CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

There has been an ongoing debate among the magic blogs the last few weeks regarding the value of having comments enabled on blogsites, ever since Steve Pellegrino turned off the comments on Magicrants. He was taken to task by John LeBlanc of Escamoteurettes who wrote

"...a blog that doesn't afford visitors the ability to interact with the author is a one-way street and I consider (it) a traditional web site."

Then Andy at Magic Circle Jerk wrote

"Completely unnecessary. It's a blog. Short for "web log." You're logging your thoughts and activities. Star Trek starts out with Kirk saying, "Captain's Log..." it doesn't end with Spock adding, "2 kewl!!!!"

Andy always cracks me up.

I have comments turned on because I'm hoping to hear your opinions and experiences regarding the topics I write about. It's no secret that I'm writing a book with the working title "Special Effects for Limited Budgets" and that this blog is a great place to test chapter ideas and topics on you, my potential readers (and, I hope, buyers.)

Why do I think your comments will be worthwhile? I check my stats each day and I see some of you coming from NASA, M.I.T., Harvard and lots of very impressive domains. Now, I'm not fooling myself: I know you're all searching for the latest news on the Aliun Levitation (especially you NASA guys who are looking to cheap out on rockets) but on the rare chance that you are theatre majors or engineers, I'd really value your input! Actually, I value everyone's input... well, okay, not everyone's:

1. If your name is Bambi and you think it's important to tell us about your website where you and your roomies show off your panties, you'd better all be theatre majors or at least, not charge for the pantyshots.

2. If you've got a rad blog on Xanga.com and you want to leave me some eprops, those aren't the kind of props I'm interested in. Go away.

3. Viagra and Cialis are not special effects. Silicone breast implants are special effects.

There was a cable TV station, back in the early days of cable when local stations were scrambling for content, which had a camera focused on a bowl of goldfish for 24 hours a day. Live goldfish. That was it, something to test the channel with until they came up with some shows. One day, a station janitor was cleaning the studio and moved the bowl out of the camera frame. The phone lines lit up with indignant viewers demanding the goldfish back!

I figure that there must be a huge demographic out there who'll watch anything (otherwise, why does Ben Stiller make movies?) I also notice that there are thousands of new blogs appearing each day with content like: "toosday i fed my cat some tunafish and u wudn't belive what he puked on my bed!!!" followed by 20 comments from concerned readers. I assume that there were no Ben Stiller movies playing that week. I assume they did not work for NASA or attend Harvard or M.I.T. Those are just assumptions though, right? Comments?

posted by C. J. # 2:37 PM