You have to admit, that new Britney Spears song is pretty catchy.

I got excited when I heard over at The Magic Newswire that Ed Alonzo was going to be helping Miss Spears with incorporating some magic into her new circus themed concert. Wicked stuff!

Gossip central of the world “E!” has been all over the story as well.

If you head on over to candies.com you can put in your information into that box in the lower right corner, or some bogus information, and you’ll see a short video clip montage of their rehearsal. Lots of circus stuff, but there appears to be a couple moments where they show magical apparatuses. I’m not sure if this is what the E! commercial was referring to or not. We’ll have to wait to seen.

[Edit: Below is the video that was previously "locked" at the Candies.com website. Thanks itricks! ]

First Look at Britney's 'Circus' Tour

[Edit #2: Looks like an extended version of the above video was released today. Its, like, twice as long, at 2 minutes in length. Haha ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDc4nwegtFo

I just dug this up from my saved “draft” posts. I found this video a long time ago but I forgot to post it. Enjoy.

The other day I mentioned a couple of Lee Ashers websites. Well it turns out that Lee Asher also has a Magic Camp for kids held in Toronto. Kids can come out and learn some magic with some of the very best teachers of magic.

Even if you aren’t interested, check out the video clip on their website, it looks like so much fun.\
http://www.sorcererssafari.ca/

There’s more general information at the below link.

Lee Asher | Sorcerers safari magic camp 2007.

One of my favorite magical groups is Mark Kalin and Jinger Leigh. In my last post I mentioned the Calgary PCAM magic convention, and that’s where I also saw Mark Kalin and Jinger perform during the evening gala show. Their performance was simply the best live magic I’ve ever seen. The below clip is a great example of their work. I saw this illusion live, but I believe that when I saw it was a little different. It looks like they’ve made some improvements to it as well.

Over at the Magic Newswire they posted an hour long podcast with Kalin and Jinger, and I encourage any magicians to check it out.

This movie looks like its going to be amazing. I can’t wait till it comes out. Click on the youtube link below and watch the high def version.

YouTube – Coraline Web Trailer HD.

I love graphic design, and I love magic, so naturally I’d love old magic posters. A gentlemen that I know in the local business community had an interest in magic and especially Houdini, and he gave me some of his collection. There was a copy of a Houdini painting, along with a whole bunch of copies of old magic posters. The pages came from a book originally, but all of the below pages were just torn out of it. I have no idea what the original book was unfortunately. Does anyone know?

Some of them are really fantastic though. I’m going to see about framing a few of them and hanging them up in my office. If you go to my facebook album, you can see all of the posters.

Naturally I recognize some of the names, but there’s a bunch that I’ve never heard of before.

I’m trying to learn AfterEffects so that I can put together my own promotional video. At some point I’d also like to put together my own DVD with clips from the show, interactive magic tricks, and teach-a-trick segments.

This is my first video test of learning Adobe AfterEffects. Hopefully I’ll have an opening title like this for my promo video that matches my new business cards that I’m getting.

I’m sure I’ll post more clips as I put them together.

Everybody always complains about the horrors and tortures of flying, and although I’m not a regular air-passenger I’ve had my fair share of flying nightmares. But even still, there’s nothing more magical than being up in the air just as the sun is going down and looking out the window at all the stars on the top half of the sky, and the bright lights of the cities below.

When I flew to Vegas this past summer our transfer flight from Seattle was at night, so our flight to Vegas was in darkness. But it was an amazing sight to fly into Las Vegas, the brightest city in the world, and see all the lights below.

I’ve always hoped that as I continue to perform magic I’ll have more opportunities to travel. The world around us is spectacular.

YouTube – Charlie Chaplin – The Lion’s Cage.

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

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.”