The Biography Channel is rerunning the series, Breaking Vegas, which was a run of hour-long shows produced a few years ago for, I believe, The History Channel. Or maybe, since it rarely had Hitler in it, it was The Discovery Channel. Anyway, they did a little more than a dozen episodes that profiled people who came up with ways, legal or otherwise, to "beat the system" in the casinos.

The shows tell their story via a combination of conversations with the actual people involved and dramatizations featuring actors who portray those people. It's occasionally a little puzzling to switch between an interview with the real person and an interview of the actor playing him but for the most part, the form works. The dramatizations look like they were done on a budget of about eleven dollars, and that included catering. Someone seems to have made the decision not to bother with getting the period right…so even though an episode is set in 1961, the props and much of the background ambience is obviously current. They don't even use the right money. Because of the subject matter, there are a lot of shots of cash being counted out and fondled…and it's always in new bills that have the designs instituted in 1990. This is a minor distraction since the stories being told are often quite intriguing.

On Sunday, they're rerunning an episode called "Professor Blackjack," which is the story of Dr. Edward O. Thorp, the math prof who invented Card Counting. Any time you see a system of tracking the cards that are played in 21 and adjusting your wagers and game play based on which cards have already been played, that system is built on Doc Thorp's research and calculations. He did it with a computer but also with an awful lot of personal smarts.

In the early sixties, Thorp made a legendary assault on the casinos of Reno, Nevada. He was bankrolled by a wealthy gambler and businessman with, as they say, "mob connections." This man, who for years Thorp would only identify as "Mr. X," watched in both anger and delight as Thorp beat casino after casino…and each casino responded by ejecting him. They didn't toss him out for Card Counting. They didn't know what that was. They just knew the guy was winning at an unnatural rate and this, they could not allow.

The whole game of Blackjack changed forever that week…though not as much as some people expected. When word of Thorp's discovery got around, many in the gaming industry predicted that it was the end of Blackjack. They tried to make Card Counting more difficult and less potent by going to multiple decks but some assumed that it was just a matter of time before the Card Counters would be able to outsmart that system, and that the game itself would have to be withdrawn. This view was especially strong after Thorp published Beat the Dealer, the first book to ever explain Card Counting and how to do it. (The books is still in print and can be ordered here.)

They assumed that the casinos would be flooded by people who, like Thorp, could actually win most of the time. There were some but there were also a lot more who now thought they could…and couldn't. As it turned out, Thorp's system was the best thing that ever happened to the Blackjack business. The fact that he'd shown you could "Beat the Dealer" attracted so many more players to the game that it became more profitable than ever. For every one player who learned how to win, there were hundreds who either didn't bother to learn how to Card Count, or tried and didn't do it well, and those people lost more than enough money to make up for the occasional Ed Thorp. One prominent "insider" book on the casino business cited this as an example of something that gaming execs too often forget; that if you want people to play at all, they have to believe that the games are winnable. That means that from time to time, someone has to win.

Thorp's "Mr. X" died in 1986 and his identity finally became public knowledge. He was Manny Kimmel, one of the owners of the New York-based Kinney Parking Lot business. Historians of the comic book business will be intrigued at the connection. Kinney Parking Lots began diversifying in the late sixties and one of the businesses they acquired was one that owned Independent News (the largest distributor of magazines in the world) and DC Comics. Not long after, the corporation also bought Warner Brothers and after a few name changes and a lot more acquisitions and mergers, it all became the entity we now know as Time-Warner.

The "Professor Blackjack" episode of Breaking Vegas reruns on Sunday on The Biography Channel.

The worst thing some people can find to say about Barack Obama these days is that there's something wrong with his patriotism, as proven by the fact that he doesn't wear an American flag pin on his lapel. This is three notches below Ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with wearing one of those pins but a gesture that small should never be confused with actually doing something meaningful. It's like the folks who, after 9/11, spent three dollars for a plastic flag, stuck it on their cars and then acted like they'd made a substantive contribution to The War on Terror. Putting a flag on your car or your coat is just about the dictionary definition of The Least You Can Do.

Actually, I say there's nothing wrong with it but I have to admit that when I see one of those pins on someone's lapel, it makes me suspicious of their patriotism. The first thing I think of is how Richard Nixon's crew made a premeditated effort to equate the wearing of a flag pin with support for Richard Nixon. They were really selling the idea that being a good American and backing Nixon were one and the same thing, and the flag could therefore denote both. I thought it showed zero respect for the flag to use it to promote one person or party. The flag belongs equally to everyone.

