Tommy Cooper - Almost a Magician: an excellent tribute site to Tommy Cooper. Includes lots of biographical details, credits, catchphrases, jokes, photos, routines, soundbites and stories, a wonderful tribute to a very funny man.
Denis Behr’s Archive: Denis has picked 100 books at random and indexed them so you an search on sleights, creators, props etc. also you can display each books contents, with the categories each trick falls into, and some comments about each one. Lastly you can go on a ‘discovery journey’ and make a route based on a certain topic you are interested in and see what tricks come up and in what books they appear. An excellent resource which I hope Denis and maybe others will be adding to…
I Polygraph: Jim Bumgardner’s new version of his Internet Lie Detector written in Flash, it looks good, very convincing and very well thought out. If you can learn to do it then I think you will have a fooling piece of magic you can do anytime you have access to the internet, the nice thing about it is that if the spectator tries it at a later date they most probably will always fail to get it to run, therefore protecting the trick even further.
Kellar’s Nightmare: a new Magic blog with seems to have a focus on Houdini and the History of Magic.
Magic of Robert Harbin (158 of 500): Alastair Horn has e-mailed me and asked me to draw some attention to this auction. His dad is selling an original copy of The Magic of Robert Harbin to fund a trip of a lifetime to China. This is an excellent book, I have access to a copy in the HMC library and have read it a few times when I was Librarian! Fascinatingly we recently had Alan Shaxon lecture for us on his memories of Robert Harbin, interesting stories and some great original Harbin magic. Check out the auction, its set at a fairly high price, but its worth every penny.
Napkin Rose: Michael Mode has produced some napkins that are coloured in the right way to make realistic coloured roses out of cocktail napkins! Order them from the website, and also you can find really clear instructions on how to make the roses.
Magic Insider: Magic Reviews, Links, a Forum and an interesting article on how to create ‘practice packets’.
Rings and Things II: Rings and Things is back dealing again, check out the gorgeous cups that they make.
Magic Jax: Ron Jaxon has just relaunched his site, and also released his very visual close-up take on Cardiographic called VCR or Visual Card Rise, and also his Jaxon Magic Notes which is like a live e-book in the form of a message board.
Menta-List: Blair Robertson’s weekly e-mail newsletter for mentalists. Sign up to get tips and suggestions on becoming better performers of mentalism with the focus on business, performance and entertainment.
Custom Playing Cards: get any design you want printed onto Bicycle cards for a resonable price.
Magic Books Research Tool: Jacky Kahan’s new forum that brings together content lists of books from various sites and others submitted by members, a great and fascinating resource.
Gregg Webb: has just released an e-book on CD called ‘The Book that doesn’t exist and more…’ the CD contains all the copies of his feen-x magazine, the book that doesn’t exist and SOSOHA, looks great value for money at $30.
Magic Auction: Kevin Gallagher’s new Magic Auction site has just gone live, might be a nice alternative to e-bay.
Brainpoke Blog: Ryan Pilling’s new BrainPoke weblog including a new version of the Random Idea Generator.
Sleeping Beauty Problem: a puzzle similar in logic to the Monty Hall puzzle, but this really will make your head hurt! Check out some other links to the same problem:
The Sleeping Beauty Problem
Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty Awakened
Steve Pellegrino: has a new blog called Magic Rants, well worth a read, Steve also does some web work for L&L and has started a new L&L blog over there.
Monty Hall Problem: this famous problem is based on the game show of the same name, basically he would give you a chance to win a good prize behind one of three doors, you would select one, and then Monty would open another door and show you what was behind it, he wouldn’t open the one with the prize behind, so that left you with the door you selected and the other door, now is it to your advantage to switch your choice of door? Some people find it hard to get their head around the fact that yes you stand a much better chance of winning if you switch… follow the links on the page to find out why, or check out a Simulation
and background explanation. Also Bob Farmer wrote a couple of articles on this in recent GENII magazines which are worth the read, and this problem also appears in the currently best selling book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.
Playing Cards with CSS: how to create playing card images on web pages using a bit of CSS magic.
Magical Trevor: from the makers of The Badgers comes a new toon called Magical Trevor, very funny if you like the Weebl and Bob style of humour. I wonder if thats what you get to see in David Copperfield’s Thirteen illusion!