[ietf86-tech] Welcome to the "ietf86-tech" mailing list (fwd)

[Lucy Lynch]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:05:57 -0800
From: ietf86-tech-request at daedelus.com
To: llynch at civil-tongue.net
Subject: Welcome to the "ietf86-tech" mailing list

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends
We're so glad you could attend
Come inside! Come inside!


I like the notion that we're some kind of traveling sideshow - must 
appropriate for Orlando and the tent shows there -

- Lucy

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~kscott/juggle/fire/fire-eating.html
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Eating Fire
by Penn Jillette
Teller lighting a cigarette from Penn's mouth
[The stage is dark. Penn speaks to the audience.]

Everything that Teller and I do in this show comes from a love that we 
share of the American Sideshow.

[Penn lights a candle. He is seated on a stool.]

Now, the real name for the freak show is the Ten-in-One Show, and it's 
called the Ten-in-One Show because you get ten acts under one tent for one 
admission price.

When I was a kid I used to go the Franklin County Fair-- That's where the 
carnival came in my hometown. And that fair would be in town about ten 
days every year, and every one of those ten days, I'd go to the fair, and 
every day at the fair, I'd end up at the Ten-in-One Show. And I loved the 
freak show. I loved it because you'd pay your seventy-five cents and you 
were allowed to go into a tent with people who were entirely different 
from you, and then you could just stare at them.

And I loved the freaks, but I especially loved the self-made freaks, the 
fire-eater, the sword-swallower, the tattooed people, because they had 
made an extra decision to be there. I can remember standing in that tent 
watching the fire-eater and I swear my whole life was there; it meant 
everything to me.

And my friends would go with me to the Ten-in-One, but my friends were 
different, 'cause they took the whole show as some sort of weird 
challenge, and all through this fire-eater's perfect act, my friends would 
be talking. And they'd be saying stuff like, "Oh, I know how he does that, 
Penn, he just coats his mouth with something." They would try to convince 
me there was sort of something you could just smear in your mouth, then go 
suck on a soldering iron, and it wasn't going to hurt you.

And it's not just kids -- it's also adults-- and it's usually a man, and 
it's most often a man who's with some woman he's trying desperately, and 
often pathetically, to impress. And I'll hear this guy who just thinks 
he's got to pretend to know everything, you know? So he's saying stuff 
like, "Oh, don't worry about him honey, he's just using cold fire." Yeah. 
[He laughs]

Or needles. Now the reason that Teller and I are working together today, 
is about thirteen years ago I saw Teller on stage in Jersey, alone and 
silently eating those needles. When I watched him up on that stage I got 
that same feeling in my guts that I used to get watching the fire-eater as 
a kid, and I knew we had to work together, and we have been ever since.

Now, I go in to the lobby during intermission. I have a cola and I talk to 
folks and I hang out. But the whole time I'm talking, I'm also try to 
listen, and I've learned a lot from eavesdropping on you guys for all 
these years. And one of the things I've learned is there's a certain kind 
of person who comes to our show, and they may like the show, but they 
don't get it. And these are the people who cannot accept mystery.

Now I want to make this very clear to you: by "not accepting mystery," I 
am not talking about scientists, and I am not talking about skeptics. 
'Cause I'm a skeptic, and I've always felt that skeptics love the mystery, 
and that's why they don't want to believe anything. They don't want to 
have any faith. They either want to have it scientifically proven over and 
over again, or they want to leave it alone. "We'll get to it. Let it go." 
The kind of people that cannot accept mystery are the kind of people that, 
when there's a mystery there, they just believe the first thing they're 
told for their whole life, or they pretend to have an open mind, so 
they'll believe anything that's popular that comes along, or they'll make 
up something that makes sense to them and they'll just believe it. Just 
anything to shut the mystery out of their heads and stop them from really 
thinking.

And I'll hear people doing this even with things as trivial as the 
needles. I'll hear guys in the lobby with these real authoritative voices 
gathering little crowds of people going, "Oh, yeah, needles, yeah, I 
figured that one out, sure. He's got a little pocket sewn in the back of 
his throat. It's a skin graft from his leg." Or my favorite one, and I 
actually heard this, I did not make this up. (Some stuff I just make up, 
but this I heard.) There was a guy in L.A., who was talking about "candy 
needles." Now I don't know where this guy ever heard of candy needles, but 
I assume he figured they're manufactured around Halloween time, as treats 
for the neighborhood children. I don't know.

