More magic that sucks

Last night I took part in a joint lecture at the Sid Lorraine Hat & Rabbit Club raising money for the Mosquitoes Suck Tour. The lineup included some fantastic local magicians including two Canadian Magicians of the Year. Thank you to Bill Abbott, Jay Sankey, David Peck, Matt DiSero, Bobby Motta and Anthony Lindan who donated their time to support a good cause.

Buy the Mosquitoes Suck Download – 106 minutes, 2.97 GB, $10

Magic that Sucks

Earlier this year, I contributed a trick to a special project organized by David Peck and the Mosquitoes Suck Tour. His plan was to create an instructional resource for magicians - magicians teaching magicians - and to take all the proceeds (actually all the revenue!) and put them towards the purchase of malaria preventing mosquito nets. It took a number of months to gather all the contributions and edit them together and the final product is now available. The Mosquitoes Suck Project can be downloaded for just $10. It includes contributions from Bobby Motta, Joshua Jay, Anthony Lindan, David Peck, Brian Roberts and Canadian Magician of the Year Winners Bill Abbott and Jay Sankey. All of the performers donated their time for the project and SoChange provided the filming and editing so 100% of the revenue goes towards bednets.

On "set" with Anthony Lindan, David Peck & Brian Roberts

The download comes as an mp4, 106 minutes long, 2.97 GB. It's an enormous amount of content at an incredible value. The reason for the $10 price tag: $10 buys one insecticide treated mosquito net which protects a family for up to five years. So please consider buying a copy now.

Mosquitoes Suck Project

If you're not interested in magic but still want to help, MST also has a bunch of cool stuff like T-shirts, and an assortment of private label fair trade coffee available at their shop.

Mosquitoes Suck

This is a shameless piece of promotion for some colleagues who deserve it. In particular, this is directed to anyone who works in the field of education, especially Ontario high schools. My friends, Matt Disero and David Peck, who between them are a magicians, comedians, philosophers and teachers (I'll leave you to sort out who's what) and have created a fantastic school program: The Mosquitoes Suck Tour. The program blends magic and comedy with an important message about the importance of social justice and the means to eradicate malaria.

If that weren't cool enough, they shows also contain contributions from Rick Mercer, Fefe Dobson and the boy band Neverest. There are also spinoff programs including curriculum materials about social justice and malaria for social/science teachers. There is also a fundraising program they run for both schools and mosquito nets involving fair trade coffee which is quite good.

The program originated a few years ago in the Halton/Peel region and built itself up slowly. Most of their performances have been in that region, but they are starting to expand their territory outwards into the rest of Ontario.

I know that because of labour disputes, this has been a particularly strange year for education in Ontario. But if you're in the field and could benefit from some exception programming, I can't recommend this program highly enough.