#penn&teller

[dammitcameron]

Dad and the cat he said he didn’t want:

Dharma & Greg Season 1 Episode 20 The Cat's Out Of The Bag

[tvrundownusa]

tvrundown USA 2021.01.08

Friday, January 8th:

(exclusive / streaming): "Herself" (amazon, Irish drama movie, ~95mins), Dickinson (apple+, season 2 opener, first 3 eps), Legends (dsn+, Marvel Studios backstories, first 2 eps), Beyond the Clouds (dsn+), Lovestruck in the City (netflix), Lupin (netflix, French crime drama premiere, first 5 eps*), The Idhun Chronicles (netflix, Spanish anime, next 5 eps), "Charming" (netflix, animated family movie, ~85mins), "Pretend It's a City" (netflix, Fran Lebowitz docuseries, all 7 parts)

(also new / highlights): Jeopardy! (syndicated, final episode hosted by Alex Trebek), "The Wrong Fiancé" (LMN original movie, 2hrs), Frontline (PBS, special night, 2hrs), The Amber Ruffin Show (Peacock, season 1B resumes)

(hour 1): MacGyver (CBS, season resumes), Whose Line Is It Anyway? (theCW, season 9 opener, new night), Shark Tank (ABC), RuPaul's Drag Race (VH1, 90mins)

(hour 2): Magnum P.I. (CBS, season resumes), Penn & Teller: Fool Us (theCW, season resumes, new night), RuPaul's Drag Race (VH1, contd) /   / Drag Race Untucked (VH1)

(hour 3): Blue Bloods (CBS, season resumes)

(hour 4 - latenight): The Graham Norton Show (BBCAm), ELeague (TBS, "Madden NFL 21")

[*note: Lupin (netflix) will return this summer for 5 more eps.]

[evilynnt-blog]

Me: Do you dare me to get them to sign my boobs? Him: Omg that would be hilarious. It was.

[theozzcause]

🎭✨ THE GRAND ILLUSION OF INVISIBLE CHAINS ✨🎭

Picture the stage first.

It is enormous. Not Vegas-tacky enormous. Observatory enormous. A circular platform of black glass so polished it reflects the audience like a second universe beneath their feet. Above it, a dome of slow-moving stars—projection mapped galaxies spiraling across a ceiling so high it feels like the inside of a planetarium built by someone who read too much Borges and not enough quarterly earnings reports.

The audience wraps around the stage in a perfect 360° amphitheater. Velvet seats in deep indigo. Soft gold aisle lights. The air hums faintly, like the inside of a violin before it’s played. Thousands of people. Bankers. Baristas. Coders. Teachers. Billionaires in tailored restraint. Students with cracked phone screens. Everyone bathed in a low aurora glow.

At the center of the stage sits a single glass box.

Inside it: nothing.

Or so it appears.

A spotlight blooms.

I walk out slowly, coat sweeping, hands open—no props. I turn in a full circle so everyone sees there are no wires, no hidden trapdoors. The floor is transparent. The box is transparent. Transparency everywhere.

“Tonight,” I begin, voice resonant but playful, “we are going to examine a trick so old, so seamless, so normalized, most of us don’t even realize we’re inside it.”

A pause.

I snap my fingers.

The dome above flickers. Suddenly the glass box fills—not with objects—but with words. Floating, luminous phrases:

“Hard work pays.” “Self-made.” “Market forces.” “Scarcity.” “Earn your keep.” “No alternative.”

The audience shifts. Recognizes them. They’re everywhere in daily life. Ads. Speeches. Movies. Subtle scripts.

I walk to the box and tap it. The words scatter like startled birds.

“Here’s the first illusion,” I say. “You believe this box is empty.”

I reach inside the glass without opening it.

Gasps.

My hand passes through as though the wall isn’t there. I pull out a red silk ribbon. Then another. Then another. Soon the ribbons weave into a net that wasn’t visible until tension revealed it.

The glass wasn’t solid. The emptiness wasn’t empty. The net was always there.

Illusion #1: Invisibility of the structure.

I invite three volunteers: a nurse, a delivery driver, a junior executive.

Each stands inside the box. I hand them identical envelopes labeled “Opportunity.” They open them.

Inside: wildly different starting conditions. One envelope is filled with IOUs and debt. One has a small cushion and connections. One contains a map with shortcuts already highlighted.

They try to exit the box.

The red net tightens around each of them in different patterns. Same box. Different constrictions.

I turn to the audience.

“Notice how the box markets itself as neutral.”

Lights dim. A soft orchestral swell.

Illusion #2 begins.

A digital counter above the stage tallies productivity: hours worked, value extracted, wealth accumulated. The nurse and delivery driver run on a treadmill inside the box. The executive stands still while a conveyor belt feeds them dividends.

