Undoctored Image from TV Needs no Comment

No Whammy! No Whammy!

Has anyone else noticed that daytime network game shows have all but vanished. All that is left is The Price is Right, and that is more of a science demonstration as they keep Bob Barker going at age 125 with various tubes, electrodes and catheters.

In 1984 when I was "less then optimally employed" I saw something amazing on a daytime game show. The program - Press Your Luck staring Peter Tamarkin.

In the show contestant's collected "spins" by answering trivia questions, and then used the "spins" on a board with dollar amounts. The person who amassed the most in cash and prizes at the end of the game won.

The show was most memorable for the Whammy, a red cartoon creature wearing a cape. The Whammy's spaces on the game board took away the contestants money, accompanied by an animation that would show the Whammy taking the loot

In the second part of the show The contents of the spaces on the "Big Board" changed every few seconds , as well as the highlighted square (which bounced around as well). A game space contains either money, a prize (the dollar amount of which would accrue to the contestant score), or a Whammy.

On one episode of Press Your Luck in 1984, a self-described unemployed ice cream man named Michael Larson made it onto the show. With the use of a then exotic VCR, Larson was able to memorize the presumed random patterns of the game board. It turned out that the patterns were not random. He was able to press the button at a time when only prizes and no Whammys were on the board. Larson spun over 40 times in a row without hitting a 'Whammy.'

Normally one would hit a Whammy about a quarter of the time. I was so shocked by his run (like rolling 7 10 times in a row at a crap table) that I called my brother at law school in Ithaca to get him to watch.

Larson bagged $110,237 in cash and prizes. His total was a record by far for a single appearance on a game show up to that time.

The Press Your Luck board's patterns were significantly reworked after this incident, increasing from the original five patterns to thirty-two, and such a run was never repeated on Press Your Luck again.

The Larson episode was split into two half-hours that aired on June 8th and June 11th of 1984, but it was not rebroadcast for nearly two decades after that. Every once in a while I wondered about what I had seen. Was it magic? Was it cheating? Game Show Network finally aired portions of it in 2003 as part of a two-hour documentary called "Big Bucks."

Michael lost all of the money that he had won. Michael actually robbed of his cash one Christmas night after leaving it all lying around the house in an attempt to scan serial numbers on $1 bills for a radio contest. He was thrown out of his house by his common law wife, and was hardly heard from by his family again until his passing in 1999.

Copywrite, Schmopyright....Its funny.

Outsource FEEMA to Wal-Mart?

At Wal-Mart,Emergency PlanHas Big PayoffBy ANN ZIMMERMAN and VALERIE BAUERLEIN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 12, 2005; Page B1

The Federal Emergency Management Agency could learn some things from Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

On Wednesday, Aug. 24, when Katrina was reclassified to a storm from a tropical depression, Jason Jackson, the retailer's director of business continuity, started camping out in Wal-Mart's emergency command center. By Friday, when the hurricane touched down in Florida, he had been joined by 50 Wal-Mart managers and support personnel, ranging from trucking experts to loss-prevention specialists.

On Sunday, before the storm made landfall on the Gulf Coast, Mr. Jackson ordered Wal-Mart warehouses to deliver a variety of emergency supplies, from generators to dry ice to bottled water, to designated staging areas so that company stores would be able to reopen quickly if disaster struck.

For the rest of this story, check out the first comment on this post.

City of New Orleans

Consider this - prior to its fall to the Goths (476 according to the redoubtable Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) Rome had about as many occupants as New Orleans before Katrina (between 500K and 1 million.)

Before the Goths had their way with Rome, the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns and Vandals paved the way. You gotta love saying Ostrogoth and Visigoth.

Just a few hundred years later the population was down to about 10,000. Transpose the recent images of the abandoned Big Easy and picture the Eternal City in its stead.

Oh, and Mike Myers Coffee Talk character Linda Richman was right - the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an Empire. Discuss.

Don't worry...the dragoon are coming!

We all know what the cavalry are but dragoon?

A dragoon is a soldier trained to fight on foot, but transport himself on horseback. In other words, they move as cavalry but fight as infantry. The name derives from their primary weapon, a carbine or short musket called the "dragon."

Who knew?