Anyways, about nineteen years have passed, and those kids I grew up with, 
I guess they're all still living in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and I 
turned out to be a fire-eater, and the ironic thing I found out, is that 
there's no trick. Not to this. To everything else in the show there's a 
trick--don't let anybody tell you differently. Susan floating in the air, 
she wasn't hypnotized--there's no "balance point." Go home, get a chair, 
clear your mind, think clean thoughts, concentrate: you'll break your ass. 
It's a gimmick, it's a lie, it's a cheat, it's a swindle! But fire-eating 
is a stunt, and if anybody here still thinks that there's any such thing 
as cold fire, and I'm using it, you wait till I get it lit, you raise your 
hand, I'll stick it in your eye--prove it to you.

[Teller enters from left with the fire-eating props.]

Teller's coming out here with a fireproof camping fuel container. In the 
container is lighter fluid--it's Ronson brand--and Teller's dipping the 
torches in.

[Teller hands Penn a torch.]

The torches are cotton, sewn tightly around a threaded, metal rod that's 
then screwed into a wooden handle. It's not the cotton that burns, it's 
the fuel that burns and the way fire- eating works is this:

You've got moisture in your mouth, and all that moisture has to evaporate 
from any given part of your mouth, before that part will burn. So you 
learn how to handle the burning vapors, then you gotta make it look good. 
Now if you've got a lot of saliva in your mouth (and that's at least where 
I try to keep most of mine), you rub your lips right along the cotton and 
pull that vapor off. Now the vapor's still burning, but if you breathe in 
a little bit , the audience can't see it, so you've got a beautiful 
surprise there. The you just wait until the time is right an just let it 
flow, like it was magic smoke. Then when you want to put the fire out, 
there's a move for that, too, and it's the move that gives it the name 
"fire-eating." Now, you're not actually eating the flame, but I guess they 
figure that "Oral Fire Extinguishing" didn't sound that butch. When you 
feel your mouth drying out, you close your lips tightly. That cuts out 
most of the oxygen and... [he snaps his fingers] the fire goes out. Now 
when I was being taught this, I got burned every time I tried it, and I 
still get burned occasionally, but the burns you get from fire-eating are 
for the most part extremely minor. They're the kind of burns you get--you 
know what I'm talking about--when you eat a pizza too fast, and that 
cheese'll snag you, or you gulp some hot coffee. Now I'm not trying to 
snow you. I'm not talking mind-over-matter jive. There's no such thing, it 
just hurts like holy hell. But it's not dangerous. The dangerous thing is 
something lay people don't even think about. And that is every time you do 
this act, no matter how carefully or how well, you swallow about a 
teaspoon of the lighter fluid, and that stuff is poisonous--that's why 
they write "Harmful or Fatal if Swallowed" right there on the can-- and 
the effect is, to a certain degree, cumulative. Now I say a certain 
degree: I do eight shows a week, I'm a big guy, that doesn't effect me. 
Carnies, the real boys, they'll do up to fifty shows a day, and in as 
little as two or three years that stuff'll build up in their liver and 
they'll get sick enough, they actually have to take time off and do 
another line of work in the carney while that liver regenerates, which, 
thankfully, it will do.

Now I take the time to explain all of this to you in such detail because I 
think it's more fascinating to think of someone poisoning themselves to 
death slowly on stage than merely burning themselves, and after all, we're 
here to entertain you.

I really tell you this 'cause this is the last bit in the show, and when 
you leave here tonight and you're thinking about our show, as I hope you 
will be, I don't want you to be thinking about how we did it. I want you 
to be thinking about why. So sit back and relax, I'm going to burn myself.

[Teller lights the torch. Penn twirls it with a flourish.]

This move right here and this move right here are called stalling.

[Penn and Teller look out at the audience, studying them.]

I realize you've been sitting in these seats a long time, but if you can 
just bear with us another moment, we'd like to look out at you guys. 
'Cause there's an obvious but still unique quality of live theater, and 
that is that while we're doing the show, you're right here in the room 
with us. And that means that light will fall on some of your faces. And if 
light happens to fall on one of your faces while we're doing the show 
we'll do a small part of the show for you, I mean, just for you, just 
staring right in your face. And when we do that, and we've picked you, and 
you know it, and you can feel it...we're not paying any attention to you 
at all. We're trying to get the tricks to work, get the laughs. We can't 
worry about you individually. So what I'm saying--convolutedly--is that 
right now is the place in the show we can look at you in the same light 
we're in, and we can kinda pay attention. And it's really important. And I 
used to feel that importance should be made explicit, so I would do these 
little speeches about community and these speeches were superficial and 
they were contrived, and I really believed them, so they were 
embarrassing. So now I'm trying to learn to shut up and look at you. 
Teller's got it down.

And if your the kind of person that needs to sum things up, all you need 
to know now is that you're in our tent, so it's okay. And the sideshow 
ain't dead. That's for damn sure.

[Penn eats fire.]