This video is one of those things where, once you start watching… you can’t pull away. I don’t speak Korean, and have no idea what the lyrics mean. Still, my brain tries to put some kind of narrative to the visuals I’m seeing, piecing the disparate sequences into some kind of coherent whole.
I started reading the first few pages, and then the storyline took an odd little turn. And then it took another odd little turn, and made me wonder where things were headed. I went a few more pages in, and another turn… and before I knoew it, I had lost maybe nearly half an hour, reading through a ton of the story.
Don Johnson is a blackjack player who’s done well for himself. He’s done really well for himself, actually. He’s made nearly $15 million from three Atlantic City casinos (and won nearly $6 million in one night at the Tropicana).
Trust Issues is an utterly fascinating article at Lapham’s Quarterly about “Methuselah” trusts. Named after the long-lived Biblical Methuselah, these perpetual trusts are pockets of money that are meant to accrue interest over extraordinarily long periods of time.
The catch? We’re actually talking about compound interest.
I’m updating the blog over lunch, so I don’t have a time to elaborate here… but this is an absolutely fascinating article about how a select few people are gaming a Massachusetts lottery game called Cash WinFall. One example is 70 year old Marjorie Selbee and her husband: Over the next three days, Selbee bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets…
Wanted: Gentleman Bank Robber is the true story of Leslie Ibsen Rogge who, during the span of two decades, did the unthinkable: he robbed over 30 banks, stole over $2M, appeared on “America’s Most Wanted”, and spent over a decade eluding the FBI while on their Top Ten List. And he did all of it without hurting anyone. A sample…
When I was an undergraduate at Indiana University, I was an English major looking to learn more about Literature. I carried several Norton Anthologies in my backpack, each one a large cinderblock of the best writing from a specific era. I studied Chaucer, Shakespeare, essays from the Victorian era, poetry of all shapes and sizes, and the list just went…
Just read over a pretty eyebrow-raising article about the Stuxnet worm. Entitled A Declaration of Cyber-War, Michael Joseph Gross lays out what researchers have found about this virus in the past year… and speculates on the hand(s) that may have coded it. In computer security parlance, a vulnerability in a computer application that has not been detected before is considered…
Doc Searls has a very interesting post regarding the role of the Internet, during the early moments of the earthquake in Japan. Though this was written on March 11th, it’s still a pretty insightful glimpse into how, more and more, we are turning online to find updated, of-the-moment information on world events. Here’s the take-away: emergencies such as wars and…
Secrets of a Mind-Gamer is the story of an unlikely mnemonist: someone capable of remembering and recalling large amounts of data. The article has a fantastic opening, providing an example of how one would go about memorizing a random sequence of playing cards: Dom DeLuise, the comedian, was implicated in the following unseemly acts in my mind’s eye: He hocked…
I’m not sure what it is with stories about drugs and drug-dealers. I have a dark fascination with the trade, the business of it, the illicitness of it all. I’m positive I would never be cut out for that world, but I enjoy getting glimpses of it from afar. The One-Man Drug Company is a compelling article by David Amsden,…
I’ve got two stories for you to read about, both of which involve the sauce: one beer, one liquor. First off, let’s go with the strong stuff: Michael Dozois has an idea that’s as ingenious as selling bottled water: he wants to sell custom ice cubes to bars. A veteran bartender, Dozois strongly feels that the quality and shape of…
John Noonan writes an incredibly interesting, first person account of what it means to man a nuclear missile silo. His article, In Nuclear Silos, Death Wears a Snuggie, is at once light-hearted and sobering. For decades, missileers (as we’re known in the military) have quietly performed their duties, custodians of a dying breed of weapon. But American citizens have no…
Man enters bank. Man robs bank. Man leaves bank with money… and with a bomb still locked around his neck. When captured by police a short while later, Brian Wells claimed he was assaulted, fixed with the bomb, and forced to rob the bank. Was this pizza deliveryman an innocent, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or…
Jay Caspian Kang writes an incredibly open and stark account of the gambling life in his essay entitled The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High. He talks about his gambling friends, poker celebrities like Mike Matusow and Phil Hellmuth, and what it feels like to lose $18,000 in 36 hours. Playing poker, after all,…