The Doom That Came to Cowtown

It's not that I've been unaware of my upcoming participation in City Chase, it's just that every other time it's come up it hasn't taken up more than about 10% of available brain resources. I was either in the middle of a work problem, or daydreaming, or something.

"Want to do City Chase with me? It's in three weeks."
"Sure. Hey, is that a squirrel outside?"

Later.

"If we fundraise $50 we get perks during the race. [coworker] is doing it to and says he'll donate $50 to ours if we donate $50 to his. Can you do that? BTW, it's in two weeks."
"Sure". *does it* "Gosh Kate Beckinsale is attractive."

Later still.

"I've paid our registration and you took care of the donation, so that means you owe me X. Don't forget it's next Saturday."
"No problem, here's the money. I like pie."

Today.

"CITY CHASE IS TOMORROW?!? WHY DIDN'T ANYONE WARN ME!!!"

I am officially in an anxious panic. Not a bad anxious panic you understand - this is the same sort of thing I get before going a trip to somewhere I've never been, or before a race. Still, it's making me all jittery.

So a few things:

1. Lots of my coworkers are doing this too (there are six pairs) - I attribute this to one of my coworkers winning last year.
   
   
2. There are a handful of spots left if you want to come out. I hear it's a lot of fun. You like having fun don't you?
   
   
3. I might call you up and pump you for information.
   
   
4. Want to donate? I doubt it will make a big difference to my team's standings at this late date, but it will make a big difference to the people the charity helps! Do so here!

The team name? Grätüïtöüs Ümläüt of course!

It would be ridiculously easy to troll ontd_political if one were so inclined. Thankfully, while I'm 99 kinds of asshole, being a troll is not one of them.

Holy crap - my house is on Failblog!


Check out the comments they're evenly divided between "bad assumptions" and "that's some funny shit".

In case you're curious, it was a deliberate attempt to be funny, though I might rip the gate down if it gets in my way while mowing the lawn. Of course, my master plan is to have nosarious do the yard work this summer. If he's the one who submitted the photo, it'll be his just desserts.

Here's an entry from about 5-6 years ago showing the fence intact.

A bunch of us are chatting on the path between the two pieces of The Outlands party. The south bit was where you went to get bacon and the north part was where you went to get booze. They sensibly didn't put the booze and bacon together, because that would have caused collisions.

As it was, there were collisions, but these were caused by intentional douche-baggery.

Anyway, we were standing around chatting and some of us were trying to decide if we'd had enough carousing for the night. From behind us we here someone yelling "Make way! Make way for my lady!" I (and a bunch of other surprised people) are strong-armed aside so that this guy can make a clear path for his girlfriend, who doesn't seem to be aware of just how much force this guy is using. It's like he's a guy who's been to a handful of events showing the ropes to someone who's at her first event and is just seeing the surface of the SCA but gets none of the heart and soul of it.

As he pushes past me, he comes up to our Prince, who is now aware of what the guy is doing and decides he's had enough of it. Another Prince might have just given this guy a shake and told him to knock it off. Prince KK is a step above that.

KK subtly braces himself so when Douchy McBoyfriend tries to push past him he's actually deflected past him while KK stands like a chunk of granite. Douchy turns but KK is not facing him at all, he's already focused on the girlfriend. He turns on a 1000 watt smile and his voice drops an octave as he takes her hand and kisses it.

"Hello milady, please allow me to introduce myself - I'm KK, Prince of Avacal. And you are?"

She tells him her name, giggling at the attention.

"Well may I say that you are a vision of loveliness." He then goes on to flirt with her another few minutes while she blushes from the attention, no doubt concluding that this whole medieval-reenactment thing is nine kinds of awesome. Not even the Old-Spice guy could have handled the episode better.

Douchy McBoyfriend, upon hearing the words "I'm Prince" just let's it happen. He knows enough not to mess with a guy who got to his position by being an expert martial artist. The girlfriend returns to Douchy - the narrative for his night now irrevocably altered from a story where he gets laid to one where his girlfriend thinks Knights are dreamy. It could have been worse, but KK is a happily married man. Note: KK is not a knight yet, but I doubt she'd know that.

Police say they're trying to find a helmet-wearing gunman who robbed one of Las Vegas' most recognizable casinos of $1.5 million in casino chips Tuesday morning -- and may also have robbed a different casino last week.

Source

It wasn't me, I wasn't there, you can't prove anything. Plus, I don't know how to ride a motorcycle.

The first rule of gambling is to not bet anything you're unwilling to lose. Problem gamblers forget that, because the house edge will always get you eventually. This guy is gambling his freedom. The house edge is the entire Las Vegas establishment and law enforcement want this guy caught. Someone successfully robbing one of the most recognizable casinos on Earth is not the kind of PR that MGM Mirage wants. They're not really "out" any real money at this point, but they will move heaven and Earth to find this guy because they don't want a repeat.

