A Dusting of Christmas Snow

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This is the final post (most likely) for this year at the Jerx. In January I will be completing the next book, so there will just be a few posts here and there on this site. Then I’ll be back to regular posting sometime in February. Soon after that I will be introducing a new support structure for the site which may or may not work. We’ll see how that goes.

William Daly Harrington has been kicked out of the GLOMM for being convicted of distributing child pornography. Harrington was a former police chief and part-time magician, as per this news report:

In September 2020, Harrington came under scrutiny after a deputy for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Offices followed up on a tip that a Facebook Messenger account associated with the police chief had disseminated child porn in correspondence with another account.

Harrington, who used a “fictitious” Facebook profile — and the pseudonym “Stella Carlson” — to send images of minors engaged in sexual acts, was caught after investigators linked the email associated with the fake account to an entertainment company Harrington owned. At the time, Harrington, who served as East Helena’s Police Chief, and also performed at events as a stage magician, owned “Magic Man’s Mobile Dj,” charging documents show.

As of now, this website still lists his entertainment services. It states: All shows are considered "G" or “PG” rated and are suitable, or customizable, for all age groups.

So, unlike his computer hard-drive, all his shows are PG at worst. And can be customized for all age groups. The ad is written in such a way that he desperately wants you to know that you CAN bring your pre-teens to the show. This was our first clue the guy was a creep. You know what magician I’d trust around my kids? The one who’s like, “Nah, my shows are for adults only. I’m not a fucking clown.”

I like this bit of info too:

Wow. 10 whole miles? That’s some real commitment to the job. You know for a fact this guy would drive 12 hours to install a hidden camera in the bathroom of a cub scout jamboree, but if your gig requires more than a half a gallon of gas to get there, he’s not interested.

The best way to force something on any site is to use the Inertia app by Marc Kerstein. It’s so simple and so straightforward. It exactly matches the way you might “randomly” select a something on a website if you were doing it for real. With no preparation you can go to any site on your phone (as long as that site involves some scrolling) and force a line of text or a picture or whatever. (Check out this video to get an idea of how it works.)

I don’t know if Marc has launched this officially, but you can now get Inertia Pro in the app store which adds a bunch of new features, including an integration with his app Xeno that allows you to do the Inertia force on Xeno sites on the spectator’s phone (either remotely or in person).

You’ll need the Xeno app to do a spectator’s phone version. But Xeno is absolutely another app of Marc’s worth having. While Inertia is a forcing app, Xeno is an app that allows you to know a spectator’s free choice. In recent months, a user named Dan R. has added a bunch of interesting lists to the Xeno app which give you a number of intriguing subjects to “mind read” (including one related to the What3Words site I mention in this post). If you have Xeno and haven’t checked the additional lists out recently, you should do so.

If this sounds like a commercial, it’s not. Just a heads up. I believe Inertia Pro will be going up $15 in the near future. So if you’re interested in it, hop on it now.

I really like the look of The Giraffe Switch by Kyle Littleton.

I doubt I’ll get it because I hate learning hard shit, and this is apparently at least somewhat difficult. But I thought it deserved a shout-out because it looks really good.

Speaking of that, I made a decision a few years ago not to bother with any sleight that requires more than 10% of my concentration. While this cuts a lot of sleights and tricks out of my repertoire, it doesn’t make a dent in the thousands of tricks I can still choose to do. I think the worst thing that can happen when showing someone a tricks is when they realize that for a brief moment you’re not present—that you’re focusing on something else. So I try to eliminate that possibility from my performances by not having sleights or moves that will take me out of the moment.

This is not a cool thing to admit in magic. You’re supposed to get off on mastering hard moves. But I hate practicing. I like performing. You don’t need to apologize for that if you feel the same.

And speaking of sleights. I had mentioned many years ago that I was looking for a good lotion to give my hands a bit more tackiness when executing card sleights. My hands have very little moisture to them, and sleights that used to be simple when I was younger (and, apparently, dewier) can be damn near impossible. For the first time this year I tried Chamberlain Golden Touch. This was apparently Dai Vernon’s recommendation for the dry hand issue, and that guy was pretty much made of crepe paper by the time he passed away, so if it’s good enough for him, I figured it was worth a shot. And I have to say that it’s probably the best thing I’ve found so far for the issue. It doesn’t work as well as I would hope, but it works better than anything else I’ve tried so far. I think it all comes down to your own personal chemistry, so it might not work for you, but if you have dry hands you may want to give it a shot.

