Monday, July 10, 2006

Double Down Disappointment

GSN is currently running its 2006 World Series of Blackjack, one installment per week. I enjoyed the 2005 competition for reasons explained here but this year's is a lot less interesting. For one thing, the contestants aren't as interesting. For another, the hosts aren't as good. (They keep saying things like, "He really wants to win this one," as if it's news that the players have some interest in not losing.)

There's also a lot of annoying editing and telescoping in each episode. Each game consists of many hands of Blackjack. How many? I'm not sure because they don't tell you and they occasionally skip a hand or two, even though something significant may have happened in one of them. They'll cut to a little background video on a player or the hotel and when they return to the game, the hosts will say something like, "Well, while we were away, Rosie Piggleworm hit a couple of Blackjacks to take over the lead." Can you imagine watching a baseball game where they don't bother to show you the fifth and sixth inning and instead they just tell you that someone hit a Grand Slam to put their team ahead? A very silly way to cover a competition.

But it's worse than that. Two new rules have been added — rules that, as far as I know, exist in no other Blackjack game or tournament anywhere in the world. One is that twice during the game, the dealer deals out something called a "knockout card." When that shows, it means that the player in last place at the end of the following hand is eliminated. That forces some players to abandon the careful strategizing that is the fascinating thing about Tournament Blackjack and just make reckless, all-in bets.

Even worse is that each player gets one "Burger King Power Chip." This is a shameless bit of product placement and almost every time it's mentioned, the host or player works the fast food chain's slogan into the dialogue and says something like, "This would be a good time for him to have it his way with the Burger King Power Chip." When you play your B.K.P.C., you can discard any one card you've been dealt and get a new one in its place...a cute gimmick that, again, doesn't relate to anything one might encounter in a real Blackjack game. (In tonight's match, a player may have lost not because he played Blackjack poorly but because he didn't know how to use his Burger King Power Chip.)

There's still some nice suspense and moments when you can hear the wheels turning as good players compute their bets. But last year, I looked forward to the weekly installments and this year, I don't care much if I forget to set my TiVo. Maybe they'll learn from this before the 2007 games.

• Posted at 8:25 PM · LINK

Today's Political Thought

News sources say that George W. Bush will cast the first veto of his presidency if the Senate, as expected, passes legislation to expand federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research.

I don't get it. Why doesn't he just sign it and issue a signing statement saying it doesn't count?

• Posted at 2:46 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Got a good one for you this time. The funniest act I ever saw in Vegas — and maybe the funniest I've seen anywhere — was performed by a man named George Carl. Mr. Carl passed away in 2000 but for the fifty or so years preceding, he could be found on stages around the world doing his pantomime act. Johnny Carson called it "the funniest twenty minutes in show business" and that's about as good an endorsement as you could ever want.

What did Carl do for those twenty minutes? Well, he threw his hat in the air and caught it. He tried to play the harmonica. He struggled with a tray full of musical instruments. But mostly, he got tangled in the microphone cord.

When I saw him in Vegas in the eighties, he had honed this act to such perfection, it was like a fine ballet. He knew how to get a laugh every second he was on stage. In most cases, the rest of the show he was in featured spectacular-looking naked women but even the men in the audience were wishing there was less of the ladies and more of the sad-faced little man who couldn't work a microphone properly.

This clip runs a little more than four minutes and therefore can only give you a brief taste of what he did. Trust me: It got funnier and funnier, especially during his battle with the mike cord as things grew steadily more dysfunctional. He dropped it down his pants, he got the cord between his legs, he wrapped his face in it...he just kept surprising you with his every move. I wish I had a longer sample but you'll have to settle for just this much of the incomparable George Carl. If someone out there has any tape of his entire routine, please let me hear from you.

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK