Magic Stories

Magic Trust and Betrayal

There is a maxim we follow — and we don’t mean the magazine by the same name. Although it is possible that the magazine Maxim actually has written about our maxim. Of course, we would never know. We trusted and apparently our trust was foolishly tossed to the four winds – three of which came from the person we trusted.

In fact, the more we think about that lying little creep, the more we become perturbed. She said she was selling magazine subscriptions for her troop. We’re always looking to help out any scouting activities and while we normally associate cookie sales with troop fund raising, we trusted.

And we gave her good money to go with that trust. We mean we paid for the subscriptions with “real money”; not a charge on one of our almost certainly over-the-limit credit cards or even proceeds from a cash advance or payday (HA!) loan.

Our intention was to use real funds to purchase subscriptions the great journals of our era; and help the local troop raise money for something.

Well, we learned the hard way.

We have not received a single issue from any of the top quality magazines we ordered.

Not one.

We paid over $422.12 for the subscriptions and received nothing. No cards falling out of the pages and cutting one’s lap or landing in the toilet. No poster-size images of the featured models in faraway places with a “come hither” or, in our case, “don’t bother,” or “stay there-ith” look in their eyes.

Yes, we were foolish to trust. We should have been suspicious and cautious. Did we already mention she wasn’t wearing a scout uniform?

We don’t think she could have fit in one anyway. She looked like she was about 35 or 90 years old – we could not tell if it was grime or five o’clock shadow responsible for her alluring Humphrey Bogart look. We know she wasn’t wearing nail polish unless Covergirl now makes a line of nicotine stained shades to go on longitudinally cracked generic, knock-off brands of Lee Press-On Nails. Perhaps they do, we haven’t kept up on women’s cosmetics since Dad moved back to Florida.

We challenged her and she passed. Well, she said it was the scout’s oath – we would have no way of knowing. Her scout oath was a little different than ours – perhaps girl troops are different generally. We didn’t make much use of the F-word in our solemn pronouncements and there was no discussion of “the man” in ours.

True, we met her at the door but we were trying to enter our house and she was trying to the door shut. We almost didn’t get inside; we were weak from our afternoon of metal detecting at the fairgrounds. (We found seven dimes, a mouth retainer, our own keys (twice), and what appears to be evidence authorities have been seeking to re-open the Hoffa case).

She allayed our suspicions when we asked why she was inside our home.

The scout put out her aromatic blunt in the kitty litter tray and calmly said it was part of the service provided by the scouts this year.

She was conducting a free, in-home inventory of our current magazine library.

Sure, she was. She probably didn’t send our full payment to the magazine companies. She was probably holding back a few bucks until next month when she’ll collect more money from another sucker for magazines and then pay our subscriptions with his payment. It is the oldest scheme in the book.

Of course, we don’t have that book either but that is another story. One best saved for a day when we hit our head again.

Anyway, our maxim is “great minds think alike.”

That maxim delivers boatloads of relevance on our laps today as we launched the new Inside Magic iPod, Droid, Smartphone and Windows Mobile app. We’re not alone in seeing technology as a wonderful tar pit in which we intellectual dinosaurs may frolic and eventually sleep.

Ryan Swigert wrote just after we launched the new app with news of his work with the iPhone Magic Apps. You can read his note and check out his great ideas via the links therein.

You can get your version of the Inside Magic app here. Depending on your type of phone, it will load as a true app or a widget that will tie you directly to Inside Magic’s special mobile site.

Best of all, it is free.

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