Naquada

Having now settled in, enjoyed a large pot of tea and sausage sandwich, we’ve started to get down to the maim business of the weekend.. Magic..

Heading back to the Ruskin hotel, we did a bit of mingling, and watching magic, nothing major going on, as I think most people were only just starting to arrive.

Registration starts tomorrow morning from 9:00am..

Well after almost four hours of driving we are finally here.. The trip up wasn’t too bad, only about 4 hours from home to the hotel. The hotel its self is fair, a bed, very large bar, shower, and most importantly… FREE wifi!! The other main advantage is its almost on top of the winter gardens, and main HQ hotel the Ruskin.

First stop is a large cup of tea and a sandwich to repleanish ourselves the from the drive up.

The line up looks great for the weekend.. David Sousa, Valerie, Chris Priest, Shawn Farquhar, David Stone, Martin Sanderson, David solomon, Shoot Ogowa, Kostya Kimlat, JJ Sanvert, JC Wagner, Lior Manor, Helder Guimaraes, Colonel Custard (paul Megram), Geoffrey Durham, Wayne Dobson, Michael Close, Topaz, Shimada, Ken Dodd, Manka Tendo, Rafael, Antje Pode, Fukai, Scott Penrose, John Archer, Danny Hunt, and Adrian Walsh all listed to appear at some point during the weekend.

The Blackpool Magic Convention is the worlds largest magic convention, held in February every year at the magnificent Opera House and Winter Gardens in Blackpool, Lancashire, England. The Convention features over 100 Magic Dealers from all over the world, the British Magical Championships for Close-Up Magic, the United Kingdom Children’s Entertainer of the Year Competition, Lectures, the British Magical Stage Championships and an International Gala Show.

Hosted by the Blackpool Magicians Club, it’s always a fabulous event, and it’s been a few years since I’ve been. This year, just like I did at FISM 2006, and The International Convention, I’m intending to blog and report as much as I can from the event.

This is going to rely on a number of things, firstly the quality of mobile signal in the Winter Gardens, given that I’m hoping to blog the majority of the event from my iPhone. Secondly, just how much I can see and report on during the weekend. I hope to live blog as I go, and provide updates and photos as I go. Anything I can report on live from the convention center, hopefully I’ll be able to update from my hotel just round the corner from the Winter Gardens and the Ruskin Hotel (the epicenter of the convention). I will be up in Blackpool from Thursday, and hopefully start reporting from there on in.

Given it’s only likely to be me blogging on here, then I’m unlikely to cover everything, I’ll try and provide as much an overview of the day to day happenings as I can. I have also created a Flickr group for anyone attending to upload photos to.

Update: The convention blogs are now posted under the Blackpool2008 category. Enjoy!

FISM is the Olympics of the Magic world, I went to my first one in 2006 and thoroughly enjoyed it. The next one is scheduled for Beijing, China, and I’m keen to attend again. Each country hoping to host the FISM convention has to create a case, and bid for the honor of hosting the event, in 2006 it was down to three, one of which was China.

I think one of the major points for the Beijing bid was the use of the newly constructed National Center for the Performing Arts, a mammoth $400 million titanium and glass half dome. Housing a concert hall, opera house and theatre under one space, the venue looked amazing, and really seemed like a great home for FISM 2009.

However reading an email on the Electronic Grymoire last night, and checking the FISM 2009 site, it seems there has been a quiet change of venue..

New Venue for the FISM World Championships of Magic 2009 in Beijing

After multiple discussions about the best venue to host the 2009 event in Beijing, Mr Lin Jian, President of the organising committee has proposed to drop the National Grand Theatre in favour of the China National Convention Centre, in the heart of the Olympic Green in the North of Beijing.

Reserves and concerns expressed over the initial venue on Tianenmen square were the difficulty to organise a compact event with great distances between the different rooms (dealer fair, competitions, lectures, etc.) and the lack of hotels nearby.

The China National Convention Centre, which is to be home of the modern Pentathlon as well as the broadcast centre for the 2008 Beijing Olympic games, will allow a much more intimate event. Further details about the new venue will be released later on www.fism2009.org

This news is actually not on the main FISM front page, and is almost shown to be an after thought, raising for me some questions. Firstly did the venue have problems to start off with (lack of nearby hotels, venue too large?), and if it did, then why was it selected ? and secondly, each country bidding for FISM had to make a case for it’s selection. Delegates from around the world were shown the National Grand Theatre as part of the site inspection, and based on inspections and ability to give FISM a good home, Beijing got the vote.

