Poof.

Sister-in-law Michelle came to visit the new rabbits yesterday.

The major difference between these two and Jellybaby - Jellybaby licked everything. Never chewed.

These two have chewed through the sofa, chewed buttons off the remote control beside my hand on the floor (I was watching the other rabbit) and shredded a footstool from Ikea. The footstool was a good thing, though - we left it out for them. It's made of woven banana fibre and we never use the thing anyway.

Lesson learned. Anything is fair game for these two. They even had a go at a library book I put by my feet while I was putting on my shoes to head out the door.

This is them on their (yes, 'their') footstool.

Breakfast TV redux

As I'd expected, the link to the breakfast TV spot fellow-magician Yeats and I did a few weeks back has expired, so I've stuck it up on Youtube.



And bunny photos of the day...

Two new bunnies!

Right. It's been six months since the lovely wee Jellybaby died and the two of us have been looking forward to having company again. Hell, I've got a multi-pack of lint rollers sitting unused in a cupboard and it's been weeks since I've been woken by the sounds of nocturnal newspaper-ripping.

Yup. Time for a new rabbit. New rabbit? How about a pair so they can keep each other company? Sure. In for a penny...

On the way out on a road trip last weekend we followed up on a lead and stopped in the city of Red Deer to visit a couple who had young rabbits. On the way back from the road trip last night we stopped by again and came away with a pair of two-month olds.

So here we are again with a living room dedicated to fluff - this time two different shades. A little magpie boy called Augustus (a name held by half a dozen of Nadine's ancestors) and a little mostly-white girl called Snowdon (after my great-grandmother).

They've barely stopped racing around the house since we first let them out of their carrier this morning. Even with the camera set at ISO-equivalent 1000 almost all the pictures have come out blurry; they just haven't stopped moving. In seven hours they've proved to be more of a handful than Jellybaby was in 30 months. Time for me to get back to work rabbit-proofing the house.

Stampede time!

Just finished a series of street magic stints as part of a thingy (let's not get all technical; 'thingy' works fine) promoting a new Hollywood movie that opens in cinemas today. My job was to accompany a small team of free-stuff-givers, and to do close-up magic for people meandering too slowly to avoid me. Not that I was getting all Lord-of-the-Savannah, accosting only the aged, the young and the sick; no, I was getting all and sundry. On one or two days the crowds were spartan and it felt a bit guerilla, spotting them from a distance, dashing up and unloading an armful of souvenir posters and the like before hitting them with a trick or two (oops, nearly wrote 'large stick', which would have been incriminating and inaccurate).


Reactions? Superb, especially since this is Stampede time. Yup, we're in the middle of another year's cowboy-hat-and-bandana bonanza. Tourists aplenty, some of whom were thoroughly confused at being entertained a propos of nothing at all, and then given free bumf. Out of hundreds of encounters over the five days, only one bad reaction: a German engineer who refused to watch as he had a morbid fear of magicians. I was rather chuffed at having caused such terror; I usually have to work so much harder at it.



Check out the last photo - me, two of the free-stuff-givers and a handful of the people I performed for. What's cool about the pic is that in the background you can see we are moments away from being crushed underfoot by an ebullient mob of Spain supporters celebrating their World Cup victory over the Netherlands - Spain had scored their one and only goal only minutes earlier.

Flash hotels and mountain parks

A few days ago I was booked to do a show way up in Jasper National Park at the wonderfully swish Jasper Park Lodge (in the photo above). I'm surprised anyone at the hotel gets any work done; frankly I'd be spending all day staring at the scenery rather than doing my job. (And this differs from my daily life...how?) In fact, I did exactly that nearly 20 years ago when I spent a summer living in Jasper and working as a tour guide and boat driver on Maligne Lake. Spent nearly ten hours a day admiring the views. Salad days.

Jasper townsite is a good five hour drive from home so Nadine and I turned it into a little holiday and spent a couple of days with some good friends there. Their 12-year-old pug Mabel is still going strong, though her tongue sticks out even more than ever before. Lack of teeth will do that. I fully expect to spend my twilight years with my tongue lolling about in full view of the public. And if it doesn't do it of its own accord, I intend to make it do so. Screw dignity.



And of course our friends' four kids got their own kitchen-table magic show.

Are we getting this on the *FLASH*...monitor?

Glenn Stevenson from City TV sent me a few snaps he took while Yeats and I were at the studio last Wednesday. Anyone who's tried to take photos of a person in motion rather than just posing will know that for every good picture there will be fifty rubbish ones featuring closed eyelids, gurning mouths and looks of painful constipation. Considering none of these images features me drooling, I think he did a marvelous job.

This first picture I've titled "Are we getting this on the *FLASH*...monitor?" Subtitled "Blinking makes you weak".

It's the same expression I use while stalking the vulnerable.



This second one I'm calling "What is this thing you call 'fork'?"

Or maybe simply "WTF?"




And finally, me and Yeats hanging out with a cup of herbal tea at dawn.

Breakfast TV

Man, those guys get up EARLY. And so I had to as well.

The Calgary Magic Circle is having its annual fundraiser public show this weekend so magician colleague Yeats Wong and I managed to blag a spot on CityTV's breakfast show in Calgary this morning. I was up at 4:30am to make the drive.

At first I took the jokey on-air banter about host Andrew Schultz being a bit of a magician himself as precisely that - jokey banter - but it turns out to be true. The man is an avid hobbyist magician and has been for about 15 years, which was a nice surprise as he immediately understood how best to position ourselves and the cameras to get nice clear shots.

We were in the studio along with an Australian cover band (with a Glaswegian drummer) currently doing The Eagles at an autitorium in Calgary. Quite astonishing that they sound like Aussies and Weegies in person but Yanks on microphones. Would it be cruel of me to petition Lonely Planet travel guidebooks to inform North American visitors to Glasgow that they can overcome their difficulties in understanding the locals by insisting that their interlocutors sing their responses into a portable karaoke microphone?

Yes, that would be cruel.

But funny.

*

As Yeats and I left the studio and walked outside into the early morning air, I thought to myself, "You know, knocking off work at 9am isn't so bad at all."

Maybe those breakfast TV-types have got the right idea.

I won't be able to embed the video for my bit, but here's the link...

http://site.btcalgary.ca/video/?bcpid=5173168001&bclid=5184558001&bctid=90907402001