Sigma Derby Fun Time

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Most gambling games are boring. They are simple games with lots of etiquette rules or other arcane scoring systems. I can never figure out what is going on. Either that or you have to dedicate time, treasure and mental resources to become victorious. This never seemed worth it to me. I’d rather just exchange money for good and services instead of trying to get a free drink.

This is true for everything except one game – The Sigma Derby Horse Racing Machine. It is perhaps the greatest mechanical game, like even better than pinball bro, ever created.

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Derby

Watch a video:

The game may look a bit dated, but it is truly a genius level machine considering when it was created and how complex it is. The game has a massive cult following and throughout the day at the MGM you will hear whispers of “The Dream” echoing from players headed to and from the table. Wait times to play can reach over an hour. Combine this with $9.00 32 oz. beer from the sports book and you have an OMG you can have fun in Vegas for less than $500 moment.

However the horses is more than just the only fun gambling game, it is a metaphor for life. What you learn from the horses you should use as your investment retirement strategy or even how you choose to follow sports. It comes down to a simple axiom:

Pick the right brands and throw them in the fire.

I call the strategy the HedgeStriker Think of a hedgehog that shoots lightning bolts. Here is how it breaks down. The most important thing is to not lose. (yeah, duh) You make your bets so you hopefully will recoup your spending. For instance if you see a group of horses with odds at 2, 3 or 4 bet enough on them to cover your overall cash investment. For example, if you are going to play 10 coins, make sure 5 of them are on the horses with the odds of 2. This is like having a mutual fund or blue chip stock like ExxonMobil.

Now once you hope you are covered you can pick a reach set. Don’t waste time on anything 100+ unless it is your dream team and you just want be the guy who hit the huge odds. This is like when you pick your home team in the NCAA tourney. You know they won’t win, but what if… That is how I almost won it all with Nova a few years ago until everything collapsed in a massive depressing flame out, but I digress.

You must have a favorite team. I pick 2-5 and they have never let me down. This is a like a favorite industry in stocks or a favorite sport. Usually it is a market you know about or a sport you have played. This is also known as your wheelhouse. If the odds look good for your dream team you must play it big. You just need it to hit once or twice to bring in big money. This is the same with stocks or even fishing. You pick that good looking stock and try to ride it hard. (Remember your selling rules for stocks though!)

Then you hedge. You always must hedge. If your dream is riding around 20 and you played it hard pick some 8, 10, 12 and put a couple of quarters on each. A hit of 2 on any of these should make sure you don’t lose your bank. That is the key – always have a bank to keep playing with. If you keep trolling the game like this you can make a $10 investment last for at least an hour. (That is a couple of free drinks BTW) Hopefully in that time your dream will pay off with at least one 15+ bet that you laid at least 5 quarters down on. That is 75 coins or $18.75. A very nice return on your investment.

You can keep applying these hedge and dream bets to most of your life. For instance, you should have at least 3 kids. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Three kids however should allow your genes + parenting skills to work at least once and you will get some quality grand kids out of this. Having just one kid is like betting on your dream team with all your quarters. You are playing with fire there!

Same with sports. Follow as many sports as you can because one of these is going to pay off with a championship. Don’t like baseball? Suck it up and watch and cheer if you have a good team because the parade is worth it. (You can’t bandwagon jump though. You need to deep dive the minute your team looks like it might be ready to break out. This is the cup and handle theorem of sports which is exactly like the stock version. If a team or stock is ready to break out of its base go all in.)

You have to know which brand to pull out of the fire and sear some flesh with.  Life moves pretty fast. You have to keep your brands hot and ready to go.

Real War on Women

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So by now everyone has heard of Obama’s farcical war on women. This has pretended to rial up a few people but really no puts any gravitas on this.

However what if you were to wage a real war on women? Here is how I would do it:

Step 1: Pass the Equal Rights Amendment. This was a very popular feminist movement coming out of the 1970s. It was killed by middle class housewives who realized this might put an end to their free ride.

