
I thought after a week, it was fair to finally recap the hurting that the Isle of Capri put on me in Biloxi. Why the Isle you ask? Hasn't your day at the Isle on past trips always been the stuff of nightmares? Well the answer is yes, but considering that they and the Imperial Palace are the only 2 casinos opened back up, coupled with the fact that they're handing out free nights and other inducements like candy, all added to fact that it's been over a year and a half since my last trip leads to the conclusion that sometimes you just have to tempt fate.
And man did fate kick me right in the ass. I'll spare you the hand by hand account at the blackjack tables, lest this flip into a Simmonsesque rambling where suddenly Bish and J-Bug and I are high-fiving over jokes at the blackjack table and drinking vaguely gay drinks while the Ukranian Jonathan Papelbon comes out of the bullpen to close out our hot streak.
The whole trip can really be summed up by two simple situations. A single session included these two statistical slaps to the face. I quadruple split aces against a 6 and managed to reap two pushes and two losses. I later triple split 9's against a 5, including a double on one when he threw a deuce on it and reaped 1 push and 2 losses, and obviously the double was one of the losses. That really cuts right to the heart of the matter. And of course there was the usual bitch slaps of doubling on 11 against a against 5 or 6 and getting dealt a 4, only to watch him flip a combination of a hole face and a 5 on the next card or a hole 5 and a face on the next card. And this happened multiple times, within the space of an hour or two. I also, as one has to do, watched myself sit on 15 against a 5 or 6 from 3rd base, only to watch him flip a face and deal himself a 5 roughly 5 times in one shoe.
In the end, the Rains of Justice were against me as the pockets were emptied, until Tom, the helpful dealer pointed out around 1 the a.m. that the ATM's were giving away money. I felt compelled to tell him that unless they were giving away free money, I probably wasn't going to partake, and that yes, I did get his joke. Much like I was the only one to get his joke wherein he felt compelled to say that, "He hadn't had a match since Superman died," in response to someone's request for a match. Of course, that lead to a strange discussion on the curse of actor's who had portrayed Superman. Weird night.
So some would say things were not meant to be last week. TJ was in fact correct in saying that they could keep busting me up all night. And it was probably time for that, it was the first time I ever left a gambling trip with less than I showed up with, and little surprise that it happened at the Isle, my own personal slaughterhouse.

Now as an aside here, I went back the other day and reread Simmons's earlier articles on Vegas trips that he had up on his page. I noticed something this time that had never really occured to me before. I have no idea what kind of check ESPN.com or Kimmel were cutting 2 or 3 years ago, and he wasn't yet a best selling author with a book (which he may or may not be now after his book, but whatever), but one would assume primary writers for late night TV shows and far reaching websites such as ESPN.com must make some decent coin. And in fact he goes to the trouble of pointing out had they had moved up in the world because they were getting rooms where they had their own beds instead of double bunking, man love style (nullus). So taking all that into account, the fact that he's treating a couple hundred up or down in a day as a big thing, and making a couple hundred in a long session as some serious play, and limiting himself to not even dropping a grand over 2 or 3 days just seems kind of odd to me. Neither myself or any of my friends are exactly made of money, but I've got plenty of them that'll put $500 into play in a day, make over a grand in a session, and drop a grand over a couple days if things aren't running hot. I don't know, just struck me like the big man really isn't putting an amount of money comensurate with his means into play. Or perhaps I'm just in the mood to poke fun today.
-In Braves news, as my last post intimated, we now have a closer in the mold of Bam Bam Bigelow, which is clearly a reason for much rejoicing on multiple levels. And he's been, to the extent we've gotten to use him, pretty much nails since he got here, at least compared to what we were dealing with. And I just wanted to use "nails" in that context. Then we made the move for Baez so that we actually have a setup man too. There's two problems with all this.
Problem the first, and this one is a little less timely now that the Mets sweep is starting to fade from memory. They're pretty useless when your starters are getting handed leads and still getting blitzkrieged out of the game by the 4th or 5th innings.
Problem the second. They can't help us recoup any of those 20 or so blown saves from the first half. Which, had these guys, or at least some semblance of a serviceable bullpen been in place the whole time, you can at least cut those blown saves in half, and suddenly you're leading the wild card by a couple games and still in striking distance of the Mets. But alas, in these days of fiscal restraint amongst Time Warner/Liberty Media/whoever might end up owning the Braves, we've found that even John Schuerholz can't play Angus McGyver to the bullpen indefinitely.
-In movie news, I think we all know that Snakes On A Plane is only two weeks away. How in the holy hell though
is this only 3 weeks away and tonight was the first I'd heard of it? My guess would be because Broken Lizard took a hit after Club Dread didn't live up to the promise showed by Super Troopers. Still, I'll give them another chance. Super Troopers is still OMG LOLZ whenever I watch it, and Club Dread grew on me with multiple viewings.

You think Eddie Money has to put up with this shit?-Lastly, the Sunday AJC had a great article about college coaching turnover. And unfortunately for all who have made it thus far, the Sunday paper has disappeared. So sadly I won't be able to mock proper quotes or use the exact numbers or poke fun at the author by name, but I'll summarize just for the hell of it. The accompanying graphic went something like this (numbers promised to be vaguely correct within 2 or so percent, but trends are upheld):
Year Coaching Turnover (%)
1997 20%
1998 9%
1999 15%
2000 10%
2001 21%
2002 11%
2003 14%
2004 8%
2005 20%
2006 9%
And the headline centered around the drop in coaching turnover between 1997 and 2006. Perhaps I'm wrong, but what I see there is a 4 year cycle, with a weaker two year cycle, where coaching turnover hits a max every 4 years, drops to it's lowest point in the 1st and 3rd years after the max, and has an intermediate high in the 2nd year after the max. So, the beauty of this data, for whoever wants to misuse it, is that they can claim whatever trend they want. This year, you can point to a drop in coaching turnover. On the other hand, you could have written it 365 days ago, started your table with 1998, and decried the huge increasee in coaching turnover. Or at least I think that's what anyone with a passing knowledge of data analysis would see is going on here. And those with the reckoning of numbers would probably write the article and point out the cyclical nature of things.
For the sake of full disclosure here, I will say that due to my busy Sunday, I didn't really get to read the whole thing, so there is a possibility that the author did choose to do this late in the article. But based on what I know about the AJC, I tend to guess that like most newspaper writers, they continue to mold numbers to mean whatever is convenient, as opposed to what they might actually be showing.