AnyFu: hire tech experts for affordable screen-share sessions
May 7, 2012
Since the dawn of time, when a business needs help, they seek out experts, and since the dawn of time, snake oil salesmen have been prevalent. Looking for a social media expert? Just Google “social media expert” and see the 1.16 million results. Or “social media guru” which reveals 2.26 million results, and “social media maven” with over 600k results.
After step one of Googling any combination of these words, you read a few and likely contact the first ones that showed up (they are first in Google for a reason, right?). They tell you about their 3,000 Twitter followers and 2,000 Facebook friends, and you are sold. You don’t know that you need to ask them for a list of brands they have consulted with, or if their expertise is in setting brands up, building a strategy, or fixing failed strategies. You don’t know that their Klout score is irrelevant to their expertise, but they tell you it is, and you don’t know better than to not be impressed.
It isn’t just social media experts, it’s any type of expert, and in some cases, it can be a costly mistake to choose the wrong expert. One such case is when you need help with your website, particularly coding and copy.
That’s where AnyFu comes in. AnyFu is an on-demand technical expertise platform that allows startups, small businesses, and growing companies to find the exact help they need from a curated and concise list of experts that focus on Ruby on Rails, Java, Conversion Rate Optimization, Copywriting, Flash and even Mathematical Modeling. The list goes on and it is likely that the company will continuing adding experts.
The goal of AnyFu is to save businesses time and money with pain free, one-on-one screen-share work sessions, so that rather than back and forth proofs and the like, direct access to an expert can save everyone time, thus money, plus this type of collaboration reduces miscommunication on both ends as to what you are looking for. Additionally, sometimes a brand’s needs vary from simple to extremely complex, which AnyFu is equipped for – most consultants only take on work that is a long term commitment or a large project.
Bottom line: AnyFu looks to be extremely picky and experts are vetted by the company’s co-founders Jason Roberts, who also founded Preezo, and Justin Vincent who founded and developed Pluggio and TweetBoard. AnyFu also manages the signing of NDAs and document exchanges, scheduling (and time zone resolution), collecting and forwarding required tax information (1099s and W-9s), invoicing and payment remittance. In other words, they manage the process for you so that you don’t have to become an expert in hiring an expert!
AnyFu: hire tech experts for affordable screen-share sessions
Chatroulette: shot in the head or savior of society?
May 6, 2012
During my Italian classes in high school, my teacher gave us many prompts: you are lost in Rome, ask for directions; you are in a grocery store, buy food for a picnic.There was one we didn’t get to: you are videochatting with a stranger. What will you say? What will you show? Perhaps she should have. These days, Chatroulette is the place I most often use my Italian.
After hitting the “play” button, the web site chatroulette.com sets up a videochat between you and a random stranger with a text chat panel on the side. At any point, either party can hit the “next” button to receive a new partner.
Stranger: why did you study italian?
Stranger: it is a dead language, such as latin
You: e una lingua molti bella (it’s a beautiful language)
Stranger: aren’t you catholic?!?!?!?
You: e la cultura e magnifica (and the culture is magnificent)
Stranger: I know only ignorant people
Stranger: where’s culture?
He also said that Chatroulette was very “schifoso.” To explain the word (which means strange) he said, “come la pizza con ananas (like pizza with pineapple).”
Chatroulette was started by Andrey Ternovskiy, a seventeen-year-old high school student from Moscow. According to an e-mail he sent to a New York Times reporter, Ternovskiy created the site in November of 2009 to allow his friends to Skype with strangers. He does all the coding himself, and the site uses seven servers in Frankfurt, Germany. He said that most of users are from the United States, though he himself has never been.
Professor John Kim, HMCS, first went on the site a couple months ago after hearing about it from his students. He’s noticed that it has changed in the time since his initial encounter. He said it used to be a space for conversation, but that it has shifted to “web porn” content.
Kim said he was very impressed with some Chatroulette screen shots he saw in an article. One man was dressed up in a cheetah suit and makeup, while another had covered his face with clothespins.
“Wow [I thought], I didn’t see any of that creativity when I was on Chatroulette. So I went back on, hoping or expecting to see some of that. artistic exploration.”
He didn’t, but he says he is still impressed with the site. Chatroulette “seemed to capture what the Internet was like years ago . The Internet is becoming increasingly more enclosed-you only engage with that network of friends that you have on Facebook and few people are willing to let in strangers. Different websites are more and more about creating these gated communities,” he said.
Yet Kim says he hopes this openness could “translate back into real material life. It would be really great if we could create software that would encourage people to feel comfortable in the privacy of their own home to have conversations with random strangers, but have that occur in non virtual spaces. It could break us out of the preoccupation with privacy and gated-ness that we have seem to have moved as a society.”
Kim says he imagines this could be possible if computer screens became so small that you could carry them with you, possibly imbedded in eye-glasses. He asked me to imagine if I was near a stranger, “and some information popped up about a mutual friend we had in common,” prompting a conversation to start.
“I do think we need to repair communities,” he says. “We’ve been too preoccupied with our privacy.”
Does Chatroulette offer a way to escape societal problems? Many people say they use the site to have conversations, face-to-face (or other body parts), with people from all over the world.
Tuesday night I began a conversation with a 24-year-old man from Madrid.
Stranger: What brings you here?
You: I guess just to chat with people.
Stranger: Maybe not the best place, I mean everyone is looking for sex.
So there you have it. Maybe it should be renamed sexroulette.
Chatroulette doesn’t really seem to have caught on at Mac. Many have heard of it, but I’ve encountered few enthusiasts.
Lillie Taggart ’12 tried it last week with a group of friends who held a teddy-bear up to the built in camera. When I asked her if she would do it again, she gave a definite no. “I’m not that desperate to talk to people. But I don’t find it to be dangerous,” she said.
Vasa Trubetskoy ’11 Chatrouletted with some housemates during dinner. “The level of conversation is very low. It just brought dinner down.”
I first went on Chatroulette two weeks ago. I heard about it in The Mac Weekly office, but it sounded too bizarre to try. My roommate from last year, Grace Fleming ’12, convinced me to try it. During finals week last year, she introduced me to TextsFromLastNight.com, so I trust her to provide me with the best the Internet has to offer.
When I went over to Fleming’s room to interview her she suggested we simultaneously Chatroulette. We spoke to the first guy for a minute before he asked us to flash him. When we didn’t, another guy walked into the room and exposed himself.
“That pretty much sums up Chatroulette. Somebody asks to see your boobs and a guy walks on the screen, dick out,” Fleming said.
It is not uncommon to encounter streaming of a man masturbating. What are the odds? Unlike Russian Roulette, the game where you place one bullet into the chamber of a revolver, spin, hold the gun to your temple and press the trigger, your odds are not as high as one in six. Of the three times I’ve done it, once I was on for an hour and saw zero penises. The site also has a “report” button for offensive substance. People don’t seem to use it though.
When I asked Fleming if she ever reported people she said, “I can’t. It’s instinct to hit next.”
