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My father took magic very seriously and went way beyond simple slight of hand that this article suggests. He could make coins disappear without a trace. Our mother was often astonished when she found all the money in the house and bank had vanished. One day he wanted to show us a disappearance trick with a cigarettes carton. He didn't have one so he went to the corner to pick one up. He hasn't been seen since. A true magician never reveals his trick.

Sounds like a Johnny Cash song.

It was the prolog to a 70s sitcom as I recall, about the dad going to the corner for cigarettes and only coming back years later. I can’t remember what the show was now though.

Probably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z1Ple-qYuU

From the article:

> If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how.

Tangential but that's one of the reasons I actually migrated away from sleight of hand towards juggling. IMHO it's far less stressful when your performance doesn't require fooling the audience.

There was a very good article about magic [1] where the magicians describe tricks that are too good to perform because people will get angry. Apparently the audience is much more receptive when they believe they can figure out how the trick was achieved.

[1] The New Yorker. “The Real Work: Modern magic and the meaning of life.” by Adam Gopnik July 28, 2008

> I became my father’s assistant, carrying props, rehearsing patter, acting as the straight man. But I was also his skeptic. If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how. When he succeeded, I applauded; when I found the secret, I felt the satisfaction of uncovering a law of nature.

I find this beautiful

> My father taught me to vanish before I learned to appear. Science taught me to appear without vanishing — to stand by evidence, to let truth emerge even when it contradicted the spectacle.

Poetic

>>"The real wonder is in the human mind that constructs reality from fragments, that can be fooled by a flourish, but that can also be illuminated by experiment. "

Beautiful.

Agreed, sounds Lovecraftian.

Seems a little pretentious.

[dead]

Talmudic test of Abrahamic faith.

Bit of Jungian parapsychology: tell the physician to forget everything he knows prior to undergoing psychoanalysis.