Sometimes if I’m watching a lecture by a left-handed performer on my computer, my brain doesn’t feel like flipping everything around in my head. I know left-handers have to do this all the time with right-handed performers, but I don’t, so I’m not used to it. So when this happens, I just flip the video instead.

Here’s how you do that using the VLC media player (which is really the only media player you need to have).

From the menu bar go to Window

Then:

Video Effects
Geometry
Transform
Flip Horizontally

And you’re all set.

Obviously this reverses everything on the screen, so it’s not ideal for learning certain effects. But for card tricks I find it to be helpful.

I’m not someone who “believes” in mystical or occult subjects. But they’re fun to use in performance because concepts such as “fortune telling” or contacting the spirits or whatever are so well understood by the general public. So you don’t have to really lay any groundwork. You’re playing with ideas they’re already familiar with.

Here are a couple products I’ve had some fun using in performance since I purchased them earlier this year.

Blue Bird Lenormand Fortune Telling Cards

38 Cards that combine fortune telling, numerology, an oracle deck, and some standard playing card elements as well. That’s a lot of types of information, and a lot of options on each card. And I like that they’re standard poker size.

Tabula Mortem

This combines a Ouija board/spirit board with pendulum work. And it adds some additional symbolism you may find a use for as well.

Just be careful. These boards are nothing to play with. If you don’t know what you’re doing you might unleash a lot of negative spirit energy.

Just kidding. Do whatever you want with them. If fucking around with these things without knowing what you’re doing was really dangerous, my ass would have been possessed about a dozen times already.

Both these items can be found on Amazon.

This is going to sound psychopathic, but it’s something I’ve been doing this year and enjoying in a way I hadn’t expected. This has nothing to do with magic, but you may get something out of this idea regardless. What I’ll do is I take a movie and—instead of watching it all at once—I watch it over the course of a couple weeks. The first day I watch one minute, then next day I watch the next two minutes, the day after that I watch the following three minutes. And so on, adding a minute each day. Most movies can be finished within 15 days at this pace.

If you say this sounds insane, I wouldn’t disagree with you. And it’s certainly not how the person who made the movie intended it to be watched. But it gives you a lot of time to process and think about the movie. And the movies I’ve watched this way have stuck in my mind much more completely than the ones I’ve watched straight through. I don’t know that that’s really any justification to do this, but I thought I’d mention it as maybe one of you will find some pleasure in this as well.

Hey everyone. Have a great Christmas and New Years! Holy hell, 2022 is almost here. I hope for all of us it’s our best year ever.

Two Early-Stage Ideas

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Here are a couple routines I will be trying out over the holidays. The ideas are still in the early stages. But there’s no reason these shouldn’t be workable.

First is a variation on my trick The Look of Love, which I wrote about here and here.

Instead of the patter used in that trick, I’m going to tell about my friend who is a painter and who likes to have his paintings named via the intuition of a stranger. (Or something like that.)

Then I’m going to have the person for whom I’m performing blindly come up with a name for the most recent painting he worked on by combining a noun with a visual adjective.

Then I’m going to text my “painter friend” to see if he accepts this name for his new work

His reply is going to say something like, “I think that’s the perfect name. Check out the photo I gave you.” Then I’ll take an envelope from my wallet, tear it open, and remove a photo of a painting where the chosen name seems to fit incredibly well.

To do this, I’ll be using the same basic method as The Look of Love. But to create the image I’ll be using an app called WOMBO Dream. This is an app that uses AI to create artwork based on a title you suggest.

Unlike the AI writing rabbit-hole I fell into earlier this year on this site, AI created paintings are bad in a way that aren’t too distinguishable from real art.

I will either use a wingman to help with this trick, or, during the course of “texting” my painter friend, I’ll create the picture (takes 5-10 seconds). Download it and crop out the “Dream” branding. Then print it in preparation for the wallet load. It sounds like a lot, and maybe it will feel that way. If so, I’ll get a buddy to help me out, so I can do it without going on the phone at all.

Sometimes you have to do a little work to see that the artwork works well with the title. It’s not completely obvious every time. But I don’t think that’s a negative.

Here is some of the artwork created by the app, based on some noun and adjective titles.