A couple of awesome things would come from this:

  1. Equal pay for all under the Constitution.
  2. Equal divorce laws. Right now in most states women are treated unfairly in divorce law, meaning that all the laws are rigged to benefit them. Men even if in similar pay and social status almost always pay support.
  3. No more discrimination in college admissions. Right now women are about 55% of the college population. We should force this to be 50%, even if it means less qualified men are admitted over more qualified women. This is about fairness and equality and the way to make that a reality is via quotas.

Step 2: Make women required to register for selective service. It is not fair that women are not eligible for the draft. They should be forced to be able to be drafted and they should be eligible for combat operations just like their male counterparts.Women have been getting a free ride here for 1000s of years. It is time for them to step up and share the burden.

Step 3: Women live a lot longer than men. We need to change this via more specific research on men’s health problems and more money spent to keep men alive longer for no reason. Women should also be pushed into careers will lower life spans that men typically dominate today.

How is that for a war on women? I suspect a lot of this a feminist from 1972 might agree on or even be shocked at how much the cause of advancement of women in America has changed over the last 40 years.

You see women’s movements today don’t have much left to fight for so they seek relevancy. They won the social war and they have flipped the equation in the economic war to where all future success factors favor women overwhelmingly. But these groups want to eat their cake and bake it too.

Men of course go along with this for obvious reasons. However keep putting frivolous wars and false claims of inequality on men and they will start to look around and start saying “really?” You can’t trust a group when they turn substance into hyperbole, it is the proverbial calling of the wolf and the results won’t be good.

More men will stay away from marriage and responsibility. More kids won’t have Dads be there for them as men shrink away. Relationships will become more and more superficial and less committed.

None of that is good for society but it is the real legacy of these false wars on women.

Of course then if that all happens men can get robots (thanks Japan!) and women can become lesbians. Hopefully I will be dead by then.

Kickstarter FTW!

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Have you been to this site:

http://www.kickstarter.com/

It is the perhaps the greatest site for good ever made, well except for nra.org of course. For a while there it was looking like some type of typical hippie clap trap being used to make bad indie movies about cowboys eating yogurt but then the site started to support video games.

That is when all hell broke loose and people realized they could actually influence what games got made. Games that they would actually want to play. Suddenly rainbows and unicorns starting busting loose as people dreamt of the remakes they would want, the sequels to long forgotten classics would come to fruition. The only real question about kickstarter is: why did this take so long to happen?

Might and Magic 12?

Wizardry 9?

And gulp… Star Control 4?

These dreams now live. Of course no one is funding them now. But for the first time in a very long time there is hope. Unlike the generic FPS clone crap we get subjected to each fall we now can help build the games we really want to play. This is what the internet was designed for, not flash mobs doing the Carlton, although I do admit that is pretty awesome. Ok, maybe the internet was designed for two things: kickstarting video games and Carlton dancing. And Porn. Ok the internet was designed for 3 things, but that is it.

There is one super awesome blast from the past that has been funded that is making the game sites go all aflutter and that is Wasteland 2. Wasteland was a good Fallout. With humor (thus making it good.) I loved that buggy incomplete game so much. It is on my top 10 of all time games and to think that it might get a sequel made by people with talent who care about the original and not repacking it into a cheesy rip-off of the past – I am looking at you Bard’s Tale remake, just causes a hope gusher. It’s enough to make you want the world to survive past 12/21/2012 just to play it.

How do they make you go to that movie again?

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Today we are going to delve deep into one of my favorite topics: Movie Marketing!

I DVR/TiVo everything but sometimes a commercial will slip through the cracks. This seems to be especially true for movies. Bad movies. I still debate whether I just notice the bad movie commercials more because they are so bad, but that is a different deep dive. For instance, I am so happy that John Carter came out in theaters so I won’t have to watch those horrible commercials anymore.

