This evening’s meeting, co-hosted by Victor Heng and John Teo, and themed “Mental Magic”, was attended by 27 members and 1 guest. Secretary JK Tan announced that Dr Eric Yap, Charles Choo and Lim Teck Guan qualified for Life-Time Membership with IBM Ring 115 as they have been members for at least 30 years and are 80 years or older. These 3 members will henceforth have the privilege of free club membership. Baharudin also announced an upcoming trip to Penang from 27 February to 2 March 2025. Members were invited to check out details in the Ring 115 chatgroup and let him know early if interested.
Yu HuiHang kicked off the evening’s performances by transforming 3 American silver coins into bronze coins, and then, into Chinese coins with a hole in each of them. A volunteer shuffled a deck of cards and cut to the Jack of Hearts. This card was turned over face up and was in the 9th position from the top of the deck. HuiHang took out the cards from a second deck on the table. It also has the Jack of Hearts as the only card face up and occupying the 9th position from the top of the deck. He then showed that all the other cards were blank ones.
Ryan Goh performed a 3-Fly coins routine. He had a volunteer write down an object on her mobile phone notepad. The mobile was passed to a 2nd volunteer who erased the written object and replacing it with his own object. This was repeated with a 3rd volunteer. Ryan took the mobile and could announce the erased objects written by the 2nd and 1st volunteers respectively. Next, he took a photo of a volunteer couple holding up a piece of black film. He enlisted 3 other volunteers to make up an imaginary playing card, and the identity of that card was shown captured in the black film in the photograph of the couple.
An induction ceremony was then conducted for both Ryan Goh and Yu HuiHang.
Ivan Lee and Rebecca Seet took their induction tests as a couple. Using the theme, four of a kind, they produced 4 different coloured flowers, each springing from a matching coloured pot. They performed a 3 Card Monte effect using giant cards where the only Queen among 2 Kings finally transformed into the third King. Rebecca not only could guess correctly the exact number of cards cut to by a volunteer, she also caused the volunteer’s selected card to be the only card face up in the deck. Ivan had the same volunteer cut the deck into 4 piles, and he found the 4 Aces. The second card of each pile was turned over to reveal 2 Queens of the same suits as the first 2 Aces, a 5 and a 2. The couple cleverly concluded that the 2 Queen cards represented themselves and the numbers, including the Aces, represented 15 December, the date of their induction test.
Dr Loke Han Ying invited a volunteer to complete a series of 3 actions. Firstly, the volunteer drew a picture related to a travel destination. He then selected a photograph from a picture book on travels. Dr Loke had two 4-digit numbers randomly written by 2 other volunteers and a third one totalled them up. The first volunteer randomly selected 4 playing cards. The identities of these 4 cards coincided with the sum of the two 4-digit numbers. Dr Loke then correctly described the selected travel photograph, and drew a similar picture drawn by the first volunteer earlier.
Thomas Yeo presented art mentalism. Inviting 4 volunteers to draw a portrait of President John Teo while he stepped away from the room, he correctly matched the “ártworks” with their respective “artists”, on his return.
Charles Choo set aside a playing card as a prediction. He invited a volunteer to use a mobile phone to multiply any 2 sets of 3 digit numbers. Using this result, he counted off cards in a deck and arrived at the mate of the card he placed earlier as his prediction.
It was dealer’s demonstration time. Goh Yin Xiang demonstrated some interesting items on sale at his dealer’s booth. They included a double-load chick pan, “Run Rabbit Run” effect done with playing card, Michael Murray’s “Polarity” and Showcase 2.0.
After a 15 minutes break, James Pang invited 3 volunteers to respectively write down any word from a book, any page from a book and a colour chosen from a colour chart. Using his magical sense of touch over each volunteer’s closed fist which held the written piece of paper, he correctly read what each of them had written – the word ‘lower’, the number ‘274’ and the colour ‘mustard’.
President John Teo rounded off the evening’s meeting with a teach-in. He shared interesting insights about the De-Monster, and how the unique drawing of this monster was inspired by a comic years ago. A volunteer would be asked to select one of the 3 prominent features on the monster – its face, feet or tail. The magician would present his correct prediction from an envelope with 2 other decoy envelopes standing by. He also shared on the use of large motivational messages placemats, where a volunteer would be invited to choose 1 of the 10 displayed. He patiently demonstrated and explained in detail, how he could correctly predict any placemat chosen.
Following a cosy evening of entertaining performances and teach-in, 5 members won prizes from a lucky draw. Several members lingered on after the meeting ended, for fellowship, magic jamming and shopping.
