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Well the convention is finally over, 3 days of solid top quality magic arranged and run by the Blackpool Magicians Club. When I looked back yesterday at my live blogging from convention I worked out that I'd written close to 6,284 words (or about 29,650 characters!), a large part of this was done on my iPhone, with other stuff being typed up on my Macbook between getting back from the Ruskin hotel and sleeping each night. The iPhone was a breeze letting me update the blog, and email stories over to iTricks in an instant.

I also worked out that unless you're a real die hard, it's unlikely you're going to read the entire Blackpool 2008 Category on my blog, for those of you who can't spare the time: here's the low down and summary: the theme of the 2008 Blackpool Magic convention was Close-up Colossus. The convention started Friday lunch time with the dealers halls opening with about 127 dealers in total. I had a good chat with Richard Kaufman about the April copy of Genii magazine, which will contain an in-depth article about the recent performance of the hooker rising cards. Richard was very excited about the article, stating that "this was the real deal". The colossal 27 page article in April's issue is written and illustrated by Jim Steinmeyer, and from the preview issue that Richard was kind enough to let me look through, it details a lot about the illusive effect, it's history, and even includes a good number of photos, and drawings of the setup from the recent performance.

This is a copy of the review I placed on my blog. The 36th International Magic Convention started around 7:30pm on Friday evening, its always great wandering round and running into people you know, or recognise, Magician Bingo is always a favorite pastime of ours when we’re there. Magician Bingo for those who don’t is a bit like buzzword bingo and the like, you get points for spotting various members of the magical fraternity, and points are added up on the last day’s gala show (normally where the points roll up), I probably should post the slightly loose rules at some point for those into the weirdness of it all, but generally Magician Bingo got off to a good start me me scoring a starter for 10 with JJ shopping in Tottenham court road.

The start of the evening was Guy Hollowingworth, Guy was presenting his ‘Expert at the card table‘ a 75 minute play and performance based around the book by S.W Erdnase. Another double word score on Magician Bingo with Andy Nyman, who I had a quick chat with as Derren Brown was sorting out his registration and was signing books (again forgetting mine for him to sign!)