Green Volleyball

Tall Blender

Golden Monkey

Another thing I plan on testing is a trick using this tactile illusion as the jumping off point. (Thanks to JM for tipping me off to this)

I will start with the illusion part, which I think will be pretty interesting on its own. And then I will take it a step further with a more impossible conclusion.

So this illusion creates a connection between this slime hand and their actual hand. I will follow that up with some version of ashes on palm. I will tell them that now that their mind is “primed for a connection” between a fake hand and their real hand, we can manifest some more intense phenomena. Cigarette goes under the slime hand. “Do you feel the heat?” Blah, blah. Turn the slime over, showing the ashes underneath. Then reveal the ashes on their own hand.

Sometime in the new year I’ll let you know how these turned out.

The Gift Raffle

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I want to start this post by noting that this coming Wednesday is going to be the last regular post on The Jerx for this year. January I am off, but I will stop in occasionally with some updates or to make fun of whatever goofball shit Joshua Jay is up to.

For supporters of the site, a reminder that the new schedule for the book release has the book coming out in springtime. I’m guessing April-ish, but I will keep you updated. Also, there are two more issue in the current volume of the newsletter. One will come out at the end of December or beginning of January, and the last one in the late February/early March time period.

Joe Mckay sent in this idea for a Christmastime effect. I like it.

Have a present addressed to somebody.

Then wrap that present inside more wrapping paper that has no label on it.

Gather a bunch of friends and/or family.

Have the present covered in Post-It notes. Each Post-It note has a different name of it (of one of the people gathered in the room).

Remove the Post-It notes and fold them up.

Place them inside a Karrell Fox Switching Envelope to mix up the names. [Joe suggested an envelope mentioned in Karrell Fox’s book, “Another Book.” But you can use any type of switching envelope, bag, box, etc.

Have a name chosen at random(?).

This is the force name of the person who the present is actually for.

They open the wrapping paper and find inside a present inside that is addressed to them.

The only changes I would make is that I would have everyone remove their own name from the present and drop them in whatever the switching vessel I’m using is.

And rather than having a present labelled specifically for the person I’m forcing, I would try to have a present that would only make sense for the person I’m forcing. To me it’s slightly more magical if your 14-year-old niece wins the “gift raffle” and the gift just happens to be a signed t-shirt from her favorite band, or something like that.

In that way I feel like the mentalism aspect is actually stronger because it feels less presentational. There is no, “Aha! The random slip matches my prediction!” They’re not choosing a slip to see if it matches the tag on the present. They’re choosing a slip to decide who gets the present. And just by coincidence it’s the perfect gift for that person. If, afterwards, one of your big, burly 55-year-old uncles asks you, “If I had won, what exactly did you expect me to do with a size-small, signed BTS tour shirt?” Then you just tell them you don’t know. That you just had “a feeling” that was going to be the perfect gift for whoever won the raffle.

Or you could play up your “powers” to a more absurdist level. After your niece’s name is drawn, you rest a hand on the still unopened present and act like you’re concentrating deeply for a moment. After a little bit you snap out of it. “Okay,” you say, “it’s ready for you now.” As if you are somehow changing the gift in the box to match the chosen recipient.

If someone asks anything about how you did it, you ask them if they really want to know, and then you pull them aside and say dead seriously, “You know that song, ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’? Well, it’s based in reality. Santa loves the ladies. My mom didn’t just kiss him though. She fucked that fat slob silly. He’s my dad. And I have some of the Christmas magic in me. That’s how I did it. Please don’t tell anyone.”

Bare Bones: The Stray Force

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Last week I was reminded of a trick I postered here a few years ago called Stray the Daisy. That was primarily a Valentine’s Day trick and it required at 8 outs, so it wasn’t the sort of thing I did regularly. Although the handful of times I did it, it was a fun trick and people dug it.

I decided to break out the basic idea from that trick and perform it this weekend and it again got a really good response, even though I performed it in a very bare bones way. Normally I would wait to publish a trick (usually in the books) until I had a presentation that I thought was particularly interesting in some way. But I thought it might be worthwhile to see the trick at this stage, and then maybe revisit it again in the future if/when I have a presentation I’ve come up with for it.