Chatroulette: shot in the head or savior of society?
A racetrack, a killing, and the history of organized crime in Hot Springs, Arkansas – Grantland
May 5, 2012
The author’s father, second from left, as a young man performs his work as a groom // Courtesy of Hill familyIn the first of a series of personal essays about gambling, David Hill looks back at a racetrack, a killing, and the history of organized crime in Hot Springs, ArkansasBy David Hill on April 8, 2012
It wasn’t anything new for Curtis to smack Linda June around, especially when he’d been drinking. This seemed like too much, Eric thought, even for them. Eric came up behind Curtis as he stood over Linda June all balled up on the couch. When Curtis cocked his hand back, Eric grabbed it. Curtis spun around and landed a haymaker on Eric’s temple that sent him flying into the kitchen table. The sounds of Linda June’s screaming prompted the neighbors in the trailer park to call the police. They wouldn’t get there soon enough to stop what would happen next.
“I’m going back to that bedroom to get my pistol.” Eric picked himself up off the floor. “When I come back you better not be here.”
“If you bring that pistol in here, by God, you damn well better use it.” Curtis didn’t have to say “or else.” Everybody in the room knew what he meant. And they knew that he meant it.
Eric staggered back to the bedroom. When he came back through the hall with his pearl-handled .38 revolver, he hoped Curtis would be gone. He wasn’t surprised when he saw Curtis standing in front of the couch with his hands balled up at his sides, his nostrils flaring. “Get out of here, Curtis.” Eric had the gun pointed right at Curtis’s chest. Curtis didn’t say a word. He lunged for the gun.
When the police finally arrived at the trailer on Vineyard Street, Eric was sitting peacefully at his kitchen table. In one hand he held the telephone to his ear. With his other thick, red hand he gripped a nearly empty glass. On the table next to the pearl-handled pistol was a bottle of Wild Turkey.
“The police are here. I need to go,” Eric said into the receiver.
“What do I do, Eric?” my father asked on the other end of the line. Not much had changed since Eric and my grandmother had split up. He still looked after her with whatever little money he had. He still bought my sister and I birthday and Christmas gifts. And he still called my dad first whenever he got in a pinch.
“Just call Don,” Eric replied. “Tell him to give you a horse. He’ll understand.”
Eric hung up the phone, knocked back what was left in the glass, then stepped over Curtis’s body as he made his way to open the door for the police. The year was 1983. Eric Boatright was 59 years old. He was about to be arrested on a charge of murder in the first degree.
I visited my hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the Grade III $250,000 Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn Park. The Southwest is an important prep race for April’s Grade I $1 million Arkansas Derby, which itself is an important prep for the Kentucky Derby.
Hot Springs, a town Garrison Keillor called the “loose buckle on the Bible Belt,” has a colorful history. On the Friday before the race, I took in some of that history at the Gangster Museum of America on Central Avenue. The folks who work there wear fedoras and pinstripes but have accents like Cooter from The Dukes of Hazzard. It was jarring at first, but once I finished the tour it was easy to imagine all of Bathhouse Row in downtown Hot Springs bustling with redneck wise guys — the way it was from Al Capone’s first trip there in 1920 until 1967, when the Arkansas State Police shut the doors on the last of the town’s illegal casinos.
The first thing they tell you on the Gangster Museum of America tour is that Hot Springs has always been neutral territory. The Native Americans originally used the “valley of the vapors” as a place where warring tribes could fish, trade, and bathe in the hot waters without conflict. Gangsters, too, used Hot Springs as a refuge from violence. A popular vacation spot for hoods from New York to New Orleans, the unwritten rule was that when mobsters visited Hot Springs, everyone left their beefs behind. Rival gangsters could fish, bathe, and shoot dice side-by-side without fear of catching a bullet in the head.
For nearly a century Hot Springs, Arkansas was what they called a “wide-open town.” Gambling was technically illegal but was done in public without fear of retribution. Free-flowing booze and a half dozen major casinos made Hot Springs a larger gambling destination than Las Vegas, and a popular spot for mobsters to lam it. When the FBI finally caught Charles “Lucky” Luciano in 1936, after a nationwide manhunt, they found him taking a stroll down Bathhouse Row with the chief detective of the Hot Springs Police Department.
Each room in the Gangster Museum of America has a different theme. The first room is dedicated to the political power brokers who made vice possible in Hot Springs, the most important of whom was Mayor Leo McLaughlin, who held court for more than 20 years. He was elected to office in 1925 on a promise to allow illegal gambling. Al Capone even donated to his campaign. McLaughlin made good on his pledge and used the revenue the illegal gambling created to pave the streets of Hot Springs. Soon enough, Hot Springs was not only one of the most modern cities in Arkansas, it was an international tourist destination. Mayor McLaughlin had only one rule about Hot Springs’ illicit gambling — no outsiders. He would decide how many casinos there would be and who would own them. He knew that barring legalization of gambling, his “wide-open” town would only work if he could both keep everyone in town fat and happy with cash and keep the state government from giving a damn. Mayor McLaughlin knew that there was one thing that the Bible thumpers running the state up in Little Rock hated more than gambling, prostitutes, and liquor, and that was goddamn Yankees.
The notorious Mayor Leo P. McLaughlin, left, in the grandstands at Oaklawn // Courtesy of Garland County Historical Society
McLaughlin’s reign as mayor came to an end when a group of local boys returned from WWII and decided to take on members of the Democratic political machine. The anti-incumbent campaign, called the “GI Revolt,” won control of the state capital and the local government and law enforcement agencies in Hot Springs. The reformers shuttered the casinos, but the decision was unpopular. Hot Springs voters swept them out of office in the next election. By 1950 the governor relented and allowed the casinos to reopen. Nate Schoenfeld, a Harvard graduate and one of the founders of the “GI Revolt,” rationalized the about-face this way in a 1962 interview with Sports Illustrated: “The gambling is home-owned and operated. There’s no hoodlum element, no oppression, no scum. No one forces himself on anyone else. There is no guy around here with greasy hair and a Mafia smile. The people are capable, clean, decent, friendly. This place reflects the quality, character and charm of all of us. This place has got roots. It’s 24 hours of happiness.”1
Eventually Arkansans’ distaste for outsiders would wane. Despite the fact that only 11 percent of the state’s voters were registered as Republicans, Winthrop Rockefeller, a New Yorker and the son of John Rockefeller, was elected to the statehouse in 1966 as the first Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction. Rockefeller dispatched a former FBI agent named Lynn Davis to Hot Springs to head the state police and shut down illegal gambling. In the next-to-last room on the tour of the Gangster Museum of America, we were shown a video of Davis piling roulette wheels and slot machines in a field, breaking them with a sledgehammer, then torching them — all while smiling for the cameras.2
It was hard for me to watch that video. It was even harder for me to watch my fellow tour-goers pose for pictures with a replica tommy gun. “I never knew about this side of Hot Springs!” exclaimed a man in pleated jean shorts posing with the gun while his wife took his picture. I’ll bet you didn’t, buddy. There is little evidence of those days left among Hot Springs’ strip malls and megachurches. Everything is different: the economy, the culture, the people. I could understand the man’s surprise. It is a strange thing for people who moved here from other places to grasp, that a place as genteel and quaint as Hot Springs was built by criminals. Those of us with roots in that town weren’t embarrassed by its history. We owed everything we had to that history, and much of what we didn’t have to its disappearance. There was no Gangster Museum when I was growing up, but I was raised in a family of gamblers and grifters who kept me spellbound with stories of the good old days. But even now, watching that video of Lynn Davis burn those slot machines, I found it hard to understand how a town that fancied itself so sharp let itself get taken by the biggest of road crews, how they let the good old days get away.