Here is my wild-ass guessing about the case:

• The suspect is smarter than average. We know this because the heist shows good planning and preparation.
  
• He's not that smart - casino chips are not that liquid and high-end chips are almost impossible to use anonymously.
  
• He's probably desperate for quick cash, hence two robberies in two weeks.
  
• He's working alone. Too many potential failure points in his plan could have been removed with an extra set of hands.

Alternatively, he's a thrill-seeker who's not doing it for the money. This makes him more dangerous because he'll keep upping the ante.

The plan:

1. Make sure that a table close to an exit is in play.
   
2. Park the motorcycle at the valet stand.
   
3. Run into the casino wearing a full helmet.
   
4. Pull a gun on the table and grab their chips.
   
5. Hightail it out of the casino to the waiting motorcycle.
   
6. Drive away like all the demons of hell are right behind you.

The points where the plan can fail:

1. You can only do this if you've cased the place, which puts you on casino surveillance, either immediately before the heist, or at the same time of day. If the casino rotates which pits are in use during the slow times (like 3:30 am. on a Monday morning), the odds of one being near an exit are lowered.
   
2. And hope no one messes with your motorcycle.
   
3. Concealing your face in a casino is a pretty big "tell". Door and floor security plus the guys watching the monitors should all be paying attention at this point.
   
4. Casino policy is probably to just give an armed man whatever he wants. The risk here is some tough guy deciding to be a hero. This isn't real predictable. The pit boss should be tripping a silent alarm and the guys on the monitors should be aware of a robbery now if they weren't before. The police are being contacted.
   
5. If you watch the tapes of this guy, you'll see he's constantly craning his head on the way out - that helmet is now a liability because it keeps him from identifying peripheral threats. He's at greater risk to that random tough guy.
   
6. He's in shit if his bike isn't there or it's been disabled. If the bike is still there he's now in danger of getting in a chase with LVPD.

So here's a guy that planned and executed a heist. The heist seems likely to have been done by a lone individual who planned out as best he could how to do it by himself. He minimized but could not eliminate all the risk. The problem is the end-game - how do you spend $1.5M worth of chips? Remember, he doesn't have $1.5M in real money. High-end chips have RFID tags on them, so they can be identified. I'm not sure if all of the chips have RFIDs on them, but given the denominations were $1000 and up, I think it's likely (there's really no good reason for not IDing any casino chip worth more than the RFID tag itself).

Now just because a chip has an RFID (or equivalent) on it doesn't necessarily mean an alarm is going to go off as soon as you walk in the door. Maybe they only get scanned when security is bringing them in or out of a pit. If this is the case, you could (with decent timing) walk up to a roulette table and start playing with your naughty chips, which effectively launders some of them. Doing so in a way that doesn't raise behavioral flags to security is hard and would take a lot of patience. The robber's new "job" might be to walk into the casino every day with $1000 worth of dirty chips and lose his way down to $500 worth of clean chips. That's better then what I make, but I don't risk going to jail.

The casino can swap out the chips for ones of a different colour. This serves to visually identify them and keeps them out of play. Of course, there's always chips floating around in peoples' pockets, which allows the robber some leeway. OTOH it forces anyone with chips to cash them immediately rather then launder them by playing, effectively eliminating the "job" option above.

Even if the chips don't have some kind of unique identifier on them, I've been told it's rather hard to cash them if you can't prove you've been playing. Walk up to a cage with $5000 in chips and be prepared for the third degree if you can't immediately point at a pit and say "I've been playing blackjack there for the last two hours".

There are two other ways of converting chips to cash that don't involve the casino. The first is to use them in Las Vegas' underground economy. The second is to simply sell them to someone at a discount. Ten cents on the dollar is still a remarkable haul for armed robbery. The Bellagio greatly reduced the chances of this happening by publicizing that the chips are useless. Only the truly dumb or desperate are going to be buying discount Bellagio chips for awhile. And if someone where to offer them to you, you might start wondering if the Bellagio was offering any sort of reward.

It's possible the robber knows of a way to cash a large amount of chips that bypasses the scanners and the cages - if that's the case it's now a job with insider knowledge.

Here's how he's going to get caught:

He talks to someone. Loose lips sink ships and they sink criminals too. At some point he's either talked about his plan to someone (perhaps back when it was still idle speculation rather than anything concrete) or he's bragged about it. People remember conversations and they can tell the authorities.

Even if he doesn't talk, he needs to convert the chips to money, that exposes him to the casino or people who could report him to the authorities.

Maybe he was sloppy before the heist - If I were casino security I'd certainly be curious about people near the craps pit in the weeks prior to the robbery.

Maybe he never gets caught and has a story to tell his grand-kids about years after the statute of limitations runs out.

I saw Micmacs (original French title is "Micmacs à tire-larigot" which they tell me translates directly to "Non-stop Shenanigans"), Jean-Pierre Jeunet's latest confection. It was really good, but be warned that in the set of people likely to enjoy Micmacs, I'm damn near dead center.