One thing I like about this is that it’s a completely hands off trick. Not just a little bit hands-off—you literally don’t need to touch anything at all. Technically you could do this over Zoom (but you’d have to send them the deck, and Zoom shows are gross, so you probably wouldn’t want to).

When I did this, I did touch the deck, but you could choose not to.

You need a marked deck in Si Stebbins order. I also used a little playing-card-sized envelope, although that’s not absolutely necessary.

When I did it this weekend, I started by giving the deck a quick false shuffle, and then did a rough spread on the table face-up. I have zero concern of someone noticing a red-black pattern in a face-up spread. Especially not a rough, uneven spread.

I scooped up the deck and had my friend take the deck under the table and cut it a few times, remove the top card and put it in the envelope. And put the envelope in his pocket. This all happened completely in his hands and under the table where no one could see.

I had him set the deck on the table and I told him we were going to try and see if the deck itself could help identify the card he cut to. (Again, that’s not a presentation I would use other than in the early stages of testing out a trick.)

I told him to cut off a small packet of card. And that he would remove cards individually from the packet he cut off. Tossing them to the table and alternating saying red-black-red-black. Whatever color he was on at the time the last card in his hand was reached, that would be the color we would go forward with. “Sort of like, ‘she loves me, she loves me not’ with flower petals.” (To be clear, he’s not naming the actual color of the cards in his hand. Those cards are face down. The cards are just being used as objects for the back and forth nature of the selection. They’re standing in for the flower petals.)

So he spread the cards in his hand a little a started plucking cards out individually. Red-black-red-black. The card he ended on was black.

He cut off another packet and did the process again with spades and clubs. (Ended on clubs)

Then picture/number. (Number)

Odd/Even (Even)

High/Low (Low)

So we were at a black, club, low, even, number card.

With the final packet he alternated between the Two of Clubs and the Four of Clubs, landing on the Four.

I made the point (as I had made on some of the previous packets) that if he had cut just one more or one less card in this packet, he would have ended up on the Two of Clubs rather than the Four.

So I recapped. He cut to any card and put it in an envelope in his pocket. Then, using the deck of cards and a random process he narrowed all the cards in a deck to the black cards, the clubs, the number clubs, the even number clubs, the low even number clubs, and finally the two of clubs. At any step of the way, a single card difference would have pushed us down a completely different path to a completely different card.

He removed the card from the envelope in his pocket and of course it matched.

You have the general idea on this already.

As I mentioned, the deck is marked and in Stebbins order so you know what card is in his pocket when the deck is brought back out. It’s going to be the one before (or after, depending on how you set up your deck) the card that’s currently on top of the deck.

Now it’s just a matter of “forcing” the outcome to match the card that’s in the envelope.

So you’re going to narrow down the cards in binary options, and force the outcome of each option. To do this, you just need to know if the spectator cuts off an odd or even number of cards each time.

So you look at the marking on the top card of the deck and notice if it’s a red or black card. Then, after they cut, you make note of the new top card’s color.

If the color of the original top card and the one they cut to are the same, then you have them start the “plucking of cards” elimination, on the option you don’t want them to end up with.

If the color of the original top card and the one they cut to are different, then you have them start the elimination procedure, on the option you do want them to end up with.

For example, the top two cards are the same color and you want to force the “low” option.

You: “Okay, now just pluck them one at a time from your hand, alternating between high and low. So toss one. High. Another. Low. And keep going like that until you have one card left.”

Them: “High, Low, High, Low, High… and the last one is Low.”

If the top two cards were different colors, that means they have an odd number, and so you’d have them start with the force option. “Low, High, Low, High… and this one is Low.”

For it to seem as fair as possible, you need to tell them how to count before they spread the cards in their hand. So it seems you can’t possibly know how many cards they hold. You may want to turn away while they cut the cards and then have them hold the cut off portion between their hands when you turn back.

Here are the binaries you would use. They’re pretty straightforward. There are only couple exceptions.

If they selected a J, Q, K

Red/Black - Suit A/Suit B - Number/Picture - Male/Female - Jack/King (if not a queen)

If they selected a 2-9

Red/Black - Suit A/Suit B - Number Picture - Odd/Even - High/Low - 1st Option/2nd Option

In this case High is “6 and above” and Low is “5 and below,” because the court cards were already ruled out.

If they selected a 10

Red/Black - 1st Suit/2nd Suit - High/Low - Number Picture - Odd/Even - 1st Option/2nd Option

In this case High is “7 and above” and Low is “6 and below,” because here the court cards are still seemingly in play.

