Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Briefly Noted

One more item about the infamous Michael Larsen episodes of Press Your Luck...and yes, I know a lot of you couldn't care less about this. As I mentioned, GSN did a special documentary on the incident, replaying most of the footage with interruptions to tell Larsen's story. It was called Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal and it reruns next Monday night, January 9, on GSN.

• Posted at 8:45 PM · LINK

Today's Political Question

I'm watching MSNBC and a reporter just said, "[Jack] Abramoff's plea bargain deal today should keep his prison time down to between nine and eleven years."

How guilty do you have to be to make that kind of deal? The charges could have put him away for thirty years but how often does anyone in a non-violent crime get the maximum? Abramoff and his lawyers had to be pretty sure he was heading for a lot more than fifteen or sixteen.

• Posted at 5:41 PM · LINK

Another Saturday Night (Thing to Do)

As mentioned here, the always-festive-shirted Scott Shaw! is commencing his Oddball Comics show this Saturday night at the Acme Comedy Theater at 10 PM. Here, once more, are the details.

Also that same Saturday night, the Totally Looped improv troupe, which ordinarily performs once a month on a weekday, is doing the first of four consecutive Saturday night performances at the Second City Comedy Theater at 8 PM. At this show, which I've plugged unmercifully in the past, several brilliant improvisational comedy performers dub in new dialogue to old films without ever having seen the films before. In my day, I've seen good improv and bad improv and even phony improv. This is the first of those three kinds and here are those details.

And I might point out that it is quite possible to do both shows in the same Saturday night. Totally Looped runs about an hour in a venue which is (I actually looked this up on Mapquest) 1.98 miles from where Scott will be performing his unnatural act. Mapquest figures travel time at five minutes so I'd guess you could make it in a half-hour. I always multiply estimated driving times from such services by six to figure how long it will take if you obey the speed limit, stop for red lights, have other cars on the road and don't run over too many people.

• Posted at 4:38 PM · LINK

About Michael Larsen

Five of you have sent me links to this webpage which tells the story of Michael Larsen and Press Your Luck. The article has some errors in it, most notably in claiming...

In order for Michael to keep his winnings, he'd have to remain trapped on the stage of Press Your Luck forever. His situation was an infinite loop from which there was no escape: he'd learned how to trigger only plunger-hitting patterns nailing a cash prize and a free spin. According to the game's rules, this "free" spin would eventually have to be spun. In other words, each plunger push would lead to another. Nobody else could play, and Larsen himself could never stop playing. The only way to break this loop would be for Larsen to abandon any pretext of surefire pattern matching. He would literally have to Press His Luck like a regular contestant, plunging the Big Board onto a non-winning square, a non free-spinning square, and one possibly yielding a Whammy capable of draining him of every penny. When he pushed the plunger the last and final time — Michael Larsen won a trip to the Bahamas. He stopped playing, to thunderous applause.

Absolutely wrong. The rules of the game allowed a player to pass his remaining spins at any time, which is exactly what Larsen did as soon as he crossed the $100,000 mark. The trip he won to the Bahamas was won when he slipped and didn't hit one of the two spaces for which he was aiming. At no point was he intentionally out of control of the board.

What always interested me about Press Your Luck (much like Deal or No Deal, recently discussed here) was that its rules were cleverly configured to usually promote an exciting conclusion. Yes, it was largely a game of chance — so is Deal or No Deal — but near the end, the player is forced into increasingly-tough decisions about how far to push that game of chance and must keep making decisions that mean the difference between a big cash win and going home with nada. What Larsen did was to take the rules used to foster those suspenseful conclusions and use them to wring serious dollars out of the show. Landing on a big money square also gives one an extra spin which therefore (usually) gives one another hard decision to pass or play. Larsen just kept using the extra spins to win more until he hit his target goal.

I'm not suggesting Larsen was heroic or admirable. From all reports, he seems to have been something of a creep. I just like the fact that a guy from out of nowhere could, with a little ingenuity, walk into a big time TV studio, make so much money and create so much chaos.

