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Magician impales hand on huge nail during London show after trick goes massively wrong

Magician impales hand on huge nail during London show after trick goes massively wrong

A magician performing a Russian Roulette-style trick managed to impale his hand on a six-inch nail after it went badly wrong.

Kyle Wallace was performing at the Arch 1 theatre in West Ham, east London last week.

During the show he tried to perform a trick where an upright nail poking through block of wood is placed in a bag, and three identical bags which have items of a similar size within them are swapped around.

The audience is then invited to choose which bag the daring magician slams his hands on. READ MORE..

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/magician-impales-hand-huge-nail-6815924

On Verge of TV Deal, Magician Says ‘Illusionists’ Partners Left Him Stranded in Venezuela..

On Verge of TV Deal, Magician Says ‘Illusionists’ Partners Left Him Stranded in Venezuela..

In a federal lawsuit, professional magician Brett Daniels says he has a trick to make vehicles like an antique horse and carriage appear out of thin air, but needed to resort to legal threats in order to get out of Venezuela.

Daniels is the co-creator of The Illusionists, reported to be the highest selling magic show in Broadway history and possibly soon to be showcased in a television broadcast.

In his complaint filed in Wisconsin against other Illusionists producers including Simon Painter and Timothy Lawson, Daniels alleges he was due 10 percent of all fees paid to performers for any Illusionists show in any format.

“However, after using Daniels’ expertise, contacts, and efforts to get the show off the ground, and after the Show began to achieve international success, Defendants cut Daniels out of the Show and refused to pay him his contractually guaranteed share of the Total Act Fees from at least November of 2013 to the present,” states the complaint. “Further, Defendants continue to use Daniels’ proprietary copyrighted illusions in the Show without Daniels’ approval or consent.”  Read more…

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/verge-tv-deal-magician-says-839004

THE KATS REPORT: EVEN AMID TURMOIL, MURRAY SAWCHUCK CONTINUES TO RAISE HIS PUBLIC PROFILE..

THE KATS REPORT: EVEN AMID TURMOIL, MURRAY SAWCHUCK CONTINUES TO RAISE HIS PUBLIC PROFILE..

Over the past year, Murray Sawchuck has felt the loss. He’s lost his venue. He’s lost his father. He’s lost his onstage assistant and wife—one and the same—to a fellow Las Vegas magician. But Sawchuck is not at a loss for words. He’s not lost focus, his zeal for performing or his uncanny acumen for promotion.

And good for him. Sawchuck is the recently star-crossed yet indefatigable afternoon magician at Planet Hollywood’s Sin City Theatre. The 13-year Vegas performer is holding tight to his daily 4 p.m. time slot like an NFL running back protecting the football. He’s uniformly billed as the Celebrity Magician, familiar for his cobalt-blue suit and shock of high-rising blond locks.

“This suit is from Armani—Salvation Armani,” he jokes, characteristic of his throwback comedy stylings. As he produces a deck of cards, he scans the audience and says, “I usually do this card trick for 1,000 people. But 82 will do.” READ MORE…

http://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/2015/nov/04/the-kats-report-murray-sawchuck-turmoil-raise-prof/

Let’s look to magicians to better understand technological deception..

Let’s look to magicians to better understand technological deception..

In order to best understand the new technologies in our lives, it may be more useful to look to stage magicians than to source code.

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But I’m not saying that the performances of David Copperfield and the products of Steve Jobs are one and the same. What’s important about the example of stage magic is that it will help us think about which technological deceptions should be permissible in society.

We like the deception at the heart of a Penn & Teller show, but we don’t like the idea of being “deceived” if the outcome is a negative one. Take, for example, the Volkswagen scheme to evade emissions regulations. At the heart of the plot was a kind of magician’s trick. The company’s “green” diesel cars had a “defeat device,” software that produced the illusion of a car with stable emissions behavior. Like a trick deck of cards that looks “fair” but is actually rigged to favor the magician, the “defeat device” masked the car’s reality, that it was a computer with four wheels designed to fool environmental regulators. Read more..

http://fusion.net/story/226364/what-magic-and-technology-have-in-common/