Glorpy, like the magic mouse, Svengali decks, etc. were all part of the old midway shuffle & pitch products originally... you'd be surprised at the plethora of such bits that were originally designed for the layman's market as a lure of getting people interested in magic by giving them a cheap, easy to make and/or operate puzzle. Then again, some of these midway bits of merchandise were simply older "out of date" bits such as the Ball & Vase, which most magicians assumed that the laity were a bit "in on" to begin with... that is, when not presented in the hands of a master manipulator... if you ever see John Gaughan work one of these gems...

I degress...
As I've pointed out countless times in the past, it really doesn't matter that the public knows the rudiments behind an effect so long as YOU take the time to transform what they think they know, into a true impossibility.
Hobbyists in particular, fear exposure more than the working pros simply because they want to do tricks more than they want to learn how to create enchantment (as Kenton would say). If you take any effect, and most especially those that have become "known" to the public, and work with it, your scripting, misdirection/indirection, etc. you can turn the know it all on their ears and make them believe you are the real thing and not someone using cheap tricks that mimic psi phenomena... learning how to do this is the primary challenge of ALL magic & mystery performers but we must let go of our fear, when it comes to public access to our "secrets" and learn to move beyond what has been shared, even to the point of using the known method in a way that cancels out the possibility that this is what we are doing... I'll refer you to Rick Maue's
Book of Haunted Magic pages 54-59
Speaking of Rick's book... you will also find a wonderful Spirit Message routine in there, using business cards and a unique twist to the old paddle move.
We need but think through things and actually earn our title as magical performers, when it comes to such expose' issues. At the same time we need to look at how the availability to our more traditional handling of things hurts magic as a whole... including within our own ranks where anyone with a credit card thinks they have the "right" to know and have access to anything they want and how this has resulted in the wonderful YouTube menagerie of 12 and 14 year old mentalities tipping the inner workings to our hard earned methodologies "just because they can" and the fact that they are bored...
idle hands being the devil's tool, as they say.
The moral of the story being that WE need to start curtailing our lust for access as well as the sense of availability when it comes to the tools and secrets of our craft. We can't have it both ways; available and secret at the same time. We can however learn to protect ourselves and what we have learned in overcoming exposure but keeping it very close to the vest.