Eric’s intake form from the city jail listed his address as 217 Vineyard Street. Under “Previous Address,” Eric wrote “traveled with carnival.” Originally from Tennessee, Eric spent more than 20 years traveling the country with the carnival before he ended up in that trailer. His specialty was a midway game called Razzle Dazzle, a gambling game where players placed bets and then threw darts at a board filled with numbers trying to build up a score to win a big payoff. The game was impossible to win. How much a barker could make completely depended on his ability to convince players they were close enough to winning to keep betting. Eric was a fair-to-middling Razzle Dazzle barker, but his grift got a big lift when he arrived in Hot Springs to work the race meet. It was there that he met my grandmother, Hazel, a widowed mother of three grown children. Hazel was out of work and busted, but she had the heart of a hustler. He took her with him on the road and taught her how to shill — she would show up at the Razzle Dazzle game, place her bets, and always win. “Look how easy it is, folks,” Eric would say. “If this pretty lady can do it, you can do it, too!” The marks would beat a path.
In the “wide-open” days, Hazel worked as a poker dealer at the Southern Club, the largest, ritziest, rip-roaring-est casino in town. Today the Southern Club is occupied by a wax museum. Once visited by flesh-and-blood movie stars, heavyweight champions of the world, political leaders, and dignitaries, today it is filled with cheap statues. The escalator that once delivered visitors into the casino, the first one in Arkansas, has been broken for years. At the top of the stairs where visitors could have once walked up on a poker game between Titanic Thompson and Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, today they will encounter a wax reenactment of the Last Supper. The day that I visited the wax museum somebody had discarded an empty Wendy’s cup on the table next to James the Elder.
Not too long after Lynn Davis closed the doors on the Southern Club, the local economy started sliding downhill and would never recover. Hundreds of jobs were lost. Tourism, the city’s main industry, was devastated. Planned construction on major projects was halted. The fancy downtown hotels with their glass-bottomed swimming pools and luxury penthouse suites are now nursing homes or completely abandoned and falling apart.
The current mayor of Hot Springs, Ruth Carney, was elected with the backing of the local tea party. She and her husband, the pastor of a local megachurch, moved to Hot Springs in 1997 after a decade as Christian missionaries. She believes the Bible supersedes the law, that the separation of church and state is meant to keep government out of the church and not the other way around, and, of course, she is opposed to gambling. Last year her church and their allies tried and failed to get the city to audit the last gambling house in town: The Oaklawn Park.
Today the Southern Club may be a wax museum but Oaklawn Park is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the state and one of the best-attended racetracks in America. In 2006 Hot Springs residents passed a measure that would allow Oaklawn to install electronic “instant racing” machines at the track. These machines look and act like slot machines and poker and blackjack tables, but somehow (don’t ask me how) the payoffs are dictated by the outcomes of past horse races. The casino’s largess has brought the city and state tax revenue, funded scholarships for students of Hot Springs High School (an alma mater I share with Bill Clinton), and added money to the purses for the races, which in turn brings in more horsemen and bigger fields for Oaklawn’s boutique spring meet.
I visited the modest casino attached to the racetrack the night before the Southwest Stakes to play some poker in the seven-table electronic poker room. Sitting at my table was a horse owner from West Virginia, a guy with bad teeth and stringy hair who worked at a local window factory, a kid from the projects who went to high school with my sister but is now one of the biggest drug dealers in town, and a Republican state senator. After getting particularly unlucky in a hand, the horseman from West Virginia hollered “bullshit” and sparked a roundtable on the fairness of the digital machines. The consensus from everyone but the drug dealer (who was up over a thousand bucks at that point) was that the game was absolutely rigged. I questioned why Oaklawn would have any interest at all in the outcome of our game since the casino’s cut is the same regardless of who wins each hand. I was told by the window-maker “if you have to ask that question, you must not know the Cellas.”
When the owners of the Southern Club casino opened Oaklawn Park Racetrack in 1905, the city of Hot Springs declared a holiday so that everyone in town could attend the races. Two years later the track was closed after a state legislator named William McGuigan teamed up with a fire-and-brimstone preacher named W.T. Amis to campaign across the state against the sinful business of gambling. It mattered not that McGuigan was the owner of Essex Park, a competing racetrack on Malvern Avenue.3
Oaklawn Park would be saved by two brothers from St. Louis: Charles and Louis Cella. The Cella brothers were racetrack tycoons, having built a handful of other tracks around Missouri.4 They bought Oaklawn Park and then worked to get the state to legalize gambling on horseracing. Their efforts and investments would go unrewarded for decades until Leo McLaughlin was elected mayor. He gave the Cellas the green light to reopen Oaklawn in 1934, gambling laws be damned. A year later the Legislature passed a bill legalizing pari-mutuel gambling on horse racing. Charles Cella built a house right on the home stretch of the track next to the grandstand. Oaklawn Park hasn’t missed a meet since. Four generations of the Cella family have sat out on the porch of that house and watched champions round the last turn into the stretch.
Eventually my grandmother and Eric would marry. Eric moved to Hot Springs, joined the Showmen’s Association (sort of a union for carnies), and took work selling the Daily Racing Form out at Oaklawn. His main grind wasn’t selling papers. Eric got to know everyone at the racetrack — the horsemen, the jockeys, the gamblers, even the Cellas themselves. He put all his relationships to work for him and became a tout.
A tout was someone who could put you on to a horse — for a fee, of course. Selling tips on racehorses was illegal. If you wanted to tout you needed to pay the city $200 and then give it half your take from selling your selections. Some guys made enough selling their “tip sheets” to afford the exorbitant taxes. Most guys figured it was easier and more lucrative to tout on the black market. Eric was one of the latter guys. Don was one of the former.
The morning after Eric called, my dad went looking for Don out on the backstretch near the barns. They called Don “the Stable Boy” because he got most of his information from horsemen and jockeys hanging around the stables. Like every other morning during the race meet, Don was up before dawn and at the track to clock the horses’ morning workouts. Dad told Don what had happened.
“He said to tell you he needed a horse.”
“He said that you’d know what that meant.”
Again Don nodded without looking away from the horses on the track. “I don’t have one right now. I’ll call you when I got something.”
