Sell-By Food Shops

I watched an item on the news this morning about "dumpster diving" for food thrown out by supermarkets simply because it's past its sell-by date. A shocking statistic flashed on the screen. The US alone throws out billions of pounds in weight of perfectly good food every year simply because it is "time" to do so.

In the UK, the big supermarkets have basically gang raped the hell out of our high streets, and local councils have held their coats while they did it. Up and down the UK, high streets lost small businesses as the likes of Tesco expanded into everything from dry cleaning to prescriptions. no one was there to help them and that was wrong of us. I propose a new law that taxes the supermarkets to fund a chain of high street stores that cheaply sell the "past sell-by" food they currently throw away.

Naked Mentalism 3

I don't usually talk about my magic books in this blog, but about 5 years ago, realised that I rather liked using my smarts to come up with new material for magicians. Perhaps the thing I'm most known for inside magic is Naked Mentalism, which has to do with using genuine psychological principles in magic - specifically mind magic or "mentalism". I'm currently readying Naked Mentalism 3 for sending out to trusted friends to read and pick apart, and I thought it'd be good to throw caution to the wind and share what it's all about.

Volume three marks quite a departure in the series. By that, I mean it focuses on the way in which mystery entertainers can exploit the naturally occurring "bugs" in the way we use common sense thinking. It is the business of experimental psychology to discover these bugs. Rather than showing how to avoid them, this book shows how to use these bugs to enhance effects of all kinds (not just mentalism effects) to make them seem more natural and all the more remarkable. As well as containing more traditional "Naked" effects, this, I think is the "breakout" volume of the Naked Mentalism series because it spills quite naturally into other areas where the techniques I reveal are also applicable.

Needless to say, I'm very excited about this book, and excited to know what the magic community at large think about it.