For breakfast, there was the grapefruit at Pulino's in SoHo, not really a dish so much as a magic trick, the fruit covered with muscovado sugar and mint, then cooked into caramel.
But it's not Gödel's conclusion that matters here so much as the trick he used to achieve it: He invented the mathematical double entendre.
The counterfeit bills did not appear intended to fool customers so much as to trick the A.T.M.'s into believing they were carrying a full complement of cash.
Hot Press Bill Graham said of the show, "U2 don't so much use every trick in the book as invent a whole new style of rock performance art".
That's why we love this trick so much: the audience think they're in on it, that they are seeing the trick being worked while our volunteer is distracted, when in fact it is the other way round.
That is why, in recent decades, those glossy World's Fair promises tended to be seen as just so much hokum, an ideological magic trick: watch the glittering spectacles and you won't notice what is really going on.
With so much to see, the trick is to edit out the visual distractions — just as with any good photograph.
It's an immensely enjoyable evening, made all the more distinctive by the interventions of film projection specialists and theatre-makers Imitating the Dog, whose flickering images on newspapers and lab coats remind that Mitchell and Kenyon's achievement was so much more than a trick of the light.
This is isn't so much an eco-friendly trick, more just a summer hack you'll be glad you learned this year and not next.
"So much of politics is magic tricks: focusing the public's attention on one area while doing something else," said Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute, a libertarian group in San Francisco.
