Technically, Dubai is one of the United Arab Emirates, so I don't know if that counts as a country.

Dhekelia is a sovereign base area on Cyprus that belongs to the UK. A palomino horse from Dhekelia?

How about black jaguar from Djibouti?

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(You didn't specify currently existing countries, after all.)

Dominica isn't the same country as the Dominican Republic, BTW.

When I got to the end I said, "Ha! Didn't work on me . . . wait."

I put the "mental" in mentalism.

* And it you can't trust heralds, who can you trust?

Anyway,here's another one which should preferably be done live and under pressure, and preferably on a 10-year-old.

Answer these questions successively:

What colour is snow?
What colour was Christian IV's white horse?
What does vanilla ice-cream look like?

Now - imagine in your mind :
first, a polar bear blinking in a snowstorm.

Good, now imagine a blank sheet of paper and you with a pen in hand sitting staring at it.

Good. Now, quickly, on that blank piece of paper on your mind, write down what cows drink. What did you write?

* * *

(And obviously _everyone_ says "milk".)

Another one, which probably everyone knows:
What's 20 + 25?
What's 15 + 12?
What's 12 x 9?

Allright - now that we've got the mandatory obfuscating questions out of the way - think of a colour and a tool.

* * *

So, yeah, almost everyone said red hammer, right? Why is that? Anyone here who can explain it?

Think of a flower. Got it?

Lbh'er guvaxvat bs n ebfr.

Btw - trivia: the highest order of Denmark is called the elephant order. It was instituted by Christian V. We do not know whether he had any white horses, but odds are he did. White elephants, on the other hand, not so much.

Two different commenters in this very thread share the same birthday. (Mine's Feburary the twenty-second.)

Wonderful!

Now go get a deck of cards. I'll wait.

Got 'em?

Say two different values--Jack and Four, for example--suits don't matter. Said the values? Great! Now shuffle the cards. Shuffle 'em again.

Go through the deck, repeating the values of the cards you've chosen. Those two cards are lying side by side!

Amazing, isn't it?

Unfortunately, self-working mental magic shares the same problem as other self-working magic: the showmanship requirement to make it entertaining becomes immense.

Moving on to an allied field, cold reading, may I recommend Ian Rowland's book?

It was honestly the first D country that occurred to me.

As a matter of fact, I thought of a daisy.

I am somewhat proud that I managed to imagine a pink elephant.

Odds are he had grey horses; white horses are much less likely. If it's got black skin on its face under the white coat, it's grey. The white horse in "Animal House", as far as I could tell the last time I saw it, had pink skin and was therefore likely to be authentically white.

In retrospect, I really wish I'd picked Djelibeybi.

Sadly, this is the most fun I've had all week.

And to go with it, a white-and-black Jack Russell Terrier.

Why I thought of ermines before elephants remains a mystery.

I think I read too much internetz.

Martin @19 - That red hammer trick is interesting. I was scanning the whole thread and saw your instruction to think of a color and tool, and the image popped in my mind of a yellow-handled screwdriver, but when I actually read through your comment and did the math, etc., I got the words popping out "blue hammer", and no image at all.

Wacky.

Um...

Did I ever tell my second-hand emu story here? Background: there are a few emu farms out in the country around here (NC); there's a mini-push to raise them for meat.

So one of the guys I knew in high school lived out on the edge of suburbia, starting to fade into farms. He came home from school one day, and was fixing himself a snack in the kitchen when he glanced out the window in the back door.

There was an emu in his back yard. Looking at him.

Emus are pretty big birds, and he was scared to go out and confront it. So he called Animal Control. "There's an emu in my back yard," he said.

"What's an emu?" came the response.

"It's a bird!" he said. "It's a really big bird!"

"Well, we'll send someone out as soon as we can, sir," said the woman on the phone.

Half an hour later, an Animal Control truck rolls up. The guy knocks on the door. He is carrying a squirrel trap.

Luckily, by this time the emu was long gone.