Changing the venue with less than 18 months to go sounds very worrying, the majority of Beijing’s bid was around the ultra modern and sophisticated new performance venue.

We know very little about the replacement The China National Convention Centre and it’s my guess that no site inspection has taken place of this venue. I hope the FISM main committee will be updating us on the changes..

UPDATE: Magic Unlimited (Tim Ellis and Sue-Anne Webber) are also now reporting on this, and shed a little more light on the subject:

Though no official word has come out yet, it appears that the FISM 2009 convention in Beijing has moved to a newer and possibly more practical venue (with a hotel right next door!). You can take a look at the Chinese National Convention Centre and take a ‘virtual tour’ of it right here.

Having a hotel right next door sounds good, but with no official word, except the snippet on the FISM main media site, it makes arrange hotels a little more complex. It’s good news if the venue is more practical, but the Chinese National Convention Center site is all in Chinese,  so it’s not that enlightening!!

We always go to the Big Big Comedy Bash, an event that it seems most people don’t know about. Held annually in Reading at the Hexagon, it pulls in a sell out crowd every year, which is no surprise given the star studded range of talent that attends.

The charity event at the Hexagon has seen many top name entertainers such as Jo Brand, John Hegley, Paul Zerdin, Eddie Izzard and even prog king Rick Wakeman inspire belly-aching laughter year after year.

However the main difference with this event is that all the top names appear on the same night. Meaning you’re in for a good night of comedy regardless.

Comedian and cabaret juggler of all manner of stupid things, Steve Rawlings organises this event each year for charity, and surpassed himself this year by managing to pull together a line up that was both diverse in the nature of its talents and consistent in its quality, basically good big names that can make you laugh out loud, and cry.

Once we’d managed to get to our seat through the full and packed foyer (the show was completely sold out), we settled in for a good evening. The compare for the night was Jeff Stevenson and introduced the nights acts, featuring the talent of Jo Brand, Ed Byrne, Sean Lock, Steve Rawlings, Earl Okin, Jethro, and Phil Walker. Every single act was superb and on form.

Ed Byrne was his wonderful irish sharp witted self, Sean Lock delivered a great set of surreal imagery and observations mainly around whales and stress. Steve Rawlings, as always delivered his polished, sharp and outright crazy juggling and comedy, including a balancing section involving four gold clubs, Earlin Okin delivered his international sex appeal and musical genius to the crowd, and Jethro, well, talked about ‘fannies‘ a lot, which still made us laugh, in not just for shock value..

It was a wonderful evening, as it always is, and we laughed so hard at almost every act that it was soon all over.

Next years tickets will go on sale.. sometime before the event..

Roo Reynolds mentioned in his blog a few days ago about disabling Mac OS X’s always ready widget application, Dashboard. Now although Dashboard is a nice idea, I tend to use Konfabulator (which is of course now Yahoo Widgets), Roo noted that Dashboard actually ate up a lot of memory and resources, even if Dashboard itself is closed and not visible.

The solution was to follow Macworlds article on disabling the Dashboard. That procedure involved opening the Terminal application and running the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Telling OSX you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. Since Dashboard is actually owned by the Dock you need to restart the Dock by again in Terminal typing:

killall Dock

After that, there should be no more Dashboard, or Dashboard tasks.

Given that I never ever run Dashboard, I thought I’d just check to see how much RAM Dashboard was actually gobbling up on my iMac, so I ran Activity Monitor to find out. Strangely there was nothing listed, even if I ran Dashboard itself, nothing showed up if I filter on Dash..

This got me thinking, and I came to the conclusion that Dashboard is actually part of the OS (or Dock) and it’s only the Widgets themselves that eat memory. I had months ago removed all the widgets from Dashboard (clicking the x to close them when Dashboard was up and running) effectively leaving Dashboard empty.

Adding a widget back in, resulted in the same behavior others had seen, a Dashclient application eating memory. Removing it, made all the Dashclient tasks vanish again.

So the bottom line is, simply opening dashboard and removing all widgets from the heads up display by use of the close button on the widgets, results in the same effect as detailed in the MacWorld article.

