What Happened at the Meeting on Friday 21st January

The theme of the January 2014 meeting was ”Free Choice” – which is a pretty broad theme ! - hosted by Al Hirschel.  "Free Choice" could include items we had been working on during the holidays..... 

Al's free choice was an alphabet game, in which the goal was to be the last person to cross out the last letter of the 26.  This fascinated all of us, particularly David Blunden, who did a logical and mathematical analysis of it to discover its workings ! 

Joel Howlett showed a diary with a card written on each day, and the card chosen by the spectator matched the one that was written on today’s date in the diary! In another card item, the chosen card disappeared from the deck and appeared back in the card box, which was on the table all the time. 

Next, Joel did a magnificent item.  He cut off ten talons from the pack of cards, and showed that they each had 1, 2 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 cards in them!  Then he turned over the top card of each pile and showed they were all the spades from 1 to 10 in numerical order!   He added the K, Q, J of Spades to complete the suit, then he mixed up the remaining cards.  Dividing the cards with two cuts, he displayed each of the the three packets – one had all the hearts in numerical order, and the others likewise all the clubs and all the diamonds. Stunning!…….   think of the practice this must necessitate !

John Ferguson did an item of Chemical Magic – Colourless to Muddy to Colourless illustrating a story that he told. (This uses silver nitrate, sodium hydroxide and ammonia.)

Al Hirschel did one of those wonderful story-telling items he likes so much in which he repeatedly turns over cards to illustrate the story he is telling. They work well - as long as every card turns up at the right moment, as they did - there's practice and skill.

Noel Clair was into story telling as well, and his story was based on the well-known jumping rubber bands, which we hardly recognized, it was so cleverly illustrated by his story.

He performed some items using hair securers, and levitated a card.  Then he did that beautiful classic, Card Warp, in which a card bent inside another card reverses from front to back as you push it through.

Barry Whitson performed Equal-Unequal Ropes – a nice rope routine that always goes well.

David Whitson showed us Three Card Monte using giant cards, and he talked about methods for doing this.

Our "free choices" ended up as a really enjoyable night.