“But Eric’s in jail. How long will —”
This time Don broke his stare to shoot my dad a look. “I said I’ll call you when I got something.”
The less that was said the better. If all Eric wanted my dad to get was a tip on a horse, then he could have easily paid $2 for the tip sheet Don sold across the street from the entrance to the track. A good tip on a horse wasn’t going to help Eric get out of jail. His bail was $50,000. He needed a damn good lawyer. For years my dad was convinced Eric was squirreling away money under his mattress in his trailer. It was clear to him now that Eric was flat busted. He needed to spend the only capital he had left. He needed to call in all his favors around the racetrack. He needed a horse.
I needed a horse. I lost $300 the night before playing Nintendo poker with the drug dealer and the state senator. I lost another $50 trying to beat the chalk in the early daily double. I was off to a bad start and had six more races to go before the first of the two Southwest Stakes. I swallowed my pride, stood up from my seat, and walked through the crowd at the paddock to the newsstand.
“Program? Racing form?” Once upon a time Eric stood at this very newsstand at the south entrance to the track shouting “Racing forms!” and whispering his picks in guys’ ears. When I was a kid my dad would send me to him to slip him a $5 bill and ask him for help on a race. Eric never took my dad’s money, and my dad hardly ever took Eric’s advice.
My dad was a decent-enough handicapper. He made an effort at least. He always read the racing form. He followed certain maxims he had learned over the years — years he spent working around the track as a groom or a hot-walker for his grandfather. He always bet on a horse who was using Lasix for the first time. He never bet on a horse whose front legs were wrapped. He said that a horse taking a shit during the post parade was a sign it was ready to run, and that a horse who had its mane braided had a trainer who was confident the horse would “get his picture took” in the winner’s circle after a race. He always bet on a horse who was running without blinkers for the first time (or was it never bet on a horse who was running with blinkers on?). It wasn’t all just folksy racetrack wisdom, though. He knew enough about speed and pace handicapping that he could pick his share of winners. But he was never above paying a tout for a little help. I, on the other hand, had too much pride. For me the game was about finding the winners on your own. Where was the fun in just betting on someone else’s selections? “Winning,” my dad would say. “That’s where the fun is.”
Today the tip sheets that once had to be sold across the street were prominently displayed on a board above the newsstand. The ones who had winners the day before had them circled, the winning payoffs scrawled in big, bold letters. “$74.60 EXACTA!” “FOUR WINNERS!” The tip sheets had names like Silent Sam or Private Label. I pointed at the one called Stable Boy. I couldn’t even look the man in the eye as he handed it to me, I was so awash with shame.
A view from the grandstands // Courtesy of Garland County Historical Society
A couple of weeks after their chat on the backstretch, Don called my dad with the horse. My dad had to act fast. He set off to the pawn shop to unload some of Eric’s jewelry and a couple of his own hunting rifles. He went to the bank and pulled out everything he could. He told nobody. This was crucial. The information my dad possessed was extremely valuable. He didn’t need Don to stress the point; he had been around long enough to know — if the word got out, the odds on this horse would take a pounding, and nobody would make any money.
Here’s where I should say a word or two about fixed horse races, because it’s something I don’t want to be flip about. Fixed horse races were once a lot more common. Some smaller tracks in the thirties and forties probably had more fixed races than square ones. As purses grew larger and horsemen and jockeys made better livings, the need to supplement their income with gambling waned. As racetracks and regulatory bodies got stricter with penalties, the professional need to continue racing outweighed the short-term gains of fixing a race for dishonest trainers. These days fixed horse races are almost nonexistent. Guys like Rick Dutrow (the trainer of 2008 Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown, who was recently banned from racing in New York for 10 years for doping his horses) aren’t race fixers. They are cheaters, sure, but only because they are giving their horses an unfair advantage. They still could lose the race. When a race is fixed, the outcome is guaranteed. A lot of people have to be in on it. It happens only rarely. The stakes are high for everyone involved. People can and do go to prison over it. As a horse-racing fan and a gambler with integrity, I find the notion of a fixed race to be disgraceful. But this isn’t a story about me. It’s a story about a carnie facing the electric chair. Those among us without sin can cast the first stone.
I bet the picks from the Stable Boy tip sheet all day long, making every single exacta bet that he suggested.5 By the time the first leg of the Southwest Stakes rolled around I hadn’t cashed a single ticket. I was stuck deep. The only hope I had was on a live pick-4 that went through the two stakes races. In the first Southwest I picked a whole mess of horses, being sure to include all the lightly raced long shots that were coming off their first or second races. I considered it insurance, given that there were enough of them in the race to make it unpredictable. I got lucky when a horse named Castaway, who Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert shipped in from California after the horse won his maiden race, won the race at 6-1. I showed my buddy Adam my ticket and told him the good news.
“Who do you got in the next race?” he asked. I pointed at my racing form to a horse named Cyber Secret. He laughed. “You picked the wrong Secret!” He was referring to Secret Circle, the 3-5 favorite, another horse Baffert shipped in from California to try to nab some winnings on the way to the Kentucky Derby.
“Did you notice this?” I pointed my pencil at the line just to the right of the horses’ names in the form where the owner of the horse is listed. It read Charles J. Cella. “The fix is in, my friend. How do you not bet on a horse that’s owned by the guy who owns the goddamn racetrack?”
Adam smirked. “You don’t know much about Charles Cella. His horses never win. Always bet on the invaders.”
The invaders. The horses shipped in for the big races. While most horses arrived at Oaklawn were pulled behind dually trucks, the invaders arrived on airplanes. Like big-city bagmen for the Mob, they snatch up all the purse money and then fly off to the next big Derby prep. Few stakes horses are born and bred in Arkansas, but Hot Springs embraces the horses who stable, work out, and train at Oaklawn. The locals see trainers like Gary Hartlage, D. Wayne Lukas, and the late Bob Holthus as their own. When the silver-haired Baffert brings in horses from Hollywood and takes them back the next day with all the money, he may as well be Frank Costello sticking the place up with a tommy gun.
I took the elevator up to the Oaklawn Jockey Club to watch the second leg of the Southwest Stakes. The Jockey Club is a members-only who’s-who of racetrack personalities and local aristocrats. I had a cousin who was having lunch with her mom, whose boss was a member. Somehow that and a jacket and tie were enough to get me in. There is a path of dirt and mud that leads to the Jockey Club elevator from all the owners walking back and forth to the track to take photos in the Winner’s Circle. One way to tell who was a player and who was just a rich chump was to look for who had the most dirt on their shoes.
My cousin and her husband told me everyone was excited that both Bill Parcells and Toby Keith were in the Jockey Club that day, although I never saw them. They each owned horses running in a leg of the Southwest. Toby Keith may have been from Oklahoma, but he was no invader. He had been a regular fixture at Oaklawn over the years, always opting to stable his best horses there for the entire meet. His latest prospect, Reckless Jerry, always got a lot of local support when he ran despite the fact that Keith was an Okie and despite the fact that his biggest hit is a song about feeding his horses beer.