Reading Sanders The Great’s blog this morning I noticed that I noticed that he mentions that Derren Browns show from last year, Something Wicked This Way Comes, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk. I’ve actually seen this show twice now, once in February 2006, and once in June 2005, both shows were excellent.

“The first half started with a thunderous round of applause as Derren walked confidently onto the stage. As with most of his live shows a ’selector’ was thrown into the audience to pick out helpers for each effect, this time in the form of a monkey in a yellow raincoat.

Every effect was neat, crisp and very much bewildering in every sense, with probably only two of the effects that I honestly really didn’t have any clue on how he managed to be spot on with. The show is really divided into two halves, as shows normally are, but this was very much more a Yin and Yang type of division between the first and second acts.

The first half was very upbeat, funny and what I would call Derren’s normal style of work. The second half started a lot more darker with some fakir type effects (nail hammered into the nose and effects with broken glass) before moving back to a nicely done huge prediction effect, it was especially nice to have the mood lifted back to the light hearted and more mental work, as I’m not a huge fan of Derren doing the putting himself through pain and danger type of effects.

Even though, the effects during the second half were still very entertaining and did work well with the other parts of the show.”

The show has also been broadcast on Channel 4, although some sections were cut out of the final edit (possibly the better ones of the show).

The DVD is due for release on the 20th April 2008, and includes deleted scenes (assuming these will be the sections in the show that didn’t make it to TV), and behind the scene footage. Cost is £9.74 at the moment, normal price £12.99 (or it’s listed as available for rental)

One of the members of our local Magical Society, Robert Bone has been successful in being voted onto the BBC’s ‘Upstaged‘ show. The daily fate of the Contenders will lie with the ‘upstaged’ online community.

The Members will decide which acts make it through by watching their audition videos and voting for who they would like to see. The Contenders with the highest votes will go head-to-head on two specially built glass stages in the middle of Millennium Square, Bristol. Here, they will try to entertain the nation LIVE for 6 hours straight. Their attempts will be streamed online and filmed for a BBC Three highlights show.

Presenter Scott Mills describes Upstaged as “a brand new BBC entertainment event open to anyone across the country who thinks they’re worth watching. In short, it’s like having your own studio where you can broadcast what you want to the nation live on the internet.”

After scrutinising their performance, the public will vote for their favorite act and the winner will stay on. The Champion will perform again the next day with a new Challenger brought forward to try and upstage them. The rivalry all comes to an end on the 30th March with the overall Champion winning something rather tasty.

Robert’s profile and videos on the site got him through to the next stage, allowing him to perform in the BBC studio in Bristol on the 5th of February. Here he’ll be performing for 6 hours straight. Make sure you check it out online from 3pm on the main Upstaged site. Make sure you show your support for him today, and good luck Rob!

Here’s everything you need to know about Lost in 8 minutes 15 seconds. Oceanic 815 leaves Sydney for Los Angeles and crashes on an island in the south pacific, a very mysterious island. There are 48 survivors but some die later on.

Jack is a doctor, he has a compulsive urge to fix things. Kate’s on the run from the law for killing her dad, Sawyer is a con-man. Locke is a cripple, but after the crash he can walk. Hurley won millions in the lottery but thinks it’s a curse. Charlie is a heroin addict and a musician in a one hit wonder band. He has the hots for Claire the cute pregnant girl. Sayid was in the republican guard and tortured people. Then theres Sun and Jin from korea, they have marital issues. Micheal and his some Walt are just getting to know each other, walk is kinda special.

After the crash Jack helps everyone out, he becomes the de-facto leader. Jack meets Kate, Kate stitches up Jack, they bond. On the first night there’s a monster in the jungle, theres other weird stuff too, like polar bears.

Jack, Kate and Charlie look for the cockpit. Kate learns Charlie was in the band ‘Drive Shaft’. they find the cockpit. They find the transceiver in the cockpit. The monster comes, and eats the pilot. They get a signal on the transceiver, its a french woman, speaking french. The message has been repeating on a loop for 16 years.

Charlie asks, “where are we?”

Locke kills wild bore, loves life on the island. Jin catches sea urchins. Claire’s baby starts to kick. Jack starts seeing his dead father, and it almost drives him crazy. Locke sees the monster. Sawyer hoards medical supplies. Shannon has asthma. Sayid tortures Sawyer for an inhaler. Sawyer just wants a kiss from Kate. They kiss.

