Why, hello. You guys like my windows? Sorry, if it blurs you can’t see me. Whatever. You get used to it. All right. Let’s get back to it. Remember, if you see something you like, just let me know. How They See Us, oh, milk and honey. It’s probably not what I am expecting at all. Nothing that’s really screaming at me right now I’ll go to number two.
You know what? I like this one. History of Magic and Experimental Science. That sounds interesting. Right? However, You Only Live Once, sounds pretty interesting too. Look at this. This is a good little row right here we got. We got Houdini’s Magic. We even got Dennis Rodman, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived. Well, I think we are going to make a few videos out of here. All right. We are going to do… Oh wow, they even got Guns, Germs, and Steel on this row. I outdid myself on this one. This is jam-packed of interesting stuff. Oscar, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to have that, but let’s start with, Houdini. All right. We all know who Houdini is. I got a couple of Houdini books. We’ll see what this Houdini book… It’s Houdini, Fabulous Magic by Gibson and Young. All right. Let’s go over to my middle of the library office.
Excuse me. All right. This is old. Here, you can look with me, I apologize. All right. The book is 1958, we got a 1961 right there. 1960. That’s the latest date that I see, is 1960. This should be interesting. Obviously right now it’s not the idea of reading every chapter, we’re just going to find one chapter that looks the most interesting of everything else. These are all, like I said, interesting. I mean, let’s see. Can you guys read? Yeah, it’s not the greatest. Whatever. You can see it though. The Vanishing Elephant or we got the Houdini’s Jail Escapes? What’s that? What’s that? Let’s do the Jail Escapes? No, I kind of want to do the elephant. We’re going to do The Vanishing Elephant. All right. Nobody wants to hear about jail. Jail’s depressing. 130.
The Vanishing Elephant. Look, here we go. “The world famous Houdini offers his latest creation, The Vanishing Elephant. An elephant weighing 10,000 pounds and he’s going to make it disappear in front of your eyes.” All right. Let’s see. Do we got any pictures? See, it’s kind of difficult. I don’t have two hands to be able to do [inaudible 00:04:42], but he did this in January 1918. It was the biggest illusion ever performed. [inaudible 00:04:51]. It was important but it wasn’t the greatest.
“Look, here is the elephant. I’ll first introduce her as the first known vanishing elephant. She has a baby blue ribbon around her neck and a fake wristwatch on her hind legs so the audience can see her leg until the last second when she enters the cabinet. I say, “She is all dressed up like a bride,” and that gets a big laugh for the good natured beast lumbers along, and I believe she is the best natured elephant that ever lived. I never allowed a hook to be used, relying on a block of sugar to make her go through her stunt and she certainly is very fond of me. She weighs over 10,000 pounds and is gentle as a kitten. There is no black arts.”
And he’s basically it’s like… All right. I mean, so far… I’m trying to not to get the backlight in you guys’ face. A vanishing elephant? This is right around Barnum & Baileys, so a long time ago. I mean, it’s kind of like, “You can just put it on YouTube now or Instagram,” but back then they used to really travel around, do these kind of shows and everything like that. And magic’s not as big as it was back then, I guess. I mean, it’s big but during Houdini’s time it was probably mad, like huge. Like a whole elephant disappears. This is when it first was coming out.
Very interested on giving you guys a more in-depth article below. Sounds like this is going to be fun. I don’t know. The little part that I was reading to you guys sounds like he was a pretty good guy. You know what I’m saying? He made sure to let us know that he wasn’t a hook, which would be miserable. Dude, what do you mean? You guys would hook and ladder like a fish, stick the elephant and drag him around? That would be just horrendous. But back in the olden days, they didn’t really think about or care too much if they hurt people. A lot of people are going to argue with me but I’m going to be like, “Yeah, well, think of slavery.” You know what I’m saying? It wasn’t that much before this, so if they are hooking an elephant, they’d hook people. I doubt they’d care about an elephant. But back to where we are at. Should be fun. Read a little about Houdini, and enjoy the paper.