Nothin' Up My Sleeve

best wishes to Dee Zee for a speedy, uneventful recovery. May you never have to think about that dreaded gall bladder again.

Raise your hands--how many of you remember Rocky and Bullwinkle? And, how many of you remember the phrase, "Nothin Up my Sleeve" when Bullwinkle performs a bit of magic???

I thought so.

I have no time for babbling about national health care or about the legitimacy of recent town hall ridiculousness, I've got bigger things to worry about....like, how that street magician is hovering off the sidewalk and why the hell Jillian Michaels is hawking weight loss products.....

Here's something you might not have known: I am a huge fan of magic. No, not the basketball kind of magic; the kind where some guy pulls a rabbit out of a hat or cuts a scantily clad assistant in half. Most of you have no idea that I am even one bit interested in magic, but I am. Why, I even worked as a magician's assistant one summer (okay, so I was in one show with a guy who was a "magic clown"). I love a good card trick, I love to watch pro magicians to see if I can "see" the illusion, I love the thought of Seigfried and Roy wowing the Vegas crowd. So, it's no surprise I love learning secrets of all those illusions. That's where my newest favorite T.V. show comes in: it's all about revealing secrets of the world's biggest magicians, grand illusion style.

Who knew there was such a show? I found it by accident while the wife was on her last leg of her Annual Tour of the Cheddarlands. It's not a new show in any capacity--in fact, the first round of the show was filmed in the 1990's. It's new to me, as I just didn't know about it. Always the last to know. It's on MyNetworkTV, whatever that is. All I know is it's Channel 16 on our cable and that the show is on Monday and Wednesday nights. I was flipping channels and there he was, the Masked Magician. Sure beat watching another thirty minutes of the Weather Channel.

Those of you who know about magic know that it is really, really naughty to reveal trade secrets. It's against every code known to magicians. In fact, it is so naughty that I'm thinking this guy (I am assuming it's a guy) is going to disappear once and for all if his anonymity is compromised. The Masked Magician--blackballed to Magician hell!

So, I now know how to levitate....and, how to cut the wife in half, make the dogs disappear and then re-appear, stay underwater for 18 minutes, hold a seance, and stick a sword through Xena. I can throw a card through a solid window and make a motorcycle disappear......

......thing is, I haven't been able to figure out how to get out of a plane stuck on a tarmac for seven hours (those poor people!), pull health care reform out of a hat, magically remove the scratch I put on the wife's car, turn Freckles' yeasty, scabby, smelly, itchy skin allergies into apple-blossom, healthy skin, or how to magically remove my shoes from my feet when I enter the house.

I certainly haven't figured out how to levitate Ann Coulter off the planet.....

So, Jillian--can you help me magically keep my new (read: bigger) sized pants from not fitting? I'm having a little trouble in that department. I see you are selling weight loss products. (Yes, that's a copy of my computer screen and that's what I was looking at today.)

Jillian, Jillian, Jillian. First you ruin me knees, now you want me to take your products. You know I read your most recent book, liked what you said, agreed with a lot of your metabolism rantings, thought about getting the ol' goiter checked as I progress down the perimenopause trail.

Then, this link comes in my email....is that my Jillian hawking diet products???? Say it isn't so, Joe!

I am distraught about the whole Jillian-selling-weight-loss products thing--I'm not sure why, but I feel like you're selling out here. What happened to your insisting that working out, eating healthy foods, getting your thyroid checked was the only way to go? Isn't putting your name on this stuff the same as all those other lame diet tricks that you are so against?

I can't say I researched any of this, so don't take my word on anything--I'm going with my twenty second eye-balling of the ad illustrated above and the few morsels of information I read in the email I read from the Jillian Michaels' website.

Jillian, you're my girl--explain this to me! (I'll wait for your answer.)

You know, if you could whip up some magic and make my pants fit and magically make my peri-pooch stop expanding, I might forgive all this.

If not, I am so going to practice levitating you AND Ann Coulter off the planet at the same time....

....Presto!