All of us remember those family gatherings plagued with uncles who performed those second-rate magic tricks with a deck of cards, spoons and your aunt’s oversized lingerie. Boy, did those tricks suck.

Yet, inspired, we here at M.O.O.S.E. take a look back at a glorious profession that, sadly, has become a thing of the past — the magician.

“But, M.O.O.S.E.,” you say, “magicians still exist today — this isn’t ‘old school.’ Why, just this week, magician David Blaine …”

This is where we slap you, you foolhardy shell of a human.

Today, we are looking back at the good old days of magic — when magicians were magicians, before sleight-of-hand and optical illusions were replaced by camera tricks and idiotic endurance stunts, and when Roy Horn still could walk.

Escape artists once were a stronghold of the magic profession. Greats such as Houdini amazed crowds with escapes from deadly, seemingly impossible situations.

Here’s a little flashback for all you suckers who love David Blaine so much: The year is 1915, and Harry Houdini has just come onto the stage. Beside him is a safe -— a trademark of his famous escapes.

Houdini tells the audience he will climb into the safe, lock it, suspend it from the ceiling and stay in it for six weeks, drinking only bottled Evian water, until he is lowered; 42 days later, unlocked by his assistants and rushed to a hospital. Before entering the safe, he reminds his fans a DVD will be available in three months, and live, 24/ 7 video of the feat is accessible, for a small fee, at his Web site.

The fans of 1915 would have left. There would have been no vigils, no one would have called him brave and no one would have bought the damn DVD.

This leads us to our point. David Blaine is not a magician. By his standard, every starving child in wherever-the-hell those late-night commercials come from is at the top of his or her A-game in the magic world. Starving yourself to death is not a magic trick.

Mr. Blaine is far from a role model. He merely is whoring himself out for nothing more than a cheap dollar by standing on a flagpole until his legs go numb.

This joker actually would be funnier if he was part of the cast of “Jackass” instead of his worthless solo career of over-publicized self-torture.

Speaking of self-torture and humiliation, that Roy Horn fella truly is a magician. That’s a man we here at M.O.O.S.E. can rally around.

Several weeks ago, using nothing but a white tiger and a team of doctors and surgeons, Roy made a chunk of his skull disappear and then reappear in his stomach.

To us, the magic of Siegfried and Roy was that two heavily-sequined men could survive this long (more than 30 years), performing on a daily basis with scores of animals who saw Roy as nothing more than dinner with a lot of hair-care products in it.

Truly, this new stunt of his with the tiger attack will turn out to be the duo’s greatest feat. Roy will face surgery when, while on the operating table, Roy also will walk in through the ER’s doors. This stunt will shock the world.

These stunts prove what magic is all about — the unknown. Mr. Blaine is not a master of the unknown — all he did was the same thing IRA members have been doing in British prisons for years.

Where will Blaine be in a week? No one cares.