I had singled the race with Cyber Secret. I had bet it all with Charles Cella. His family had saved Hot Springs before; I needed him to save me this one time.
The bell went off and the horses broke from the gate, Cyber Secret stumbling a bit and ending up wide on the outside. The room was practically silent. Out on the apron outside the fans were screaming and hollering like lunatics as the horses raced past the grandstand. High up in the Oaklawn Jockey Club the well-heeled patrons of the sport sat cross-legged and watched the race with mild interest, perhaps raising an eyebrow or standing on their toes to register excitement. These men and women, Toby Keith and Bill Parcells included, were passionate and knowledgeable fans of the sport. But it was hard for me to see any place for myself in this mahogany-and-brass-fixtured room. I was raised sitting on the shoulders of my father, him slapping his program across his leg and screaming the number of his horse, me with arms stretched high in the air, meeting him note-for-note in yelling and pleading with our horse, our jockey, the good Lord, or the racing stewards to “stop the race!” whenever our horse nosed out to the lead. The sport, to us, was a visceral, emotional experience. It wasn’t business. As the horses came around the final turn, Cyber Secret made his move, separating from the pack of horses to join Secret Circle and Scatman on the lead. He sat off of their hips, in perfect position to overtake them in the stretch. I couldn’t help myself. I banged my hand against my table and shouted, “Dig deep! Dig deep! Dig deep!,” breaking the obscene silence as the horses charged toward the finish line.
All of my shouting and embarrassing myself and my cousin did no good. Charles Cella’s horse finished fifth. The fix wasn’t in after all. Secret Circle, Baffert’s other California invader, impressively won the race as the overwhelming 3-5 favorite. You’d never know the public bet so heavily on him if you were in the Jockey Club. The room was as quiet as before the race began. Outside the windows on the apron down below, you could see the fans celebrating, hugging, jumping up and down.
I boarded the Jockey Club elevator with a group of filthy-shoed men I assumed were from California; they headed to the Winner’s Circle, I headed back to the proletariat. They were staid and dignified. One of them shot his cuffs and adjusted his tie, ready for his picture. Just another day at the office.
The elevator opened and dumped us out into the throng. People were lining up at the windows to cash their tickets and collect the $1.20 in winnings that Secret Circle paid on a $2 bet. It was nowhere near the six figures that Secret Circle’s connections had won, but these fans were high-fiving and back-slapping like their ship had come in. Perhaps my dad was right. Having a winner was fun, even if everyone else in the track had it, too. I pulled my tip sheet from my jacket pocket and unfolded it. Disgusted, I read the words Secret Circle — BEST BET!
My dad has always been dodgy about the amount of money he cashed on Don’s tip. He would only say “it was a lot.” He gave what was Eric’s to the lawyer and took what was his to the track. I know he got his rifles out of hock. My mother says she never saw a dime.
As for Eric’s plight, the court records tell a story not much different from the one I’ve been told throughout my life. On September 15, 1983, the state filed a motion to dismiss the case that all but confirms for me just how much money my father won that day at the track.
The investigation officers for the State of Arkansas are presently unable to locate Linda Oldham, viewed by the State as a critical witness in this case, in that she was the only other witness to the shooting involved herein other than the defendant.
My mother used to say “the only damn Yankees are the ones who won’t go home.” There is an entire room at the Gangster Museum of America dedicated to one such Yankee, an English gangster named Owney “The Killer” Madden. Madden was a prominent figure New York’s underworld. He was one of the owners of the legendary Cotton Club. He managed the careers of (and fixed fights for) heavyweight champions Max Baer and Primo Carnera. He murdered at least a half dozen people and was suspected in the murder of the infamous Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. After Coll’s murder, Dutch Schultz suggested that Madden take a vacation to Hot Springs to lay low. Owney Madden ended up staying in Hot Springs for the next 32 years until his death in 1965. Madden held court as the resident ambassador for organized crime figures who visited the city. He made sure there wasn’t trouble for the locals and made sure visitors were kept happy. He loaned money to prop up two local banks during the Depression. He put up the money to build the local Boy’s Club. He joined the Chamber of Commerce and local civic groups. He was considered a civic leader in the community. He’s buried a couple of blocks away from my mother’s house.
The tour guide at the Gangster Museum of America proclaimed “Owney Madden loved Hot Springs, and Hot Springs loved Owney Madden.” State Senator Q. Byrum Hurst Sr. put it best in his eulogy for Owney at his funeral. “There is no ball park named after Owen Madden. No silver cup bearing his name. But his name is written upon the hearts of all the people he helped — with money, by deed, and by word of encouragement in their dark hours. It has been said that there is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it doesn’t behoove any of us to criticize the rest of us.”
When I was 13 years old, shortly after Eric had passed away, I agreed to do a magic show for the kids at the Showmen’s Association’s Christmas party. After the show, one of the members, a hulking mass of a man with a cracked red bulb for a nose and a cigar lodged in the crook of his mouth, threw an arm around my shoulder and walked me outside.
“So you’re Eric’s grandson?” he asked.
“No, he was married to my grandmother.”
“Did he teach you those card tricks?”
“No. Why, did he know how to do card tricks?”
“Hell, Eric was the biggest card cheat I ever met!”
“That guy was as crooked as a corkscrew.” He shoved a wad of 20s into my shirt pocket with his free hand. “Why do you think he ended up in Hot Springs? This town has always been full of suckers.”
I pulled the 20s out of my pocket and started counting them right in front of him. It was more money than I had ever held in my hand. He ignored my rudeness, still caught up in reflection.
“It’s really a shame he ended up with nothing, your granddad.” He patted me on the head and turned to walk back inside to the party. “Used to be this was a town where a dishonest man could make an honest living.”
Dave Hill is a writer in New York. He has written for McSweeney’s and writes sketch comedy for The Charlies. Folllow him on Twitter @davehill77.
A racetrack, a killing, and the history of organized crime in Hot Springs, Arkansas – Grantland
The Lonely Island interview on writing lyrics for YouTube videos – GQ.COM (UK)
May 4, 2012
It’s a couple of weeks before Christmas and Andy Samberg has locked himself in his office, as he does most Thursdays, and is refusing to come out until he’s had an idea. There is a good reason for this: the idea, which ideally should have been conceived on Tuesday, but then that never actually happens, will be for a song that needs to be written that day, recorded that night, the accompanying video shot from the crack of dawn the day after, which will then be edited that night and into the next morning and, finally, just a few hours after that, broadcast to the seven million viewers who will be watching the 10 December edition of Saturday Night Live. Or, to put it another way, Andy Samberg has 36 hours to make a music video. Oh, and it has to be funny.
