Looking through the shelves of fiction in UNLV Special Collections for pulp crime/gambling novels to read, I stumbled across this gem. If nothing else, I got some interesting looks from the guy sitting next to me on the plane as I was reading this one; I pored over it with a look of studious absorption, like it was a highly significant text.

WARNING: this book contains strong sexual content, violence, and general sliminess, and so does this review. If you don’t like these things, go look at some nice, safe casino carpet.

Otherwise, read on:

When this was first written in 1961, it was probably meant as a heart-wrenching story of a lovely young woman mercilessly crushed by prostitution. But forty-some years later, it’s almost impossible to look at the cover without laughing. Here’s the text:

$50 a Night
Ann’s price was high but she had a book full of satisfied customers to prove she was worth every penny.

Fifty whole dollars, huh? I might have to get a part-time job down at the malt shop for a few weeks to get up the scratch for a night with Ann. Seriously, when $50 will not buy the standard dinner-and-a-movie (unless your cheap ass took your date to Panda Express and a matinee), $50 hardly seems like the gold standard of high-class call girls. According to a recent story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a standard cabbie-referred skank will cost you in the neighborhood of $500. That’s 1000% inflation, right?

With an opening vignette of Ann’s sadistic beating and rape by a “client,” the book starts off on the lurid side, and it continues in that vein for all 144 pages. It doesn’t have much of a plot, in the sense that Ann is trying to earn $500 to by herself a farm by the end of the week, or she’s trying to foil a bank robbery. Rather, $50 a Night purports to share a week in the life of Ann Freeman.

Ann had drifted into prostitution after moving to “a West Coast city” (we never find out which one) from Montana to become an actress and model. Though she gets a few bit roles, the money starts to run out, and she drifts into prostitution. Ann doesn’t seem to get much joy out of sex; she is monumentally underwhelmed in her first sexual encounter, which seems kind of like date rape, because she keeps begging the guy to stop. Most people find that consent makes for a better sex life, but I guess things were different back then.

Anyway, even though Ann is depicted as a decent young woman who is taking an unwise shortcut to wealth, virtually every other character in the book is coated in a few layers of slime:

–Casey Shean is her first boyfriend, but he’s a well-meaning dolt who ends up taking her for granted and dumping her. He’s the one who introduces her to the “joys” of sex, and first inadvertently turns her on the prostitution by bragging about having been with hookers.

–Clara Lindy, Ann’s upstairs neighbor, was a “strictly hundred-dollar girl,” who maintains a worthless pimp, Mike, who has just graduated to a serious heroin habit. He also scams on a nameless blonde and Ann, trying to add either or both to his “stable.” As promised on the back cover, Clara makes a play at Ann, giving the novel a few pages of girl-on-girl action, something that must have been rather novel in the literature of 1961. I’m sure that for many guys back then, that was the redeeming feature of the book. Today, it reads kind of funny. After Clara makes a move, Ann asks her, “Are you a les?” Personally, I thought of Les Nesman from WKRP in Cincinatti when she asked that.

–Cal Marker, the smooth, Ivy League-looking pimp, who is trying to seduce Ann into becoming his “head chick.” His big pickup line: “Let’s take a country drive in my Jaguar.” It actually worked, too. The lesson: you can be a complete slime, but if you have an expensive car, women are completely powerless to resist your advances. Besides having nice clothes and knowing judo (and the car), I don’t see how he was such a “smooth operator.” He was, after all, known pimp. I also don’t get why he was so “Ivy League.” In all my time at Penn, I never looked at any of my fellow students (or professors) and thought, “You know, that guy would make a really smooth pimp.” Maybe its a Princeton thing.

–The vice cops are also crooked and generally corrupt, lascivious wretches. That’s about all we get to know about them.

This book is a genuine artifact of 1950s/1960s West Coast underworld argot. Take, for example, this exchange between Cal and Ann. Ann is upset that Mike is trying to get a second woman as his prostitute:

“So he needs a lot of horse to satisfy the monkey he carries,” Ann said, reverting to the idiom of the place. “He had to do this to Clara? She’s a star. You know she is. So does Mike.”

“She’d still be head chick,” Cal said. “So what’s a wife-in-law or two when a girl’s head chick? She’ll just have someone sharing the work with her.” (p.51)

That’s about the peak of literary sophistication in $50 a Night. All in all, it’s just a depressing glimpse into a miserable week in the life of a prostitute. There’s a lot of weird stuff about pimps, too. According to $50 a Night, prostitutes don’t get pimps because they necessarily need protection or contacts: they maintain otherwise worthless men as status symbols, buying them clothes and cars. In exchange, the men get to run around a lot and physically abuse their “girls.”