It seems there are always horrible movie commercials coming out though – Source Code, Immortals, Repo Men, and Red Tails to name just a few semi-recent ones. I was so happy on 11/12/11 because no longer would have to see Immortals ads. Then the Blu-Ray / DVD came out and I was subjected to more terribleness. Finally that dropped on 3/6 and I felt safe. Until the terrible Wrath of the Titans commercials started. It is like bad movie whack-a-mole.

In the pre and early internet days studios could drop 10-30 million on marketing and guarantee a good opening weekend for a bad movie. Now they can at best secure a mediocre weekend or slightly better if the film is in certain genres. Two things are at the top of killing the studio’s ability to trick people into watching bad movies. The first is Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. You don’t need to read reviews to see if a movie is bad or not, you just need to see the score. Studio’s also can’t buy reviews anymore to hide the truth. A lot critics were / are for sale. Some critics were even made up. Studio’s loved this as they could buy enough to fake people into thinking bad was good, or good enough. Then the sample space grew so large because so many reviews were pulled in from so many sources that it because impossible to hide the truth. Web 2.0 FTW!

The second thing that happened is texting / internet enabled phones / twitter. Within minutes of a movie starting to play the tweets fly out. People text their friends to never see a movie. This social power of the people kills all the carefully crafted marketing messages. It must be so frustrating to work in these marketing departments trying to trick people into seeing all this drivel.

I think a part of this is they market to lowest common denominator. They just assume everyone is stupid and will fall for the wiz bang effects or star. They don’t think ordinary people care / want to see good movies. Either that or studios / marketers are stupid and can’t tell what a good movie consists of. I am not talking The Artist “good movies” here, I am talking Forest Gump, LOTR, Captain America, Saving Private Ryan, Top Gun,  The Social Network and last year’s Moneyball, good movies. These are well crafted stories with good effects, good characters, quality acting and they are well paced. Unlike some POS art artist crap. (The idiocy of the Academy is a whole other topic.)

This “stupid” factor, whatever side it lies on, is a key component into why studios only make sequels now or copies of other movies. They have exhausted their ability to market crap as people figure out it is crap way to quickly now. We did it to ourselves! Of course the solution to the problem is to figure out how to make better movies so they don’t have to attempt to sell crap to people, but I guess that idea hasn’t occurred to anyone, if it did, it fell on deaf ears. Either they can hire some smarter writers / producers or stop lying in their marketing, or keep kicking the can of crap down the road. (Guess which option they appear to be making.)

But let’s say you have a stinker on your hands, what do you do? Consider the case of the Three Musketeers. You remade a classic, so you had a known brand, threw in all the modern PC stuff so you hit all your demographics, made it take place in France / Europe so you would get your foreign markets to see it. You had your star power and you marketed her as the reason to see the movie. You showed ridiculous special effects that would get the “stupid” kids to come and watch. Then for some unknown reason no one watched! Your opening weekend earned $8M on 3000+ screens, coming in at 4th place. Yikes! Luckily you only spent $75 million to make this turd puppy. Overseas would allow you to recoup your loses but a picture like this will have a DVD / Blu Ray release. Obviously your original marketing plan failed. How can you re-sell this?

Consider the original commercial:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkspbi_the-three-musketeers-new-tv-commercial-launched_shortfilms

Now take a look at the new DVD commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD5P9bFfnvk

Or how about the Movie poster versus the new DVD cover –

Theater:

DVD:

Notice something is missing? I guess Mila didn’t sample so well. Sacré bleu! Joan of Arc shunned? Say it isn’t so, but she is gone. So are the over the top moments in the commercial. It’s like they are trying say the movie isn’t about giant airships shooting fire. Of course that makes the rebranding commercial very short because the movie really is about fireball shooting giant airships. But at least they are trying to trick people picking this up, like it is a whole different movie. Marketing: If the truth doesn’t work for a movie, make sure to lie better next time.

