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These men truly made this country great

These days, it is more important than ever to understand how our Latin American brothers and sisters live, think and view the world. During the past decade, I have been occasionally reading "Love & Rockets" graphic novels in the random order that I have found them. Earlier this week, I came upon the collection "Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories" that reprints all episodes of the Palomar storyline into one convenient giant collection. Reading them at the same time and in order clarified several things to me about the relationship and histories of these characters. I am not entirely sure if the Palomar storyline has any connection to the other storyline of Love & Rockets, the punk-futuristic and robot-laced we're-such-wild-and-zany-girls-in-LA "Locas", but hopefully I will someday find that out.

Another collection of important comic strips, "American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar", reprints some of the American Splendor comics that the mass audience is familiar from the movie of the same name, in which Harvey's depictions of some of his black working-class coworkers were wisely toned down a bit. I also have to note that things sure were inexpensive back in the seventies and eighties, with a hundred bucks paying the rent of our heroic gamma male and still leaving plenty of money left over for groceries. Even so, I don't know if Harvey really is a person that I would like to have as a neighbour or a roommate. He seems like he is more enjoyable when safely separated from me by a couple of layers of abstraction. But then again, so do many other things.

Meanwhile, I have learned to play backgammon a bit better with Barclay Cooke's "Paradoxes and probabilities: 168 backgammon problems". Just like with some Go books, this book is easy to read due to its format: present a game situation and ask for the proper move, then explain why the chosen move is the best one. Of course, the move I thought of was never the best one, but the explanations were illustrative. This book was printed in 1978, so I couldn't tell if the new era of computerized backgammon has changed any of its advice. According to the book jacket,

Barclay Cooke graduated from Yale in 1934, is married, and lives in Englewood, New Jersey. Though he is devoted to classical music, including Bach, Beethoven and Brahms", he insists that for him the three B's are baseball, backgammon and bridge.

I wonder if it was even theoretically possible for someone to be more WASP than this. I can already vividly imagine Mr. Cooke in my mind. I was also reminded of the Richard Brookhiser's book "Way of the Wasp: How It Made America, and How It Can Save It, So to Speak" which argues that men like Mr. Cooke are the ones you really want to have in your side.

On the other hand, I was also reminded of "Bobos in Paradise" by David Brooks, who I guess is lovingly called "BoBo" in the leftist blogosphere. I recently reread this delightful book that starts with the description of the habits and structure of the old WASP ruling class and contrasts it to the modern bobos, and I had to laugh to its wry observations of what is proper bobo behaviour and what isn't. For example, that spending $15K on a giant home theater is tacky, but spending $20K on a massaging shower stall is virtuous. (This is probably somehow related to the apparent paradoxes listed in "A Handy Guide to Anti-Television Elitism".) This instantly classic book is already a bit dated on some aspects, though: for example, what does $900K currently buy in Santa Monica, some two-bedroom bungalow perhaps?

When we go to Vegas this summer, I wonder if the pit boss will comp us a steak dinner and Celine tickets. Probably not, since we'll get at most a pasta buffet ticket. But I'll rather spend any money on myself than let the grubby hands of the casinos get it. Ben Mezrich's book "Busting Vegas" tells the story of an MIT blackjack card counter team. This is apparently a different team that was depicted in the earlier book "Bringing Down the House", not to be confused with the Queen Latifah movie of the same name. The techniques of the first group are described in the article "Hacking Las Vegas" at Wired and in an oncoming movie. Canadians already made their own little version of this story, "The Last Casino", that was so low-budget that the whole team has only three members; the cocky fratboy, the hot babe, and the nerdy Asian guy. Economy of both budget and drama, I guess. But worry not, after some initial troubles and intracrew friction we soon get to a montage where the good cards keep coming, the piles of chips keep growing and the group gets to party in their wholly comped suites.

As I was reading the book about the second group of card sharps, in several places I had to wonder if this story is really totally true, since the gang's adventures in Aruba and Monte Carlo racing against their supervillain-like nemesis reads almost like a thriller. There might be some poetic and artistic freedoms involved in here. The techniques that the group used, which involve taking a look at the bottom card of the six deck while it was shuffled then and exactly cutting the deck so that they know where this known bottom card ends up, and then playing so that the known bottom card ends up to a player (if good) or to the dealer (if bad) and betting heavily on that particular hand, sounds kind of fantastic. But it doesn't really matter, since this book was such an enjoyable read that even if it wasn't true, it damn well should be.

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