Playfair, House Wars, Clippership… all parts of the first-year orientation experience, for sure.  They're each fun in their own way.  But the one orientation event that will make first-years question their own minds occurred on August 22, when Craig Karges performed in the orientation tent.

Karges (pronounced "CAR-guess"), a mentalist and magician, wasted no time before starting to read minds.  He asked a volunteer to silently pick out one word from a book, and then guessed it ("Illustration").  He then read numbers from ID cards and money while his eyes were covered with coins and tape.

Impressive, sure.  But maybe the coins had miniature cameras in them, and the book was rigged.  Maybe.  His next segment, though, erased all doubt.  Karges proceeded to pick out people from the audience and read very specific things from their minds.  After stumbling when nobody responded to the request "does anyone out there have the initials R. G.?" he guessed the names and birthdays of a couple different students.  The skeptics out there could point out that anyone with a list of students could do that.  However, he then guessed their phone numbers (slightly trickier) and what they were thinking (probably impossible).  First-year Pasha Gill was thinking about popcorn, first-year Katie Griswold was concentrating on the name of her favorite Guster song, and CFA/MCS first-year Jason Gates was memorizing the improbable nonsense phrase "unraveled pipes."  They all insisted that they did not talk to Karges ahead of time but only wrote the phrase on a piece of paper that they kept.  They were as stunned as the rest of the audience, especially Gates: "… after that I was in a haze … due to how numbed I was from my experience."  

The remainder of the show featured some more conventional magic tricks, such as spoon bending, ring linking, and Karges's signature "table lifting" trick.  After his mind-blowing mentalist skills, these tricks seemed almost a bit of a let down.  

He returned to his strengths, however, to finish with two more seemingly impossible mind-reading tricks.  He let audience members specify an imaginary car (color, make, license plate, and price) and then revealed a sealed envelope containing the exact description of the car.  Finally, he prepared three envelopes and let an audience member choose two of them, which were shredded.  What's the big deal?  The third one contained the check for his performance fee!

Karges performed at Carnegie Mellon last year as well.  Both this year and last, he offered a $100,000 donation to charity if anyone could prove that he used plants, stooges, or confederates in the audience to help his tricks.  At this point, though, if I had $100,000, I'd try to bribe someone to tell me how he did his tricks!

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