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Astrolingua

Phantomas

(Based on 1 review)

Inspired by Ray Grismer's "What's my sign," (a routine in which the magician is successfully able to guess the zodiac sign of an onlooker after a few questions) Phantomas has created another practical version of the "Progressive Anagram."

Very easy to remember. After a little practice, you will be able to tell your spectators their sign, simply by "reading their minds!"

Reviews

Bryce Kuhlman

Official Reviewer

Jan 24, 2004

Being a positive person, I wish I could say something nice about this. Unfortunately, the paper is of such high quality that it doesn't work well as a fire starter.

Here's something positive: if you want to do a reading on someone's astrological sign, pick up a copy of the Mystery School book. In my opinion, Alain Nu's work on this is light-years beyond anything else in print.

This manuscript, however, is not worth the paper it's printed on. Like most, it's based on a branching anagram. The diagram showing the branching is extremely confusing and there are no examples or additional text to help explain this diagram.

Once I figured it out, I realized one other glaring error: half of the paths have no end. You can whittle it down to two possible signs, but there is no mention of how to get to a final conclusion other than, "call out one of the two possible signs and wait for the reaction of the spectator… if there is no positive reaction [make up some BS]."

To be fair, the author does offer a couple of additional methods for the final choice, but they're equally as lame and require extra props like business cards.

Which brings me to the "outs," or rather the lack thereof. In my mind, to make a branching anagram work, any "no" has to have a logical way to turn it around into a "yes" (or at least a believable misunderstanding). There is a short "HINT" section that mentions the need for these outs and gives a couple of lame examples. I'm all for making up things that work for you, but if I had to pay money for this, I think I would want the complete story.

Another requirement I put on branching anagrams is that there is a clear premise for calling out the letters. Not only is there no premise, but depending on the letters you get, you might either be spelling the name of their sign or spelling out a word that describes the astrological symbol. For instance, an "A" could mean either a letter in Aquarius or the "A" in the word "animal" -- a description of the symbol.

The bottom line: save your money!
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