These men truly made this country great
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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