To be fair, along with his colleagues Jorma Taccone (currently locked in the same office, also desperately trying to come up with an idea) and Akiva Schaffer (currently in Atlanta directing Neighbourhood Watch starring Ben Stiller), Samberg does have some form in this area. Specifically, 92 previous videos made by SNL Digital Shorts – the viral-baiting division the trio almost single-handedly spawned – the vast majority devised by them on a Thursday while locked in their SNL office, and one (starring Betty White) delivered so late they had to play it directly from the computer’s editing software (“So if you’d pressed the space-bar,” says Taccone, “it would have stopped live TV”).
For those 92 previous efforts – which have seen them specialise in comedy skits delivered in hip-hop video form, but have also seen them broaden out to loving spoofs of pretty much every musical genre – they’ve been nominated for a Grammy, won an Emmy, released two best-selling albums, featured everyone from Lady Gaga and Rihanna to Natalie Portman and Justin Timberlake, and single-handedly made Saturday Night Live cool again.
But the fortunes of an American comedy show is only part of the story. The trio, who collectively call themselves the Lonely Island – so named because of an apartment they used to share (Schaffer: “Any time you have a group of dudes living in an apartment, they name it”; Samberg: “You know that’s just you, right?”) – have become the internet’s biggest comedy superstars. Even if you’ve never seen SNL, chances are you’ve been forwarded a video made by the Lonely Island.
Their break-out 2005 hit “Lazy Sunday” – which featured Samberg and Chris Parnell as two dweebs rapping about their afternoon watching The Chronicles Of Narnia in the style of bragging rappers (“It’s the chronic/What?/-cles of Narnia”) – got five million hits in just two months. Another – which has an unprintable title and paired the pretentious cool of Nineties synth rock with the rather uncool topic of having a sexual accident in one’s pants (Justin Timberlake had a cameo) – has racked up 115 million hits. A medley starring Michael Bolton got 65 million hits. And “I Just Had Sex” – the first single from their second album released last year, which featured Akon and contained the trio singing some very un-R&B sexual boasts (“I ain’t one to argue with a good thing, she could be my wife/ That good?/ The best 30 seconds of my life”) – stands at over 150 million. That’s more than the population of Russia. To put it into context, the most viewed video of their musical comedy rivals Flight Of The Conchords, “Business Time”, has only clocked up 24 million hits. The videos from the Lonely Island don’t just go viral – they’re much more popular than that.
“I remember with ‘Lazy Sunday’, it was the first time you could forward a link using YouTube,” says Samberg. “We’d heard a lot of people had seen it, but when we tracked it on our YouTube channel, it was mind-blowing. We were like, ‘Wait, our video’s the No.1 watched thing, in, like, Israel and Sweden and places we’ve never even been?’ It was the coolest feeling.”
So, now, on a Thursday morning, like the 92 other Thursday mornings before them, they need an idea. Or, rather, they need another idea. They did have a rough idea on Tuesday, based around a rapper who was due to guest star on the show that week, but who has since cancelled. There’s still the guest host, Katy Perry, and feelers were put out to Matt Damon on Tuesday, who, it turns out, is another one of their many celebrity fans, and is keen to take part. But they still need an idea.
“You rarely go into a room with an idea,” says Schaffer. “If you do, that’s a lucky day.”
Most sketches at SNL go through a regimented process – there are writers’ meetings, pitching sessions, approval processes, budget allocations. The Lonely Island guys don’t do any of that. Their very first short wasn’t musical, but rather a piece of high farce involving Samberg and Will Forte having a heartfelt conversation of pure melodrama while casually munching on a couple of large iceberg lettuces. They’d only been at SNL for a month, so decided to make it in their spare time, borrowing a camera, editing it on their Macs between tasks and handing it to one of the producers.
“We knew if we had to pitch it and go through the table and get a budget, we weren’t going to be allowed to do it because we were so new,” says Schaffer. “It would have cost a lot of money and been a big deal, so we just decided to skip all that. And a few weeks later it got on air.”
The producer was encouraging. “But it was like, ‘Well, you handed me that, so hand me something else.’ We were literally costing them nothing. There was no downside for him at all. We had total freedom. But then it’s easy to have that kind of freedom when you’re not asking for anything.”
Their second effort was a sequel to the lettuce-eating sketch that was deemed too similar to air straight away, while their third – and second to air – was “Lazy Sunday”, which instantly became a web phenomenon. It led to them being featured in the New York Times, caused ten people to recognise Samberg the next morning, one as soon as he left his apartment (“Like, thesecondI walked outside, it was crazy”), got them a record deal and led to them heading their own division, SNL Digital Shorts, with almost complete autonomy (“Because [it] started outside of the SNL system,” says Schaffer, “it never stopped being like that”). A couple of months later, Natalie Portman walked into their office.
Natalie Portman started quoting lyrics so foul, we said: “OK, are you willing to do stuff like that?” Akiva Schaffer “‘Lazy Sunday’ got us a lot of clout,” says Schaffer. “Natalie Portman [who was that week's guest host] had watched it, and she just showed up and said: ‘I want to do one of those!’ We were like, woah, Natalie Portman! But we were wary, because every host at SNL comes in, sees the last thing that was popular, and says they want to do that again. Which is a problem. But then she started quoting Lil’ Kim lyrics to us that were just so dirty. So we said, ‘OK, are you willing to do stuff like that?’She was like: ‘Sure! Whatever you guys want.’ So we wrote a song to see what we could get away with basically – and she did everything.”
The result, “Natalie’s Rap”, was textbook Lonely Island: it took a sub-genre (in this case, overly aggressive and profoundly profane gangsta rap) and undercut it by having a goody two-shoes, Harvard-educated Hollywood sweetheart as the star. Plus, it was just funny watching Natalie Portman say things like: “Don’t test when I’m crazy on that airplane glue/Put my foot down your throat till you s*** in my shoe!”
Like all Lonely Island efforts, it’s not a straight parody – their comedy is never simply at the expense of an individual song or person – but uses the genre’s excesses as a comedy vehicle. “It’s eternally nice to know that people know we’re not making fun of a particular genre,” explains Taccone, who says they’re all hip-hop fans, and We’re just using rap to tell jokes. If we could sing, we’d be doing indie-rock stuff Jorma Taccone their proudest moment was working with rapper E-40, a childhood idol of theirs. “We’re just using that genre to tell jokes. If we could sing, we’d be doing indie-rock stuff.”
Or, to put it another way, if they didn’t love the genres they were riffing on, they wouldn’t be able to rib it so accurately or parrot it so well.
The spot-on mimicry is perhaps the most important. “Natalie’s Rap” didn’t look like a spoof video. It looked, well, much as a lo-fi gangsta rap video would look. This, says Samberg, is the true key to their comedy, from “Natalie’s Rap” to the brilliantly OTT “I’m On A Boat” starring T-Pain, which effuses a run-of-the-mill boating experience in the ludicrously self-important style of a Jay-Z hip-hop anthem.
The manifesto is a dedication to absurdity. Just making something look and sound really cool that is the dumbest idea we can come up with Andy Samberg “In general, the mission statement is a dedication to absurdity,” says Samberg. “We often call it ‘polishing a turd’ – just making something look and sound really cool that is the dumbest idea we can come up with. In a lot of ways it’s become the trademark of our stuff.”
