magique!

So I was catching the number 9 home from work today, and I'm standing there right by the very back doors of one of those accordian buses, just listening to my discman (Wolf Parade; brilliant). And I look down the aisle--and you know how they have those four seats on each side that face one another across the aisle near the middle of the bus, as opposed to the two-seaters that face forward? Okay, I'm like ten feet away, so picture it: I was watching this guy who was sitting on one side of the aisle do some street magic with this Australian (most likely) who was in town for the Masters and drinking some Tim Hortons coffee--and it was the most amazing thing.

So these two guys, there's no way they know one another at all, and there's about two feet of completely open space between the two that is easily observable. And the magic guy's first trick is a switcheroo, in that he has the subject pick out a card from the deck that he never sees, and I watch the subject put the card in between his two own outstretched palms; it's hidden, the magician's never seen it, but it's out there, in between the subject's hands. So the magician shows the guy another card; I saw it was the nine of diamonds (the card the subject had picked was the four of clubs), and the magician waves it over the guy's outstretched palms and tells him to open his hands. Lo and behold, the two cards have switched.

And I sincerely ask--how? As a casual observer, I wasn't the target, so I wasn't going to be distracted by anything. This guy, the subject, I watched him put the four of clubs into his own hands, and then I watched as this guy waved another random card a couple inches over the subject's hands. And somehow they switched. I watched it all, and they switched, without any contact. Obviously, sleight of hand is a more powerful thing than I thought.

But sleight of hand doesn't explain the next trick I happened to watch. Same guys, and bear in mind that there's at least two feet of clear space in between them that, after the last trick, I'm watching like a hawk. So the magician, he holds out the deck and gets the Australian guy to pick a card and memorize it. Then the subject shuffles the deck himself, like, several times, without the magician ever coming in contact with the card or the deck. Then the subject hands the deck back to the magician, and the magician holds it to his own forehead, closes his eyes, and then rifles through the deck and picks out a card. "is this the card?" he asks, and it's not, the other guy says (I never saw the card he chose, so I'm taking his word). And the magician's all like, "Oh. Okay... that's embarrassing," and he rifles through the deck some more. And here comes the crazy shit: he looks through the deck and says he can't find it--and at that moment I see the subject jerk like something just touched him, even though that space between them was never breached... and he reaches into his own back pocket and, to his own pants-shitting amazement, pulls out his card.

How? I've watched David Blaine's street magic specials, and I understand that when something is on film, you can't take it at face value. But this was on a bus. In full view of spectators from various angles. And it totally happened. Honestly, I have never been more blown away in my life.

Then I went over to Darren's and ate chili and got drunk. The mundanity of it all cancelled everything else out.

JUST the face!

I don't know if any of you have ever been to snopes.com, but it's this actually really valuable website that answers reader mail about potential urban legends by researching whether or not it could possibly be true. Really, it's an awesome site to kill a few hours at any time of the week, but they recently just added a page of completely absurd but very urgent-sounding emails they've received over the last little while. Needless to say, it totally reaffirms any suspicions you may have had that people are, in fact, incredibly stupid. Here's my favourite actual question posed to snopes:

They say that if a person has a pet cat and dies, if the person's body is not found fairly soon after death, the cat, having not been fed, will become ravenously hungry and eat the dead person's face off — JUST the face!

Is this true? My cat often looks me in the face. I used to think he was just being friendly. Now I know he's just sizing me up, like a chef at a butcher shop, waiting for "the big day". Since hearing this rumor, every time my cat licks his chops it gives me the willies!

Read the rest of them here. And feel free to repost your favourites.

me = criminal, apparently.

Hey! So last night, the stenciller guy who I'm writing a story about and I went out around 2:30am and he showed me the basics of laying down a stencil. It would have been nice to do it up in a more high-traffic area, but seeing as we were doing this just as the bars were letting out and we both live just off Whyte Ave, we very rebelliously hit some Canada Post boxes on University Ave instead. Whoo!

As you can see, the stencil was a very moustache-exaggerated Tom Selleck. I went back today to take a pic in the daylight; this one was mine, and is on a box on the corner of 108 St and 76 (I believe) Ave. Awesome? Totally. I was actually pretty surprised at what a fast process the whole thing is--so speedy, in fact, that it hardly seems like breaking the law at all. Basically, you make your stencil (out of acetate, as in those sheets they print overhead material on) in the comfort and safety of your own home, and after that, all you need is a newspaper to transport the stencil in and a can of black spraypaint. Hold the stencil up, take a look around, and five seconds of paint later, you lift the stencil and put it right on top of the paper you're carrying (a See or Vue works best) and just fold it loosely in half, so the stencil can dry discreetly without touching itself and getting stuck together. Once it's dry, repeat. Yay!

Actually, it was fun, and I might take the guy's offer to come along more often, and maybe even try and make a few stencils of my own. It's getting pretty crowded out there already, though.

Hmm, what else. Oh yeah--remember that crazy pinched nerve in my neck that was making my legs go buzzy? Yeah, well, I finally got freaked out enough by it that I had to go to the U of A's emergency room and have it checked out. It was pretty scary at first; the news that both my parents have diabetes caused a knowing glance to be shared between the two doctors present (the first, apparently, couldn't figure out what the fuck was wrong and had to bring in backup), and, quite terrifyingly, they spent a lot of time wondering if I'd suffered a minor stroke somehow, and I had to do a bunch of movement exercises and reflex and speech tests. Yee.

Luckily, it turned out that I'm not losing the use of my legs to diabetes or suffering the after-effects of a stroke, but rather, my problem might just be stress. They attached great significance to the fact that this thing started happening almost immediately after I began working as much as I have been lately, and possibly also to the fact that I now spend almost twice as much time as I did before hurting my back in a terrible office chair that was probably found on the side of the road while Ron was moving one time. So they figure I'm just carrying so much neck and back tension right now that something is impacting the nerve root near the base of my neck. The prescription? Nine (!) Motrin IBs taken throughout the day for a week, and Robaxacet to taste. And go see my family doctor (whoever he is; it's literally been years), because I'll probably need a CT or MRI to make sure there's no actual nerve damage going on. Oh, and find a way to ease my job stress. Ha. Anyone want to trade off?

Anyhow, I'll keep you all posted if I turn out to be dying, and you guys can fight over who gets my fake fireplace with the built-in eight-track and record players.