I just returned home from attending an after work dinner for a good friend and colleague with whom I have spent a good deal of time (including lunch time) every workday for the past 13 years. Over the years, we laughed at everything imaginable, shared sorrows, and listened to each other’s rants. I have known for months that he would be leaving at the end of March, but I remained in steadfast denial about it. We rarely discussed it, but I knew the day would come, and so it did today.

The party was great. There was plenty to eat and drink. There were also lots of jokes, and I even brought the guitar and played and sang a goofy song that I wrote for him. At rock bottom, however, it was sad. I hate see him leave. I will miss him terribly.

Good luck, Joe.

I’m back, and I managed to escape Atlantic City without being bloodied too badly. Although I prefer winning, getting out of there making only a modest “deposit” to the coffers of the casino is a good thing.

It has been several years since I visited Atlantic City, and I was taken by the several new gargantuan hotel-casinos that popped up in the interim. However, the contrast between the seedy city and the opulence of the hotels is still stark. I took my morning walk today on the boardwalk, and in the space of about two miles, the gambling palaces are replaced by boarded up apartment buildings and grubby looking motels. On a brighter note, I did see that numerous manufacturers’ outlets have come into the city, possibly even enticing some of the gamblers from the casinos.

The other thing that struck me was the super-sophistication of the state-of-the-art slot machines. For all practical purposes, coins are just about gone from the scene. The machines accept U.S. Currency in denominations between $5.00 and $100.00 and light up with the appropriate number of player’s “credits.”

Most machines take from one to five “coins” (credits) per pull, depending on how much the player wishes to play. However, the mondo prizes require that the maximum number of “coins” (credits) be bet. The machines make betting the maximum number of credits extremely easy by providing a button that automatically makes the maximum wager and instantly sets the wheels spinning. There is also no need to pull the handle to spin the wheels, as another button is available to do that electronically. However, most machines still have the handle as an option for gamblers who mistakenly believe that there is some sort of winning pulling technique.

If a player wins on a particular pull, coins no longer chug out of the machine and clatter satisfyingly in the metal trough. Rather, the machine electronically adds to your available credits. When you have had enough, and you are lucky enough to have credits remaining, you press the “cash out” button, and instead of getting a bunch of coins, the machine prints and delivers unto you a bar-coded voucher that can be taken to a cashier and turned into money. The good/bad news is that vouchers also can be placed into any of the machines as if they were currency.

All these bells and whistles are designed to permit rapid play (and most often rapid loss), and the replacement of coins (real money) with credits tends to make the player less conscious that real money is disappearing as the number of credits is reduced with each pull. In addition, the vouchers that are dispensed also do not have the feel of money, making it more likely that the player will pop the voucher into another machine than would be the case with real money.

The sheer number and variety of these machines is mind-boggling. Conservatively, I would estimate that the casino I was in has several thousand slot machines. What also amazed me is that I never saw a single one that was out of order, despite daily almost round-the-clock usage.

I wish the slot machine folks would go into the car business.

This will be it for today, as I am about to head south, on the Parkway of course, to Atlantic City (or, as we say around here, “A.C.”) to foolishly piss away some money do a little gaming and have a seriously expensive very nice dinner.

I wish you all a MAHvelous day.

I again tangled ass with Mr. Template, trying to add a farookin’ button to the left side of the site. When I was done, the text above the button didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, the button itself looked like ca ca, and clicking it sent you nowhere.

After checking the Jimbo Code and not being able to find the error, I successfully deleted my noodling, rather than risk a hypertensive crisis. This time, I saved my work and sent it to Craig (whithout whom I would still be bogged down in BlogSpot), requesting that he “mark my paper” and tell me where I screwed up.

In return, I promised to talk to him about Business Law and Promissory Estoppel until his hair hurt.

So, that makes it:
The Button – 2
Jimbo – 0

The Fat Lady has not yet sung.

It’s not easy being surrounded in the blogosphere by people who can whip up a three-column page, full of bells and whistles, at the drop of a hat. They’re certainly not bad people. In fact, they are kind and often helpful to the few truly techno-challenged among us – those of us who still get stomach flutters each time we open Mr. Template to add a site to the blogroll. Still, it’s sort of like hanging around all the time with an Indy 500 pit crew and not even knowing the names of the tools, never mind what the hell to do with them.