If there was a single likable character in the book, I didn’t find them. The main point of $50 a Night, I guess, is that prostitution is bad. As a document of the culture of the West Coast underworld of the early 1960s it might be valuable, but as an edifying piece of literature, it comes up way short.

This is one of those books that actually makes you feel physically unclean. Ann showered four a five times a day, particularly after her “dates,” but I felt like showering myself after reading this. So I’ll save you the discomfort and give you “the message” here: prostitution is a brutal, hopeless way of life that promises great riches ($50 a night, if you’re classy enough) but exposes women to vicious predators.

Bottom line: You can safely avoid this one. There’s probably a great reason why it’s not on amazon.com–it is a flat-out depressing book with little redeeming literary or artistic merit. Now that you’ve got “the message,” there’s no real reason to read it.

Originally reviewed September 2004.

Casinos, certainly, have taken their place as legitimate businesses, and a former Harvard business professor runs the world’s biggest gaming company. So it’s not a question of whether people take casinos seriously — they are so potentially lucrative that everyone, particularly state-level politicians, pay attention.

No, it’s a deeper question, an existential query about the role of Las Vegas in the world.

Are we really living in what Hal Rothman called the first city of the 21st century? Are we the shock troops of the continuing transition to a service economy? Is Las Vegas a city that points the way to the future?

Or is it just a place where people come to drink footballs full of beer and yard-long margaritas and play nickel slots? Is Las Vegas really hip, or is it a city that real hipsters condescend to visit with a knowing smirk at the cheesiness factor?

Can a land that was once the king of fake be taken seriously?

Does it matter if most of Las Vegas is just an imitation of someplace else? I think it does, because eventually the appeal of the fake wears off. So the recent move to build properties that are just themselves–not fake somewhere else–is a good one.

This doesn’t mean that Fontainebleau and the LV Plaza (should it happen) should be lumped in with the fakes of the past. They are just Vegas outlets of budding (international) hospitality brands. No one would say that the Las Vegas Hilton is an enlarged copy of the Beverly Hilton–it’s been one of the most “authentic” Las Vegas casinos for almost 40 years. I see the Font and LVP as in that same mold.

I knew that if I kept this up long enough, I’d end up in the avant garde of culture and design.

Of course, I’m sandwiched between articles on a collection of macaroni and cheese and one on a pocket protector collection, which I think is right about where this belongs. Great fun all around.

Check out the article here.

Over the years, so-called proposition betting — the sometimes absurd, usually spur-of-the-moment wagers that gamblers make among themselves — has become as ingrained as oversize designer sunglasses in the professional poker world. Huck Seed, the 1996 champion in the World Series of Poker, once bet $10,000 that he could learn to do a standing back flip in two months (he did). The pool-player-turned-poker-pro John Hennigan vowed to spend six weeks living in Des Moines, Iowa (action-starved, he returned to Las Vegas after two days). Howard Lederer, an avowed vegan, ate a hamburger to win $10,000 from a fellow poker professional, David Grey. (Offered an opportunity to win his money back by eating a few olives, which he can’t stand, Mr. Grey demurred.)

With $10,000 or $100,000 on the line, what often sound like frat-boy boasts had better ring true, and fast. “You make claims? You say you can do something? You put your money up,” Mr. Lederer said. “That is being a gambler.”

These bets offer a glimpse into the rarefied world of professional gamblers, where often money is not the object, but the pawn one moves about the board. Such wagers are “mostly a way of keeping score, but if the points are too small there is no fun in it,” said Daniel Negreanu, the winner of four World Series of Poker tournaments, who has been known to play casual rounds of Wii bowling and Golden Tee golf for sums totaling in the low five figures. “You have to understand that losing money is no big deal when you gamble for a living.”

“We don’t think of money the way that salaried people do,” continued Mr. Negreanu, who sports a goatee and two gold hoops in his left earlobe. “We don’t love money the way rich people do. We know we can always make more of it.”

Pro Poker Players Bet Away From the Table, Too

Those are some great quotes. The whole poker subculture is fascinating because in a sense it’s market capitalism on steroids, with such an overarching emphasis on the bottom line, but in another sense it’s the antithesis of capitalism, since it’s not about rational investment and accumulation but living for the moment. What does the fact that these guys are celebrities say about public confidence in the market?

