictures are not for the greedy touchy-feely spectator. You need some decent audience management skills. They can briefly look and hold the pictures but, though I haven't run into this issue yet, they might accidently do something to the photos which could reveal how it's done though the chances of that are minimal. So, as long as you're careful about how they handle the pictures, you will be fine. If they choose not to touch it and just want to look at them really, really carefully, you won't have any issues at all.

One way I've used is using a mini stand for each of the pictures and turning the photos around. The display gives them this "museum" feel, so I feel like a spectator is less likely to grab them, rather than touch them. I also subtly hint that these are nice quality photos (they are, for real).

Really, if you like what the description says, you get exactly that. It's a great method that eliminates the equivoque in exchange for slightly less examinability (still mostly examinable). I can't imagine anyone going wrong with this purchase. It's brilliant.

Pros: Solid presentational line, allows for great creativity, no equivoque or forcing, 100% end result
Cons: Spectator cannot examine super thoroughly though you can get around it, reset is not instant and needs a few seconds alone.

The plight of the soul in med school...

Well, med school is still hard. I'm currently on my neurology rotation which I like significantly less than psychiatry. This is because in neurology, everything makes sense to everyone except me. In psychiatry, nothing makes sense to anyone including me so at least I never felt like an idiot (knowing medications, clinical indications, DSM criteria, etc weren't so bad. Knowing the thousands of nerve pathways - that is bad.)

I think the pressure is hardest right now. The AOA awards went out and of course I wasn't even close to being qualified for one. Knowing that they did makes me feel kind of like a stupid loser. Also, match day was last Friday. Knowing that this time next year, I could be one of the kids who doesn't match (I hope not) is totally scaring. I am trying to stay motivated despite the heavy burnout to continue doing well on my new medications and psychotherapy. I am working on my CV and will be emailing to recommendations in the coming days, as well as hard-scheduling my Step 2 dates. I have a few books set aside, and with UWorld + my new study abilities, I don't think I will go wrong like I did in Step 1, and I will work just as hard.

I remember back in college, which were just more years wasted away on studying endlessly and never having fun, one of my friends told me I probably was going to med school because of familial pressure, and that I should have followed my dreams of becoming an English professor.

Shit. Shit. I think he was right. I just don't want to admit I've been lying to myself this whole time. Not when I've come this far up the mountain...

Good thing I have card tricks.

Some Upcoming Reviews...

...on magic things (I only review things that I really like, so all my reviews are positive):

Paul Carnazzo's "The Unfolding"
David Solomon's "The Wisdom of Solomon"
Devin Knight's "A Knight to Remember"

Food for thought....

In Strong Magic, Ortiz discusses the importance of scripting, and how it is far better to have a fully scripted set rather than going in without a script. He states that, paradoxically, you will sound a lot more natural and smoother when you go in knowing exactly what you're going to say, rather than trying to sound natural by "we'll do it live!" method. I fully agree with this, and I think it's worth thinking about especially if you, like me, used to be in the "fully impromptu script" school.

Now that my life is back on track

I can finally catch up on this thing.

Medical school has been of the most tumultuous times of my life. I don't say it because it's a first world problem that doesn't exist elsewhere (but it does), I say it because the events that have transpired since my last post are very important to me.

So in the beginning, med school owned me even though I was studying nonstop 24/7 over and over again. I didn't know why. Step 1 sucked for me, even though it shouldn't have. I understood physio like the back of my hand, but physio is only a part of the exam.

So flash-forward after screwing up (not totally, but pretty screwed up) the biggest exam of my life (and possibly the most important), we start rotations. Medicine sucked for me for all the same reasons other things sucked for me - I couldn't remember anything. It was like everyone around me had wonder memory. They just knew stuff. I felt like a loser, and I hadn't felt so suicidal and depressed since the incredible breakdown where my parents called security in 2nd year.

So that sucked. Next up, pediatric rotations. What the hell is this...my attending suspects a lot of my depression, my issues with med school...might be learning disability. She says she notices how I can never keep information organized, how my words and things are all over the place...ADHD she suggests. It's not uncommon to have ADHD in med students, not diagnosed until residency, when the depression sets in even harder. So she refers me to a neuropsychologist.

5 hours of neuropsych testing. I'm up there in smarts...but, wow...I'm in the 5th to 10th percentile in attention/distractibility.

What. The. Fuck. Is this serious? Is this seriously why I could never hang out with my friends, or feared so much going out to have fun because I knew I had to study so much?

Is this...seriously the answer?

Yeah, it was.

Forward to finally getting testing accomodations and medicines: Grades. Going. Up. Studying became easier. I still spend a lot of time reading over things, but I can finally read questions without skipping words (if I'm not under pressure), I can finally read through things and remember more of what I read. It's night and day. There is no comparison to what is happening to me. I can finally go out with friends, and study appropriately and still do well.

I almost want to cry. This was too much for me. I owe so much to Dr. Traba, the pediatrician who took the time to think "maybe this kid is fucking nuts because he has ADHD"...given my history of school, got in trouble a lot for calling out, acting like a lunatic, going to the principle's office...how the hell did no one see this in me before? Ah, I realized, it's because I did so well in school, that no one cared that I was loud and obnoxious and the kid everyone called "hyper and weird"....sheesh. And of course I owe so much to my beautiful girlfriend who knows EXACTLY what I'm going through!

Unfortunately, my poor grades in the beginning are a huge hindrance. I can't do the thing I wanted to do most - surgery. It's gone, and I just have to accept it. However, I have found a new love in psychiatry! It is less pressure, for one, but more importantly, I love the patient interaction (even if most of them are nuts), and I love the social aspect. It is abstract, and feels like Star Trek - going where other doctors don't go.

Things are getting better. I'm psychologically getting better. I feel like a newer person, a person who has finally been able to open the door and find that, well, it's kinda sunny outside, and it's pretty easy to breathe now.


Oh, and I almost forgot about magic stuff. Kaitlyn got me Designing Miracles. Can I just say how amazing this book is? Things I'm working on: billet/center tear work, David Solomon stuff. Oh, and I'm learning how to draw, also thanks to Kaitlyn!!!