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It’s been a rough week, readers. So how about you sit back, relax, and enjoy some curated magic videos courtesy of your old friends at Genii Online. 

Tommy Wind appeared on KSNV News Las Vegas to promote the new season of Masters of Illusion which, if I’m not mistaken, begins airing tonight. For the impatient among you, he starts performing tricks at the 1:45 mark.  

Jay Sankey dropped another tutorial, this one is for an awesome trick performed with a deck of cards and a firecracker, making it completely illegal in Canada. 

Update: I have just been informed that Jay Sankey is in fact Canadian himself, meaning he is a firebrand magician with no regard for the law. 

Hostel director, Eli Roth, has never been my cup of tea, but his upcoming adaption of children’s horror novel, The House with a Clock in its Walls looks like it might just change my mind. Jack Black is perfectly cast as a goofy magician, and judging by the trailer, the film seems to lay on the classic performance magic shtick really thick. It hits theatres September 21st. 

Fresh from his victory over gravity itself, Mat Franco has returned to our screens to teach magic and shill donuts. Elastic band tricks are a quick and easy way to fill out a close-up routine, or annoy your co-workers at the office. Learn them. 

We somehow managed to miss Piff the Magic Dragon auditioning for Game of Thrones last month. Sadly, a dragon his age will get nowhere in Hollywood without a scale lift. The green screen gag is absolute genius, by the by. 

Rob Lake made an appearance on America’s Got Talent. I thought the setup was a bit overwrought, but it went down well with the judges and the live audience. Best of luck in the competition, Rob!

Christian Wedoy also made a splash on AGT (it never stops, folks. It. Never. Stops). We’ve seen him perform with this set up before, albeit in a less dramatic setting, but it’s still amazing to see him and his lungs strut their stuff. 

Alex Geiser uploaded a slick, no-nonsense coin routine to YouTube.

And there we have it, a cavalcade of magic to keep the blues away. Stay safe out there, readers. 

As a little experiment, I held my breath before starting the video below.

Being a rotund chap with the cardiovascular fitness of an asthmatic sloth, I made it about thirty seconds in before I felt like I was going to die. Escapologist, illusionist, and deep diver, Christian Wedoy, on the other hand, manages to last over four minutes without breaking a sweat.

That four minutes is actually less than half of the current world record for holding one’s breath without the aid of pure oxygen – the current record stands at 11 minutes and 54 seconds as set by Branko Petrović in 2014 – but those records are set in freezing free dive conditions, not in what looks like a mall. Oh, and Petrović probably didn’t have to pick a bunch of locks while he was setting his record.

We’ve seen Wedoy do this kind of stunt before -in the video above he manages a terrifying five minutes underwater – but there’s something about the setup in this feat that puts my teeth on edge. There’s something viscerally unpleasant about the transparent box filled with water, even if I know on an intellectual level that the box likely has all kinds of safety features built in to prevent Wedoy from drowning in front of a bunch of kids. Still, one of the many secrets to good escapology is a palpable sense of danger, and that unnerving SAW-like setup certainly conveys that.  

As a bonus, that kid’s terrified yelp when the wooden stock fell over was hilarious. 

Christian Wedoy is an escape artist with lungs of steel. Or maybe rubber? Titanium? I don’t really know, but his ability to hold his breath underwater really does seem superhuman. Here he’s showing off his skills with a few goldfish for company, but he can also stay cool underwater for four whole minutes while navigating several layers of locks and chains.

If you’re like me and escape artists make you deeply uncomfortable, then you might want to skip this story. If you can be cavalier watching somebody hold their breath underwater for a whopping 5 minutes while picking the locks restraining him, then by all means marvel at the wild amount of physical control on display by Christian Wedoy. Gulp.