In fact, unlike Flight Of The Conchords, their music has sounded so cool, that in the case of “I’m On A Boat” (sample lyric: “I’ve got a nautical-themed pashmina Afghan!”), they were even nominated for a Grammy, pitching them against, yup, Jay-Z for “Run This Town” in the Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category. They turned up at the ceremony and didn’t take their shades off once. “We were rocking it!” says Schaffer. “We were like, ‘We’re rock’n'roll now.’ It was kinda ridiculous.”
Along with the nomination, “I’m On A Boat” went platinum. Adds Taccone: “That just makes it so much stupider - and awesome!”
Back in their office, Samberg and Taccone are still working on the dumbest idea they can come up with. Taccone thinks he’s found a way to adapt the idea he’d had for the rapper – a festive medley about best friends undercut by an increasingly demented subject matter – for Katy Perry. He thinks he might be able to add Val Kilmer to the mix, whom he knows from directing the 2010 comedy MacGruber, hung out with on Monday, and just might be able to convince to cancel his scheduled flight out of New York the following day. Just maybe…
Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone are childhood friends, having all attended the same junior high school in Berkeley, California, and hung out while at high school. They split up for college – Samberg to study film at New York University, Schaffer and Taccone studying film and theatre respectively at the University of California – but the trio reunited soon after graduation for a summit at Taccone’s mother’s house; they decided they should all move to Hollywood together and try to get assistant positions in TV or films. They moved, but didn’t get the positions, instead ending up in soul-destroying temp jobs – “I remember tying ribbon around Christmas ornaments at the Fox Home Video Christmas party,” says Schaffer, “so technically that was in the industry; me and ten fat people tying ribbon.” So instead, every evening they honed their craft, making short comedy films, and borrowing equipment from their musician flatmate to make the music.
“We would come home every night after having some drinks and challenge ourselves,” says Schaffer. “Like: ‘It’s only midnight. By 2am, let’s have this video done.’ It would be the s***tiest 8mm camcorder effort, and we would know it wasn’t going anywhere, but we were consciously training ourselves. If one of us had got a killer assistant job to a director or something, we wouldn’t have done that. You can stay very focused when your job is tying ribbons.”
Even when they finally got signed by an agent in 2002, and worked on the MTV Video Music Awards, their agent didn’t really know what to do with them, and nor, at that time, did anyone else.
“We weren’t trying to be staff writers on a TV show or any of the normal ways an agent can help you,” says Schaffer, who notes that they had to record their short films onto a VHS tape in order for prospective agents to even see them, as none boasted an internet connection fast enough to stream video at the time.
Schaffer also remembers pitching sketch shows around this time to Fox (which eventually gave them $70,000 to make a pilot, Awesometown, which never aired) and Comedy Central, but rather than commissions, they were met with bemusement.
“When we tried to explain why our stuff would be different,” he says, “we’d say that most sketch shows came from the stage, from Second City [the Chicago-based improv group that includes the likes of Steve Carell and Tina Fey among its alumni] or wherever. But you can tell it’s a live show made into a TV show. Our comedy comes from the medium of TV and music videos. A lot of our jokes are editing- and music-based. Ours could never be a stage show. It seems so obvious now, but I remember the people at Comedy Central listening tothis, and then saying to us, ‘OK, but could you put this up on our live stage, so we can see what you’re talking about?’ That’s literally what they said.”
Eventually, technology caught up with them, and as their videos became increasingly popular across the web – notably The OC parody “The ‘Bu” – in 2005 they came to the attention of Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey. The entire trio was hired – unheard of at the time – with Samberg taken on as a full cast member, and Schaffer and Taccone as staff writers.
Taccone describes their SNL office as resembling “the nastiest dorm room you’ve ever been in”. The walls are plastered with posters in various interpretations of horizontal. Old props are strewn across the floor, including a rather menacing-looking papier-mâché kangaroo that Taccone slaved over lovingly for a year for a skit that never got made (“and it doesn’t even look like a kangaroo”). The room has no sound-proofing, yet it’s here where all the artists – from Justin Timberlake to Rihanna – come to sing on a $500 mic, which the guys claim is the most they’ve ever spent on anything. Timberlake has been here the most, having become the closest thing to a fourth Lonely Island member – to date, he’s recorded three videos with them, one a eulogy to intercourse with a friend’s mother, and all of which he has not only sung on, but co-written the music and lyrics, too.
But perhaps the most notable thing about the room is the amount of computer power in it. “As soon as we went there we were asking for new computers powerful enough for us to edit on,” says Taccone. “It was really weird at the time – to be in the show but also your own production unit. So, our office is a sound-record/video-production unit type thing. It’s still, of course, a really crappy office…”
But it’s been the key to their success.
“Jorma and Akiva are both directors,” says Samberg, “so it’s definitely born of a DIY attitude – we record all our music with no engineer, we edit all the stuff, we write it all ourselves. It’s crazy how many skill sets we have between us, and it’s definitely helped a lot in terms of controlling the creativity, havinga specific tone, and doing something only the three of us need to agree upon.”
Their success has even changed howSNLhires writers for the show – now, many are expected to come with video-editing skills.
It’s just gone 9pm on Saturday,SNLis due to start in an hour, and Taccone is still editing that week’s SNL Digital Short. The video – a freewheeling festive effort that begins with Andy Samberg and Katy Perry as best friends taking part in wholesome Christmas activities, which soon sees them teaming up with a “handsome drug addict” (Matt Damon) and a “brilliant lunatic” (Val Kilmer), playing Russian roulette, taking drugs and setting free a bird-man mutant – may not seem like a typical Lonely Island effort. Until, of course, you watch it, and realise that the upbeat tone never falters once, and it’s very, very funny. The jaunty festive song has just got the Lonely Island treatment.
Samberg and Taccone finished writing the song on Thursday afternoon, then called Perry, Damon and Kilmer in to record it on the $500 mic – minding the papier-mâché kangaroo – late on Thursday night and on into Friday morning. They started shooting the video at 6am that day, and finished at 11pm, leaving Taccone to edit until 1am, grab a few hours sleep, then edit up until the 8pm run-through later that day. A run-through that has seen it come up long, and now means he has an hour to cut 45 seconds from it. By the time the show starts, he’ll still be correcting the colour.
“That’s really good for us,” Taccone will tell me the next day. “To finish shooting on a Friday at 11pm is great. [On] two other shorts I’ve done this year, I’ve stopped shooting at 4.30am, slept an hour, and started editing at 5.30pm. And some of the things I’m changing, I just know I’m the only one who’s going to notice them. But then, if it’s going to be online, it’s going to exist forever. You want to feel like you did your best work.”
“It’s funny,” says Schaffer. “We joke that we’re a band, because we’re a joke band, but it turns out, we have the exact same problems.”
Well, guys, no one said it isn’t Lonely at the top.
