The theme of the meeting was “Bar Betchas” hosted by Jeff Clarke, who led off with several items. He did the “Giraffe turn around” and the “Fish turn around” using kebab sticks. Next, he dropped three dice into a glass of water. Drawing attention to the numbers visible on the dice, he asked us to predict the total of the numbers on the bottom of the dice.
David Whitson displayed mismade flags – A Union Jack without blue colour, a Union Jack with red but no blue, and the flag of Australia, correctly coloured. These he produced from a change bag. He also showed us large posters – “Stop Pollution” from his antipollution show.
One item performed by Jeff Clarke was repeated by David Blunden – he did the Fish again with kebab sticks. He also did the “squashed dog”. Laying out a mathematical equation with the kebab sticks, he showed how to solve it with a minimum of moves. He asked a spectator to “Do As I Do” – to copy his moves, and the spectator was unable to do so.
Steve Irwin has been preparing for our show later in the year, and he rehearsed his introduction for us.
Joel Howlett did a Spiderman Card trick. In this he used a deck with a card that had a spider inked on it. The he exchanged torn corners of playing cards. He tore a corner off, gave it to a spectator to hold, tore a corner off a different car, and then magically swapped the corners over.
The “Piano Card Trick” is fully explained in “Royal Road to Card Magic” page 119, and this was performed by John Ferguson. Two piles of card are dealt, and one odd card is added to the pile chosen by spectator. Magically, the magician makes the odd pile become an “even” pile, and you can’t see the odd card magically move over. He gave us two URLs of youtube videos – performance and tutorial :