Moral: If you ever have an escaped emu in your back yard, use the word "ostrich" in explaining to Animal Control what one is.

I agree they're probably not found in Denmark, though.

A yellow screwdriver.

A tulip.

Then blue hammer and camellias. There's a bush outside my door.

What else would you expect from Djibouti? A javelina?

(Me: boring ol' grey elephant, Denmark. My daughter: brown eagle. Wish you all could have seen her face when I said the punch line. "Whoa!! How'd you know DENMARK?" Quite gratifying.)

"Tool" comes up with too many examples simultaneously. Filing. Thesaurus. Slow loris. Wrong thread.

i thought of an iris. cause they're my favourite flowers. if i liked the english pronunciation of "iris", i'd even want to name a hypothetical daughter that (in hebrew, it's pronounced like ih-reese, with the accent on the short i. much nicer in my opinion).

i think maybe that question only works with people who don't garden, or think of flowers very often.

It was honest the first time around, because I was in 8th grade and we'd just recently discovered its existence in social studies (while giggling like 8th-grade ninnies, of course).

Never!

Predictably, my Danish elephant
Was grey. Perhaps fatigue from its diversion
Through Delaware created some aversion:
I try to picture it again and can't.
The tool conundrum, though, completely fails.
It's yellow striped with black; no trace of red,
And if they're shaped by what's inside my head,
My problems all are screws instead of nails.*
The flowers? Saw a daisy but said "rose".
I plead distraction, since I'm also searching
For missing elephants, who must be perching
Atop a pile of screws that hurt their toes.
The final couplet looms! I must be terse!
I'm off to bed before I make things verse worse.

-----
* Screwdriver, damn it, is a dactyl and doesn't fit.

...I think I've just unvented my new .sig file.

Here's one that I learned a long time ago -

Ask "Pick a number between one and four" - you'll get about 49% choose three and 49% choose two (and 2% that choose one, or four, or 2.5 - this subgroup is likely over-represented in this forum!)

However, if you phrase the question "Pick a number from one to four" - you'll get 98% choose three.

Reason?

In asking the question you vocalise the numbers 1, 2 and 4 ("One", "to", "Four"). The brain immediately goes for the 'missing' selection - three.

You can go on from there to use this "randomly selected" three in any way you choose.

Do the alphabet thing, and ask them to pick a vegetable starting with the letter that corresponds. You know they have 'C', so you are 98% sure they'll pick carrot. (Bonus points - what other options could they have chosen?)

Also note that if you ask for a vegetable to be selected just off the cuff, you will get a majority response of 'carrot' anyway. I don't know the reason for that one.

Thanks for keeping me interested with awesome content and conversations. Looking forward to contributing again when I have something more worthwhile!

It's really interesting though, and I love these sort of forces and mind games.

"You know something, Jerry? Your great Shismar ain't sh*t!"
"Earthman, your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!"

My flower, however, is a chrysanthemum. I'm not entirely sure why mums are a default flower for me - I don't even like them very much. I think it's specifically Anne Drysdale's chrysanthemums -
So, notwithstanding what Kung Fu Tse said
Buy two chrysanthemums, and bugger the bread.

Following up Jim@25, shared birthdays, mine is Dec. 6

What colour is an Emu anyway?

People are also trying to grow emus and ostriches for meat here in NoVA, and a batch of them got loose a while back and the police were trying to catch the emus for days. The ostriches apparently weren't that interested in leaving.

I suspect that for many people, when instructed to quickly think of an animal, there's a bias toward mammals.

Interesting math tidbit: you can actually start with any integer for this trick. Keep summing the digits until you end up with a single digit, and your result will still be 9.

Tool was a black hammer, although I think the color is coming from motor oil stains.

Flower was lily-of-the-valley (my favorite since I was a kid).

Generic vegetable is rutabaga, because it's just such a cool word.

Vegetable starting with C: carrot, celery, chard, at which point I realize I've been reading The Joy of Cooking too much recently (and skipping the section on cabbage).

