Card Tricks and Great Balls of Fire

There’s a lot of bad advice out there, and Show Me Now—a new smart phone application that gives you step-by-step directions on how to do variety of different things—has it’s fair share of it. Case in point: the app offers up tips on how to “Breathe a Ball of Fire” (that smell of burning flesh? That’s what a lawsuit smells like).

But as I flipped through the categories—move, eat, style, help, survive, make, nurture, home, and wow—a few piqued my interest. For instance, I’ve always wanted to know how to “Fool a Polygraph” (don’t ask) and “Apply Lipstick Sexily” (again, don’t ask), but the demonstration that really caught my eye was the one on how to do a card trick. You’ve probably seen this one: the trickster has you pick a card then has you put it back in the deck. They cut the deck a few times and—voila!—there’s your card.

After practicing the trick a few times on my own, I tried it on one of my friends and—voila!—it didn’t work. I went back to my phone, figured out where I’d gone wrong, and was able to amaze and confuse my buddy. For that alone, the $2.99 cost of the app was worth it.

Now if I could only bring my phone underwater for the next time I encounter a shark…