Magician Feature

Magician Mac King Escapes for New Jersey

Image of Mac King in Cloak of InvisibilityInside Magic Favorite Mac King is to appear on Saturday, March 16th at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey for one nearly sold out show at 8:00 pm.  The theater is a long way from Las Vegas but just 1500 feet from the home of Albert Einstein.  We explore the obvious implications of this “coincidence” in our special investigative article today.

One of the downsides of being a headliners on the Las Vegas strip is . . .

Okay, actually we cannot think of many, or any downsides per se.  We suppose having people trying to force business cards for escort agencies into your hand each time you enter your place of work would get old and risk paper cuts but other than that, it seems like a pretty good thing.

And to be fair, Inside Magic Favorite Mac King is not complaining about being a favorite of both resident and tourists.  It is just an unfortunate truth that being a headliner means you have to appear live on stage at the venue for which tickets are sold lest you lose your headliner status and risk class action lawsuits by disgruntled putative audience members.

(By the way, according to our recent review of Clark County, Nevada’s civil court docket, there has not been a lawsuit against a headliner by a disappointed ticket holder that was described as “gruntled.”  It appears only the disgruntled are willing to pay the filing fees and cost of serving a summons to seek recompense for their alleged damages.

Interestingly,  we came across a lawsuit brought by a family who attended the Cirque du Soleil show “O” and found it wanting.  For some reason, the ticket broker told them the front row seats were for a show starring Oprah Winfrey.  The suit was dismissed at a preliminary stage of proceedings.  We were amazed that they stayed for the entire two-hour show apparently waiting for Ms. Winfrey to appear in the midst of the aquatic fete that is O.  See, Family Van Der Wallen Jag v. Cirque du Soleil, et. al., (Nev. Nov. 23, 2012)).

Mr. King performs ten shows a week and if he were performing them all on one day, he would have plenty of time to see the world but apparently his contract with Harrah’s requires him to take the stage at the beautifully appointed Main Showroom twice a day on five days a week; Tuesday through Saturday.  (We did the math, performing a show at 1:00 and 3:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday equals ten shows.  We were pretty certain Mr. King’s representation was correct but it is also good to check things for one’s self).

Mr. King will be in Princeton, New Jersey on the stage of the beautiful McCarter Theatre Saturday, March 16 at 8:00 pm.  We just checked with the box office and it seems he is almost sold out.  Their online portal shows just 12 seats remaining for the show.  The dearth of billets is not a shock.  After all, Mr. King is a great magician with a perfect act and a loyal following.

We understand his arrival in this university town has been likened Albert Einstein’s first trip there in 1921.  Not to dwell on the obvious but this portends great things for Mac King in the coming years.  Dr. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics the following year.  The Nobel Committee conferred the honor saying, “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.“

Exactly.  Right?!

What is Mac King’s big cool trick?  The Cloak of Invisibility!

And, what did Einstein write in his paper on the law of the photoelectric effect?

Actually, we don’t know, we don’t read “smart.”

But we know three scientists in Europe who believe Einstein’s theories can be used to make a — wait for it — cloak of invisibility.  Seriously.

A cloak, such as the one worn by the Harry Potter character for example, is not yet possible but it is a good example of what we are trying to move towards. Using this new computer model we can prove that light can bend around an object under a cloak and is not diffracted by the object. This happens because the metamaterial that makes up the cloak stretches the metrics of space, in a similar way to what heavy planets and stars do for the metrics of space-time in Einstein’s general relativity theory.

And unlike most things in this news source, we are not just making it up.  Liverpool mathematician Dr Sébastien Guenneau, together with Dr Frédéric Zolla and Professor André Nicolet from the University of Marseille are the people behind the work necessary to develop a practical, commercial invisibility cloak.  As always, magicians lead the way and science follows.  We cannot imagine what Mr. King’s cloak must have cost in terms of man-years and millions of bucks in development but without his groundbreaking work, Einstein’s theories would be dismissed as mere mumbo-jumbo.

(Mumbo-jumbo is not to be confused with “Mumble gumbo.”   “Mumbo-Jumbo” is a hip manner of describing confusing, double-talk.  The latter were the original last words of the fictional Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ opus Citizen Kane.  In the original script, the billionaire utters the phrase as his dying hand loses its grip on an American-Cajun dictionary given to him by his mother, Queen Patrice du New Orleans.

To help fund the very expensive production, RKO studios accepted $20,000.00 from a sporting goods manufacturer for one of the first instances of product placement in American cinema.  The script had to be rewritten to accommodate the change and several scenes were re-shot but the added cost was far less than the fee paid by The Rosebud Sled & Sleigh Works of Bethany, Vermont. Welles initially objected to the “crass commercial contrivance” but later felt the script actually worked better with the new object and final lines.

Interestingly, when Welles first heard about the change, he immediately began work on a separate version of Citizen Kane to preserve his original cinematic vision.  It was to be filmed using the new technique known as “claymation.”  In fact, Gumby (the name derived from the word “Gumbo” in Welles’ original script), was the prototype figure for Charles Foster Kane.  Gumby would have a career of his own in less serious films but it is little known that each Gumby film was ghost-directed by the loveable bendy man’s originator, Orson Welles).

We are in negotiations to buy the internet domain name MacKingNobelPrize.com so that we can sell it back to the enterprising performer when he picks up his hardware and huge check at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden. next year.  If you cannot make it to Stockholm or Las Vegas, make sure you see him in Princeton, New Jersey on March 16th at 8:00 pm.

[This article was updated to remove the home address and phone number of certain royal family members; remove allegedly libelous statements regarding two of the Nobel Prize committee’s administrative staff; and insert the Gumby history].

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