Word: houdini
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...elephant disappear, sawing a woman in eighths), later perfected the mind-reading act that made him famous. Among the brains Dunninger picked were those of six Presidents and such luminaries as Thomas Edison and Pope Pius XII, who temporarily baffled him by thinking in Latin. Like his friend Houdini, Dunninger was a debunker of occult phenomena who modestly assessed his own skills: "Any three-year-old could do it -with 30 years' practice...
...plot? Does one tattle on Sherlock Holmes? No. But yes, there is a beauteous lady in distress, purloined papers, low, seedy minicriminals, velvety London fogs, the claustrophobic peril of a sealed gas chamber and Holmes' agile Houdini-like escape from it. Over everything lurks the brooding presence of Moriarty, played by Philip Locke like a Mephistophelean raven of evil...
...magic out of life. They spoke in the jargon of the trade: there were no tricks, only "effects"; a disappearing object was a "vanish"; a suddenly appearing object was a "production"; a nimble-handed move was a "sleight." The masters of all these effects and sleights had vanished. Houdini, who could get out of a steel coffin, could not escape from his wooden one; Cardini, who commanded the attention of a jammed theater with nothing but a deck of cards and a pack of cigarettes; Thurston, Dunninger, Blackstone, Dante: all, all were gone or retired. People wanted facts, not illusions...
Chop-Chop Cups. The conjurers had forgotten that their heroes were also afflicted with nostalgia, that Houdini himself had borrowed his name from an earlier performer, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century French prestidigitator. Moreover, as the magicians should have known, scientists are the easiest to fool. They seek rational explanations for contrived phenomena, connections where none exist. Magicians were in fact doing what they had always persuaded their audiences to do: they were looking the wrong way. "We magicians are notorious for staring in the rear-view mirror," says Semipro Charles Reynolds, picture editor of Popular...
...announcer for the Rucker summer basketball tournament in Harlem was groping for the best way to express his enthusiasm over the new court phenomenon. The youngster heard himself called "Houdini," "The Claw," "Black Moses"-and none of the nicknames pleased him. He took the announcer aside. Softly but deliberately he said, "Call me The Doctor.' " Julius Winfield Erving Jr., 21, was already demonstrating that he would...