Sayid finds a wire on the beach, the wire leads to a trap. Sayid meets Rousseau the french woman on the radio. Hurley conducts a census. He learns a guy named ethan wasn’t on the plane. Ethan kidnaps Claire, Charlie kills ethan. Ethan was one of the others.

The others are the islands original inhabitants, they live in nice houses, have lots of food, hold book club meetings and don’t want to be bothered. They also can’t have children. Women get pregnant and die.

Locke finds a hatch in the ground. Lock tries many ways to open the hatch. Locke and Boon find a plane. Boon climbs up, it falls, boon dies.

Claire has her baby, she calls it Aaron, ah the circle of life. Michael builds a raft. His son Walt burns it. Michael builds another raft. Michael sets sail with sawyer Jin and walt. The others come and take Walt. They blow up the raft.

Lock blows open the hatch. There’s a man down there, his name is Desmond. Desmond was in a sailing race and crash his boat on the island. He pushes a button on a computer every 108 minutes, saving the world.

The hatch is part of the Dharma initiative, a scientific research project from the 1970’s, they wanted to find out why the island is special. There’s lots of food in the hatch.

Desmond bolts and takes off on his boat. Locke starts pushing the button and thinks he’s saving the world. Micheal, Sawyer and Jin wash ashore. They meet the survivors from the tail section of the plane, anna lucia, libby, bernard and mr echo. They make their way back to camp.

Sun and Jin are happy to see each other. Sawyer gets sick. Kate is worried. Jack gets jealous. Kate sees a horse from her past, she freaks out. Jack consoles her, they kiss. Kate freaks out again. Jack is confused.

Sun is pregnant, but Jin is sterile, whats up with that? Michael iChats with Walt. Michael runs off to look for Walt. Michael gets caught by the others.

Sayid and Rousseau catch a man in a net, he calls himself Henry gale. He said he crashed in a hot air balloon. They think he’s an other. Sayid tortures him. They lock Henry up. Henry plays mind games with Locke.

Henry draws a map to his balloon to prove he’s telling the truth, but when they find the balloon, they also find the real Henry Gale from Minnesota, so they know Henry is an other. Henry tells Locke the button is a joke. Locke looses faith.

The others tell Michael if he can free Henry and bring back Jack, kate, swayer, and Hurley they’ll give him walt. Michael frees henry but make it look like he was attacked.

Meanwhile the survivors see a boat coming to shore. Its Desmond, he’s drunk. Locke tells Desmond the button is a joke, and they are going to see what happens when they don’t push it.

Michael, Jack, Swayer, Kate and Hurley set out to find walt. Sayid, Sun and Jin follow them with desmonds boat, they see a statue with four toes, very strange. Sayid makes it to the other camp, but it’s empty. Michael and the gang are ambushed by the others and taken to a dock.

Henry gets off a boat, hurley is told to go back to camp, feels rejected. Henry take Jack, kate and sawyer prisoner and gives Michael and walt the boat to leave the island.

Meanwhile Locke and Desmond don’t push the button in the hatch. the sky turns purple and the hatch is obliterated. The force from the explosion makes the island visible to the outside world for a moment. Two scientists in a snow hut someplace see a blip on the radar. they call Penny Widmore, Desmonds girlfriend and tell her they found it.

Hurley finds desmond running naked in the jungle. The hatch blew his clothes off and now he can see the future.

Jack Kate and Sawyer are taken to an abandoned Dharma station where they did experiments on polar bears. Kate and Sawyer are put in bear cages. Jack is kept inside and is greeted by Henry who tells jack his real name is Ben.

Jack meets an other who’s name is Juliet. Juliet brings Jack cheese burgers. Juliet is a fertility expert, recruited by the others to find out why all the pregnant women on the island are dying.

A while back Juliet told Ben he has cancer and he needs surgery. Then Oceanic 815 crashed. Ben learned there was a doctor onboard, now he wants Jack to fix him. Ben tells Jack he can go home if he does the surgery. Jack doesn’t trust Ben, tells him to forget it. Kate tells Jack if he doesn’t help ben they’re going to kill sawyer.

Kate and Sawyer think they are going to die, so have sex. Jack sees kate and sawyer on an old TV. Jack says he’ll do the surgery. Jack cuts Bens kidney and says ben will die is Kate and Sawyer don’t go free. Jack tells kate never to come back for him. Kate and sawyer go free.

Jack and Juliet grow closer. Ben tells them they can go home.

