Here's the new cover for my book. Details at my website:
http://blackbeltmagician.com
Oops file is too big. I'll send another when I get it shrunk.

(SWITZERLAND) An interesting page at Swiss Info has many busking attractions, pictures, and related stories starting in the nation's capital with the Berne Buskers Festival.Celebrating its 12th year this summer, the three-day event featured 42 acts with 145 performers from 18 countries. Half of the acts were musical with the rest involving clowns, dancers, human statues, and other artists.

Related busking stories and pictures take us around Switzerland to Basel, Biel, and Montreux as well as podcast on what it's like to be a busker in Berne.

A reporter for Busker Central entered a Buskerfest contest in Luzern back in 1992. Unfortunately, the city was given a bad reputation when the contest was found to be "won" by a professional opera singer who had stumbled outside. Her father also happened...

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(NIAGARA FALLS) Up, down, and sideways. That's how the planning for this years St. Catharines Buskerfest has gone.And now, it's going, going, gone all the way to Queen Street in downtown Niagara Falls. As the organization says, "Plans to re-stage the festival in 2012 appeared to be over."

The on-again, off-again antics have some buskers wanting to barrel over Horseshoe Falls.

On Thursday, Lyndesfarne announced Buskerfest Niagara, previously known as the St. Catharines International Busker Festival, will go ahead on Queen Street Niagara Falls over Labour Day weekend.

Buskerfest Niagara 2012 will feature more than 150 performances, vendors, special performances, and record-breaking attempts for the Guinness Book of World Records.

“Busker festivals have been gaining popularity all over Canada i...

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(ST. LOUIS) Remember collecting baseball cards as a kid? Now you can collect busker trading cards of all the wonderful street-performers in St. Louis.Thanks to Board Bill #181, busking and street-performing is now legal in St. Louis. They are now buskers to be memorabilia-ized! And collected! And traded!

It all came about when the city raised the busker fee in order to monitor buskers. Huh? That's exactly what buskers Fred Walker and Nick Pence said - along with the ACLU when it heard of such a preposterous notion.

Now that a wrong has been righted and the laughter has subsided, the buskers may be memoralized as a collector's card. The busker game includes finding each artist performing and having them sign their card. The winner gets featured in an upcoming street-performer festival.

It's a fun idea....

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(KEY WEST) Just when you think they've figured it all out, Key West's city hall has created still more controversy in their busking laws. Being in the news over the past several years, it may be a matter of the successful Mallory Square Sunset Celebration turf just not being big enough for the city's satisfaction.
The city along with the Cultural Preservation Society(?) now wants to charge individual buskers $20 a night for accepting tips. Federal courts repeatedly rule that permit fees for First Amendment activity are unconstitutional. Yet we see constant challenges to the right of free speech. City halls do not seem to understand that busking and street performing are immune to their taxing. Confusion appears to come when the performer is observed accepting tips. It seems any exchange of money gets some excited...

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