Monthly Archives: October 2011

Not all that far from where I live is the coffee-shop-that-isn't-a-coffee-shop. It's called Johnie's and up until around 2000, it was just your average place to go and get a sandwich, a piece of pie and a cuppa joe. Once upon a time before that, it did a lot of business but that was long ago and far away. That area once housed some of the city's largest department stores and I would guess that their demise, as the trend in retailing moved towards malls in other locales, was why commerce at Johnie's declined.

At the turn of the century, the place was sold to the company that operates the 99-Cent Store chain. They acquired it, I guess, because it was a prime hunk of real estate even if it wasn't a profitable place to have a coffee shop. The chain owns a lot of land in that area. There are actually two 99-Cent Stores within a two block area and I keep waiting for them to have a price war. I'm imagining one becoming a 98-Cent Store and then the other one parries by becoming a 97-Cent Store and so on…

Since the new owners took over, Johnie's is no longer a coffee shop. It's a filming location. The article I'm about to link to probably underestimates how often it's used for that. I drive by it maybe four times a week and I'd say that at least one out of every four times, I see trucks and trailers and cameras filling its parking lot. Someone is shooting a movie or a TV show or perhaps a commercial there. It obviously makes a lot more money in that capacity than if it was still selling patty melts. (Not far from it there used to be a gas station that operated in the same way. It had stopped being a place to fill one's tank and instead was a location for movies and TV programs that needed to shoot a scene at a gas station. Its pumps had been painted to reflect an imaginary brand name.)

Here is the article I just mentioned. As it explains, a movie museum is going in across the street and some are wondering and maybe worried about what it means for Johnie's. I'm guessing it won't change anything but you never know. It could increase business in that area enough that Johnie's will go back to serving meals. That would be a shame because it's a great location to film but it always had really lousy food.

[This the second of I-don't-know-how-many posts about my days of playing semi-serious Blackjack in Nevada casinos. If you want to read the first part, it's over here.]

You're not a real Blackjack player until you get thrown out of a casino. I wasn't so much thrown as gently tossed…and the odd part was I hadn't done anything.

The casino was the Las Vegas Club downtown. This would have been around 1985 or so. At the time, I was wearing a big, clunky Casio watch (I think it was a Casio) that did all sorts of things a watch hadn't done before and didn't really need to do. It had an utterly impractical calculator on it. It had a timer and several highly musical alarms. It had the capacity to store around 50 phone numbers. I wore that thing for about a year and at no point did any of that come in handy. The calculator was confusing and hard to operate because its buttons were so tiny.

The timers were even harder. I'd set an alarm to go off at 5 PM and find out unceremoniously in the middle of the night that I'd set it for 5 AM. And it took forever to program each phone number in.

The real uselessness of the phone book feature was underscored if one asked the question, "Which fifty numbers do you put into it?" If I put in the 50 I most often called…well, I knew all those numbers by heart. I didn't need to scroll through them all on the watch, which was a very slow process. But if I put in fifty I didn't have chiseled into my memory…well, those were fifty numbers I almost never needed to call. Still, the watch seemed cool at the time so I wore it for a few months.

So I was playing double-deck at the Las Vegas Club and I was winning. I was counting cards so I had an advantage…enough to put me six hundred dollars up, which was about how much I'd just dropped at Binion's Horseshoe next door. We came to a moment when the dealer shuffled, which meant that I had no advantage. At the point of shuffle, the "count" starts over and the odds of me winning are exactly the same as they are if I'm not counting.

The hand just before the shuffle, the deck was quite favorable to me so I'd wagered $100, which was a big bet for me at the time. When the dealer shuffled, I was afraid to pull it back because it might flag me as a counter. That's one of the ways they identify counters: Counters want to lower high bets after a shuffle.

I decided to let it ride and was glad I did when the dealer dealt me a Blackjack. Then the person sitting to my left was dealt a Blackjack. Then the person sitting to her left was dealt a Blackjack. Then the person sitting to his left was dealt two face cards and the person sitting to his left was dealt a Blackjack. Five players, five winning hands (the dealer busted out) and four Blackjacks, which paid 3-to-2. Not mathematically impossible at all, of course, but it did look very unusual. We and a few folks watching all let out a whoop! and the pit boss came scurrying over to see what the whoop! was all about.

He looked and something looked very fishy to him. Fishier than a mermaid from the waist down.