Some of us don’t forget though. We remember the failure, and more importantly the 26% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.

 

Supermodel? A blast from the past

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Has Kate Upton revived something long thought dead? In this age of Internet instant gratification and youXXX is the Supermodel back? This is a revival on a Jurassic Park scale. No one would have thought this possible but just like when Bieber used the Internets to recreate the male teenage singer, also thought dead after Michael Jackson grew up, so Kate has rebirthed the Supermodel.

A lot of people have been pretending to be Supermodels, like Tom Brady’s Yoko wife, Gisele Bundchen and the other stars of Victoria Secret lingerie parade. Most ended up as fodder tossed out of Leonardo Dicaprio’s or George Clooney’s bedroom. Heidi Klum tried to rise to the top with her Halloween shenanigans and strange marriage to Seal (now divorced.) But they never had “it”. Either too skinny, too foreign, or too lacking in synapse firing skills none of these models rose to the top. They never broke out of their Vogue monologue and hit the mainstream.

Without Supermodels we have been filling in with reality stars – Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton; actresses – Scarlett Johansson or Megan Fox and failed actresses – Lindsay Lohan. We have also absorbed the strange hybrids full of the crazy – Tila Tequila I am looking at you here. But models? No.

Even Upton’s rise to fame was all rated PG. Paris and Kim had to resort to underground sex tapes. Kate? She made a tape all right. A tape of her doing the dougie at a clippers game. This endearing 5 minutes was not the reason in and of itself of her rise, as I doubt you or me doing the same thing would result in a modeling contract, but it was a huge catalyst in an oversaturated media driven world that allowed her cream to rise.

It was assumed porn stars had destroyed the youthful almost innocence associated with Super Models. Sport Illustrated? Really? Is Maxim magazine still even published? The days of a Kristy Brinkley poster hanging in some young male’s room of yesteryear were assumed to be supplanted by a flush of porn sites running the gamut of every possible taste imaginable.

Perhaps it was this overabundance of pornography (and the freeness of it that is destroying the porn industry) that left the door open for a fresh face from Michigan via Melborne to save the popular modeling industry. Since cash left the porn industry are there even real porn stars anymore? Who is left to spend $25 dollars on one DVD? And it is not like you want Blu Ray porn.

The evidence is piling up of her Super Modelness. Consider this ad. Is it something only a Supermodel could make? (Or a reality star in her prime which we used to replaced Supermodels. Nitpicker.)

http://www.longislandpress.com/2012/02/28/kate-upton-carls-jr-commercial-video/  (SNSFW) This is quite reminiscent of Cindy Crawford hocking Pepsi products back in the 90’s, a true demonstration of her SuperModel power. We haven’t seen the like since, at least not by anyone calling themselves models.

 

Is this a flash in the pan, a Jump Jive An’ Wail, moment or do we have a real rebirth? Has she made case that she made the leap and that she is a Supermodel? The upcoming days will tell. No matter what though, it is exciting to see something so old being something so new.

 

Oscars 2012

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I’ve only seen one of the nominees and that was Moneyball. It was excellent. I fully support it winning. I only want to see two of the other films – Hugo and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I might watch The Help. I want to make sure I never see The Artist, The Tree of Life, and War Horse. I am cheering hard against these last three. Especially The Artist.

Know what that tells me? The Artist is going to win. None of my movies ever do well at the Oscars. So if you are betting, put the farm on The Artist or perhaps hedge with The Tree of Life. I have no frickin clue what that movie is or why it was nominated.

Otherwise work on your outrage for when Moneyball and Brad Pitt get shafted at the Oscars.

Get ready for my 10 – 20 delayed tweeting Sunday night. Should be amazing!

Matthew Broderick

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With his recent Super Bowl victory Matthew has broken back into the public consciousness. Or at least mine which is just as good. He inspired flashbacks to his glory years before the incident and the sellout. The incident has left a sour taste in my mouth for the last 15 years. It was just such an unthinkable act. Something so tragic that it was nearly impossible to maintain respect for him.