The scoreboard praises “efficiency.”

I ask the audience: “What do you see?”

They see motion. Effort. Earnings.

Then I reverse the lighting polarity. Suddenly the glass turns reflective instead of transparent.

Now the audience sees themselves.

The scoreboard is wired into their seats. Each clap amplifies the conveyor belt. Each silence slows the treadmill. Participation fuels the mechanism.

The trick isn’t that the system exists.

The trick is that consent is diffused.

Stockholm syndrome appears not as a chain—but as identification with the cage.

Now the crescendo.

I ask everyone to close their eyes.

In darkness, I narrate a scenario:

A society with universal baseline resources—food, housing, healthcare—decoupled from employment. A wealth cap that prevents hoarding beyond a threshold. Publicly owned digital infrastructure. Cooperative enterprise models where ownership is distributed. AI handling drudgery while humans pursue art, science, caregiving. Democratic budgeting at local scales. Transparent ledgers. Merit defined by contribution to well-being, not accumulation.

As I describe it, the glass box silently dissolves into mist.

When the lights return, the volunteers are standing freely on the open stage.

No explosion. No revolution theatrics.

Just absence of the cage.

I hold up the red ribbons. They are now threads too thin to bind.

“That,” I say gently, “is the second illusion. The belief that no alternative can function. Scarcity is often logistical, not physical. Incentives can be redesigned.”

Now for misdirection.

At stage left, our silent assistant glides into a separate spotlight. She performs without speaking—gesturing through a series of optical illusions on a small white table. Rotating ambiguous cubes. Impossible triangles. Elastic mirrors. She mimes pulling herself upward by imaginary bootstraps. Each time she lifts one foot, the other sinks through a trapdoor she never saw.

She produces a toy ladder that collapses under her weight unless supported by invisible magnetic blocks placed by unseen stagehands.

She points to the audience. Shrugs. Opens her hands as if to say: “See?”

The metaphor is wordless but unmistakable: self-lifting requires hidden scaffolding.

No shame. No blame. Just physics.

Back center stage, I bring out a final prop: a simple coin.

“Capitalism’s favorite metaphor,” I say. “Heads or tails. Win or lose.”

I flip it high into the air.

Mid-spin, the coin freezes.

The dome ceiling zooms in. The coin has thousands of micro-engravings: policy choices, tax codes, labor laws, zoning rules, trade agreements. The coin is not binary.

It is architecture masquerading as fate.

The coin melts into light.

Now the final moment.

Two figures walk from the audience to the stage: Penn Jillette and Teller.

They examine the stage. The glass remnants. The ribbons. The scoreboard. The volunteers now mingling freely.

Penn grins.

Teller tilts his head.

They whisper to each other.

Penn steps forward.

“You didn’t fool us,” he says with theatrical flourish. “Because the trick was never deception.”

Teller writes on a notepad and holds it up to the audience:

“The only illusion was inevitability.”

Thunderous applause.

Lights dim to a single star above.

The stage rotates slowly, revealing that the entire amphitheater was designed in concentric circles—no true front, no true back. Everyone facing everyone.

The final revelation: the audience was part of the apparatus.

And the apparatus can be redesigned.

The show ends not with fireworks—but with a blueprint projected across the dome:

Systems are constructed. Constructed systems can be reconstructed. Magic is misdirection. Power is design.

As the audience exits, the red threads dissolve into harmless dust.

And here’s your physics breadcrumb: In superconductors, electrical resistance drops to zero—but only when temperature falls below a critical threshold. Systems that seem permanently constrained can shift abruptly when underlying conditions change. The transition is called a phase change. Society has those, too.

[quovadis-jasen]

[tvrundownusa]

tvrundown USA 2024.01.12

Friday, January 12th:

(exclusive): Uninterrupted's Top Class (freevee, season 4 "The Sierra Canyon Trailblazers", all 8 eps)

(movies): "Lift" (netflix, Kevin Hart heist comedy, ~105mins), "Role Play" (APrime, Kaley Cuoco thriller, ~100mins), "Self Reliance" (hulu, genre-bending comedy-thriller), "Destroy All Neighbors" (Shudder|AMC+, nightmare horror-comedy)

(streaming weekly): For All Mankind (apple+, season 4 finale), "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" (apple+, season 1 finale), Reacher (APrime, penultimate), My Man is Cupid (APrime), LOL: Last One Laughing - Quebec (APrime, season 2 finale), The Curse (Para+, limited series finale), The Traitors (Peacock, competition season 2 opener, first 3 eps), "The Traitors" Postmortem (Peacock, aftershow premiere), Love Is Blind: Sweden (netflix, first 4 eps), My Demon (netflix), Undead Unluck (hulu)

