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We all face the occasional rare storms in our lives. Hurricane Charley in 2004 upset my career and life. The roof on my warehouse was blown off and all my costume manufacturing tools, patterns and molds received severe damage which was only partially covered by insurance. All of my magic and illusions were mostly saved but a number of smaller things were water damaged. I found out that anyone with a lick of brains in Florida should have their magic in water tight plastic storage boxes. The few props I had that were not in plastic boxes got soaked. Most of the plywood dried out with minimum damage but the MAK Magic props made with Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) swelled up to 3 times its size. I have recently remade the last of those props.
One was called The Bunny Box for making a rabbit appear. A black metal sheet is used to sketch a rabbit and it is placed in a box and the sketch comes alive and a real rabbit appears. I had one that was made by MAK Magic. It was made out of pressboard with a tacky high glass paint job with meaningless graphics. The load chamber was only big enough for the smallest of bunnies. It was soaked by Charley and turned to a heap of powder.
I stripped off all the hinges and flap gimmick and rebuilt it out of some cabinet grade plywood I got for free from a cabinet shop. I made the load chamber bigger by extending the box another one and a half inches. I added double doors on the front instead of the one door. I believe that when you open up the double doors that are hinged at the sides it increases the illusion of depth in the box. With a new and more traditional paint job it is now functional.
I have probably used it a half dozen or so times. It seems to be deceptive. I first saw this trick on the old Magic Land of Allakazam about 1962 when Mark Wilson did it in the audience of kids.
Almost a year ago Siegfried and Roy promised to return to the stage in February 2009 as part of the annual fundraiser for the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute. Recall that Roy received brain damage when attacked by a tiger during their stage act on October 3rd 2003.
The promise to return to stage will be fulfilled on February 28 at the Keep Memory Alive: Power of Love gala at the Bellagio hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. The performance will be filmed by ABC television and broadcast as "The Return of Siegfried & Roy," a special edition of the network's hour-long 20/20 news magazine show. Airing on March 6 [10 p.m. ET], the show will feature the magic duo's performance, as well as a segment on the Ruvo Institute in Nevada, a center dedicated to the study of debilitating neurological diseases. Siegfried and Roy say their participation in the fundraiser will be both a return to the stage and their farewell performance, the final time they will present their signature illusions. "We never got to say a proper goodbye," Roy said. "This will be our final bow and it will never be repeated."
In the meantime Franz Harary wrecked his convertible on the way back to Vegas in a freak accident and survived the ordeal with a few stitches. I am wondering if he turns the whole experience into a televised mega-stunt? Maybe the crumpled up car can be restored in front of your eyes like “Healed and Sealed” the refilling and uncrumpling soda can.
There is a popular myth floating around (at least since the last Great Depression) that when times are bad, people flock to entertainment, and so magicians do well. The myth explains that people need escape and something to get their mind off their troubles.
Baloney. Look at the super-sensitive nature of Las Vegas right now, where hotels are hurting badly and the staff is being laid off. House prices have utterly collapses in Las Vegas. Recall that the 1930s Depression was the final nail in the coffin of the big illusions shows.
When President Obama said recently, "It's time companies getting bailouts stopped sending their executives on company-paid perks to Las Vegas and Super Bowls and --" , the mayor of Las Vegas went berserk and demanded an apology from Obama for singling out Las Vegas like that. Then the mayor ranted about how very necessary and useful corporate (business) junkets to Las Vegas really are and how this stimulates the economy...Well, in fact it actually only "stimulates" Las Vegas.
The bottom line is that America (and peripherally the world) is in the deep financial sewer right now, and every politician that suggests anything is coming up smelling like sewage. If they vote for bailout money then they get labeled as a Socialist. If they reject bailout money then they are called a heartless cruel Fascist who enjoys seeing babies and old people starve to death. Enough already!
Entertainment (magic is at the very bottom of that food chain) is one of the first "perks of discretionary income" to suffer. It figures. CNN featured a Vegas magician, David Shimshi, who has fallen on hard times. “Shimshi used to work as a house magician at the famous Mirage hotel and performed with the World's Greatest Magicians show at the Greek Isles Casino. Now Shimshi, as he's known to everyone, including his wife Janelle, has seen his gigs disappear, a victim of the struggling economy.”
Finally, I watched Bubblevision (CNBC) on my day off. They had a series of programs about the meltdown and, honestly, they must be written for someone with the academic level of a 12 year old.
Allen “Bubbles” Greenspan was on explaining that he simply could not figure out the math behind CDOs. He said, “I have several hundred PhDs that I can call on and none of them could explain it either”.
What kind of math idiots, both in and out of government, are running things?
Please, I don’t want YOU to ever tell anyone that you don’t understand any of the derivative financial math models. Warren Buffet avoided them and called them “weapons of mass financial destruction”
Quants (financial mathematicians) began applying statistical models that are topographic based to make optimum predictions under unchanging ideal conditions.
It is not that complicated. In another few paragraphs, I can make you smarter than Allen Greenspan and his hundreds of PhDs.!
Think about hiking in the mountains and figuring out a path through the mountains with the least altitude and shortest distance. Then add to the complexity the stochastic process of rockslides or high water than may block your path forcing an alternative. Crunch the numbers and you get a predictionof the best path. Since there are a number of variables, call the path multivariable. Consider the timeline of a collection of mortgages to be a multivariable in risk and return just like figuring out the best path through the mountains. It is possible to model this best path with statistical math.
These “copulas” were the basis of the models.
www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/
informative regarding “tail dependence” neglected by Gaussian copulas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/
This will give you the basics of derivative structure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
As Alfred Korzypski was famous for saying, “The roadmap is not the territory”
and that holds true for any Markov Chain Monte Carlo statistical model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
a state of automatic return of general equilibrium. (I know. This goes against the “religion” of
the Free Market people.)
To some this up: Bad things happen. You can not make a math model to predict when bad things will happen.(“tail dependence”) Math is a tool, it is not a true copy of reality. Only when you know enough about the math tool, can you understand how is can be (and was!) misused.
PS: Forward this to Bubbles Greenspan and any PhDs you know. Explain it to them.
Dennis Phillips
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