We went back to read Houdini’s A Magician Among the Spirits and finally understood some of the passion we previously misinterpreted to be a strident, arrogant tone.
Read in context with the Spiritualism movement, Houdni’s A Magician Among the Spirits is the perfect, logical balance to the incredible claims of spiritualists.
While she later recanted her recantation, it is a sombering experience to hear the side of the woman (along with her younger sister, Katie, and older sister, Leah) started Spiritualism and all that it produced.
We know that the Jonathan Edward-esque medium has a tepid following. We thought he was an aberration.
We just assumed there was not a wide-spread support for such bunk.
We were wrong and it is kind of scary how the revisionist pen can keep alive long ago solved mysteries.
The we read of a new literary exhibition: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Beyond Sherlock Holmes, opens this weekend at Chicago’s prestigious Newberry Library.
Sir Arthur’s magazines, artworks, photographs and artifacts have been collected for presentation through July 12.
We are easily distracted from one obsession to another.
We don’t just flit from shiny thing to more shiny thing. Nay, we focus on some topic — usually obscure and without any real-world value to anyone — and intensify our focus until there is no other stimuli within our view.
That is a good thing for our other profession, proof reading M&Ms, but can be disconcerting for just about every other aspect of our world.
We noticed yesterday that we had not updated Inside Magic with a new story or article since last week. What were we doing? How could this happen?
We fell hopelessly in love with a dead woman, Maggie Fox Kane of the famous or infamous Fox Sisters.
We’ll provide our complete review of two recent books on Maggie and her medium sisters, Katie and Leah, later today.
We uploaded a PDF version of the book complete with our OCR, search functions and hyperlinked cross-references. Houdini’s book and Maggie Fox Kane’sDeath Blow to Spiritualism, are both available at the Inside Magic Library.
Fifteen year-old Nick Brice had an exceptional view of the overflow crowd gathered beneath him on the hot asphalt parking lot of the Swift Current Mall.
The excited, curious, and skeptical over-flow audience had an equally fine vantage point to watch the young man struggle with the canvas straight jacket as he swayed and writhed in the 10 mile-per-hour winds dangling some 40 feet above last Saturday.
No straight jacket escape is automatic or easy.
But Nick Brice was not looking for “easy” when he agreed to perform the dangerous stunt.
If he wanted to be safe, or to perform an “easy” escape, he would have stayed planted on terra firma (likely indoors), donned a heavily gimmicked, unexamined straight jacket, and conducted his escape behind an opaque curtain.
Perhaps it is a tribute to his youthful energy and enthusiasm that he was able to fend off fatigue and vertigo to slowly and painfully work his way free of the weighty garment before he would have certainly collapsed from heat exhaustion and his inverted position.
Like many of us, Mr. Brice was inspired by Houdini – someone who never took the “easy” route.
“Probably the most famous magician, Harry Houdini, is the one that really inspires me. He was the first one to do this one at the turn of the 20 century. He was my inspiration to do the straight jacket escape,” Master Brice told reporters.
His usual performance venues are more stable, less dangerous.
“I have done a couple at the library. Actually I normally do it at schools. I am always entertaining the other kids at high school.”
How does he intend to top his latest public exhibition next year?
The May 21, 2009 on-line edition of the journal Advance for LPNs features Cynthia Blank Reid captivating review of the ultimately unsuccessful trauma treatment administered Harry Houdini.
Ms. Reid approaches the Houdini case not as a magic historian or Houdini enthusiast. Her expertise is in medical miracles. She works as a trauma clinical nurse specialist in Philadelphia and her perspective is illuminating.
She gives a clinical evaluation of Houdini’s physical condition prior to his appendicitis.
“Houdini was a relatively small man, standing 5’5″,” she writes. ”He kept himself in shape by swimming, running and doing acrobatics. His medical history was unremarkable until early October 1926, when a series of events would culminate in his death.”
Houdini’s ability and willingness to perform through pain was evidenced when he broke a bone earlier in that fateful year.
“Then, one night in 1926, while performing his famous Water Torture Cell escape, during which Houdini hung suspended upside-down in a chamber of water, ropes secured to his feet were jerked improperly, causing his ankle to break. Houdini refused medical care, insisting the show go on.”
This has become a passion and a time-suck all in one.
(Reprinted from April 12, 2003).
We are easily distracted from one obsession to another.
Fifteen year-old 
The May 21, 2009 on-line edition of the journal 
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