Click on the title for a link to a hilarious video from the BBC. I thought the Japanese were descended from brave Samurai warriors...not this lot, I'm afraid.
I have just learnt of this great tale:
Paul Michael Larson (May 10, 1949 – February 16, 1999) was a contestant on the United States television game show Press Your Luck. Larson's claim to fame was his winning $110,237 in cash and prizes, which he was able to do by memorizing the patterns used on the Press Your Luck game board.
Through a careful study of the "random" movements of the 18-square "Big Board" on the CBS game show Press Your Luck, Larson was able to determine that there were only five patterns used to determine the movements of the spinner used to award money on the show. He was able to discover this by using a VCR to pause a recorded episode of the game, and proceed frame by frame to learn the patterns. Armed with this knowledge, he found that it would be theoretically possible to go on the game show, watch the patterns carefully, and hit squares containing money consistently.
Larson arrived in Hollywood from Lebanon, Ohio for a contestant tryout on Press Your Luck, having virtually no money to his name and using most of what he had to make the trip. In his tryout interview, he described himself as unemployed, but an ice cream truck driver during the summer season, who wanted to be a contestant on the show.
Early on in the second round, perhaps due to nerves or inexperience, Larson's pattern play was irregular. On four of his first eleven spins, Larson stopped the board at a point not called for by his patterns; but luckily, he avoided the Whammy all four times.
Then his play became deadly accurate. A player stopping the Press Your Luck board randomly would expect to hit a Whammy approximately once in each six spins. By contrast, in this second round alone, Larson took over forty spins without a Whammy. On thirty consecutive spins, his pattern play was perfect.
Finally, Larson reached $102,851, and he passed his remaining four spins. The main reason for this is because he was beginning to tire from such strenuous concentration. When the game was over, and Michael had won $110,237; of this $104,950 was cash.
While Larson was running up the score, the producers contacted Michael Brockman, head of CBS's daytime programming department. In a 1994 TV Guide interview commemorating the Larson Sweep, conducted at the time the movie Quiz Show was released, he recalled "Something was very wrong. Here was this guy from nowhere, and he was hitting the bonus box every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you. And we couldn't stop this guy. He kept going around the board and hitting that box." Brockman contacted CBS lawyers to prove that he had cheated, but they failed.
When he threatened a lawsuit of his own, CBS finally gave in and awarded him his money. Because he had surpassed the CBS winnings cap (at the time) of $25,000, he was not allowed to return for the next show.
Part of his winnings went to taxes and parts of his winnings were invested in real estate, with the remainder left in the bank. The real estate deal turned out to be a fraudulent ponzi scheme and Larson lost his investment entirely. Larson then learned about a get-rich-quick scheme involving matching a one dollar bill's serial number with a random number read out on a local radio game show that promised a $30,000 jackpot. Larson withdrew his remaining gameshow winnings in one dollar bills in hopes of winning the contest. He would examine each dollar carefully and upon discovering that he did not have the winning number, would place all the money back in his account, only to withdraw it again the next day and repeat the process all over again. Larson's wife at the time stated that this obsession consumed him.
Approximately USD $40,000-50,000 in the remaining cash was stolen from Larson and his common-law wife Teresa Dinwitty while the two attended a Christmas party shortly after giving up on the radio contest, according to a Game Show Network special. Larson and Dinwitty split up soon after.
Larson fell victim to head and neck cancer in 1999 and died while on the run from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Above is the extraordinary Larson episode. It is split in to 5 parts on youtube, above is part 2 which when things just start to get going.
Michael Larson: I salute you.
When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' backsides. So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.
So the conference season is over. The politicians are heading back to Westminster and the people of Birmingham and Manchester can rejoice that the streets of their cities are no longer thronging with politicians. Good news for them. Even better news for us is that we will no longer have to listen or watch journalists asking 'people in the street' what they think.
