Wherein I Watch a Magic Show and Contemplate a Tatoo

As we are often starved for entertainment on this tiny island of ours (and loitering is illegal and carries a fine, so the American pasttime of 'hanging out' is frowned upon), anything fresh and new immediately gets the attention of the natives (best if it's free). As is often the case when I go out with Gary and the rest, we usually end up with nothing to do and go restaurant-hopping or catch a movie, usually of qualities that leave much to be desired.

So when Gary rang me up yesterday and asked me if I wanted to see a Mentalist Act, I immediately said yes, since I have implicit trust in the taste of this particular group of friends (how can you not trust the taste of people who can recite the seven network layers and the waterfall-model of software-implementation?) and also because I was feeling rather bored. Only when I went out to meet Gary today did the strangeness of a "Mentalist Act" strike me. For one thing, I didn't even know what a Mentalist was (other than the AD&D definition, which was unlikely) and I was already on the train - meaning no Wikipedia-to-the-rescue. Gary's explaination was no help, with an SMS reply of "We're watching a Wizardry show".

It turned out to be Marc Salem, this amazing guy who's been a practicing pschologist for thirty years and works for the New York police in lie-detection and such things. Stage was in Esplanade Recital Studio, tickets went at S$18, and the audience was not more than 100. A bad picture of his brochure is below.

He did a bunch of tricks that looked suspiciously like what Adam Khoo might do in an NLP session to dazzle the audience, such as detecting lies, slowing his pulse, using his fingertips to read the serial number of a ten-dollar note and "predicting" information about audience members (well, he would have put Adam Khoo to shame any day) - with one important difference - at no point did he ever mention that you could use alter your body to avoid these tricks. In fact, his only claim-to-power was that you could learn to read body language to the extent of doing what he did, but you would take a really long time and need some talent at it.

It was amazing. One trick was to identify lying simply looking at people when they answered "No" to his questions of whether certain items they contributed belonged to them. Of course, it helped that he knew at least one was lying, but still it was impressive when he managed to identify it. There were also tricks of the mind such as having a woman choose an envelope out of three, only one of which contained nothing - and she fell for his subtle cues to choose the one without. I personally think the colour of the envelope had something to do with it, but that's a bunch of psychology papers I'd rather not read.

He has, evidently, four different shows. I'll be looking out for the rest (though I'm unsure if he'll be coming back to Singapore), and I'm thinking of buying his book already.

---

Thinking of getting a tattoo. Some of you have already heard, though no one has mentioned anything sounding too disapproving. In case you haven't heard, I'm thinking of getting this tattooed onto my left breast, just above my heart. It's Code 128 and decodes to "Alex Huang", by the way, for those of you who don't own bar-code scanners at home.

It's a symbol of my disgust at capitalistic greed eating away at our expressionism, leaving us hollow empty shells who can only express ourselves through it's own recognized symbolisms and depriving us of freedom of thought. It's also a self-conscious statement of my own lack of identity, wherein I am confused about the boundaries of my existence and require a physical brand. Also, it can be seen with sentimental connotations - placed aboce the heart, it could mean that to love me, you should first decode me.

It also opens up the possibility for a wide array of puns, such as:

Hey baby, check me out

The only thing stopping me now is whether a tattoo artist can get the bar code right. Alternative would be the much less cool Temporary Tattoo Paper.

Anybody has a tatto or knows tattoo artists? I'd ask one, but I am shy and retiring. (The tattoo is in no way supposed to make me look tougher at all. Really.)