Fred and Valerie

I finished Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House last night, just six days after starting it. To say this non-fiction tale of a group of MIT students who take Vegas casinos for millions is a page-turner would be a huge understatement.

Starting with Kevin Lewis’s introduction to the MIT card counting team and weaving his way through stories of trips to Vegas, Chicago, and many other gambling locations, Mezrich keeps the reader contstantly wondering what’s next for the team. With insights into exactly how the MIT team pulled off their card counting scheme, the book reads like something from a movie script.

Speaking of movies, there is a movie, called “21: Bringing Down the House” that is based on the book. Unfortunately, I’m not likely to ever see it. I had heard that the movie was VERY loosely based on the book and after having seen the trailer from the link above, it’s way too loosely based. Here are some of the obvious problems with the movie that I gleened from just a 2:40 trailer:

• Too many white people. One of the keys to the success of the MIT card counting team was the fact that they all had some sort of ethnicity to them, be it Asian, Middle Eastern, or other. In fact, there were only two white members of the team and they were not the main faces of the team. This was important in that it played up stereotypes of these ethnic groups such that pit bosses never suspected them of card counting for quite some time.
• Kevin Lewis didn’t play for tuition money. He played for money. He never had a set plan that he lost sight of regarding when to get out of card counting.
• The woman crossing her arms and looking over her shoulder NEVER would have happened with the real MIT team. The MIT team went to great lengths to seem as if they didn’t know one another. Doing what the woman does in the movie would have gotten them caught in no time.
• Kevin Lewis never got “backroomed” in the book.
• Kevin Spacey plays the group leader in the movie. This can be taken as one of two roles from the book: Micky or Fisher. Mostly likely Micky, given his role at the start of the trailer as the head honcho. Micky was the investor who provided the money and guidance to the MIT team and never threatened Kevin Lewis the way Spacey does in the trailer. He also had a very clear role that Lewis was fine with.
• Kevin Lewis never takes over the card counting team until a big split of the team that ends with Lewis having a smaller, more relaxed-approach team. It was Lewis’s counterpart, Fisher, who had the ideas that seem to get played out in the movie.

It seems the only true things the book and movie have in common is that they’re both based on Blackjack and MIT card counting. It’s such a shame because the book completely reads like a movie script. There’s no reason they couldn’t take what was already written and turn it into a great, intriguing movie. Leave it to Hollywood to screw it up.

Next Up: Hannibal Rising (time for a bit of fiction)

With the 0.40 inches of rain we got on July 13-14, I was really hoping that plantlife in our area might start to turn back from brown to green.

Unfortunately, we’ve hit another dry spell and haven’t had any rain since the early morning of the 14th. Because of that, the grass and weeds are dying off again and the area is taking on that shade of brown that begs for some Summer showers.

There’s a 20% chance of storms tonight, which means we’ll likely get nothing, and then a 40% chance of rain on Tuesday and Wednesday. We’ll see if we get any of it and if the area can hold off the brown of Fall for a few more weeks.

A few minutes ago, I finished reading Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. It was entirely my fault that it took me so long to read the book for when I was able to devote time to it, I was thoroughly hooked and turning pages quickly.

In 1900, when the nation’s Weather Bureau was still finding it’s foothold, a hurrican developed in the Atlantic Ocean and made its way past Cuba and into the Gulf of Mexico. The Bureau’s reputation was constantly in question at this time and so the heads of the office took great care to minimize the fear they could cause with false warnings. Because of that, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 went into the record books as the deadliest hurricane in history, claming an estimated 6,000 – 12,000 lives.

This book tells the story of the impending hurricane, the mistakes that led to so many people being unwarned of the dangers, and the subsequent fallout through the eyes of one of the Weather Bureau’s top meteorologists, Isaac Cline, who was stationed in Galveston at the time of the hurricane.

To this day, the city of Galveston feels the effects of the hurricane as the damage caused opened the door for its rival port city, Houston, to take over and dominate the shipping industry in the years and decades that followed.

For anyone with any interest in meteorology, Isaac’s Storm is a must-read.

Next up: Bringing Down the House.

As big fans of Batman Begins and Christian Bale‘s performance as Batman, we were eagerly awaiting the release of the latest installment in the Batman line of movies, The Dark Knight. With Christian Bale reprising his role as Batman and Heath Ledger creating buzz about a posthumous Oscar nomination with his performance as the Joker, we knew we were going to see the movie on opening weekend.

