(Pac, this one's for you):

Planet-hunters find bonanza of new solar systems

       

                       POSTED: 12:56 p.m. EDT, May 29, 2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Planet-seekers who have spotted 28 new planets orbiting other stars in the past year say Earth's solar system is far from unique and there could be billions of habitable planets.

Reuters, continued:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/05/29/space.exoplanets.reut/index.html?eref=rss_topstories 

Skeptic June 2007 issue

 
The (Other) Secret The inverse square law trumps the law of attraction

By Michael Shermer

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An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret--write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey's endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts," we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren't such pessimistic sourpusses. The film's promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as "Everything I touch turns to gold," "I am a money magnet," and, my favorite, "There is more money being printed for me right now." Where? Kinko's? ADVERTISEMENT (article continues below) A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: "It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought." No, it hasn't. "Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we're not loving and we're not grateful." Those ungrateful cancer patients. "You've got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week." Sure, if you convert your body's hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission. "Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you." But in magnets, opposites attract--positive is attracted to negative. "Every thought has a frequency.... If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency." A pantheon of shiny happy people assures viewers that The Secret is ground in science.

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell's equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources. Plus, remember the inverse square law: the intensity of an energy wave radiating from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source. An object twice as far away from the source of energy as another object of the same size receives only one-fourth the energy that the closer object receives. The brain's magnetic field of 10 15 tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth's magnetic field of 105 tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

Ceteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews--along with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans--had it coming. The latter exemplar is especially poignant given Oprah's backing of The Secret on her Web site: "The energy you put into the world--both good and bad--is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." Africans created the circumstances for Europeans to enslave them?

Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle--as you did when you discovered that James Frey's memoir was a million little lies--and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanId=sa013&articleId=72C0E84D-E7F2-99DF-3D281803B61E675C&modsrc=most_popular 

 

Santa Fe Police Department looking into hiring Mexican nationals (10 a.m.)
By The Associated Press
Article Launched: 05/16/2007 09:56:10 AM MDT

SANTA FE (AP) — The Santa Fe Police Department is considering the possibility of recruiting Mexican nationals to fill vacant police jobs.

Sgts. Gillian Alessio and Marvin Paulk, who are in charge of the department's recruiting and training, said Tuesday they are considering alternative approaches to fill 20 vacancies on the city's 155-person police force.

But Police Chief Eric Johnson said New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy regulations prohibit non-citizens from serving as police officers.

Alessio said the Santa Fe police force, like others around the country, is vying to recruit the same 21- to 30-year-olds as the U.S. military, whose need for recruits is taking a toll on the police department.

"Every day, we get approached by young men and women from Mexico who are in the country legally but are not naturalized," Alessio said.

"There is a huge pool of people who are dedicated, hardworking and trying to become citizens of this country. They would like nothing better than to devote their time to protecting the communities that they live in," she said.

The United States speeds up naturalization for foreigners who enlist in the U.S. military, and Alessio asked, "Why can't we do that with law enforcement?"
http://www.lcsun-news.com/latest/ci_5909340N
                

 

This is from News of the Weird:

To fund a new Iraqi economy and government after the March 2003 invasion, the U.S. Federal Reserve shipped 484 pallets of shirnk-wrapped U.S. currency weighing 363 tons, totaling more than $4 billion, and, according to a House of Representatives committee staff report in February, most of the cash was either haphazardly disbursed or distributed to proper channels but with little follow-up tracking.
By March, 2007,The Times of London found bank records revealing, for instance, that to unremarkable Baghdad small-business men (appointed to the defesne ministry) eventually deposited more than $1 billion in private accounts in Jordan, and that U.S. efforts to buy state-of-the-art equipment for the Iraqi army were seriously undermined because middlemen purchased only cheap, obsolete Polish munitions and pocketed the savings.