Casino shows used to feature aging crooners and old comics like Henny Youngman, who peddled ancient jokes like, “Take my wife. Please.”

More recently, national celebrities - such as Dr. Oz, Giada DeLaurentis and Guy Fieri - are coming to town.

“What we’re trying to do in Atlantic City is really differentiate ourselves,” said Jennifer Weissman, regional vice president of marketing for Harrah’s Entertainment, especially since Pennsylvania slot parlors started pulling Philadelphia customers.

So casinos now feature lifestyle celebrities - people who will coach you about everything from the food you eat to the clothes you wear and the relationship you’re in.

“It gives greater, more diverse reasons to visit Atlantic City. We want to change the mind-set of someone who has never come to Atlantic City,” Weissman said.

And it seems to be working.

Customers filled showrooms for a “Food and Wine Spectacular” at the four Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. casinos this weekend.

Atlantic City casinos feature more “lifestyle celebrities”

It’s nice that someone’s on the ball over there. If you’re wondering about the typo, it’s not that big a deal–they just got the one of the most recognizable brand names in the world wrong in a particularly embarrassing way. No, they didn’t call it “Caesar’s Atlantic City,” which is an interesting idea, but actually is grammatically correct, though it violates the standard apostrophe-less usage. They called it “Caesers.” Ugg,

Also, I’m a little surprised that the Press’s editors assume that all of their readers know who “Dr. Oz” is and why he’s a celebrity. Personally, I had no idea who he was, but a quick google revealed that he’s a cardiologist who’s been on Oprah and spreads the revolutionary message that people should be “take charge of their health” or something like that. If he can get people to push away from the buffet without hitting max bet on the prime rib, maybe he really is America’s Greatest Doctor.

There’s a little bit of irony in a casino hosting an event where the speaker tells you how to get healthy because when you look at it critically, casinos can be very unhealthful places: rich food, free-flowing alcohol, second-hand smoke (oops! not in Atlantic City anymore), and lots of sedentary recreation. I guess you could argue that the adrenaline rush of gambling speeds your pulse and is somehow exercise, but you could say the same thing about getting mugged.

I know the above paragraph is laden with casino stereotypes–I may get an angry email or two reminding me about all of the “healthy alternatives” in casino restaurants and the impressive exercise facilities available. But I think that in this case, these stereotypes are rooted in reality. As always, though, I’m happy to hear evidence to the contrary.

THE media had a field day recently when Charles Barkley, a retired basketball player, was forced to pay a gambling debt of $400,000 owed to Wynn Resorts, a Las Vegas casino operator. It may seem churlish to chase a star as big as the “Round Mound of Rebound” for anything less than a seven-figure sum. But after a long boom, the industry faces a rare slowdown and belts are tightening across Sin City.

Gambling has long been considered all but recession-proof. Only twice have overall revenues on the Las Vegas Strip fallen since it took over from the downtown as America’s gambling hotspot in the late 1980s—most recently after the attacks of September 11th 2001—and both dips were short and shallow. Gamblers, they say, will keep betting as the economy slows, still hoping for that big win.

But Vegas is less about gambling than it used to be. Today only 41% of its revenues come from betting, down from 58% in 1990. These days people are as likely to come for shopping, shows and fine dining as for blackjack or baccarat; the Forum Shops, at Caesar’s Palace, has the highest sales per square foot of any American mall. Today’s visitors are more likely to be worried by broader economic woes than the punters who used to flock to the city were, says Bill Lerner of Deutsche Bank.

A cut in the wages of sin

It’s always good to get an outsider’s perspective on what’s going on here. I learned a new factoid: that Las Vegas now has 7% of all the hotel rooms in America. That’s staggering.

It’s also nice to be identified as an optimist in the penultimate paragraph. I really think that it’s usually not as good as people think, or as bad as people think. And as I’ve always said, with a finite number of people in the world who are able or willing to vacation in Las Vegas, there is definitely an upper limit to the number of hotel rooms that the city can support. Ultimately, the market will determine what that limit is.

Did you like all of those helpful statistics in there? I’m about 99% sure that they came from the Center for Gaming Research’s Gaming Abstract, and this is exactly why we’ve put so much energy into assembling it. It’s refreshing to see it get some good use.

The Obama campaign plays Las Vegas today, staging another “Change That Works for You” rally.

En route, the presidential candidate was asked what lucky charms work for him.