I speak of course of his marriage to the creature Sarah Jessica Parker. This was quickly followed up by the inspector Gadget sellout debacle. I have had my back turned to him ever since. However Honda reached out and made me look back and remember the man he was, not the man he became. And for that I have to thank them.

His early years were beyond impressive. We are talking off the charts life changing events. For a young white kid growing up in the suburbs Broderick’s work here inspired a lifetime cynicism, sarcasm, games, fantasy, and slacker excellence. War Games and Ferris may not have directly inspired me to want to head into Computer Science but they did do several things for sure:

  1. Make me want start a Global Thermonuclear War and eat at Burger King.
  2. Assume no one in charge has any idea what they are really doing.
  3. Use my talents for mischief and otherwise slacker behavior knowing it could all be fixed in the end. I mean, look at me now!
  4. You can always win Tic Tac Toe. You just have to keep trying.

Besides the above two megahits Broderick also brought us Ladyhawke during this period. It was of course a dangerous fantasy movie that for some reason was always on HBO or Cinemax and therefore I watched it all the time as well. This plus LOTR and RPGs helped hinder my development for years. Thank God for football and sports. Many others were laid low by these traps but this was all part of the Broderick charm.

Broderick also produced the best Civil War movie ever – Glory. Name one better. Gettysburg? Ha. Keep trying. You have to have characters and character growth to tell a real story. Name one in Gettysburg. That Glory was not even nominated for Best Picture is still a travesty to this day. My Left Foot? Come on Son!

The Lion King is still the best Disney movie. Not Aladdin or Ferngully or Avatar or any of their other hippie crap. This movie is the only saving grace for that institution. It was an amazing tale and Broderick did an excellent job of voice acting even though his career was on a downward spiral at this point.

After that Broderick’s career is a series of landmines except for the excellent Election with America’s blonde sweetheart Reese Witherspoon.

Will one commercial make up for over a decade of failure and mediocrity? No. It cannot. What it can do is form a bridge over the failure back to the past so we can remember him in better times before the incident, before the ineptitude. When he was a shining beacon of the power of the 80’s and their glory. When America was great and the future was so bright we had to wear shades.

Thank you Matthew for all the memories and terrible life choices you inspired in me.

We so Hungry

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I am hungry. Starved even. It has been almost a year since the last great pop sensation broke. In between we have been delighted by Katy Perry and of course LMFAO but it was of course Rebecca Black that produced the music of substance and sustenance of last year.

Gaga was excellent but it has been what, a couple months since she last gave a us a new song? She used to come out with a song a month. Plus she is getting played. Don’t get me wrong, she is still good, but there is no mystery there. She is like chicken parm. That is one of my favorites foods but I know what I am getting. Rihanna falls into the same camp.

We need something new to gnaw on.  A perusable of the Billboard top 100 offers no comfort. Adele? Kelly Clarkson. Even a song called “Good Feeling” is depressing. The Adele plus NickiM combo is better than Mike Tyson’s one two punch. It just floors quality music and the world is worse for it.

I was hoping something really old could bring it. Like a nice retro moment reformed. A phoenix rising from the ashes of pop culture. This was the hope and prayer for Madonna. Unfortunately the sweet melody that she started was tainted with the worst trash of the modern era: Nicki Minaj. She single handedly destroyed all hope for Give Me All Your Luvin. Her idiocy and terrible rapping ability make for beyond unlistenable songs. She is the Blake Griffin of music.

Disgusting.

Revolting.

What is wrong with everyone? It is like the country is depressed or something. Well things were really depressed in the 1970’s. And you know what that got us? Besides me? Michael FUCKING Jackson.

Where are you Mike II? We all need some help up in this place.

Who ya gonna cheer for?