Chuck Shepherd
News of the Weird

 

Found 20 light years away: the New Earth

It's got the same climate as Earth, plus water and gravity. A newly discovered planet is the most stunning evidence that life - just like us - might be out there.

Above a calm, dark ocean, a huge, bloated red sun rises in the sky - a full ten times the size of our Sun as seen from Earth. Small waves lap at a sandy shore and on the beach, something stirs...

This is the scene - or may be the scene - on what is possibly the most extraordinary world to have been discovered by astronomers: the first truly Earth-like planet to have been found outside our Solar System.

The discovery was announced today by a team of European astronomers, using a telescope in La Silla in the Chilean Andes. If forced bookies to slash odds on the existence of alien beings.

The Earth-like planet that could be covered in oceans and may support life is 20.5 light years away, and has the right temperature to allow liquid water on its surface.

This remarkable discovery appears to confirm the suspicions of most astronomers that the universe is swarming with Earth-like worlds.

We don't yet know much about this planet, but scientists believe that it may be the best candidate so far for supporting extraterrestrial life.

The new planet, which orbits a small, red star called Gliese 581, is about one-and-a-half times the diameter of the Earth.

It probably has a substantial atmosphere and may be covered with large amounts of water - necessary for life to evolve - and, most importantly, temperatures are very similar to those on our world.

It is the first exoplanet (a planet orbiting a star other than our own Sun) that is anything like our Earth.

Of the 220 or so exoplanets found to date, most have either been too big, made of gas rather than solid material, far too hot, or far too cold for life to survive.

"On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X," says Xavier Delfosse, one of the scientists who discovered the planet.

"Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life."

Gliese 581 is among the closest stars to us, just 20.5 light years away (about 120 trillion miles) in the constellation Libra. It is so dim it can be seen only with a good telescope.

Because all planets are relatively so small and the light they give off so faint compared to their sun, finding exoplanets is extremely difficult unless they are huge.

Those that have so far been detected have mostly been massive, Jupiter-like balls of gas that almost certainly cannot be home to life.

This new planet - known for the time being as Gliese 581c - is a midget in comparison, being about 12,000 miles across (Earth is a little under 8,000 pole-to-pole).

It has a mass five times that of Earth, probably made of the same sort of rock as makes up our world and with enough gravity to hold a substantial atmosphere.

Astrobiologists - scientists who study the possibility of alien life - refer to a climate known as the Goldilocks Zone, where it is not so cold that water freezes and not so hot that it boils, but where it can lie on the planet's surface as a liquid.

In our solar system, only one planet - Earth -lies in the Goldilocks Zone. Venus is far too hot and Mars is just too cold. This new planet lies bang in the middle of the zone, with average surface temperatures estimated to be between zero and 40c (32-102f). Lakes, rivers and even oceans are possible.

It is not clear what this planet is made of. If it is rock, like the Earth, then its surface may be land, or a combination of land and ocean.

Another possibility is that Gliese 581c was formed mostly from ice far from the star (ice is a very common substance in the Universe), and moved to the close orbit it inhabits today.

In which case its entire surface will have melted to form a giant, planet-wide ocean with no land, save perhaps a few rocky islands or icebergs.

The surface gravity is probably around twice that of the Earth and the atmosphere could be similar to ours.

Although the new planet is in itself very Earth-like, its solar system is about as alien as could be imagined. The star at the centre - Gliese 581 - is small and dim, only about a third the size of our Sun and about 50 times cooler.

The two other planets are huge, Neptune-sized worlds called Gliese 581b and d (there is no "a", to avoid confusion with the star itself).

The Earth-like planet orbits its sun at a distance of only six million miles or so (our Sun is 93 million miles away), travelling so fast that its "year" only lasts 13 of our days.

The parent star would dominate the view from the surface - a huge red ball of fire that must be a spectacular sight.

It is difficult to speculate what - if any - life there is on the planet. If there is life there it would have to cope with the higher gravity and solar radiation from its sun.

