Tag: card throwing

Latest Magic News

Rick Smith Jr. Magician and Record Holder

Inside Magic Image of Rick Smith Jr.Rick Smith Jr. is a former baseball pitcher and professional magician.

That means he is perfectly suited for throwing playing cards great distances with incredible accuracy.  It probably also means he can pull a rosin bag from a hat, tear and restore a scorecard or spit in different colors.

He used his card throwing skills this weekend to set a new Guinness Book of World Records record for highest vertical throw.  He currently holds the world record for horizontal throw of 72 yards (in metric that is really far) and this Saturday he threw a card 67 feet straight up in the air.

The news media claim he actually threw it higher but the Guinness are all about being exact and creditable so they only allow records based on “measurable events.”

They were willing to crown him the world’s most accurate card thrower based on causing 46 out of 52 cards to sail through a 10-inch aperture (in metric, that is really small) in less than a minute (we don’t know what a minute is in metric, maybe a nanohour).

Mr. Smith entertained the assembled well-wishers with his magic act before getting down to business as part of the science center’s Myth Busters exhibit.

Read more about Mr. Smith at The Cleveland Plain Dealer website here.

Check out Mr. Smith’s web site here.

Magic Review

Ronen Goldman: Magician of Light

Inside Magic Image of Ronen Goldman's Incredible Surrealistic Master Magician PhotographWe can pick out the word “Magician” from a thousand paces.  If there is a magic book or a book with the word “magic” in the title on a shelf along the Great Wall of China, we could see it from outer space.  Our brain is just like that.  It was trained as a “Li’l Brain” to find things that represented danger (knives, fire, flaming knives and out-of-date mayonnaise) and those things that brought pleasure (magic books or tricks, 9-volt batteries, fresh mayonnaise and the annual Sears catalog).

This skill or instinctual survival mechanism has paid off handsomely.  We have avoided the scary bad things while we have lived a life full of great magic, cheap electric shocks to the tongue, a stable source of protein and an encyclopedic understanding how women’s hosiery and undergarments have changed in structure and style since the mid-1960s.

It made sense, then, that we noticed a blurb about surrealist photographer, Ronen Goldman’s work.  He does amazing things with the camera, mysterious and wondrous things.  One of his images is titled “The Magician” and features an unidentified performer throwing cards around one tree and behind another.  We do not want to infringe on his intellectual property and have included just a portion of the image to peak your interest.

We do not know much about photography other than it apparently involves “light” + “writing” if it is true to its Greek root words.  We do not know how to make trick photographs and so, to us, what Mr. Goldman does is magic.

Like a good magician, Mr. Goldman does not reveal his secrets.  We cannot identify the card throwing magician.

“I don’t love telling everything, just for the reason of the effect on people — like when a magician does something, you really don’t want to know — but if it helps an actual photographer to go out and do cool stuff, I’m for it,” he says. “It’s not like it’s a big secret about what I’m doing.”

He has an Etsy store where you can buy his images as well as a neat thread on Reddit where he does divulge some but not all of his very cool methods.
You should check out his web page at RonenGoldman.com. He has talent and we like the way he sees the world.

Check out his Facebook Page here: http://on.fb.me/g5kiOH