Salocin

Scottish village called "Lost" to have its name changed due to roadsign confusion.

Student arrested for stealing electricity from train station by plugging in laptop.

Went to the Borgata casino and hotel in Atlantic City on Thursday evening for a friend's birthday party. It's a strange mix of overly ostentatious architecture, middle america losing it's pension money, and underpaid staff who clearly have the unenviable job of maintaining the illusion of luxury. It feels like a beautiful facade covering slapdash scaffolding, all for the purpose of maintaining the illusion that you and your $500 really can be millionaires for a day, if only you're willing to risk those $500 at worse-than-even odds.

I'm not a gambler, I really have absolutely no attraction to the sport, if you can call it that, but I do like to think about the statistics of the games, and there it gets quite complicated. You can be guaranteed, of course, that the house has calculated the odds to the hundredth decimal place, and so trying to replicate their math is a pointless exercise if you're a gambler: unless the house made a mistake, the game is in their favour whatever your actions, although you can bring the odds closer to even if you know what you're doing.

Nevertheless, people often walk out of casinos wealthier than they were when they arrived. The casinos combat this with loyalty programs.

I had the rules of craps explained to me by a friendly dealer. Didn't understand much, but by watching people play for a while you can get a feel for what's going on. I can understand the attraction of Craps, it's a complicated game where everybody can place a very wide variety of bets on the table, and the excitement around the table, during a run of luck, is quite engrossing.

I walked away from the gambling floor ~$15 poorer than I arrived: tips for the waitresses who brought me free drinks while I watched my friends play. The whole thing cost me half of the $140 cost of a hotel room plus a few drinks in a bar, and all in all it was a perfectly worthwhile night out. One of my friends has a propensity to complain eloquently when he doesn't get what he perceives to be the service he was promised, which resulted in our receiving a complimentary dinner for 4 - at 3:30am - which nicely dampened the morning after effects of the alcohol we had been drinking.

Woke up the next morning, looked out the window across the vast expanse of mud-coloured reclaimed land that makes up most of Atlantic City, and realized that the magic that holds the illusion together only works at night.

I have a very addictive personality, and can only be grateful that this doesn't seem to extend to gambling!

I've had a dorsal ganglion cyst on my right wrist, which has been there for years. It grows and shrinks unpredictably over time, but when it's large (as it is now), it completely blocks the movement of the wrist backwards, because all the little bones that need to move around and get out of each other's way as I bend my wrist backwards are blocked by this lump that takes up so much space.

It's not terribly ugly, and nobody really notices it, but it's much bigger than it looks when my wrist is unflexed, and if you poke around it it's really quite disturbing that something that big actually fits inside my wrist.

Anyway, it's been getting quite bad lately so I made an appointment next wednesday to see a doctor. They might just refer me to an orthopaedic surgeon, but I'm personally hoping they try aspiration, if only to give me a break from putting up with it for the past few months. I've got another one on my left wrist, but it went into hiding somewhere inside the wrist and apart from some slightly restricted movements, it doesn't bother me all that much at the moment.

On a related topic, Spring Break is only 8 days away, and involves going sailing in the Lesser Antilles (St. Lucia to Cariacou and back again in 8 days) with 15 friends on a pair of 40-foot catamarans, and I'd like to have full use of my hand then!

Man steals cellphone from police vehicle. Officer calls cellphone, arrests nearby moron.

Five for Fighting's new album, is a strong follow-up to John Ondrasik's previous release, the amazing America Town, which contained Superman, a track so popular with hollywood that it found its way into Smallville, Dawson's Creek and Bandits, and remains emotional to listen to despite this abuse.

While the album works well as a continuation of their rejuvenation of melodic soft rock, new influences become apparent in some of the tracks, with a slightly retro feel a few of the tunes, and some nods towards more mainstream rock bands in the blurred chords of tracks such as The Taste. The blockbuster song on this album that will undoubtedly be far too often compared to Superman from America Town is 100 Years, a beautifully melodic, piano-led tune that makes you want to stop breathing until it's over.

Although there was less for me personally on this album than on the last one, it's still a pearl and combining the last 3 albums, I can now burn myself a CD of my own personal America Town favourites which, as one-band track compilations go, rocks.

It's nice to know that amidst the furore of music piracy, lawsuits and all the shitty music these things protect, there are songwriters and musicians out there, such as this band, that are exercising their skills to produce tunes that defy the trend towards manufactured music. If you like these tracks, pay these guys the respect they deserve and buy the album.

The Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake bare breast scandal has the US in apoplectic fits. As a person with a French/Belgian background, I don't think the bared breast issue is much of a story (have you ever seen a French shampoo commercial?!), but the Great American Reaction has eclipsed even the candidature for the next Democratic candidate in terms of share of gossip - it's absolutely hysterical.

The BBC has an article which sums it up very nicely. What a country of contradictions.

Of particular humorous value is the quote from from baseball coach Tommy Lasorda. Although he was likely just having an opportunistic dig at American Football, I find it ridiculous that one second you're watching grown men wearing body armor doing their best to beat each other to a pulp, while risking serious bodily harm, but two seconds of bared breast results in the comment, "That was the most disgusting thing that I have ever seen at a sports spectacle". Not to mention that on a pay per view channel not three clicks away was the rampantly commercial "Lingerie Bowl" (which the members of my Superbowl party switched to briefly at regular intervals to see if anything of interest was happening, before eventually giving up on the whole thing).

Meanwhile, the same people who are furiously calling CBS to complain about the residual image of a Jackson breast that was indelibly burnt into their cornea, are watching commercials in which a guy throws a football through a rubber tyre to get you to buy a drug for erectile dysfunction, and no doubt hanging up on the CBS complaints department to place an order. Don't worry guys, it comes in a plain brown wrapper.

I'm going to be chuckling about this for a while.