The one value that I find hard to whittle my way down to in a natural way is the Ace. You could narrow them down to “cards with letters” (as opposed to cards with numbers). And then you could split them between the “higher value” letter cards and the “lower value” letter cards, and let them decide if the Ace is high (getting paired with the king for the next round) or low (pairing it with the jack). Giving them that choice is a nice additional bit of freedom. Although I’m still not 100% sure that’s how I’d handle it.

You’ll want to make sure they understand to pick up a “small packet” each time, or you’ll run out of cards. If they’ve been discarding cards neatly into a pile, you can re-use the discard pile for the same process, but I would try to avoid it.

The good news is, even if things get screwed up along the way, you still know what card the person put in the envelope under the table. That would be a pretty strong trick even if you just have to abandon everything and figure it out “by magic” or whatever.

Dear Jerxy: Cutting Them Off

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Dear Jerxy: What do you do if people are asking to see trick after trick? My instinct tells me not to do too many, in order to not overwhelm them and keep the tricks feeling special. On the other hand, if they’re asking to see something, and I have tricks I could be showing them, it feels dumb to not be showing them something. But I have so many in my repertoire I sometimes feel like I can’t stop. What do you think?

Signed,
Stopless in Seattle

Dear Stopless: The key factor in my decision making in this sort of situation is if I’m ever going to see this person again. For example, if I’m traveling and I strike up a mini-friendship with someone on a flight or at a hotel bar or something, I may end up showing them something. And if they’re super enthusiastic and asking for more, more, more, I may just go all night with them. I do this even though I think it’s a detriment to the magic, and even though I know the impact of any given effect will be lessened when performed in this way.

But I do this for two reasons:

  1. It gives me the chance to try out a bunch of stuff I’m working on in an efficient way (as in not having to find a different person for each trick).

  2. I try to think about what’s best from their perspective. If someone really loves seeing magic, is it better for them to focus that energy on one truly mind-blowing piece of magic? Or to see a whole bunch of stuff? I think an argument can be made for both. But if I’m only going to see them this one time, and they really love magic, and they’re asking for more, then I’m probably going to give them as much as they want. It’s likely going to blend into one generic memory in their mind, with very few specific details sticking out. But I’m fine with that if they look back and think what an enjoyable time they had in a general way.

The question is, how does me performing best serve this interaction and this relationship? With a single-serving friend, it can make sense to go ahead and overwhelm them with stimuli and perform a lot.

With someone you’re going to see at least semi-regularly, the relationship/interaction will be best be served by performing less, and keeping those performances feeling somewhat special.

I will give you a damn near perfect analogy for this...

Imagine you met a professional pastry chef somewhere randomly. You can imagine that an amazing memory would be the night you met that pastry chef and they shared with you a dozen different desserts. And you had bite after bite of cakes and cookies and doughnuts and croissants and cinnamon rolls and so on.

But if your friend was a pastry chef, and you saw her somewhat frequently, your enjoyment of those desserts would likely diminish if she brought you a bunch of stuff every time you saw her. At the very least, your appreciation for that lemon blueberry pie would be greater if she brought you one perfect slice to indulge in, rather than if it was one of eight desserts you tried. And the memory of that pie eaten on its own would almost certainly be much stronger and more long-lasting.

The impreciseness of this analogy is only in the fact that the average person has a much bigger appetite for pastries than magic. So the concept of getting “burned out” on something is only more true for magic than baked good.

But how do you gently turn someone down if they’re asking to see more and you’re trying not to wear them out?

Well, this is where it helps to frame yourself as someone with an interest in magic and not someone with any legitimate special powers. People outside of the magic world don’t have a clear understanding of how magic works in the broad sense. So if you perform a trick or two and they’re asking for more, you can just say that at this point in time you don’t have anything else to show them. You can say something like, “These aren’t like the tricks you would read in books in the public library, where you can just learn a whole bunch, and always be able to perform a couple dozen tricks at any time. With these types of tricks you sort of master one or two at a time. And if you don’t keep on top of them regularly, your ability to perform them falls away.”

If you say, “I don’t really know anything else I can show you at the moment,” that maintains the rarity of the magic performance without you having to say, “No! I’m done.”

