) unlike that produced when knocking on wood only in pitch), immune, impossibly, to charges of being filled with hot air), made mean-spirited through the caprices of public attention), given that his intention had never been to hoodwink, really, merely to entertain), and who now owed Poe a living Poe could never seem to earn through his own labors), who had ascribed the “discoveries” to one Sir John Herschel, a very real astronomer annoyed at having to answer for the bizarreries brought into being by Locke’s imagination), as he put it, “creatures willing to credit all but their own credulity”), a man who had become cynical through his powerful yearning to believe, finally, in something, anything)―anything could be believed of Poe!), albeit one that perhaps should have stayed “lost”), a poem whose most memorable lines―“Songs are only sung / here below that they may grieve you― / Tales but told you to deceive you”―are at least fair as ars poetica); it would be another fourteen years before a psychologist would review the literature and describe Pseudologia fantastica for the first time, and sixty years before Baron Münchhausen’s falsifications, amplified by his imitators’ tales of him, would become Baron von Münchhausen, father to fibbers the world around); the sound also more famously recalling the discovery of a hidden passage, a hollow recess), made necessary, it was rumored, due to Van Zandt’s “hollow leg,” his high tolerance for alcohol), a year perhaps more significant for the invention of the carbon microphone, a device to electrically reproduce and thereby transport sound), named for a god of fear and a personification of dread, respectively)―a man, incidentally, often said to have been “not all there”), survived by his wife, neé Eaton, with whom he had no children), a set of circumstances at least one Massachusetts “Safety Coffin” manufacturer found advantageous, claiming that his expensive precautions had raised Blitz from the dead, or at least had saved him from a costly mistake)―the staff evidently at least somewhat taken in, as the story then leaked to the press); Van Zandt performed as “Blitz, Jr.” until he took up ventriloquism and Bobby, renouncing or reversing his false heritage upon becoming a “father”), a claim to originality as obviously empty as it was vehemently made), a man about whom nothing is known prior to his career as the “Original Signor Blitz”; perhaps his “true” identity is just another illusion?), though, given that the existence of these doubles served to multiply the man’s fame more than any of his own efforts had, it seems unkind to condemn one and all as “impostors”), like a set of quotations left open), “blank” rounds still capable of propelling anything left in the supposedly-empty barrel at dangerous velocities), utterly unconvincing on stage alone, as though half an act, even before he made himself half an act), the act immediately becoming invisible from the orchestra section), perhaps evidence of this man’s great self-loathing, a not-so-hidden threat of suicide), which, it seems to you, is less impressive than his manipulation of the gun, if only because the latter seems so impossible), trials of which had resulted in a gap in the ventriloquist’s smile even though no projectile was ever fired)―the gasp this produced sounded as though all of the air had been sucked out of the room through a straw), which, being the opening, gives the rest of the routine a superfluous air, as if the best has come and gone before the act has fairly begun), empty and somewhat deflated, possibly also, you now realize, an impostor): reassure yourself that there is no longer anything there aside from the briefest of echoes, the sharp rap of knuckles on wood and an emptied out double of that sound, signifying that whatever had given this dummy, Blitz’s “son,” the appearance of life has departed.