Just because Gliese 581c is habitable does not mean that it is inhabited, but we do know its sun is an ancient star - in fact, it is one of the oldest stars in the galaxy, and extremely stable. If there is life, it has had many billions of years to evolve.

This makes this planet a prime target in the search for life. According to Seth Shostak, of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California, the Gliese system is now a prime target for a radio search. 'We had actually looked at this system before but only for a few minutes. We heard nothing, but now we must look again.'

By 2020 at least one space telescope should be in orbit, with the capability of detecting signs of life on planets orbiting nearby stars. If oxygen or methane (tell-tale biological gases) are found in Gliese 581c's atmosphere, this would be good circumstantial evidence for life.

Dr Malcolm Fridlund, a European Space Agency scientist, said the discovery of Gliese 581c was "an important step" on the road to finding life.

"If this is a rocky planet, it's very likely it will have liquid water on its surface, which means there may also be life."

The real importance is not so much the discovery of this planet itself, but the fact that it shows that Earth-like planets are probably extremely common in the Universe.

There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone and many astronomers believe most of these stars have planets.

The fact that almost as soon as we have built a telescope capable of detecting small, earth-like worlds, one turns up right on our cosmic doorstep, shows that statistically, there are probably billions of earths out there.

As Seth Shostak says: "We've never found one close to being like the Earth until now. We are finding that Earth is not such an unusual puppy in the litter of planets."

But are these alien Earths home to life? No one knows. We don't understand how life began on our world, let alone how it could arise anywhere else. There may be an awful lot of bugs and bacteria out there, and only a few worlds with what we would recognise as plants and animals. Or, of course, there may be nothing.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute uses radio telescopes to try to pick up messages sent by alien civilisations.

Interestingly, Gliese 581c is so close to the Earth that if its putative inhabitants only had our level of technology, they could - just about - pick up some of our radio signals, such as the most powerful military transmitters. Quite what would happen if we for our part did receive a signal is unclear.

"There is a protocol, buried away in the United Nations," says Dr Shostak. "The President would be told first, after the signal was confirmed by other observatories. But we couldn't keep such a discovery secret."

It may be some time before we detect any such signals, but it is just possible that today we are closer than ever to finding life in the stars.

William Hill said it had shortened the odds on proving the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence from 1,000-1 to 100-1.

Spokesman Graham Sharpe said: "We would face a possible eight-figure payout if it were to be confirmed that intelligent life of extra-terrestrial origin exists. We felt we had to react to the news that an earth-like planet which could support intelligent life had been discovered - after all, we don't know for sure that intelligent extraterrestrial life has not already been discovered."

The new planet, so far unnamed, is 20.5 light years away and orbits a red dwarf star called Gliese 581.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=450467&in_page_id=1965

 

I really recommend this book:

The Ultimate Gift

Jim Stovall 

Here's an amazon reader review, and not the last paragraph:

I started this book by looking at the Table of Contents. In the Beginning. A Voice from the Past. The Gift of Work. The Gift of Money. The Gift of Friends.

What is this? Is this the kind of book I want to read?

I flipped to the back cover of the book for insight to the contents. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are here to read the last will and testament of Howard 'Red' Stevens.." "Red Steves was a self-made man who gave his family everything-and ruined them in the process. Now, as his estate of oil companies and cattle ranches is divided among the greedy and self-serving relatives, one member is singled out for something special: Red's great-nephew, Jason. In a darkened room, isolated from the rest of his family, Jason is confronted by the image of deceased great uncle on a video monitor . . ."

I began Chapter One out of curiosity. It was a story, not a touchy-feely book, like I feared. The narrative comes from an eighty-year old attorney who is reading the will of a very successful long-term client who had become a close, dear friend. As part of the inheritance, the old man's grand-nephew, a spoiled brat sort of young man, is given a special bequest. Each month he is to return to the attorney's office for a learning assignment. If he stays with the program successfully, meeting the approval of the attorney, he gains the Ultimate Gift. If he quits or doesn't meet the grade at any time, he loses his opportunity for the Ultimate Gift.