At this point it’s a great idea to tell them about something you’re “working on” that you’ll try to have ready the next time you see them. Or teach them a trick that sets them up to be more fooled sometime down the road. This way you can capitalize on their interest in a way that boosts future performances.

Dustings #59

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This gets my vote for worst magic trailer of the year. Thoughts? —RE

Well… hmmmm. The trailer is nicely shot and put together professionally. So in that sense it’s fine. But I’m not sure that’s what we care about from magic trailers.

I’m not someone who is super interested in puling a shish kebab skewer (or whatever) out of my finger, so I sent this along to a virtual focus group of 20 people and asked these questions.

What is the trick supposed to be?

Were you fooled by the trick?

What is your best guess as to how the trick is done?

18 people responded. They all seemed to understand the idea of the trick. Three of them said they were fooled. And all of them had the same or similar “best guess” that involved him hiding the stick behind his hand (either during a cut or when the hand goes off screen). So based on what we see in the trailer, everyone had a reasonable explanation for how it was done. So I guess that would qualify it as not a good trailer.

Obviously if seeing this in real life, they would have to come up with some other explanation because you can’t cut or “go off screen” in the real world. But we don’t really know what this might look like in the real world, so there’s no way to judge.

As a magician, if I wanted to perform this trick, the important thing for me would be to have some idea of what it looks like in a real performance. How much freedom of movement do I have? How easy is it to get into the trick? This trailer addresses none of that. You have one choppy demonstration in the forest, and then one that was apparently shot in a cavern during a solar eclipse. If the goal is to sell me on a trick, that does the opposite. It suggests no confidence in what this trick might look like in the real world.

(If the people behind this trick want to link me to an uncut, real-world performance, I’d be happy to post it here. I’m here to help!)

That’s why, even though the production value is considerably lower, I much prefer this trailer for Marcus Eddie’s similar effect, Splinter.

At least that tells me what I’m getting.

Okay, I need your help. I’ve found myself using the word “magical” more often on this site and I can’t really tell if it’s accurate writing or lazy writing.

What I’m trying to describe is a quality of certain effects where the response goes beyond “How did he do that?” and is more like, “How could this be possible?”

There’s an otherworldliness to the “magical” feeling. It’s not just something you feel in your head, it’s in your whole body.

I think there are three responses to magic in general. An audience can be left:

  • feeling entertained

  • feeling fooled

  • with a magical feeling

Not just one of these, of course. They can feel each thing to a different extent.

However, almost all of our time, effort, and discussion in magic is spent on how to fool people to greater degrees.

Then, a smaller percentage of “more evolved” performers are thinking about how to be more entertaining with their fooling.

But hardly anyone is talking about the dreamy, romantic, mystifying, “magical” feeling that certain tricks/presentations can generate. I get the impression some people think that if you just fool people hard enough that will somehow get them to that “magical” feeling. But I don’t think the two things are necessarily related.

Anyways, while a lot of the stuff I’ve written has been my attempt to come up with ways to target the magical feeling, I’ve only recently started thinking about it in this specific way. And I’m wondering if there’s a better word to be using than “magical.” If you have thoughts, let me know.

Thanks for those of you who’ve sent me some bad forces as per my last post.

Here’s a nice bad one to get your audience to think card forces are dumb . Your force card is on top. You cut the deck into 6 piles and form them into a line with the top pile third from one of the ends. Then you use the Hot Rod force to force that pile and turn over the top card. In this case you would actually hope to get a number you have to spell, as that makes the force dumber.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting you teach this to someone out of the blue. I’m suggesting you do something where you reference a trick you’re “working on” or an “earlier version” of a trick you want to show them at some point. Then you demonstrate the trick and in the place of a good force, you use a shitty one. Which then gets exposed/taught when you break down the effect for them. (See the previous post and the posts linked within it to further clarify this idea.)

You want it to seem as if this is the type of thing you’d do to force a card. That way, later when you say, “Okay, just touch any card for me,” that will feel like something entirely different and free and normal.

Can someone explain the number of retweets on this tweet?

I mean, clearly they’re not legit, but I’m just wondering where they came from (and where they’ve gone to). I can only assume someone bought some fake retweets as a goof (or because they really think I have a Twisting the Aces presentation). Then those accounts got douched out by twitter, but still the number of retweets remains? I don’t really give a shit either way. Just curious.