The best description of it I've come up with is a cross between Amelie and Ocean's Eleven. If that doesn't make sense to you, know that it is a caper movie with a cast of goofy but lovable oddballs.

It has all the usual Jeunet-isms that we've come to expect: The aforementioned goofy characters (from his stable of character actors), weird colour schemes and character angles, scenes of ugly people having fun sex. Oh and it has Marie-Julie Baup, who is one of the most adorable looking women I've ever seen.

This reminds me that I have a Jeunet movie I haven't watched yet. I should do that when I get back into Cowtown.

Another movie I saw in Vancouver was Year of the Carnivore. This was a simple, classic tale: Girl gains boy, girl loses boy, girl gains boy again after having lots and lots of really akward sex.

It's written by Sook-Yin Lee and stars Cristin Milioti as Sally Smalls, the protagonist who works through a lot of hangups during the course of the movie, mostly to positive effects, though she does get humourously-arrived-at criminal charges.

I'm predisposed to enjoying the story of poorly-socialized nerds learning to have relationships - one reason why I liked Amelie - This mostly succeeds there, but does so with a guy I don't think deserved the protagonist. He was a bit of a jerk. Oh well, they can't all be perfect. Along the way are a bunch of sexual situations that are at times funny, and at times funny-in-that-squirmy-contact-embarrassment-way.

Between the two movies, I have to admit I've got a thing for petite and nerdy brunettes. This probably isn't news to anyone who knows me well.

Would I recommend YotC? Sure, maybe not as strongly as Micmacs, but it's still good. It's just not one for the ages.

garething asked, "How many archers does it take to change a light bulb?"

( Just me baby... Just me! )

I was chatting with a friend last night and we were lamenting the shrinking of the SCA. We concluded that the SCA's two main problems (and they're related) are the fact that the society is graying and money is becoming tighter. We need a new source of income that doesn't further strain the membership (because that will drive people away) and we need to appeal to younger folks.

I say we televise Crown heavy fighting tournaments.

Think about it: Crown tournaments have much the same appeal that professional wrestling does. There are colourful characters locked in combat. It could also appeal to the sort of people who watch the Olympics - there's a human dimension to crown tournaments that can be tapped into. These people are just regular folks when they're not at events, winning doesn't just give them a prize, it also ensures a lot of work.

The tournaments could be filmed with "period-ish" colour commentary and explanation. In between battles we could do short biopics on the competitors and inspirations. Other aspects of the SCA could be given sound-bites. Non-competitors could be interviewed. We could show footage of some of the larger wars, which might drive up attendance.

It would be a way of exposing the SCA to a much wider audience - an audience that contains many potential members. If it were to become popular enough for even a minor television station, it could become a major source of revenues.

For example, SCA Inc's total projected revenues for 2009 (the most recent I could find) was $1,144,176.00. The total expenditures is $1,174,565.96. I don't know what the budget for a show like American Gladiators was, but the SCA could potentially license it in the first year for whatever the deficit was (about -27.3K in 2009) to break even.

If the show got good enough ratings, they could renegotiate an increase in fees. If costs were kept down, they could invest the difference as a rainy-day fund.

But the biggest advantage isn't the initial money, it's attracting new people to the SCA. Some of those people will stick around and buy memberships. Most of these people will be younger then the current average.

There's lots of potential downsides: SCA combat might get a reputation similar to proffesional wrestling (not fake per se, because you can't fake a 60" bicep, nor can you fake holding a 300 pound guy over your head before slamming him to the matt - let us say a reputation for the outcomes to be predetermined).

There is also a potential that a lot of our best fighters might simply not participate because they're unwilling to be on TV. Alternately, we might get outsiders competing simply because they will be on TV.

Finally, it might simply flop. I would watch it, but I'm already in the SCA. We want people who've never heard of the SCA to watch it.

The hardest trick is to layer the additions needed to make it television-worthy on top of our existing combat, rather then stirring it in. You will never get buy-in from the powers-that-be unless they can ignore the additions. It's not that the additions need to invisible, just ignorable.

I think if one of the more populous Kingdoms were to try this (perhaps splitting royalties with the BoD), it would be a useful proof-of-concept test that wouldn't risk the rest of the society.

I heard an interesting factoid at lunch today. I don't know if it's true or not: The fish stocks off of the coast of Somalia are growing.

The theory is that Somali pirates are responsible. Nobody wants to fish in those waters (because they'll get their boat stolen) so the local fish have had ten years to replenish their numbers.

Meanwhile, off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the fish stocks are pretty much completely depleted. We tried curbing our own fishermen, but too much of the Grand Banks is in international waters, so there's nothing stopping Spain (for example) from perpetrating tragedy on our commons.

The Somalia situation does present us with a potential solution: We issue letters of marque to out-of-work Newfoundland fishermen.

This pleases me. Especially as I already own this. Now to find this and this.