I’m Back in the States — Bloated but BackInside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

I just got back from England.

As many of you know, I am not just the owner of a fabulous website dedicated to making self-centered claims about itself. I have a second job, the one that pays the bills in my non-magic world. I am a claims adjuster for a Swiss insurance company that specializes in insuring ?non-traditional and non-stationary entertainment? events and on-going concerns.

Basically, The Basil Insurance Group underwrites carnivals, circuses, side-shows, trade-shows, and stuff. We had a fire in a small town outside of London when a trade-show performer was presenting a new idea for copy paper and demonstrating how it couldn?t catch fire even when the copying machine is over-heating.

It burned down the presentation booth and allegedly destroyed his collection of diamonds that he just happened to have with him. So the booth was going to set back B.I.G. just over $1,200 (₤850.00). No biggie. Heck, we had the booth as evidence. We knew it really existed. The diamonds, however, were gone ? they allegedly burned up, like coal.

Anyway, who cares what I do in my non-magic world?

…

I just got back from England.

Anyway, who cares what I do in my non-magic world?

I came back from London hours ago; jet-lagged, bloated (they have great food there if you are a meat and potato guy like me or a meet and potatoe guy like our former Vice President), drunk from warm beer and sort of messed up because they relaxed the law against marijuana starting this week and people were rolling joints everywhere ? it was like the end of prohibition here except there was very little ?second-hand? drunkenness from the drink-fest but the pot smoke that filled virtually every room in every Pub I was in and I was in a lot of them.

Anyway, so I?m back, bloated and strangely hungry for junk food but more importantly, I?m paranoid.

When you deal with criminals all week and sit in pubs interviewing them while surgeons and solicitors around you are chain-smoking their first ?de-criminalized? doobies, you tend to get paranoid.

So, I went from Las Vegas for the World Magic Seminar to London. In Vegas, people were honest or more honest than the unfortunate characters I was investigating for B.I.G.

The Vegas trip was great and I hope to do it again. The London trip pays the bills so I hope to do that again ? after I go into rehab for the second-hand smoke addiction I suffered.

In Vegas, I had a chance to promote the heck out of the website ? slipping the special pens I invented just for the seminar. They not only proclaimed the site but allowed you to do a trick in the spectator?s hands.

But after all of that great promotion, the site went into stagnation for a week. People I told to check out the site, probably did, found that it was updated about as often as Melanie Kerr?s website. That will teach me to throw stones.

So there you go. As we say in horse racing, that which comes around had to go around.

Anyway, I?m back and I hope that things become more steady now.

If you?re wondering, we denied the claim on the diamond part of the fire, and are holding up payment on the trade show booth because of the ?suggestion of fraud? as they say over there. I called it, ?Fraud.? They called it ?the suggestion of fraud.? They?re much more polite than me ? but that?s not saying much.

I hope to get up the results of my interview with a cabbie about David Blaine and a Shocking Story about David Copperfield that might actually scandalize Magic if it is true.