Curious about items that Obama had fished out of his pocket during a question and answer session with bakery workers in New Mexico on Monday, a reporter asked the senator how many lucky charms he carries with him.

Obama said he cannot carry the complete collection on the road.

“I try to select a number on any given day,” Obama said.

Obama’s lucky poker chip

Lucky charms, huh? I wonder if he has an astrologer working on his schedule.

I know this is probably tongue-in-cheek, but it strikes me as a little goofy. I don’t know that a presidential candidate fishing through his pockets really does it for me. I just picture him pulling out a button, then a bus pass, and finally a rabbit’s foot.

Plus, it’s just so typical of today’s political candidates that he doesn’t have just one lucky charm, he’s got a whole drawer full of them that he can mix and match to suit his constituency of the day. It seems that we’re producing public figures who are passionately committed to not making decisions about anything. Sure, it’s a trivial thing, but doesn’t the minutiae of your daily life say a lot about your character? It’s like Hillary Clinton not being able to give an answer, even a sardonic one, to the legendary question of diamonds or pearls (you’ll have to scroll way, way down to see the original).

I’m not saying that we want political candidates to have rigid, dogmatic personalities, but they should be able to take a public stand on something.

I still think that some sort of poker game should be part of a bigger series of challenges that all candidates have to face, like a drug test, intelligence and reasoning assessment, and detailed, thoughtful responses to a series of policy questions. If we’re going to turn politics into entertainment, can’t it at least be…entertaining?

Virtuous or vulgar, what all these items have in common is that they’re invisible to strangers. Only your friends and family see them. Any status they confer applies only within the small group you invite to your home. And the snob appeal Brooks pokes fun at corresponds to the size of the audience. Many friends may see your Jacuzzi or media room, but unless you’re on HGTV, only intimates will tour your master bathroom. A slate shower stall may make you feel rich, but it won’t tell the world that you are. As peer groups get richer, the balance between private pleasure and publicly visible consumption shifts.

Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff describe a similar pattern in their book, The Middle-Class Millionaire, which analyzes the spending habits of the 8.4million American households whose wealth is self-made and whose net worth, including their home equity, is between $1 million and $10 million. Aside from a penchant for fancy cars, these millionaires devote their luxury dollars mostly to goods and services outsiders can’t see: concierge health care, home renovations, all sorts of personal coaches, and expensive family vacations. They focus less on impressing strangers and more on family- and self-improvement. Even when they invest in traditional luxuries like second homes, jets, or yachts, they prefer fractional ownership. “They’re looking for ownership to be converted into a relationship rather than an asset they have to take care of,” says Schiff. Their primary luxuries are time and attention.

The shift away from conspicuous consumption—from goods to services and experiences—can also make luxury more exclusive. Anyone with $6,000 can buy a limited-edition Bottega Veneta bag, an elaborately beaded Roberto Cavalli minidress, or a Cartier watch. Or, for the same sum, you can register for the TED conference. That $6,000 ticket entitles you to spend four days in California hearing short talks by brainy innovators, famous (Frank Gehry, Amy Tan, Brian Greene) and not-so-known. You get to mingle with smart, curious people, all of whom have $6,000 to spare. But to go to TED, you need more than cash. The conference directors have to deem you interesting enough to merit one of the 1,450 spots. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a velvet rope.

As for goods, forget showing off. “If you want to live like a billionaire, buy a $12,000 bed,” says a financial-planner friend of mine. You can’t park a mattress in your driveway, but it will last for decades and you can enjoy it every night.

Inconspicuous Consumption

Heading back to the Strip, if you are insecure about your wealth, you waste $15K by spraying expensive champagne around a nightclub. If you’re not, you spend $15K for a luxury suite with butler service.

If I have the time to do the serious research, I’d like to really write something about conspicuous vs. inconspicuous consumption on the Strip, because in recent years there has been a real shift towards the latter. In the 1990s, the best parts of the hotels were open to public view: the Mirage’s volcano, Bellagio’s lake, and, even older, the Frontier’s neon sign. Wynn LV was the first to save the best part for the paying guests: only they can really appreciate the Lake of Dreams.

And the real attraction for Wynn or Bellagio–or anything that’s planned–isn’t so much what’s happening in public, where people can see you, but the rooms, which are private.

Is this a sign of the maturing Strip market? A signal of a larger American cultural shift? I don’t know yet, but with luck I’ll have the time to look into it…must investigate further.

BEHOLD Mike Myers.