As the book progresses through the chapters, the young man, Jason, transforms from an insolent know-it-all to a much different person. The series of learnings, prescribed each month by the old man by videotape, gives a new meaning to Jason's life. Each of the gifts, a learning, is described in Jason's words as he gains new realizations.

I found myself surprisingly captivated by this book. I couldn't put it down. No, it's not a mystery or thriller, but it certainly held my attention. I can think of a number of people I know who would surely benefit from this book. One will receive my copy shortly as a very meaningful gift.

A word about the author. Jim Stovall has overcome blindness to become a national champion Olympic weightlifter, a successful investment broker, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder and president of the Narrative Television Network, which makes movies and television accessible to our nation's 13 million blind and visually impaired and their families. With revealing more about this man's incredible background (see page 124), I "got" that this is a man to be listened to. You'll gain the same feeling as you read The Ultimate Gift.

 

 

Michigan Prof Tells muslims to leave country.

The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman. Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student's Association. The e-mail was in response to the students' protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were "hate speech." Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:

Dear Moslem Association: As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France. This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many of my colleagues. I counsel yo u dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile "protests." If you do not like the values of the West - see the 1st Amendment - you are free to leave. I hope for God's sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans. Cordially, I. S. Wichman Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

 
As you can imagine, the Muslim group at the university didn't like this too well. They're demanding that Wichman be reprimanded and mandatory diversity training for faculty and a seminar on hate and discrimination for freshman. Now the Michigan chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn't believe that the good professor had the right to express his opinion. For its part, the university is standing its ground, saying the e-mail was private, and they don't intend to publicly condemn his remarks. That will probably change. Wichman says he never intended for his e-mail to be made public, and wouldn't have used the same strong language if he'd known it was going to get out. How's the left going to handle this one? If you're in favor of the freedom of speech, as in the case of Ward Churchill, will the same protections be demanded for Indrek Wichman? I doubt it. Send this to your friends, and ask them to do the same. Tell them to keep passing it around until the whole country gets it. We are in a war. This political correctness crap is getting old and killing us.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/wichman.asp

Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard
By Mike S. Adams
Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Yesterday afternoon, I logged on to the "Global War" blog (global-war.bloghi.com) of Associate Professor Julio Pino – a Muslim convert who teaches at Kent State University. The heading for the site used to read "The Worldwide Web of Jihad: Daily News from the Most Dangerous Muslim in America." Now it reads "Are You Prepared for Jihad?" IN THE NAME OF OBL. 2007: THE YEAR OF ISLAMIC VICTORY!"

Hardly able to believe what I was reading, I called Pino at his office in Ohio around 4 p.m. According to his secretary, he had not been at work that day (he only has office hours two days of the week). He was drawing a paycheck from the people of the State of Ohio while trying to launch a Jihad against people like me. In fact, just five minutes before I called he posted an entry under the title "Crusaders Can’t Take Anymore in Afghanistan!"

Pino began his morning of not going into his office at Kent State by penning a post under the title “Frightened British Crusaders Rush More Troops to Occupied Afghanistan.” Using terms like “occupation” and “Crusaders” it isn’t really necessary to read these posts in order to ascertain who this employee of the State of Ohio is rooting for in the War on Terror.

But, just in case you were curious about the purpose of this site, it is provided in the upper right corner: "We are a Jihadists news service, and provide battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our brothers worldwide. All we want is to get Allah’s pleasure. We will write ‘Jihad’ across our foreheads, and the stars. The angels will carry our message throughout the world."

There is also an "Oath of Freedom" in the upper right corner: "We were born free. We will live freely and when death comes to us, we will die freely. Jihad is changing all that can be changed; freeing ourselves through our own efforts; and the conviction that truth will prevail, inshallah."