And the second thing I think of is something my father told me. He worked (reluctantly) for the Internal Revenue Service and he dealt with a steady stream of very wealthy people who were doing everything in their power — much of it quite illegal — to not pay anything resembling their fair share of taxes to the government. This was during the Vietnam Era and some of these were prominent men who were quite vocal that the U.S. had to spend every nickel necessary to build every conceivable weapon with which to defeat the Dirty Commies…but God Forbid it should be their nickels. Every one of these people, he said, had an American flag in their lapel and thought that the mere wearing of it made them a Good American.

Is Barack Obama a Good American? He's just like anyone else. If he genuinely defends the Constitution and the principles on which this nation was founded and is willing to sacrifice for those principles then he's a good American, regardless of what's in his buttonhole. And if he works against those principles, he's not…and it wouldn't matter if he had a flag, the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, Plymouth Rock and John Wayne on his lapel.

This morning, we can't do any better than offer you around six minutes of Wenceslao Moreno, better known to all as the great ventriloquist, Señor Wences. When I was a kid, I loved watching him perform. I never understood what he was doing or even what he was saying…but you could just tell he did it with enormous skill. Whatever it was.

Fred Kaplan reports on the departure of General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the last Rumsfeld loyalist in the upper echelon of our military. When supporters of the war allude to mistakes that have been made the last few years in that effort, they're usually talking about something Pace did or fervently endorsed.

I've received a number of questions about the possible (probable, I think) Writers Guild strike. I'll try and answer them all here over the next few days, starting with this one from Al D'Abruzzo…

What kind of solidarity do you think the WGA will have this time if it strikes? It seems to me that in the past, WGA strikes have been a circular firing squad where the companies didn't have to break the union's will. They could count on the union doing that.

Yes and no. In the 1985 strike, the looming issue was payment for home video sales of our work and it got ugly. In an earlier contract, we'd made a terrific deal in the then-new area of video cassettes. It was so good that the Producers had decided to not honor it and to suggest the terms of that deal were actually different from what had been agreed to on paper. When the WGA threatened to go to court, the AMPTP said, in effect, "No, let's just address the matter in the '85 contract negotiations." So their big proposal in that contract was that we would agree to accept their new interpretation of the earlier home video deal instead of standing by its terms as written and suing to enforce them.

We had a faction within the Guild that insisted that there would never be any "real" money in that arena — or if so, it would only be for the guys who wrote the biggest hit movies, not for 98% of the WGA. Their argument was that it would be foolish and maybe immoral for the entire Guild to go on strike over that issue. This view was held by nowhere near a majority but its advocates were numerous enough (and loud enough) to rupture WGA solidarity and to convince the Producers that if they just sat tight on the core of their rotten "final offer" — improving it only in slight, meaningless ways — we'd eventually fold and take it. Which we did. Our leadership that year, I'm afraid, gave off the aura of not knowing what the hell they were doing so a lot of writers who wanted to fight this one to the death reluctantly threw in the terrycloth.

In hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that by giving up the old home video agreement and accepting the Producers' redefinition of it, the WGA made one of the rottenest deals in the history of rotten deals. Many who were in that no-strike mob today swear they never held the positions that I recall them holding in '85 and I think some of them even believe it. It's kind of like, "Who me? Oh no, I never thought home video would be a passing fad. You must have me confused with some other short-sighted, foolish writer."

Almost as bad as the money and clout we lost with that giveback was that we set ourselves up for a disaster with the next contract, which was in 1988. As I mentioned in an earlier message, one of the problems we have in dealing with the AMPTP is that they have an enormous problem improving their own offers. It's an alliance of all the big studios — Sony, Time Warner, Disney, etc. — and if they come in way too low, it can take them months to agree among themselves on a meaningful increase — plus, of course, they don't like to create the precedent of not sticking with a lowball offer. In '88, they more or less repeated their winning strategy of '85, which was to refuse to address our demands at all. Instead, only minutes before the old deal expired, they handed up their "first, final and only" offer, which was a mess of rollbacks and lowered minimums, and we had two choices: Accept it or go on strike.

That year, the Producers expected a strike and, of course, got one. But where they were wrong was that they predicted we'd crater in a week or two, as we had in '85. We'd start bickering again, they figured. Then they could come in and make some minor, pre-planned improvements in the deal, raising it from Really, Really Terrible to merely Really Terrible…and we'd grab it. Where they'd miscalculated — and the reason we had a five-month strike that year — was that they hadn't realized that the WGA of 1988 was not the WGA of 1985. We had smarter, saner leadership and we also had a lot of members who'd learned from '85 and were determined not to make that mistake again.

