No Regrets This Time: Mindvention ScheduledInside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

Our Love Blinded Us to Spelling

We have few regrets in our life other than selling our
Microsoft stock in 1988 to buy what turned out to be a forged
autographed photo of Ann B. Davis and Maureen McCormick
from the 1970’s archetypical show, The Brady Bunch. We learned an
important lesson. Check the spelling of alleged autographs. There are
two E’s in Maureen and no I’s.

But as we look at the millions we could have had if we had kept the
Microsoft stock or even received an actual autographed photograph of
our two favorite female actresses in a long-running, TV sitcom in which
the youngest male child was not replaced by another actor after the
first season, we realize regret is nothing more than another tool by
which we can club our ego and self-esteem like the monkeys at the
beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

To be healthy, we must think
healthy. To think healthy, we must take all negative thoughts about our
incredible screw-ups in our life, ball them up into one round ball of
self-hatred and swallow them with a brimming cup of surrender and pity
so they may mutate like a cancerous, ulcerating, blob of distress
within us.

That’s the healthy way of dealing with regret.

What does this have to do with Mindvention 2005?

Well, we have kicked and scratched ourselves for months now for
missing last year’s first-annual Mindvention held in Las Vegas. We do
mentalism and love mentalism.

In particular, we love Bob Cassidy but in
a healthy kind of way. You know, obsessively buying, watching,
memorizing, and while pretending to be him (with full costume including
tattoo on our hand) doing his entire show for startled patrons at the
mall. “Who are you?” they ask incredulously. “I’m Bob Cassidy, darn
ye!”

(Speaking of Ebay: we came across a great idea based on our superior
knowledge of the history of philosophy. If something was written prior
to 1923, the original writer no longer has a copyright in the writings.

Consequently, you can steal it and it is not even like stealing. It’s
almost noble. Almost. Well, last time we checked (this morning) Plato’s
writings were almost all done before 1923 (at least the important ones
— there is something on the internet about some “Retreat” he had in
New York during the 1970’s but we don’t care about that). So you can
just steal what he wrote and say it’s yours.

Well, you can’t do that
because we just did and claimed it was ours but you could with one of
the other “Classic” writers before 1923 like Jonathan Swift, Socrates,
Dickens, Zsa-Zsa Gabor, or Hawthorne).

According to Mindvention’s website, the following greats in our field scheduled to appear include: “Banacheck (sic), Richard Osterlind,
Bruce Bernstein, Barrie Richardson, Rick Maue, Lee Earle, and Larry
Becker.” We are…

Our Love Blinded Us to Spelling

That’s the healthy way of dealing with regret.

What does this have to do with Mindvention 2005?

Well, we have kicked and scratched ourselves for months now for
missing last year’s first-annual Mindvention held in Las Vegas. We do
mentalism and love mentalism.