Under the entry "Sister Detonates Herself to Eliminate Shia Traitors" there is a description of a female suicide bomber who recently killed 41 people. Just in case you wondered how the host of the site feels about the suicide bomber, the next line tells you: "Now she lies on the Golden Couch of Paradise."

Despite his clear support of mass murder, he once complained that the Jews were engaged in genocide against the Palestinians. He claimed that as a result of that assertion, he was "harassed" and received death threats."

I’ve always assumed that a person who advocates mass murder runs the risk of getting an occasional death threat in the office. Maybe Pino isn’t really the "Most Dangerous Muslim in America." Maybe he’s just a pro-Palestinian pansy whose cushy job with the State of Ohio lets him hide inside his house while real men are doing the work that keeps this great nation going.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MikeSAdams/2007/02/28/me_and_julio_down_by_the_schoolyard 

__________________________________________________

Comment:
We can jail Border Patrol Officers for doing their jobs, why not also judge a man who advocate the overthrow of America, and actually gives real physical and potentially dangerous aid to our enemy by suppling battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to Jihadists worldwide?

 

Just random observations but I can't go a week without seeing something that convinces me there are a lot more crazy people out there than anyone suspects:

Here we go: ( my comment in italics):

We were in church when the pastor's baby was baptized by the bishop. The baby was about two months old. During the baptism, the bishop said, referring to the baby, "She'll always remember this day."

Hello! No, she won't, she can't even talk right now.

During a sermon about why we baptise infants, a priest said, "Why, look at our Lord when He got baptized."

And how old was He then?

I was talking with a preacher who went on a rant about "homos" for a solid half hour. I asked him what about hermaphrodites. He asked me what that was. When I told him, he said there was no such thing and I made it up.

Oh that did a ton of good for his credibility.

The same preacher told me if a college student had an NFL contract offered to him, he should turn it down because the NFL plays
on Sundays.

What?

In Sunday School the topic of a Hundu custom of a wife being expected to throw herself on her husbad's funeral pyre, so she'd die along with him, came up. A woman in our group said, "Well, we have to respect the customs of other cultures you know."

Yeah, right.

 

A friend of my wife's owns a Plumbing and Heating business. He just put a "No Smoking" sign up in his shop. then he checked his mail and got some Doral coupons - he handed them out to the guys he just told not to smoke in the shop.

When I was in high school, we had a guy that had a hot dog cart at the football games, "Augie's Doggies." He sold Cokes for 10 cents each or "two for a quarter." He got that on gor years, he said hardly anyon buys one Coke, when they say they're getting a Coke somebody is going to say get them one, too. If you questioned it he'd laugh and give you change from a quarter, but hardly anyone did.

In the casino game of dice, the odds against rolling 2 or 12 are exactly the same, 35 to 1. Yet ask almost any dealer what rolls more, 2 or 12, and you'll get something like, "I've seen a whole lot more 12's than I've seen 2's."

The odds againt hitting Mega Millions lotto are over 176,000,000 to one. There are actually people that believe that playing two tickets instead of just one cuts the odds in half.

When I worked "at the Cal" in Vegas (California Hotel, yup the Hotel California! ) a friend and I would walk down the street and walk through the Horsheshoe every night just to see what was going on. This was between 2 and 4 a.m. In the casino. One time he said, "I really hope to meet a hot babe in here some night that doesn't drink or gamble."

Chuck, hello! We're at a bar in a casino!

After Cleveland Cavaliers basketball gzmes, WTAN radio Cleveland has a program called "The Cavaliers call-in show, without calls."

 

In a flyer for a book club I received today, on the same page:

Apocalypse 2012
Is this the end of the world?

and immediately under that, another book
2013 Oracle
Transitioning in the new humanity, discover what the post-2012 future holds...                 

Salem Kirban, who writes a lot of end times stuff, and has been for many years, was sending out a flyer for an end times book, one of those, "the time draws nigh" type of books - and along with that was a special on vitmain packs that he was selling as part of his healthy living 'ministry'.