There are lots of things in life I don’t know a damned thing about, but it doesn’t bother me one bit. Take, for example, meteorology. I don’t know from high and low pressure fronts and rising and falling barometers. I really don’t care. Certainly I would be more likely to care if I were I farmer, but I’m not, so I don’t. I can always turn on the TV or open the front door to see what the weather is doing. Even if I was to sit down with a bunch of meteorologists and they decided to talk isobars and cold air masses, it wouldn’t bother me. I would just drift off into my own mental space and wonder if I can still remember all the chords to “Misty.”

However, computer stuff (at least the HTML-computer stuff) is different. It does frost my stindeens that I am such an HTML dweeb surrounded by people who can make HTML sing. As such, I did what I have done in the past when I found myself similarly situated. I bought a book. Actually, I already have a book called HTML, A Beginner’s Guide, but I guess its usefulness “depends on what the meaning of ‘beginner’ is.” I decided that I need a stooooopider book, so off to Barnes and Nobel I went.

I checked out HTML For Dummies, and in short order, I decided that not only do I not qualify as a “beginner,” but I don’t even make it to the “Dummy” level. I then came across a book entitled, Read Less – Learn More – HTML. I found a chair in Barnes and Nobel and began flipping through the pages. YES!!! This baby has pictures of the screen and is actually written in English. Just right for the sub-dummy. Sold!!

I brought it home, and within a couple minutes, I learned what some of the mysterious hieroglyphics that appear in my template mean. And in a few more minutes…check this out…

I actually learned how to do colors.

Laugh if you will, you three-column-sharpshooters, but for me, that was a homerun. Today colors, tomorrow…..Mister Template!!! Then someday…yes someday, I just might bitch-slap the Satanic Red Triangle.

Update: Here is THE BOOK, which I neglected to mention, comes with a CD that I have not yet fired up.

Rodger is having trouble with his new web service. So, until he gets things sorted out, he can be found bobbing around in his cyber lifeboat here.

As we know, Jay of Jay Solo’s Verbosity and Deb, of The Accidental Jedi merged their lives by getting hitched. Now, they have gotten around to merging their blogs by creating Accidental Verbosity.

Stop by to say hello, and be sure to make all the necessary bookmark and blogroll adjustments.

As I did last year, tonight I was honored to serve as one of the six judges in the competition to select delegates to attend this year’s New Jersey Boys State. This year, there were eleven candidates (all recommended by their high school guidance counselors) competing to be among the five delegates that our American Legion Post will send to Boys State this summer.

Each boy had to select a question from the many that had been prepared in advance by the judges and placed into a hat. If the boy was not comfortable with his first choice, he was permitted to select another question. All the questions were open-ended and dealt with current events. Once a question was selected, the candidate had to face the judges and speak extemporaneously for up to two minutes.

It was made clear to the boys that there are no “right” answers. Rather, they were instructed that they would be judged on their speaking ability and the extent to which they addressed the question in a logical and persuasive way.

Not surprisingly, all the boys were nervous, but every one of them rose to the occasion. It was gratifying to see eleven American boys of all races doing their best to win a spot in a program dedicated to teaching them the fundamentals of local, county and state government. I could not help contrasting these boys with the sickening photograph in today’s newspaper of a Palestinian teenager wearing a suicide bomber’s vest. Clearly, we have it right, and they have it wrong.

Some things really are just that simple.

Too much Life 101 yesterday to permit blogging. Today may be more of the same. We’ll see how it goes.

Oh, yeah. That guy Richard Clark? What an ass.

Update: I realize that I misspelled the ass’s name, which should be spelled “Clarke.”

Parkwaye Reste Stope regretse thee errore.

“SHAKE ‘EM UP!!!”

The volume and the anger obvious in the woman’s voice caused me to pick her out from the sea of several hundred Bingo players who filled the huge room. When she saw that she had gotten my attention, she shouted again, “SHAKE ‘EM UP, DAMMIT!! Only now she was pumping her fist as she shouted.

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders as I pointed down to the clear plastic box in which the fan-driven ping-pong type bingo balls were constantly whirling about, slamming into one another much like the depictions of atomic particles in a nuclear reactor.

She glared at me and hollered again, even louder than before, “SHAKE ‘EM UP FER CHRISSAKE. WHAT THE HELL’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?” Obviously this endearing woman was not convinced that the violent and obviously random movement of the ping-pong balls, much like popcorn in a corn popper, was not adequately mixing them up. She was obviously losing and had satisfied herself that I was just another evil Bingo Caller.