Now, if you know Blackjack, you know there was no conceivable way a counter could have known this was coming…and if I had, I'd have bet a lot more than a hundred bucks. There was also no conceivable way a cheater could have made this happen; not unless he'd somehow bribed the dealer to stack the deck. And if you did figure out some way to force the dealer to deal mostly Blackjacks, you wouldn't do it with bets ranging from $20 to $100, which was what we had out there. You'd head immediately for the High Stakes tables.

Still, the pit boss looked at all those Blackjacks out there laughing at The House and you could see a thought flashing neon behind his retinas: Something is wrong here! I don't know what but I'd better do something! His eyes fell on the watch I was wearing and he ordered the dealer to pay off the bets, then close the table.

All the players took their winnings, shrugged and headed for other tables. I tried to do that but the pit boss grabbed me by the wrist just below the watchband and said, "All tables here are closed to you." I asked why and I reminded him that the cards had just been shuffled. I also told him to take his hand off me.

He doggedly repeated, "All tables here are closed to you." Then he pointed to the watch and said, "Especially on account of that watch."

I said, "It has a calculator and a phone book on it, plus a little alarm that plays 'Happy Birthday' on your birthday. Here…you can examine it." I started to take it off but he stopped me. He said, "I don't have to explain nothin' to you," then he pulled a card out of his pocket and I could see it was the Nevada Trespass Act. Once you are read that, you are formally on notice that you are being ejected from the premises and you're subject to arrest if you don't go promptly. I told him to save his breath and I headed for the cashier to turn my chips into cash.

On my way out, a slightly over-the-hill showgirl who was passing out coupons outside offered me one to get me to return to the Las Vegas Club. I've never been back, not because I fear arrest and not because I hold a grudge. I just figured that if I do go back there, I might lose. If I don't, I will always be $750 ahead on that casino…and that's a healthy kind of revenge.

That was one of the only two times I ever got into trouble playing Blackjack. The other was the time in Laughlin when I was briefly suspected of having printed the money I was betting. I'll tell you about that next time I write one of these.

Many folks inform me that the reason Penn Jillette may not be tweeting these days is that he's in New York taping his participation in the next season of Celebrity Apprentice. Do they not let those people tweet about matters, even those unrelated to the show? Perhaps.

In any case, I don't believe Penn & Teller are splitting up. I'm just kinda curious what it is that caused Robin Leach to leap to that conclusion.

Robin Leach is reporting in a Las Vegas newspaper that Penn & Teller have split up and he likens the news to the divorce between Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Teller responded by tweeting…

Robin Leach certainly knows how to generate a misleading headline. P&T are NOT splitting up. You heard it here first.

Penn, who usually tweets umpteen times a day is on a mysterious hiatus from it. A few days ago, he posted…

Fixing to get ready to disappear into NYC until sometime into November. I won't be writing tweets or reading twitter. But, I'll be back.

So it sounds like something's changing about their working relationship but that it doesn't quite fit the definition of the two of them "splitting up." One assumes that if nothing had changed, Teller would not have said it was a "misleading headline." He would have said the entire article was a total lie. We shall see.

I've written here in the past (here, for instance) about a great product called Jennie-O Turkey Pot Roast. This is a quick entree you keep in your refrigerator until the moment when you suddenly need to have a real dinner in a hurry. Then you pop one in the microwave…and fifteen minutes later, you have a steaming, delicious tub of moist dark meat turkey — and it's not just one meal. One package will last me for days.

I have also written here of my struggles to procure this product. For a long time, I got them at local Costcos. Then Costco stopped carrying them in my region…but fortunately, they turned up at the Fresh & Easy market chain. Then Fresh & Easy stopped carrying them. I spent many hours on the phone to both chains and to the Jennie-O people to try and figure out where, if anywhere, I could get more. One person at Fresh & Easy's corporate offices told me that what I craved was now a discontinued item that would probably never again be found in the refrigerator case of any Fresh & Easy store.

She was wrong. A few weeks ago, I made friends-over-the-phone with a high-ranking exec at the Jennie-O company and this much-smarter lady explained to me that production on this product, which had lessened for the summer months, was back full force. Apparently, it doesn't sell as well in summer so many stores don't carry it. But, she said, I would find them by this week in the Fresh & Easy stores…and sure enough, last night I scored four of them (about a month's supply) at one out in the valley. They should be back in some Costcos any day now, too.

Yay. If you haven't tried this product, you might want to give it a go. Some people use it like turkey carnitas and fold the meat into other, more ambitious recipes. I just put a glumph of dark meat turkey on a plate and have it with a side of rice or corn or something. A glumph, by the way, is more turkey than a splunge but not as much as a woomph. By any measure, it's a great and convenient meal.