I remember reading it and thinking, "Where's the cover sheet for the vitamin info, the one that says, "And just in case this isn't the end....."                 

tbc.......

Everyone is invited to post examples....... 

 

 

 

 

The Canadian weather forecast thread where the guy hit the jackpot brought this to mind.  

For a very short time there was a dog track in Henderson, NV,  the town that borders Las Vegas. Our pit boss went there to bet on the dogs one day and he couldn't do anything wrong.

For five races in a row he had the winning dog.  

A guy sitting next to him asked him how he was doing it, and he points out a column in the racing form, 111/8, 12. 12 1/2, etc...and says, "Look at these dogs time in their last race."

The guy says, "Time? That's not their time in any race, that's the dog's weight!"

His "streak" stopped right after that.

Luck? You betcha!

PS

The people that ran the track soon realized that Southern Nevada summers were no climate for dog races.

 

 

 

 

 

A blonde's car gets a flat tire on the Interstate one day
So she eases it over onto the shoulder of the road.
She carefully steps out of the car and opens the trunk.
Takes out two cardboard men, unfolds them and stands them
at the rear of the vehicle facing oncoming traffic. The
lifelike cardboard men are in trench coats exposing their nude
bodies to approaching drivers...
Not surprisingly, the traffic became snarled and backed up.
It wasn't very long before a police car arrives.
The Officer, clearly enraged, approaches her yelling,
"What is going on here?"
"My car broke down, Officer" says the woman, calmly.
"Well, what the heck are these obscene cardboard pictures
doing here by the road?!" asks the Officer...

"Oh, those are my emergency flashers!" she replied.

The Mystical forum can be entertaining and a fun place to go, but no offense to anyone who may do this, BUT...

About 99% of the threads are someone asking for numbers from a dream, usually from one of those dream books. (Ever thought about why dream books don't have the same numbers for the same dream?).

 There have been people ask where to get those books, and people have posted the sources. Yet the same people ask for numbers fro dream after dream.

Hello, figuring you are actually playing the numbers someone else bothers to post for you - do that four or five times and you could have bought your own book, or if the number hit and you played it, triple shame on you for still asking for numbers, you could have bought fifty books.

No one want to spring and buy a paper, yet when someone shows up with one people want to know their horoscope. I pulled this one on somebody like that one time:

"Oh, what's my horoscope?

"What's your sign?"

"Aries."

"Aries, you are one cheap individual who has not bought a newspaper since 1983 yet you want to know your horoscope everytime someone else has a newpaper. Spring for the 50 cents."

"Does it really say that?"

(I'm not kidding, she really asked that - the whole break room was roaring).

 

 

 

 

 

 

OK, I worked in casinos from 1977 until 1998.

At first, it's fun, but it's nothing like the public thinks it is. People think, "Wow, you get paid to play" and that isn't even close to the real thing.  

You learn a lot about people, you see them at their best, and at their worst, too often at their worst, losing money really brings out the Jekyll and Hyde in people.

Most people do not play to win, they just play to play (they're called "stayers, not players", came to stay, not to play).

I'll expound on all this later, but for right now want to say that anyone who plays, loses money, and then plays because they want their money back had no business playing in the first place.

I saw a whole lot of people blow paychecks chasing hot rolls of dice or streaks on a 21 table that never came. When video poker came out, it was like a money vacuum, literally. In fact a counselor in Vegas called video poker electronic morphine and the electronic crack cocaine of the 1990's.

Casino employees are among some of the worst degenerate (out of control) gamblers.  Depending on what hotel they're working in some of them are making excellent money, only to feed it back to the hotel, or another, after work.

People I worked with who were trying to win a Royal flush used to wonder why I'd drive to Californa to play the lottery. I'd tell them that the lottery does indeed change people's lives, and I hadn't seen any of them hit a royal flush and change theirs.

tbc.... 

 

 

 

 

 

(Another 'spiritual' one)

Subject: Enjoy the coffee