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Have a Happy Halloween everyone! Don’t eat so much candy your stomach starts to hurt

Well after seeing David’s show again the other night, I thought I’d dig up a clip of an effect that he performed the other night. He made himself appear on a motorcycle, predicted lottery numbers, and made a car appear above random spectators from the audience, but I think the most talked about effect is still “Slo-Mo Suck” featuring Webster!

I’m proud to announce that I’ve changed my stage name to Leif David (Pronounced Layf).

I’ll explain why I made the change.I first began performing 15 years ago when I was 8 years old. When I started out the show was called “Ali K. Zam and the Little Bitty Magic Show”. I got my start by performing at daycares and seniors homes with my beautiful assistant— Yup, My mom. She was also my manager, my director, my driver, basically everything except the magician. The name worked perfectly when I was younger, but it no longer suits my image or my performing style. However, I’ll be keeping Ali K. Zam Productions as my company name.

My websites, phone number, and email address will remain the same.

Click the below image to read a funny newspaper article on me when I first started out. It was printed in the Westside Weekly on August 23, 1995.

I’m pleasantly proud to announce that I won the 2008 KEY Business Award for Quality Excellence. It’s an honor to win two years in a row. Congratulate all the other winners:

* Alpine Aerotech
* All Kinds of Carpet & Flooring
* Hergott Law
* The Cove Lakeside Resort
* Westside Celebration Society
* Bill Wlodanczyk
* The Good Guys
* Zellers Inc. Westbank
* Two Eagles Golf Course & Academy
* Always Write Business Service
* Emmanuel Church
* John Byland
* Troy Schmidt

October is one of my favorite months of the year for 2 reasons. Obviously the first reason is because of Halloween, a night of ghosts, ghouls, and the mysterious. What will you be dressing up as this year? Let me know in the comments below.

A great way to spend some quality time with others is to carve a pumpkin together. My girlfriend and I will be carving a pumpkin together this year. To make sure she doesn’t come up with something cooler than me I’ve already started researching on Google on how to use a Dremel to carve a wicked pumpkin. A quick search on Google will reveal lots of pumpkin carving tips and templates.

My second favorite reason October is my favorite month is because October 29th is my birthday! I think October is the best time to have your birthday… Nobody is away on vacation, its possible to do things outside some years, dress up parties are always fun, and if your birthday is at the end of the month you get to be a Scorpio.

Its important to take a step back every once and awhile and remember whats really important. Between all those plans, is when life happens, and those are the parts that are so important. Being with those who you love, doing what you love, and experiencing everything life has to offer. Its why I love magic so much. It reminds us what is possible.

On February 14, 1990, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission, to turn around to photograph the planets it had visited. One image Voyager returned was of Earth, 4 billion miles distant, showing up as a tiny dot.

“The spacecraft was a long way from home. I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.”

“It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos — but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last.”

“So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth’s surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.”

“Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; every hopeful child; every inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.”

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known: the pale blue dot.”

This week is National Fire Prevention Week (Oct 5-11th) and I was invited to perform at the Kelowna Fire Hall for the “Fire Chief for a Day” event. 50 kids from different schools across the Okanagan and their parents came to the Kelowna Fire Hall on October 8 for activities. For the show I was requested to include some special fire prevention related magic. During the show I showed all the kids a Smoke Alarm, and had the fire card put into one of 4 envelopes. The other 3 had just blank paper. One by one I put the envelopes on the Smoke Alarm to see if it could find the fire. Finally the Smoke Alarm being to ring as it had found the fire!

At the event they did a live fire demonstration showing how fast a fire can spread in your house. I had no idea that by the time the smoke alarm goes off you only have 2 minutes to get out of your house.

Home Fire Safety Tips – Half of these I had never even heard of before I did my research!

• More than half of all fatal home fires happen at night while people are asleep. Smoke detectors sound an alarm when a fire starts, waking people before they are trapped or overcome by smoke. With smoke detectors your risk of dying in a home fire is cut nearly in half.
• Install smoke detectors outside every sleeping area and on every level of your home, including the basement. Follow installation instructions carefully, and test smoke detectors monthly. Change all smoke detector batteries at least once a year. If your detector is more than 10 years old, replace it with a new one.
• Smoke alarms should be tested and maintained in accordance with manufacturer’s instructions. Alarms should be tested once a month by pushing the test button and listening for the alarm.
• For battery operated smoke alarms, replace batteries at least once a year or for extended life batteries according to manufacturer’s instructions. Batteries should also be replaced when the smoke alarm makes a chirping sound.
• Smoke alarms should be cleaned, at least once every six months, by gently vacuuming the exterior.
• Smoke alarms do wear out and should be replaced at least every 10 years.

The infamous “Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed” has a new season that began just a few weeks ago.

The original five episodes composed the first “season”, the first four coming out in 1997/1998 and the fifth coming out in 2005. Magicians all over Canada and the USA quickly took classics out of their show like the ZigZag girl and the Metamorphosis. Fortunately for us magicians, the show was pretty boring to watch and laymen quickly forgot which tricks were exposed. The “Masked Magician” was later found out to be Val Valentino. In this new season Val Valentino is seen in the credits as the producer of the show. The Magician seems to be somebody else from what I can gather.

The format of the show is the same as the original. The Masked Magician shows you an effect stripped down to the bare mechanics void of any presentation while the narrator explains the effect in a monotone voice along with cheesy jokes. Then the Masked Magician exposes the effect in the same lackluster way as the trick was presented in the first place. And, you guessed it, cheesy narration throughout the explanation as well.

Tricks exposed:
• Walking through a giant wall of steel (Copperfields Great Wall of China Illusion)
• Buzz saw (David’s again)
• Turning a Bentley into a Lamborghini (Criss Angel)
• Making a soda can float (TT with suction cup.. wth?)
• Pushing a coin through a rubber sheet into a glass (Ha!)
• Vanishing a toothpick (Same trick Criss has exposed and taught on many talk shows)
• Cap penetrating a glass bottle (PK ring)
• Cut and restored rope (Extra piece method)
• Vanishing a string quartet
• Vanishing woman (Using a chair)

I found it hilarious that they included vanishing a toothpick and cut and restored rope in the show. As if vanishing a toothpick is one of Magic’s Biggest Secrets. Although my girlfriend watched the show with me and was excited to finally learn how I cut and restore a rope. She was very disappointed when the secret was revealed though. Not because she finally knew, but because she knew that the method that was exposed isn’t what I do in my routine.

During the show they never say who performed the original version. During the exposure for the “Walking through a wall of steel” they never say “Walking through the Great Wall of China” but they infer it in basically every way imaginable.

Magic is really boring when there’s no presentation and the method is exposed two seconds later. I’m sure these new episodes will have the same effect as the old episodes, they’ll quickly vanish and be forgotten.

There’s a new movie that just came out called “Women In Boxes“. I remember hearing about it a long time ago, and it looks like its finally out. It seems its also won a bunch of awards as well.

You can view the movie trailer by going to : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_dfrpRveSo (Sorry they disabled embedding!)

For $23 bucks you can buy the movie.

Has anybody seen it? Post below.

[ xkcd ]

Malcom Gladwell and Seth Godin would disagree.