And green-handled screwdriver.

Cabbage, corn, celery, cress, cucumber... just off the top of my head.

My usual number between 1 and 4 is pi, unless I am in a large group of geeks equally likely to pick it. Then I pick e.

I love tricks with the number 9!

You know, maybe I do play Napoleonics too much...

An observation:

1) Any number, no matter how large or small, multiplied by 9 will give a result which, when added together, will always bring you back to 9...

1 x 9 = 9
2 x 9 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9
3 x 9 = 27 = 2 + 7 = 9
(...)
14 x 9 = 126 = 1 + 2 + 6 = 9
etc

Subtract 5, and everyone is at 4, which brings us all to D, and then E, which then conjure up the most common answers that people will give.

Each number has its own pattern. For example, sequential numbers multiplied by 3, result in the pattern: 3, 6, 9, 3, 6, 9, etc., provided that the same rule is applied: to add together all the digits in any results with more than one digit:

1 x 3 = 3
2 x 3 = 6
3 x 3 = 9
4 x 3 = 12 = 1 + 2 = 3
5 x 3 = 15 = 1 + 5 = 6
6 x 3 = 18 = 1 + 9 = 9
etc.

I'd gotten Denmark by then, and e is pale yellow to my slight synaesthesia, so I came up with a chicken.

That's a great misreading of the instruction :D In my case if I'd read it like that I'd have come up with an amazon parrot, since they tend to be the bright green that e is to my slight synaesthesia.

Doubt you'd get as unified answers that way though.

The assistant would be placed on a chair and blindforded. The Mentalist would explain to the audience that if one of the audience members would give him some small object--obviously no collusion--he would project an image of that object into his assistant's mind.

The Mentalist would then ask a series of questions, essentially of the form "Is it an X", which the assistant would attempt to answer correctly.

Since the "X" would be such things as a railway locomotive, the Forth Bridge (there was only one in those days), and an automotive torpedo, the assistant could unerringly identify the object by going for the first plausible object.

Since I first read this when "The Good Old Days" was still on TV, I had some idea of the style of Music Hall act which was being spoofed.

"J. Hickory Wood" sounds like a penname, but he was apparently, amongst other things, responsible for the canonical "Mother Goose" pantomime script, written for Dan Leno.

I indirectly bring in the method in a story of mine which has been put up on the Spontoon Islands website, today.

You get different answers if you ask people to pick a number between one and fifty, and to pick a random number between one and fifty. The latter will yield a higher incidence of 17 and 37.

Do the alphabet thing, and ask them to pick a vegetable starting with the letter that corresponds. You know they have 'C', so you are 98% sure they'll pick carrot. (Bonus points - what other options could they have chosen?)

Also note that if you ask for a vegetable to be selected just off the cuff, you will get a majority response of 'carrot' anyway. I don't know the reason for that one.

and now for the mind reading magic: if you laughed at that in this thread, you are probably British and over thirty-five.

I am over 35, but I'm half-Brit. Me mum's from London. I'm an Air Force brat, and I spent me high school days in England, near Oxford. Upper Heyford, to be precise. Go Hadites!

Obviously, it depends on the language, too. LOL

Please note, my license plate starts PFY...

Carob is disallowed on the grounds that it's been impersonating chocolate all this time and is therefore Not To Be Trusted.

Now, think of the animal’s color."

If it's an imaginary animal, it can be any color you'd like.
Hence my green elephant, which makes me wonder...what do most people say if you ask them to name a color? I'd guess red, even though I said green.

And, tool for me? Crescent Wrench.

Which was, I admit, grey.

Looking at your list of veggies, I can only conclude one reason for carrots: some great portion of us may be predisposed to think in alphabetical order. (There are a couple in that list that would precede carr-, but all of them are less commonplace.)

(And obviously _everyone_ says "milk".)

Cows do drink milk, just not as adults. Otherwise there would be very little point in them being mammals.