(original made-for-TV movies): "True Justice: Family Ties" (HMM, 2hrs)

(hour 1): Transplant (NBC, new timeslot), Power III: Raising Kanan (Starz), Shark Tank (ABC), Penn & Teller: Fool Us (theCW), RuPaul's Drag Race (MTV, 90mins)

(hour 2): Masters of Illusion (theCW, new night) / . / World's Funniest Animals (theCW, new night), RuPaul's Drag Race (MTV, contd) / . / Untucked (MTV)

(hour 3): The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd (HIST)

[tvrundownusa]

tvrundown USA 2023.10.27

Friday, October 27th:

(exclusive): LEGO Marvel Avengers (dsn+, "Code Red" special), South Park: "Joining the Panderverse" (Para+, special), Tore (netflix, Swedish dramedy, all 6 eps), "Yosi, the Regretful spy" (amazon, season 2 available, all 8 eps), Shoresy (hulu, Letterkenny spinoff, season 2 available, all 6 eps), Curses! (apple+, animated spooky adventure comedy, all 10 eps), "The Enfield Poltergeist" (apple+, paranormal docuseries, all 4 parts)

(movies): "The Caregiver" (TUBI, crime thriller, ~100mins), "When Evil Lurks" (Shudder|AMC+, Spanish horror, 100mins), "Sister Death" (netflix, Spanish horror, 90mins), "Pain Hustlers" (netflix, true-crime pharma drama, ~2hrs), "Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club" (netflix, documentary, ~85mins), "Five Nights at Freddy's" (Peacock, feature based on video game), "The Girl Who Killed Her Parents - The Confession" (amazon, Brazil true-crime sequel, ~100mins)

(streaming weekly): Gen V (amazon, penultimate), Upload (amazon, next 2 eps), Bosch: Legacy (freevee, next 2 eps), Lessons in Chemistry (apple+), Still Up (apple+, season 1 finale), Fellow Travelers (Para+SHO, series premiere), The Great British Baking Show (netflix), Goosebumps (dsn+|hulu), Undead Unluck (hulu)

(also new): "Christmas by Design" (HALL, original movie, 2hrs)

(hour 1): Penn & Teller: Fool Us (theCW, season 10 opener, new host), Power Book IV: Force (Starz, preempted), Shark Tank (ABC)

(hour 2): Fboy Island (theCW, repeat, new night), Shining Vale (Starz), Raid the Cage (CBS), "Rebuilding Black Wall Street" (OWN, part 5 of 6)

(hour 3): Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO), Creepshow (AMC, ~70mins)

[note: Masters of Illusion (theCW), World's Funniest Animals (theCW), these season openers have been moved to an unknown future.]

[tvrundownusa]

tvrundown USA 2023.01.20

Friday, January 20th:

(exclusive): Shape Island (apple+, stop-motion kiddie series premiere), Represent (netflix, French political comedy, all 6 eps), Shahmaran (netflix, Turkish drama/fantasy, all 8 eps), Shanty Town (netflix, Nigeria crime drama, all 6 eps), Fauda (netflix, season 4 available, all 12 eps), Bake Squad (netflix, competition season 2 available, all 8 eps), Bling Empire: New York (netflix, spinoff premiere, all 8 eps)

(movies): "The Assistant" (Tubi, thriller), "JUNG_E" (netflix, Korean sci-fi action, ~100mins), "Mission Majnu" (netflix, Indian spy adventure, 2hrs++)

(streaming weekly): Servant (apple+), Truth Be Told (apple+, season 3 opener), Play-Doh Squished (freevee), America's Test Kitchen (freevee), The Legend of Vox Machina (amazon, season 2 opener, first 3 eps)

(also new): "Temptation Under the Sun" (LMN original movie, 2hrs), The Real Friends of WeHo (MTV, reality series premiere)

(hour 1): S.W.A.T. (CBS), Shark Tank (ABC), Lopez vs. Lopez (NBC) /   / Young Rock (NBC), BMF (Starz), "Boys in Blue" (SHO, part 3 of 4), Bunk'd: Learning the Ropes (disney), RuPaul's Drag Race (MTV), Penn & Teller: Fool Us (theCW, season 9 resumes)

(hour 2): Fire Country (CBS), Criss Angel's Magic with the Stars (theCW, season 1 resumes, new night)

(hour 3): Blue Bloods (CBS), Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO, season 21 opener), RuPaul's Untucked (MTV, new time)

(hour 4 - latenight):   Game Theory with Bomani Jones (HBO, sports talkshow, season 2 opener)

[note: Whose Line Is It Anyway? (theCW) return has been delayed until spring.]