OK! The title is trite – it’s Sunday and I’m tired and not particularly clever or original today.
Lost in all the hoopla over the Haydn/Sheets/Bush/MagiCentric/MagicWhack/MagicianX/Pinnard/Schneide/Kreskin/BabeRuth/HowieMandel…..etc. etc. uh……. controversy was the very real issue raised by MagiCentric in the original Haydn/Bush post. The lost point of the original post was there are 2 levels of accountability in magic when it comes to creation and crediting. First, there are the elite – I won’t call names here as that’s not the point – they can publish and produce anything and the magic world applauds. Statues are built in the park. The Magic Castle awards a fellowship and Steve Brooks gets so excited he nearly misses a meal.
Then there are piss ants like you and me. We can pull a rabbit out of a hat and some pious, self-righteous jackal will quickly inform us that that was developed by Reginald Scot and we should make arrangements with his estate before performing it again. It’s the ethical thing to do.
Create an original idea and have it ripped off and we hear coincidence or that it was already in some underground notes privately circulated by Hofzinser and the routine was well known among the cognoscenti.
Exaggerrated? Barely, if at all. It’s sick and perverted.
Drivel & Drool
Is it possible?
I’m about to say something I’ve never said before and doubt I will say again. I think the Magic Cafe may have done the right thing. OK I said it and it felt REAL strange.
The giantormous thread about the 3 shell DVD is G-O-N-E as far as I can tell. I hope someone captured it. Unfortunately, I’ve been away and didn’t have the opportunity.
My gut tells me that there’s something else going on here. Brooks’ boys seemed to have things well in hand last time I looked. MagicianX, always on top of things, wrote about Al Schneider’s posts in the thread. It may well be that the only face saving move Brooks could make was trashing the whole thread after Al called out some of that hypocritical cadre of idiots.
As I often said in my years at Arthur Andersen, “if you hear the truth, it is nothing but a statistical anomaly”. Likewise, if the Cafe does the right thing it is merely a cosmic accident that will shake the space/time continuum to its knees.
