Smoking in AC casinos could be ending this April, or not. If AC’s City Council decides to ban smoking effective April 15, rest assured that I have the requisite T.S. Eliot quote on hand, and I’m not afraid to use it. But nothing is decided yet, as you can see in the AC Press:

About an hour into Wednesday’s final hearing on a proposal that would extend the statewide indoor smoking ban to the resort’s casino floors, Mays Landing resident Cliff Beavers came to the microphone to ask: Why are we here?

“I’m just dumbfounded,” said Beavers, 62, who supports an extension of the smoking ban. “I don’t have anything clever to say. I just thought it was a done deal.”

Others in the 80-person audience in City Council chambers were asking the same thing Wednesday night.

Council plans a final vote at its meeting slated for 5 p.m. Jan. 24. City Councilman G. Bruce Ward, who conceived the idea of the local ordinance and chaired Wednesday’s meeting, indicated he believed the vote would take place.

If passed, the ordinance would ban smoking in public places, effectively closing a loophole by state legislation that went into effect April 15, 2006.

Significantly, the city ordinance would become active April 15, 2007.

Many of the 51 who spoke during the nearly two hour meeting had voiced opinions about a ban before.

Those included Judith States, a smoker and Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino security guard who criticized those who wanted to limit smoking as wanting to infringe on the rights of a person to smoke.

Others, such as Bryant Nelson, said gambling and smoking were vices well-paired together.

“This is not a church that you’re going to,” Nelson said. “This is a gambling hall.”

And Casino Association of New Jersey President Joseph A. Corbo Jr. repeated his earlier statements that a smoking ban would hurt business and likely lead to layoffs.

He objected when ban proponents characterized the casino industry as unconcerned about their workers’ well-being. Untrue, he said. He considered it most important that the casino employees would keep their jobs.

Passionate arguments at Atlantic City hearing on smoke ban

You know, I can’t hear someone say, “This is X not Y,” without thinking of Bones McCoy saying, “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a pit boss,” or whatever he was complaining about.

True story: when I first started working security at the Taj, we wore hot pink blazers. I think that someone thought this would make the officers seem less threatening to patrons, and enhance the whole “hospitality” vibe. Unfortunately, it also made us seem less threatened to the assorted thieves, shot takers, and sandfleas who filtered through the place, so I’m not surprised they switched to deep blue and finally to police-style togs.

Anyway, because of the whole hot pink thing, I was sometimes mistaken for a cocktail waiter–at least I think it’s because of the hot pink blazer. So when someone would call me over and ask for a scotch and soda, I’d step back and say, with as polite a look of consternation as I could (our customer service core standards didn’t leave much room for Bones-style curmudgeonhood), “I’m a security officer, not a cocktail waitress.”

If anyone got the joke, they were too pissed about not getting their booze to laugh about it.

Some people say that there’s a “curse” on players featured on the box of Madden NFL. This Snopes article does a good job of reconstructing it. Others have said that there is a Megabucks curse, or a curse on lottery winners. I think it makes sense to compare the two. BTW, Snopes has an article that debunks the Megabucks myth, and several other gambling-related articles that are a welcome friend in my continuing mission to bring a modicum of sense to the public discussion of gambling. Given the bad luck of some lottery winners (more on that below), is there a Powerball curse? I’m going to argue, in the same vein as the good people at Snopes, that there is no such thing. First, let’s consider the sports-related “cover’ curses: From Snopes:

Players are generally selected for honors when they’re at the pinnacles of their careers — when continued excellence has become the expected norm, and when anything less is considered disappointing. There’s nowhere to go from such lofty heights but down: Every player is subject to injury (especially in a contact sport such as football), all athletes eventually experience the decline of their skills with age (if injuries don’t prematurely end their careers first), and even top performers in are not immune to having off-years or making occasional blunders in crucial game situations. “Bad luck” happens to just about everyone sooner or later, but we only take especial note of it when it seems to fit a pattern.
(emphasis mine)

This is true, even to a greater extent, for newly-rich lottery players. Lottery winners aren’t athletes who’ve been training for years–they’re just regular people who woke up millionaires one day. So it’s reasonable to assume that they’re going to have their fair share of bad breaks, too. Even worse, with so much money (that is often so well-publicized), they become targets for various thieves, con artists, and opportunists. Case in point, from Newsday:

A man beset by problems since winning a record lottery jackpot says he can’t pay a settlement to a casino worker because thieves cleaned out his bank accounts.

Powerball winner Jack Whittaker gave that explanation in a note last fall to a lawyer for Kitti French, who accused him of assaulting her at the Tri-State Racetrack and Gaming Center, a slots-only casino near Charleston, according to a motion French’s lawyer filed this week demanding payment of the confidential settlement.

Whittaker won a nearly $315 million on Christmas 2002, then the largest undivided lottery prize in U.S. history. He took his winnings in a lump sum of $113 million after taxes.

Since then, he has faced his granddaughter’s death by drug overdose; he has been sued for bouncing checks at Atlantic City, N.J., casinos; he has been ordered to undergo rehab after being arrested on drunken driving charges; his vehicles and business have been burglarized; and he has been sued by the father of an 18-year-old boy, a friend of his granddaughter’s, who was found dead in Whittaker’s house.

In the latest lawsuit, Whittaker told French’s lawyer, John Barrett, that “a team of crooks” cashed checks in September at 12 City National Bank branches and “got all my money,” according to the motion Barrett filed Wednesday in state court.

Powerball Winner: Thieves Cleaned Me Out – Newsday.com

If you are lucky enough to win a big jackpot, I’d suggest keeping your name out of the papers, staying off TV, and not telling anyone–anyone at all–that you won. I imagine that Whittaker would give just about anything not to have won that $113 million, so be careful what you wish for.