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We have one of the worst most unexciting Super Bowls coming up. Something I think most of us will barely be able to watch. This will not be a repeat of the feel good story of 2008 that captures a national audience. This is a regional bowl where only the fans of these cities will be able to muster the energy to care. This is like the Nazis versus Communists. You just wish both could lose and lose big.

So what to do? This is the Super Bowl after all. Normally the plan is to cheer for the underdog or the winner of the NFC. However that is Giants. Calling a team like that from New York underdogs is like saying the Titanic was a nice little boat. Cheering for them is just icky. With that plan right out what is Plan B?

Plan B starts with drinking. Lots of it. The game may suck but the party doesn’t have to. Just stay away from the game. Focus on the national anthem. Pay attention to the halftime show.

Guess what? That is not going to work. You are a sports fan. You will not be able to help taking a side. It is what you do. Since you will not be able to help yourself you might as well prepare so you can go into the game with a fan plan. Otherwise you might get caught up in the moment and end up cheering for a team you will later regret ever backing.

Let’s break this down scientifically so we can pick the right team.

       I.          Which city do you hate less?

This is a tough question as both cities are pretty terrible. However for me I have to go with Boston. We are only rivals in basketball. With NY I have strong rivalries in all sports. The cumulative hate is just greater even if none of the NY rivalries match the individual hate for the Celtics. Boston is also a better city in the “city” sense. They have a slightly higher historical class and you can respect the Garden or the Green Monster. MSG is the home of basketball but come on son, all NY football is played in NJ. In a swamp. Massive points lost here. Remember we are basically comparing Axe murderers to shooting spree murderers so it is very hard to say anything good about anything here.

     II.          Hall of Fame considerations / Legacy

This is the real determining factor to me. Let’s look at the two outcomes:

Patriots Win:

Is anyone getting into the Hall of Fame now who wasn’t before? Another Super Bowl win doesn’t add anything to Brady’s or Belichick’s resume. They were already in. Stopping a perfect season in 2008 would have given them a huge legacy boost. None of that is in play here. This will just be +1 and most likely will be forgotten pretty soon.

Giants Win:

Here is where it gets sticky. Eli Manning will go from a fluke winner who got on a hot streak and pulled a game out at the end that he had no business winning to being a respected quarterback. A two time Super Bowl winning quarterback. Who beat HOF quarterback Brady. TWICE! All of a sudden the air gets thin very quickly.

People start saying he is a winner in a way his HOF brother was not. He is clutch. He has to start being mentioned with Elway, Simms, Young, and Bradshaw. Suddenly what he did in 2008 was no longer lucky but a foreshadow. Gulp. If he were to win one more, I don’t know if you could keep him out of the HOF.

When you realize this suddenly you will get scared. I know I did. My decision became clear. The Giants scenario cannot be allowed to happen. We cannot allow an Eli Manning “legacy” to come into existence. He must stay with the Mark Rippens and Trent Dilfers of the world. The alternatives are too terrifying to allow to fester and gestate.

Prediction:

Patriots 42 – 14. Why? Because that is what I want to happen.

Poor Little Cougars

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Outrageous.

 

Despicable.

 

Disastrous.

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/bizarre&id=8515384

Utah – You are on the list. What kind of message are you sending by denying the lovable cougar mascothood? Does this imply that existing cougar schools are somehow full of 40+ women preying on the student population? What’s next? Will the Orangemen have to change their name because of the association with John Boehner? And don’t get me started on the University of South Carolina. Or the College of Charleston. Or even the College of Computing. Should students be discouraged from attending these fine institutions? (Well, maybe the University of South Carolina.)

What message is being sent to these kids? Last time I checked BYU was the home of the Cougars. Does this mean this high school should break off ties with the most famous and popular school in the state of Utah? Of course not. What does this say about Jimmer Fredette? Did he go to BYU just for the hunting? Poor Jimmer, tainted for life.

Let’s get these school administrator’s minds out of the gutter and restore the proud status and reputation of the mighty cougar.