I'll be blunt. The more I watch 'people in the street' being asked their opinion about anything, I realise that I don't give a flying fuck what your average Joe thinks and that the curse of modern communications is that everyone now has a voice. For a horrifying example of the rubbish that people spout, try any of the threads on the BBC's 'Have Your Say'. It's so awful and so overpopulated by (genuine) Nazis that it should be renamed 'Have Your Say Before You Take Your Tranquilizers'. Am I being hypocritical? I don't think so - sure, this blog is a voice for me and my fellow writers but the reader at least has the chance to stop reading, close the window and rejoice that they never have to read the Last Turkey again.
On the radio and TV it's different. Both the BBC and ITV news programmes last night had panels of mindless, moronic undecided voters telling us what they though of the leaders' speeches. And guess what? They came out with exactly the mindless, moronic, clueless, naive and hopelessly stupid sort of trash that you would expect. One woman on ITV said that the current financial mess was 'the Tories' fault' but not in a way that she thought that the free market approach championed by Keith Joseph and Enich Powell and adopted by Margaret Thatcher was responsible for the banks' behaviour (and for which it is perfectly possible to frame an argument) but in a way that suggested she read the Daily Mirror because the Guardian has too many long words in their articles.
No, enough, I say. Time for the media to realise both on the TV and on the internet that allowing vacuous marons with too much time on their hands to comment about things they simply don't understand is dangerous. If people want to comment they can set up their own blogs, TV stations and radio shows. Until then, please, they should leave it the professionals.
This morning I received a phone call from a gorgeous ex-girlfriend who called 'out-of-the-blue' to see if I was still around. We lost track of time, chatting about the wild, romantic times we used to enjoy together.
I couldn't believe it when she asked if I'd be interested in meeting up and rekindling a little of that 'old magic.' I was flabbergasted.
'I don't know if I could keep pace with you now,' I said, 'I'm a bit older and a bit greyer and balder than when you last saw me. Plus I don't really have the energy I used to have.'
She just giggled and said she was sure I would 'rise to the challenge' 'Yeah.' I said. 'Just so long as you don't mind a man with a waistline that's a few inches wider these days! Not to mention my lack of muscle tone...stuff sagging, my teeth not as white and jowls like a Great Dane!
She laughed and told me to stop being so silly.
She teased me, saying that tubby, grey-haired, older men were cute, and she was sure I would still be a great lover. Then she giggled, 'I've put on quite a bit of weight myself!'
So I told her to f*ck off
This what google used to look like, back in the day... ahh, the memories. Actually, it was a bit crap.
Here are some stats on hits between 2001 and 2008, do your own - it's fun!
Search "sex"
2001 - 14,900,000
2008 - 799,000,000
Search "Facebook"
2001 - 1,810
2008 - 506,000,000
Search "Osama Bin Laden"
2001 - 44,400
2008 - 10,900,000
Search "Barack Obama"
2001 - 672
2008 - 65,000,000
Search "James Edmondson"
2001 - 783
2008 - 7,280
Search "The last turkey"
2001 - 355
2008 - 14,900
A few weeks ago this ingenious little idea was going round a few sites. With the MTV awards coming up, one of the categories is "Best act ever", and the public could vote for the likes of U2, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera or you could nominate your own singer/band.
Well, some clever chap worked out how to make your nomination vote be counted over and over and over again, just by leaving your browser open. The idea was to get Rick Astley voted as The Greatest Act Ever! Well, I did it and my vote was counted in the region of 100 times. Some people were leaving it on all day.
I assumed MTV would twig and so thought nothing else of it. How wrong was I? It actually worked! It seems Rick Astley is now up for greatest act ever!! Brilliant. Nothing like ruining an awards ceremony.
I guess no foul play has been done either as it clearly states on the MTV site that you can vote as many times as you like.
This is the final word on Sarah Palin. Nothing more needs to be said or done. She is unfit for office. Hell, she shouldn't even be allowed out in public.