Kate Locke and Sayid come back for Jack. They see Jack play football with Mr Friendly. Mr Friendly throws like a girl. Kate gets caught by the others. Jake tells Kate he’s going home. Locke blows up the submarine that was jacks ride. Jack is mad.

Hurley finds and old Dharma van thats full of beer and a skeleton. The skeleton is Bens dad. Ben killed him and everyone else on the Dharma initiative , then he becomes the leader of the others.

Hurley gets the van started and takes a joy ride with Charlie. Jake, Kate and Juliet come back to camp.

Locke says he’s going to hang with the others for a while. They all think he’s special. The survivors dont trust Juliet, they think she’s an other. Jack says leave her alone.

Desmond has a vision a woman parachutes on the island. Her name is naomi. She has a picture of Desmond and Penny and a phone. Naomi says she was sent by penny and theres a rescue freighter 80 miles away. Naomi tells Hurley there were no survivors of Oceanic 815.

Juliet tells sun Jin is the father of her baby. Sun is happy. Ben is threatened by Locke. He takes Locke to see a guy named Jacob. Jacob lives in a creepy cabin surrounded by white ash. Ben talks to Jacob but Locke can’t see him. Lock hears Jacob say “help me”, and all hell breaks loose, now ben is really threatened by Locke. He takes him to a hole where all the remains of the Dharma people are.

Ben shoots lock and leaves him for dead. Juliet tells everyone the others are coming to take the pregnant women.

Sayid tries to get a signal with Naomi’s phone to call the freighter for help, but ben is blocking all signals to and from the island from and under water station called the looking glass. It’s connected to the wire Saeed found on the beach.

Desmon has another vision of charlie, in it he flips a switch and drowns but everyone else gets rescued. charlie knows he’s going to die to says goodbye to claire. Very sad. Hurley wants to help Charlie but he’s too big. Charlie dives underwater and swims to the looking glass to flick the switch.

The others come for pregnant women. The survivors ambush the others. Most of the others get blown up, but Saeed, Jin and bernard get caught. Jack thinks ben had them killed, jack beats ben to a pulp. Sawyer and Juliet try to help, but hurley saves the day by running over the others with the dharma van.

Jack leads everyone to the radio tower to make the call for help. Charlie flips the switch. Charlie talks to penny on another old TV. She’s never heard of naomi. One of the others, ‘patchy’ blows up the looking glass. Water rushes in. Charlie writes on his hand, “not pennys boat”. Charlie drowns, very sad.

Locke is ready to end it all in the Dharma grave. Walt appears, he tells Locke he’s got work to do. Up by the radio tower naomi calls the freighter, but falls over with a knife in her back. Lock threw the knife, Jack is mad. Locke doesn’t want to leave the island. Jack and Locke have a stand off. Jack calls the freighter anyway. The freighter says they will be there soon. Everyone is happy.

Flash forward to an unspecified time in the future. Jack is a broken man living in LA. Jack has a beard. He’s a drunk and addicted to pills. Jack calls Kate on his cool new phone. They meet out by the airport. Jack tells Kate, “We have to go back!”.

So there you have it. some will leave, some will not..

I have to apologise for being so slow on getting round to posting on this one, but, past events have been keeping me away from getting round to it! My fellow blogger, and spanish card flourish guru, TheCuso is running a photo competition over at his blog.

The rules are pretty simple; take a photo, just one, that contains at least one card, deck or related playing card influence and send it over. So if you’re a magician, flourisher, poker player, sleight of hand expert, or anyone that has an interest in cards, then you could be in with the chance of winning some supplies of Wynn Playing cards.

1st place: 12 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (6 red / 6 Blue)

2nd place: 8 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (4 red / 4 Blue)

3rd place: 4 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (2 red / 2 Blue)

The rules are that you can only have one picture per participant, the picture must contain at least a one playing card, deck of cards or anything related to playing cards and only submissions to sent directly to thecuso@gmail.com with the subject My Photo will be allowed, and you’ll also need to include your full name and nickname or screen name (if you have one). All entries must be in before 29 February 2008.

TheCuso is also providing some runner ups prizes for the funniest, most artistic, and the most original picture. These prizes will consist of his Nebula tutorial and some other additional unreleased clips.

I’ve yet to submit my photo, and given that you can only have one single entry. I’ll have to choose carefully.. Full details and updates can be found on TheCuso.Info