I found myself in the position of being the object of this woman’s anger by virtue of having volunteered to help at the semi-annual Bingo game that our American Legion Post hosts. We are one of the civic organizations that is given the opportunity to “run” one or two Bingo games per year at the local Boy’s club, which the only organization in town with a hall large enough to accommodate several hundred players. There are approximately 16 Bingo games per week at the Boy’s Club, and I have been told that many people play several times per week, sometimes even twice per day.

The vast majority of people who attend these games are women, although there is a fair sprinkling of men, most of whom appear to be accompanying their spouses. In addition (again with a notable number of exceptions), the women who frequent the games tend to be older (i.e. 55 and up).

I remember the first time I volunteered. Before the games began, I remarked that the evening would be interesting – maybe even fun, because, after all, who doesn’t like ladies, most of whom could be your aunt or grandma, depending on your age. One of the guys who had good deal of prior Bingo experience with another organization, heard my remark and said, “Do not, for one second, think that these people are nice, little old ladies. They are hardcore gamblers, and sometimes they are not very nice. I remember dismissing his remark, chalking it up to cynicism.

Well, the “Shake ‘Em’Up” Lady was a great example of what he was talking about. She was just one of the 90% of the players who would sit there for four hours and never win anything, and then blame their lack of success on the poor slob who calls the numbers.

However, not all of them are rotten. Some are just weird. One lady (I swear this is true) used to sit directly in front of me with twelve double cards lined up in two rows in front of her. That means that she was playing 24 bingo games at once. That, in itself, is not terribly unusual. What set this woman apart was that she never used a single Bingo marker. She would just sit back, cross her arms and stare at her cards as I called number after number. Think about that for a minute. Pretty amazing.

One night I could not resist, and I asked her how she could keep track of which numbers had been called on each of 24 separate cards. She told me that it was “easy,” but she conceded that she could only “do it on the easy games” (e.g. one row, horizontal, vertical or a diagonal wins, or four corners wins). She said, “I can’t do with the ‘butterfly, top hat or the star’.” I figure that she was some kind of Bingo savant.

Then there are the superstitions.

I would guess that about half of the people come equipped with their good luck charms. Rabbit’s feet and stuffed animals are popular, as is the practice of lining up pictures of all umpteen of one’s grandchildren. My favorite was the lady who lined up rubber dolls that represented all of the “California Raisins.”

Another oddity is the curious practice of someone ringing a bell or tooting a horn each time the number 66 is called. I think that it is some kind of anti-Satanic thing, but I am not sure.

The players can also be downright mean. The local ordinance requires that there be a police officer present at each Bingo game. Back when I still believed that the players were all nice little old ladies, I thought that the requirement for an on-site police officer was a bit much. However, on more than one occasion, we had to call upon the police officer to separate two potential combatants.

There’s something quite unsettling about seeing two overweight 60+ year old ladies screaming at each other on the verge of going to Knuckle City. One night the cop had to physically get between the two grandmas and threaten to throw them both out of the hall. Even after these Poli-Gripped potential pugilists were persuaded to sit down, one of them continued to loudly refer to the other as a “Bitch,” which begat another visit from the man in blue, at which time, he told that that if she didn’t “cut the shit,” she would be arrested. Charming, no?

Finally, these Bingo Badasses are overwhelmingly a humorless bunch. I had originally thought that Bingo players came out on Saturday night for some fun. So, my first time out as a caller, I would occasionally (and I mean very occasionally) make a cutesy remark after reading the number on the ball. It went something like, “I – 33. Hmmm….that’s my age” (I am clearly older than 33). After maybe two or three such remarks over the course of about an hour, one of our guys working the floor walked up to me with a big smile on his face, gesturing that he had to speak with me. So, between the balls, I got up from the Bingo machine and walked to the front of the stage to speak with him.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He said, “A couple ladies complained.”

“Complained about what?” I asked.

He responded, “Let me tell you exactly what one of them said. She said, ‘tell your friend to cut the f***ing comedy and just call the f***ing numbers’.”

I no longer volunteer to work at bingo games, having decided that being a volunteer Bingo Caller is only slightly more rewarding than, say, shoveling shit at the zoo.

Hey lady, I got your Bingo RIGHT HERE!!!