So my lovely finance Stacia went a bridal show here in NYC a couple weeks ago. I missed out on all the “fun”, but apparently Stacia is the luckiest person on the face of the earth. She seems to have “won” virtually every drawing she put her name into… from free waxing to vacation getaways, she has probably been getting a call every other day from someone telling her that she won a contest. Amazingly, our friend Mandy who went with her also seems to have won all the same contests. Funny how that works.
Anyways, today’s call came from 21st Century Today’s Bride. They told Stacia that she won 2 nights and 3 days at a hotel from a choice of hotels, a $500 gift certificate, and the ability to purchase goods from their website for “up to 50% off”. All we had to do was go to a presentation at a hotel out by Laguardia airport about some cutlery. What a bargain right!
Well, of course 2 seconds of looking around the internet came up with this post from Ryan Cragun’s Blog describing how this is in fact a scam. I guess that the hotel stay is actually a timeshare thing (even though the lady on the phone assured us it was not), the $500 is for a scam site where everything is super overpriced, with shipping costing just as much as the items, and the cutlery that we can buy from them is overpriced and of poor quality. This is all according to the comments from Ryan’s post.
So thanks internet & Ryan for saving Stacia and I an afternoon out by the airport!
In honor of Ryan here is one of my favorite clips from Mr. Show:
Ever wonder how Wal-Mart can do so many terrible things yet always seems to come out relatively unscathed? You can thank the spin machine that their PR company for that. I just read an excellent article in the New Yorker about Wal-Mart and spin.
Quite possibly the greatest and best sketch comedy group in the land is doing some new shows in NYC this month and you would regret it if you did not go. Don’t live in NYC? First off, why not? Secondly, get on a plane and get here, just…get here if you can.
For a small taste of what Party Central has to offer you can always check out their website, but seeing them live is an experience to remember.
Here is one of their videos just in time for tax day, again you can visit their website www.partycentralusa.net to see more.
It seems that the casinos are just not satisfied with winning at blackjack almost all the time. According to a recent LA Times article the casinos have been slowly altering the rules of blackjack over the past few years to skew the game even further in their favor. What’s the big deal? Well, everyone knows (at least I HOPE you know) that all games you find in a casino have a house edge built into them (it’s how casinos make money…well, that and charging $30 for a crappy buffet). Slots has one of the highest house edges (have you ever REALLY won at slots? What if you calculate your total life time slot profit vs how much you have pumped into those machines? Yea, that’s what I thought), while blackjack is has classically been one of the lowest. Using classic rules on a one deck game of blackjack the house edge was is a tiny .18%. What that means is that for every hundred dollars you wager, you should only lose 18 cents. Of course it has been nearly impossible to find a single deck game of blackjack for some time (because card counters figured out how to beat the casino and skew the odds in their favor), but now it seems casinos have been further altering the rules to put the game more squarely in their favor.
Some of the changes include:
• Cutting the payout for hitting blackjack from 3:2 to 6:5
• Requiring the dealer to hit and not stand on a “soft 17″
• Limiting players’ rights to double-down
• Increasing the number of decks in the shoe
If you have no idea what the above things mean that is fine… the moral of the story is *stay away from gambling* It might feel like gambling for you but it is most certainly NOT for the casino. They will always win in the end.
If you want to see a great documentary about some people that actually did beat the Casinos, then check out Making Millions the Easy Way for free on Google Video. This is a documentary about blackjack, card counting , and the team of MIT card counters that took Las Vegas for millions of dollars. For a great book on the subject, I highly recommend “Bringing Down the House” by Ben Mezrich. You can check it out using the link below.
