{"id":74,"date":"2007-10-24T21:47:50","date_gmt":"2007-10-25T03:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/24\/phenomenon-or-welcome-to-joes-casino-of-saukville\/"},"modified":"2007-10-24T21:47:50","modified_gmt":"2007-10-25T03:47:50","slug":"phenomenon-or-welcome-to-joes-casino-of-saukville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/phenomenon-or-welcome-to-joes-casino-of-saukville\/","title":{"rendered":"Phenomenon, or Welcome to Joe’s Casino of Saukville"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just finished watching the new mentalist search show with Uri Geller<\/a> and Criss Angel<\/a>, Phenomenon<\/a>. The show itself is pretty standard as far as the contest shows go, each contestant demonstrates his\/her talent and the audience gets to vote on their favorite, or least favorite contestants.\u00a0 But this time they’re looking for mentalists – you know, those people who can make you believe they’re reading your mind or enabling you to read minds, etc.\u00a0 This is one of the most difficult professions ever.\u00a0 Not everyone can lie and make it look good – in fact, most people can’t.\u00a0 And most of tonight’s contestants didn’t do much better than the average illusionist\/magician\/mentalist\/whatever-you-want-to-call-them that works at Joe’s Casino of Saukville (aka your average local casino magic show – thank Mr. Jack Schill for the Saukville reference).\u00a0<\/p>\n

The one contestant that I really enjoyed was the laid-off steel worker who endures great pain for the benefit of his audience, Jim Karol.\u00a0 It seemed that, despite his claims to not feel pain, he feels the pain quite well but knows how to endure it better than most people.\u00a0 His act was the only act I felt inclined to applaud.\u00a0 That could be because his act was good or because we, as humans, have a strange fascination with watching others endure pain.\u00a0 Or it’s my own sick fascination.\u00a0 Whatever the case, I hope the rest of the contestants are entertaining like Jim.\u00a0 And I hope we get to see Jim again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Did I forget to mention Uri’s mental challenge?\u00a0 He did one of those things where the audience gets to choose a symbol on the screen and see if it’s the one he was thinking of . . . yeah, you know how that turns out.\u00a0 Along with the cheesy, over-dramatic background music that seemed to never stop through the entire show, I felt like crying.\u00a0 I was thankful, however, that Criss Angel is as critical of the contestants’ acts as I am of his show.\u00a0 It made me feel that he understands how the whole thing works better, perhaps, than he appears to most of the time.\u00a0 Hopefully, he’ll help keep the show from feeling like a cheap lounge act.<\/p>\n

\u00a0See more of what I have to say here: http:\/\/boards.nbc.com\/nbc\/index.php?s=&showtopic=771468&view=findpost&p=2605052<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just finished watching the new mentalist search show with Uri Geller and Criss Angel, Phenomenon. The show itself is pretty standard as far as the contest shows go, each contestant demonstrates his\/her talent and the audience gets to vote on their favorite, or least favorite contestants.\u00a0 But this time they’re looking for mentalists – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[28,83,95],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture","tag-society","tag-tv"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3aAvV-1c","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}