So we held out. The Producers were stuck with an unacceptable offer out on the table — one I'm sure they soon wished had been higher because they lost an awful lot of money as a result of that strike. They ultimately lost a lot more than they'd expected to make off their proposed rollbacks. It was rough on us too but it also wasn't like we had a lot of options. If we'd taken that lousy offer, not only would we have lost even more but the Producers would have just come back three years later with yet another crummy offer that presumed we'd surrender easily. If you're not going to get reamed in a negotiation, you at some point have to convince the other side that you can and will walk, rather than take a bad deal. 1988 was when we proved that and I'm convinced it's the reason there hasn't been a WGA strike since.

Currently in Hollywood, there's a "buzz" among all the major unions. In the seventies, there was a similar buzz that the new markets of cable TV and home video were opening up and that there had to be a meaningful way to compensate the folks who make the product — not just writers, directors and actors but other unions, as well — in that new financial environment. These days, the "buzz" says it's past time for deals that cover the many new markets that are emerging, plus a fairer share on DVDs and whatever come along soon to replace them. (New formats are coming, of course. As we all know, the whole premise of home video is to see how many times they can get me to buy Goldfinger.)

I don't think anyone in the industry thinks that kind of sharing can be denied forever…but if it can be delayed until the next round of contracts or the one after, that's a few billion the studios can save. Ultimately, that's all this is about and unfortunately, it's a powerful incentive for the Producers to try the old lowball strategy again. If they can hold us down, they can hold the actors and directors and the many craft unions down, at least for a few more years. I sure hope the Producers don't make the same mistake they made in '88…because I don't think we're going to make the same one we made in '85.

Richard Goldwater, President and Co-Publisher of Archie Comics, died last Tuesday. He was the son of John Goldwater who, together with partners Louis Silberkleit and Maurice Coyne, formed the company now known as Archie in the late thirties. (The firm was originally called MLJ Publications with those letters standing for Maurice, Louis and John. Archie Andrews debuted in 1941 and soon became so popular that the whole company was renamed in his honor.)

In the grand tradition of nepotism that ruled almost every comic book company from the forties through the sixties, Richard Goldwater went to work for his father's company around 1950, focusing primarily on editorial content. He was 14 or 15 years old at the time and by 1957, he'd assumed real editorial duties. In much the same way, Michael Silberkleit (son of Louis) joined the firm but he was more interested in the business end of things. In the early eighties, Richard Goldwater and Michael Silberkleit formally purchased Archie Comics, Inc. from their fathers, the interests of the Coyne family having been acquired some time earlier. Richard soon handed the main editor job to Victor Gorelick but remained involved in creative decisions.

I'm afraid I don't know a lot more than that about Richard Goldwater. I presume the company will put out some sort of obit/press release and that they'll have better information than I do and more of it. I'll post a link whenever there's something to link to.

From the Washington Post…

U.S. military reports from the scene of the Sept. 16 shooting incident involving the security firm Blackwater USA indicate that its guards opened fire without provocation and used excessive force against Iraqi civilians, according to a senior U.S. military official.

The reports came to light as an Interior Ministry official and five eyewitnesses described a second deadly shooting minutes after the incident in Nisoor Square. The same Blackwater security guards, after driving about 150 yards away from the square, fired into a crush of cars, killing one person and injuring two, the Iraqi official said.

Yeah, but they really hate us for our freedoms.

Luke Foster wrote a nice article about our silly comic book, Groo the Wanderer. Some of you might want to give it a read.

This was one of those "goose flesh" television moments for me…the opening ceremony for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. As usual, a relay race of athletes carries the torch to the stadium and the organizers try to pick someone special to take the final handoff and light the cauldron that signifies the commencement of the competition. This clip runs a little over eight minutes and if you don't know who the final torch handler was, do yourself a favor. Take the time to watch the whole clip — that's Dick Enberg and Bob Costas narrating, I believe — and see if the finale doesn't give you a wonderful little tingle. It does that for me every time I watch it.

Two reporters from the McClatchy newspaper group fact check George W. Bush's statements about his veto regarding the State Children's Health Insurance Program. I don't know if Bush is lying or just misinformed but neither reflects well on the guy.

Finally solved my computer network problem. After trying 7,378 other possible solutions, I found the right one. I installed a piece of software two weeks ago and its makers don't tell you that it has an unadvertised networking component that runs continuously in the background and is of no use whatsoever to me. I found a website where someone divulged the tip-top secret method of uninstalling it and when I uninstalled it, my computers suddenly began speaking directly to each other. Whew.

I have to tell you: I'm getting really sick of software that adds in all sorts of extra, surprise components. Anyone here install the current Nero Burning Rom? Or the software that comes with new Hewlett-Packard printers? I just want the thing I bought to work, people. I don't need your bonus image library software or your desktop (or Yahoo Desktop or Google Desktop) or your search engine or — especially — your memory resident networking and updater software. At the very least, you could tell us about these things before we innocently slap them onto our C Drives.