And we did.

At midnight on opening day.

The crowd outside the Harrisonburg theater we went to (they have stadium seating whereas other local theaters do not) was impressive and we were pretty excited about our first midnight movie since Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Unfortunately, it seems there may have been more people than the theater anticipated and we didn’t get in and start the movie until 12:30 am. But what followed was everything the critics claimed it would be and Heath Ledger turned in a stunning performance as The Joker.

While I wouldn’t take small children to see this latest comic book-turned-movie, we enjoyed the movie so much that we will likely see it again while it’s still in the theater.

The U.S. Labor Department let us know today that the Consumer Price Index has risen 5% in the last 12 months. Basically, that means we’re paying 5% more for things today than we did at the same time last year.

Though this is the biggest jump in the CPI since May of 1991, it only takes a quick look across the Atlantic Ocean to realize that things could be much worse.

MUCH worse.

If you don’t know by now, the country of Zimbabwe is in a major crisis. They have land issues, food issues, government issues, and many, many other issues. And, of course, they have economic issues. Things are so bad in Zimbabwe that the value of the Zimbabwe Dollar has reached comical levels of hyperinflation.

Looking at the exchange rates of the Zimbabwe Dollar to the U.S. Dollar shows how ridiculous the situation has become. As of today, US$1 will get you over Z$23,000,000,000. Yes, that’s billion, with a B.

A small description of the price of beer in a bar in an L.A. Times story puts it all into its ludicrous perspective:

Before the crunch, a beer at a bar in Harare, the capital, cost 15 billion Zimbabwean dollars. At 5 p.m. July 4, it cost 100 billion ($4 at the time) in the same bar.

An hour later, the price had gone up to 150 billion ($6).

The exchange rate inflation of the Zimbabwean Dollar, as compared to the U.S. Dollar, is 91.0% in the month of July alone. Over the last 12 months, the exchange rate (hyper)inflation is 93,424,925.3%

5% inflation over the last 12 months? It could be a lot worse. 93,424,920.3% worse.

After several years of wanting to change the look of this website, I’ve finally done so. To keep more in line with the site’s tagline, “The View from Stuarts Draft,” I’ve used a photograph I took of a sunrise in our area as the site’s background and derived all the colors from that photograph.

Technically speaking, the photograph isn’t from Stuarts Draft, but rather from Afton, VA. It was taken from an overlook along Interstate-64 as we headed East down Afton Mountain on our way to work. But, the photo does such a great job of conveying what we get to see on a regular basis by living in Stuarts Draft that I couldn’t resist using it.

Mother Nature finally relented and provided our area with much-needed rain. Though we never got the forecasted rain on the 4th of July, we did get 0.18 inches of rain on July 8-9 and we got 0.28 inches yesterday into last night.

There’s no real forecast of any rain in the near future, but yesterday’s and last night’s rain ought to get things looking a bit greener around our area.

At this point, I’d be okay with Mother Nature raining on the Independence Day festivities. We’d be okay with rain, period.

That’s the exact quote of what I said a couple of days ago. The current forecast?

Friday (Independence Day): 40% chance of Thunderstorms

The good news is that there is also a 50% chance of thunderstorms on Saturday, 40% chance on Sunday, and 30% chance on Monday.

Despite the overwhelming number of dark clouds that covered the city late yesterday afternoon, we managed to pick up just 0.15 inches of rain; hardly enough to do anything to change our recent drought-like conditions.

But, Valerie reminded me of something I failed to point out in yesterday’s post about the lack of rain: the strips of green.

As we drive through our neighborhood to our house, we pass several homes. With the weather becoming drier and the lawns turning from green to brown, something odd has happened. Some of our neighbors’ (not directly next door, but down the road) yards have developed strips of green grass. With the strips of green grass starting at the house, it’s where they end that provides a clue as to what’s going on.

Every yard in our neighborhood has a sewage pipe cap that allows access to each home’s sewage line right near the edge of the property. Each strip of green grass ends at the home’s pipe cap, which leads one to wonder if there’s some sort of leak involved and if all the homes with the green strips of grass were put up by the same builder.

Nevertheless, the shocks of green in an otherwise brown yard are interesting to see.