"My dad saw Houdini once—did I ever tell you this? He said it was much like you’d expect."

"They tied him up this way and that way, ropes, cables, locked him in a jail cell, then before you knew it came the sound of bolts dropping to the ground and locks flying off, and the great Houdini emerged. He just came walking out three paces behind the sheriff—and it was nothing! Anticlimax! Where was this? Manistique, Michigan, the county jail. Poor Houdini, she said. You should write a poor Houdini sonnet, Vern said. I hate it when people tell me what I should write, she said. I bet, Vern said. But still."

Wrote Anne Carson, the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in "Poor Houdini," published in 2024 in The New Yorker.

Manistique, Michigan is a real place. It sounds made up, though, don't you think? Like a portmanteau of "man" and "mystique." There's no [famous] book called "The Masculine Mystique."

"Times Square has always been the site of spectacle, but with FALL RISK, that spectacle is reoriented around the human body and its limits, resilience, and exposure."

Said Anna Starling, director of Times Square Arts, quoted in "Artist to be suspended 150 feet above Times Square in one-night performance" (PIX11).

I see: "The performance draws a connection to Harry Houdini, who suspended himself from a crane in Times Square nearly a century ago. But instead of focusing on escape, Kinlaw’s performance centers on endurance."

How far we've come! What other feats of the past will be recreated with the central element omitted?

The OED word of the day is "ghostbuster."

And "Who ya gonna call? (Ghostbusters!)" is not the first quote on the OED list, though it is there. It's second. The first quote is from 1930, and it's used in reference to Harry Houdini:

Escape artist nearly kills himself trying to replicate Houdini's old buried-alive-in-handcuffs trick.

After 9 minutes, Antony Britton's helpers dig him up, get the dirt out of his mouth and throat, and give him oxygen.

"All I remember is, literally your life goes before your eyes. Really. And then I just passed out. It was really weird because I’m not saying I heard noises but my family was talking to me. Just before I passed out I could see both my grandfathers talking to me as if I was a kid. It’s quite emotional when I think back what I went through. It fills me up. Then I just passed out and the next thing I know they dug me up and dragged me out."

"Romney’s tongue-tied eloquence."

Fareed Zakaria is back, back to kick Romney in the mouth, back from exile, presumably now purged of his plagiarism sins. Let's see how eloquent his eloquence critique is:

As President Obama has surged in the polls, Republicans have been quick to identify the problem: Mitt Romney. Peggy Noonan eloquently voiced what many conservatives believe when she said that Romney’s campaign has been a “rolling calamity.” Others have been equally critical of his candidacy. And yet, shouldn’t it puzzle us that Romney is so “incompetent” (also from Noonan), given his deserved reputation for, well, competence? He founded one of this country’s most successful financial firms, turned around the flailing Salt Lake City Olympics and was a successful governor. How did he get so clumsy so fast?

Rasmussen has the candidates locked in a tie. They're 46/46 again today, same as yesterday, and pretty much the same for the past week.  But if you want to find Obama surging, there are polls to satisfy your urge for the surge. These polls are grotesquely oversampling Democrats, to the point where the joke has become obvious, but maybe you can find your pleasure there, if you're also the sort that listens to Peggy Noonan as the exemplar of what conservatives are thinking. She eloquently voiced the opinion you want to hear: Romney’s campaign has been a “rolling calamity.”

If you bother to keep reading — and it's likely both Obama fans and Romney fans stopped at "rolling calamity," either pleased or disgusted — you'll see many paragraphs asserting that Romney doesn't want to talk about taxes and illegal immigration. He's "tongue-tied" because there's "a new kind of political correctness" in the GOP:

They cannot speak certain words (taxes) or speculate about certain ideas (immigration amnesty) because these are forbidden.... As a result, he has twisted himself into a pretzel, speaking vacuously... That’s a straitjacket that even Peggy Noonan’s eloquence cannot get him out of.

I'm picturing Peggy using her tongue to untwist a pretzel. Or is she unbuckling a straitjacket? Marvelous writing, Fareed. Did you make that all up yourself?

The Houdini shop...

... outside of the "Houdini: Art and Magic" show.