As Guru Pitka, a self-styled Deepak Chopra wannabe whose every utterance has been pre-packaged and trademarked, he glowers from behind a flowing Rasputin beard, waxed curlicue mustache and eyebrows that arch and swoop like a roller coaster. He’s a one-man production number: You take him in the way you would, say, the Taj Mahal, or a Steve Wynn hotel lobby.

Review: ‘The Love Guru’

So what’s the meaning of that comparison? Is it sarcastic, like if I told a student, “You need to transfer to a more rigorous institution, like Princeton or a clown college?” Or is it serious, as in, “You can now get better rates on rooms at expensive Vegas hotels like the Bellagio, or the Palazzo?”

I’m not sure even the author knows. If it is sarcastic, how humbling for one of the most recognized innovators in the casino biz to be reduced to a punchline in a review of a bad movie. There is a lack of respect for casinos outside of Las Vegas–it’s hard to be taken seriously if you are serious about the business (except if you can make money off the stocks). This is why they don’t hire historians who specialize in gambling at prestigious schools like Columbia or Middle Tennessee State University.

Beyond the question of at whose expense that joke was made lies the deeper issue: A Steve Wynn-designed hotel lobby is considered enough of a cultural landmark (at least to readers of the LA Times movie reviews) that a writer can drop a reference and assume that the readers will immediately understand it.

The only Wynn lobby that’s really distinctive is the Bellagio. Most people have forgotten that the Golden Nugget was ever a Wynn property, and I can’t even bring to mind what the Treasure Island lobby looks like, even though I’ve been there plenty of times. The Mirage’s aquarium is awesome, but it’s not really a stunning architectural statement–it’s the sort of thing you might find in a dentist’s office (or Sack’o Subs on Ventnor Ave), but done up a lot bigger and nicer. WLV’s lobby is another that apparently didn’t make a huge impression on me, distinct from the rest of the place, because I’m having a very hard time visualizing it.

The Bellagio lobby, though, is something you remember, because of the Chihuly ceiling and the adjacent arboretum. I don’t remember ever seeing tourists taking pictures of any other “Steve Wynn hotel lobby,” but I guarantee that at this exact instant, there is at least one photo being snapped at the Bellagio’s.

The economy, as the blurb that crawls across your television screen says, is bad. Really bad. And don’t you forget it.

For those dealing in luxury goods and services, the perception of an economic decline is just as ruinous as its reality. Whether or not we’re in a recession (not, since we haven’t had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth) doesn’t really matter. If people believe that they need to tighten their belts, they might be disinclined to splurge.

Here in Las Vegas, the past 20 years have seen a shift toward the luxury-end of the travel market. Does this mean the Wynns, Lannis, and Adelsons who’ve ramped up the luxe factor — and their room rates — made the wrong decision? Not at all, because in an era of casino proliferation, cheapness and convenience are no longer compelling reasons to visit Nevada instead of, say, Barona resort in California or the Horseshoe in Tunica, Miss.

Regardless of whether recession is real, perceptions affect behavior

Seriously, it’s like the national media is rooting for economic decline–that’s all you hear about.

I was inspired to write this after reading the piece in Vegas Tripping 3 weeks ago about the Sahara’s “spin the wheel, make the deal” promotion.

If ripping off of Halloween Havoc 1992 can’t buck up the visitation stats, we’re really in deep trouble here.

Delivering my tasty Peppermill Omelet, our waitress Kathy looked at me and said, “Before you talked, I thought you’d have an accent.”
“What kind of accent?” was my reply.
“Oh, I don’t know, some other country.”
“Like where?”
“I don’t know, Sweden or somewhere like that.”

Huh?

None of that will make anything approaching sense if you’ve never seen Glengary Glen Ross, but trust me, it does.

All of this is my lead-in to what is surely the casino caper of the decade: three former employees are accusing of stealing a player list from the Trop AC. From the LVRJ:

Three casino workers were indicted Monday on charges they stole a list of more than 20,000 top players from the Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City.

New Jersey prosecutors said the list was worth more than $108 million because it included the names, addresses, phone numbers and gambling data on important casino patrons.

“We charge that these marketers stole one of the most valuable assets of the casino, namely detailed contact information and ratings for its top-level players,” Attorney General Anne Milgram said in a statement. “This type of corporate espionage and theft involving proprietary information is a very serious crime.”

The three had all worked for the Tropicana three years ago and later left for other casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas.

…

Prosecutors charged that while at Tropicana, Conklin had Litterelle download a list of top-level player names from the Tropicana computer database for “future leverage” so they could take patrons with them when they went to other casinos. The list was placed on three discs Litterelle labeled “Bette Midler,” officials said.