As you may have heard, there's a movie coming out this Christmas based on the musical play by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. That's great timing because when I think of Christmas, I immediately think of a serial killer slashing throats. Johnny Depp has the title role and Tim Burton directed and though I like (not love) the stage version, I find myself curiously unexcited about the film.

That may change but it isn't changed by a two and a half minute trailer which can be viewed here. You can also view it via the film's website where you can also download Sweeney Todd wallpaper and Sweeney Todd buddy icons. And aren't there enough sickos prowling our chat rooms without people identifying themselves via Sweeney Todd buddy icons?

The trailer, as you'll see, does its best to hide the fact that this is a musical. There's very little singing, no mention of Broadway and even Evelyn Wood couldn't read fast enough to see Mr. Sondheim's name. It will be interesting to see if the marketing folks maintain this approach as they get closer to the release date.

I'm also curious if Sondheim has written any new tunes for the film, particularly with an eye on the Academy Awards. As you may know, it is not uncommon when a musical is adapted to the screen for new songs to be added. The old songs are not eligible for the Best Song Oscar but a new one is. Sometimes, a composer who'd like to win one will make that a condition of the sale; that he must be engaged to write a couple of new ones so he can maybe score a statuette. Sometimes, the producers want it because they think it a new song or two will enhance their soundtrack sales and also, of course, a Best Song Oscar wouldn't hurt the film's box office. And sometimes, of course, new tunes are introduced for creative reasons.

This is why you got "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space" in the film version of Little Shop of Horrors. It's why Marion the Librarian sings "Being in Love" instead of "My White Knight" in the movie of The Music Man and why Adelaide sings "Pet Me, Poppa" instead of "A Bushel and a Peck" in the film version of Guys and Dolls. It's why the film version of A Chorus Line, along with doing almost everything else wrong, replaced "The Music and the Mirror" with "Let Me Dance For You" and it's why Dolly Parton wrote new songs for Best Little Whorehouse in Texas even though she didn't write the show when it was a stage musical.

One might note that when a stage song is replaced by a new song, the new song is inevitably inferior and it usually doesn't win an Oscar. ("Mean Green Mother" is probably the best of the ones mentioned in the above paragraph…and I don't think it's insignificant that it didn't replace a song in the original show. It was just an add-in.) If anyone can improve on a Sondheim score though, it's Sondheim. It'll be interesting to see if he tried.

Recently, for no visible reason, one of my computers decided to stop talking to another of my computers. I have three here and they're all networked. C can connect to A and B. B can connect to A and C. A can connect to C but cannot connect to B. When I attempt this, I get a message that says it is not accessible and adds, "You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions." Since I am the administator of it all, I have no idea what to ask myself or how to answer me.

But it's weirder than that. I have a program called Network Magic installed on my computers. It's a utility that comes with DLink routers and it monitors your network and allows you to tinker with settings, and you can even network your computers through Network Magic. A can connect to B that way but not via the standard Microsoft Windows Network. This would make everything fine except that I can't run my sync/backup utilities through the Network Magic network. They only run through the Microsoft Windows Network where A can't connect to B.

Last evening, a gent who knows more about computers than I will ever know was here for four hours, tinkering and trying to make things right. I was disappointed that he couldn't fix things but I also had that quirky bit of pride that he didn't do any better at solving the problem than I had.

I spent another hour or two this morning, playing with settings and trying odd things. I'm down to, "Well, there's no earthly reason why this should make a difference but I'll try it anyway." And now, I'm going to make a concerted effort to forget about it for a while and turn my attention to deadlines and work that must be done. That may be the hardest part.

We all have old commercials that resonate in our heads for a long, long time. This was one of my faves for many years…

Today, George W. Bush vetoed a (sorta) bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children's health insurance. It's okay to spend money we don't have for the Iraq War, even if billions of those dollars disappear mysteriously or go into corporate pockets without actually aiding the war effort. But trying to improve health care for sick kids? Well, we can't have that.

I don't think anything has lowered my opinion of Bush more than a "let them eat cake" statement he made not long ago at an appearance in Cleveland…

The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.

…spoken like a rich guy who has never had to rely on an emergency room and never will. As if our emergency rooms weren't already flooded with sick folks…or as if going to an emergency room and not paying the bill because you can't afford it is a workable alternative to real medical care. You wonder if before Bush signed the veto forms, he paused to realize that because of his actions, a certain number of children whose deaths could be prevented would die. Probably not.