• Posted at 4:07 PM · LINK

Today's Political Development

Speaking of pressing one's luck this morning: Super-Lobbyist Jack Abramoff is pleading guilty in exchange for his cooperation in a government investigation. It is expected that his testimony will aid in the filing of charges against quite a few current and recent legislators and their staff members. One report says there may be as many as 20 indictments, which could lead to a fair number of Senators and/or Congresspeople deciding that though they're absolutely innocent, this would be a good time to resign and spend more time with their families.

Congressman Bob Ney is the only cohort identified in the case so far, though Abramoff was known to have close ties to Tom DeLay. Both those men are powerful Republicans so today, we have Liberal websites salivating at the thought that there will be more G.O.P. superstars on the hit list. Meanwhile, Conservative websites are selling the notion that if there is any honesty in the world, this will be viewed as a bi-partisan scandal since Abramoff also gave cash to some Democrats. I'm not sure that's quite accurate since by some reports, few if any Dems got money directly from Abramoff, though a number prospered indirectly.

Either way, it's wrong...and it's about time politicians of all kind saw that there can be accountability (i.e., prison time) for selling out the public trust for lobbyist dollars. I don't care what party they belong to or even which party did more of it in this particular case. I mean, if Democrats took less or took it indirectly, that may just be because Democrats are not in power and therefore not positioned to do as much for donors as Republicans. I also think that if I were a crooked politician — a life's goal that seems less and less attainable with each passing year — I'd feel a lot safer about taking bribes if my party controlled the government. So even if a lot more Republicans get swept up in the Abramoff investigation, that doesn't mean Democrats didn't or wouldn't. Throw all the rascals out, I say.

• Posted at 11:38 AM · LINK

Schedule Change

Aha! As half the known free world informs me this AM, the folks at GSN have changed their schedule. Instead of airing Press Your Luck reruns only on weekends, as I discussed in the previous message, they've now got them on seven days a week, effective this week. This means that the episode before Michael Larsen ran this morning...and sure enough, my beloved TiVo recorded it, even though I didn't know about the change. I therefore deduce, master of logic that I am, that the first of the Larsen episodes should rerun tomorrow morning and the second part on the following day. It's on at 9:30 AM on my satellite dish. Consult, as the saying goes, your local listing.

• Posted at 11:16 AM · LINK

Game Guy

In 1984, a man named Michael Larsen went on the CBS daytime game show, Press Your Luck, and won $110,237. This was at a time when $10,000 was considered a huge win on a TV quiz program. Mr. Larsen had managed to figure out a loophole in the Press Your Luck game board and exploited it to rack up an amazing total in a game that went so long, it had to be split into two episodes. (Ordinarily, Press Your Luck played one game per day. Larsen's game was the only one in five years that ever ran two days.) A couple years ago, GSN ran a documentary on it all and included most of the footage from those two episodes, though with many interruptions to explain things. I thought it was interesting but not as interesting as watching the original shows as they originally aired.

GSN reruns two episodes of Press Your Luck each weekend — one on Saturday morning, one on Sunday morning. They've been going in sequence and they're nearing the Larsen shows. Next Saturday morn should bring us the episode from Thursday, June 7, 1984, which was the day before Larsen's appearance. On it, you'll see a contestant win $11,516 — an amount that seemed astronomical until they taped the Friday episode. On Sunday morning, unless they pull a switcheroo on us, GSN should be running the 6/8/84 episode in which the previous day's winner faces off against two new contestants, one of whom is Michael Larsen. Then the second part of the Larsen game would air on GSN the following Saturday. This is all assuming GSN doesn't skip over them, which is possible but unlikely.

I've always found this story fascinating. It's one of the few times a network TV show ever went totally out of control in the sense that the producers were sitting there wondering what the hell was going on. The studio audience went crazy and the reactions of host Peter Tomarken are priceless. If you're setting the TiVo and you're not familiar with Press Your Luck, set it to record the one before so you can get the hang of the game before you watch Michael Larsen knock it on its ass.

• Posted at 2:42 AM · LINK

January 4, 2006 • Current • January 2, 2006