In March 2007, Conklin was at the Borgata when he called Litterelle, who was a national marketing manager at the Bellagio, and asked Litterelle to send DiMarco the player list because DiMarco had lost his job at the Tropicana, officials said.

Litterelle e-mailed the list to Conklin and arranged with DiMarco to send him a paper copy. Litterelle tried to send the paper copy from the Bellagio mailroom, but an employee notified Bellagio security department, officials said.

Bellagio notified the Tropicana and the Borgata, and all three casinos cooperated with New Jersey’s investigation, authorities said.

Casino workers accused of stealing player list

Let’s put aside for a second the notion–as humorous as it is–that the Tropicana’s leads are worth $108 million. I never knew that it had a reputation for high-end play.

Definite points for style for labeling the disks with the purloined leads “Bette Midler.” Was that because they figured no one would want to listen to three generic Bette Midler CDs? Or was it some kind of back-handed tribute to the stage legend? We can only hope this comes out in the trial.

What elevates this from a simple case of theft is the monumental stupidity involved. So you steal three disks worth of player info from your employer, but instead of keeping it, you let your assistant take it with her to Las Vegas. Of course, you wouldn’t want to waste five minutes by burning a back-up copy. Then, you try to send a paper copy of the list to your buddy. You don’t print it out yourself, at home or at Kinkos. No, you print it out at work–which just happens to be a major Las Vegas casino–then try to send it out through the mailroom.

Of course, no one will find this suspicious at all–and naturally, casino management would be happy about someone mailing out a long list of player information, because they are committed to open source casino marketing.

But strangely enough, someone notices, tells management, and the police get involved. And you find yourself facing a variety of charges for stealing leads from the Tropicana Atlantic City, of all places.

Where’s Jerry Graff when you need him?

Itinerant traders spread the tradition of monsoon betting in the 1800s; British authorities banned the practice in 1890. The ban worked as well as most prohibition, which is to say, not at all.

…

Bookies allow monsoon gambling among established clientele to prevent detection by law enforcement. Yet, even with this restriction on play, it is estimated that over $1.2 billion is wagered each year on the monsoon.

Asked the attraction on gambling on the weather, one player pointed out that there is no danger of a fix. Sports gamblers familiar with recent NBA news understand this observation well.

This year the monsoon came earlier than anytime in over a hundred years, raking in profits for bookies. Still, there was a silver lining to all concerned: the early rain signals a bountiful harvest, after a period of poor crop growth. Food supplies both locally and internationally will be positively effected.

Gambling on Rain in India Big Business

I’ll disagree with the contention that “there’s no danger of a fix.” If it’s gambling, there’s a way to rig it. You could, for example, fudge the results from the weather station. You could also take bets and not pay out the winners.

My headline is a riff on Monsoon Wedding, which seemed to be better than trying to invent a pun with monsoon and gambling.

Also, my apologies on inflicting this obviously-not-AP-style prose on you. The kernel of the story is interesting, but the way it’s written is, like something you’ve left in the fridge a week too long, a little off. Is it the over-use of the passive tense? The absence of any quote or any attribution for the information? The fact that only the top third of the jpg loads? It’s all of these, and more.

Since I’m teaching non-fiction writing this summer, I’m attuned to these kinds of deficiencies. Seriously, if any of my students read this, this article is a perfect illustration of what not to do.

I’ve got a philosophical quibble, too. The closing line of the article says that we must remember that gambling is an ancient tradition. I’m assuming, from the context, that the author is a gambling advocate and is using this fact–tradition–to bolster his argument that gambling is good.

I don’t think that tradition by itself is a justification for anything. Lots of things have a long tradition: slavery, misogyny, tribal warfare, wine in a box. That doesn’t necessarily make them something to strive for.

Gambling’s long history isn’t a reason to embrace it. Rather, it’s an illustration of the enduring appeal that it has. Because gambling is popular, it has been around for a long time–not vice versa.

The show debuts on E! at 8pm EDT tonight, then is on again Saturday at 5pm and Sunday at 3pm. So set your DVRs.

I’ve got absolutely no idea to what extent I’m even on screen. I did talk for a while, but you never know. Particularly since I haven’t won or lost much in Vegas. And I don’t think I called anyone a loser or said anything particularly controversial.

But if you haven’t gotten your daily fix of my wit from today’s two posts, go ahead and check out E! tonight.