The Lonely Island’s Turtleneck & Chain (Universal Republic) is out now.
Stuart McGurk is a Commissioning Editor at GQ and edits the magazine’s opening Details section. He has written about the arts and popular culture for The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent and the Telegraph.
The Lonely Island interview on writing lyrics for YouTube videos – GQ.COM (UK)
How We Met: Derren Brown & Patrick Hughes
May 3, 2012
Patrick Hughes, 72
A visual artist, Hughes is best known for his "reverspectives", optical illusions which play with a viewer’s perspective. He lives in east London with his wife.
Derren seems beguiling; he has that quality where people will want to do things for him. But once you meet him in person you realise he’s also a genuinely nice person – unlike me, who will appear to be a nice person, while deep down I’m squirmy, wormy and horrible.
We met through a magician, Paul Kieve, who knew my work and thought Derren might like it. So he took Derren to an exhibition of mine in London about five years ago – I didn’t know then he was also an artist – and he ending up buying one of my "Vanishing Venice" paintings.
Our art is one thing that really connects us. I’ve seen Derren develop from a caricaturist to a painter approaching photorealism. Artists often swap work with each other, so I’ve done a 3D cast of his head – but inverted – and he painted a portrait of me. It has a tremendous twinkle in the eye and a grin. But what’s most disconcerting is that I seem to look more and more like it as the years go by.
I love his TV shows – my mind gets boggled by them. My favourite was The System, where he told a group of six people he could predict which horse would win in a series of races – but they didn’t realise they were part of a massive group experiment. I loved the logic of it.
When he’s on stage he’s particularly seductive. The last show I went to, a woman dressed up in disco gear next to me was chosen by Derren to come up on stage and he had to guess what she did for a living. He said, "I know what you do," and I thought, "I can’t imagine what she must do." Then he said to her, "You’re a bureaucrat in the police department." It was the last thing I would have said. So how does he do it? I suspect he goes through all the people who’ve brought tickets and Googles them. It’s a great cheat. Though I think he has the capacity to use different techniques; when you go backstage it’s a bit of a surprise to see he has a whole team back there.
I have been with magicians who can’t stop doing tricks – such as pulling eggs from their ears – and it actually gets very wearing. But there’s no trickery involved when you spend time with Derren.
Derren Brown, 41
Since his first TV outing "Mind Control", in 2000, the psychological illusionist has performed countless live shows and more than 20 TV specials, including the controversial "Russian Roulette". He is also an accomplished painter. He lives in London with his partner.
Patrick has a long association with the magic community; some of his work is hanging at the offices of the Magic Circle. We were introduced through a mutual friend and magician, Paul Kieve, who invited me to an exhibition of Patrick’s Venice collection five years ago.
His reverspective paintings [three-dimensional paintings that shift perspective depending on where you are standing] are his trademark. I love how, as you walk around the room, the buildings in the painting seem to follow you, while your brain tells you it’s a flat object. It’s a great mind trick which had immediate appeal for me.
So I brought one of the Venice pieces and made contact with him, and it turned out that he was a huge magic fan.
He’s a tall, handsome man who dresses immaculately. He particularly likes to wear this pinstripe linen suit with trainers, which you can only get away with if you are very young – or very old.
If you get invited round to his place you discover this incredibly eccentric environment. In particular, he’s got this reverse mirror in his apartment so that when you look into it you see what other people see, as it reflips the image, which is very disconcerting, but fascinating.
We speak about painting all the time – we tend not to talk about my other work. I think it’s remarkable that there’s nothing self-indulgent about his work. It works in the mind of the viewer more than art normally does, and in that way it’s similar to a magic trick. One thing that has stuck with me is a piece of advice he gave me: "You can paint anything." It sounds obvious, but at the time I was painting portraits from photos and feeling limited by the source material. So I started taking photos myself and that advice has become something of a motto.
He is everything I would dream of being at that age. He is like a big child and it’s because he’s such an open person that he attracts such a wide variety of people around him. I had dinner with him once alongside an eccentric Russian painter, poets and [actor] Steven Berkoff.
When I’m with people who are successful, I become intimidated into not saying anything. Patrick, though, exudes confidence with anyone. I wish I had his level of self-assurance.
Patrick Hughes hosts three open days at his studio on 5 May, 2 June and 7 July. Email for details
How We Met: Derren Brown & Patrick Hughes
‘Justified’ recap: Going home
May 2, 2012
If Season 3 has been a little uneven, I’d almost recommend to those who will catch up someday on DVD that they stick it out, simply because the finale makes it all worth it. “Slaughterhouse” can’t redeem everything leading up to it, but it does its best to try, and it’s helped immeasurably by the way that last week’s episode cleared out a bunch of plot to give it some breathing room.
The episode weaves in and out of any number of families, both literal and figurative, spending almost as much time with a mother and her two sons (whom we meet for the first time here) as it does with, say, the ad hoc workplace family down at the marshals’ office. Quarles spends the whole episode longing to go “home,” as if that’s a place he can ever return to after the events of the season, yet everyone in the episode is longing for that same thing. And who most obviously finds it? Boyd and Ava, who end the episode together and happy, as we hoped they might.
Raylan began the season looking like he might finally have found the home he seemed to be spurning throughout those first two seasons. He and Winona were going to get a little place together, somewhere they could raise their child. (The killer who turned up in his hotel room in the season premiere only seemed to drive this point home all the more thoroughly.) Yet the show almost always works best when Raylan’s a lone wolf, someone who does the right thing, yes, but seems like he might start doing the wrong thing at any moment.
And so the season has methodically stripped him of the things that kept him tethered. Winona’s left him, taking their unborn child with her. He’s seemed more and more isolated from his co-workers (probably because they’ve barely appeared). And now, his own father elects to shoot at a man he thought could very likely be Raylan to protect Boyd. The ending of this episode is incredibly sad, and Timothy Olyphant, who sometimes felt lost in all the plotting, earns those emotions.
The end of Robert Quarles is appropriately operatic. Having come to understand that the only way he’ll get back in the Detroit mob’s good graces is if he delivers $500,000 to Theo Tonan, he realizes the only place in Harlan to get that kind of money is at Limehouse’s operation. Limehouse has, perhaps, felt a little too ancillary to the action this season, but I’ve liked the way these final episodes have brought his scheming to the foreground. He very nearly rids himself of all of his problems (and sends Errol packing for good measure), but then Quarles comes calling — Raylan and young boy in tow — and it all comes crashing around him.
Fortunately, Errol figures out something is up when he passes Raylan driving a van on his way into Nobles Holler (a van he’s driving because Quarles has him at gunpoint), and he arrives to fire at the Detroit mobster. It all ends with Limehouse chopping off Quarles’ arm before he can use that famous gun tucked up his sleeve, and then the villain bleeds out on the floor. It’s a giant end for a larger-than-life figure, and even if the character didn’t always work, Neal McDonough’s performance will be missed.
Even when the season-long plot doesn’t work, any given episode of “Justified” is packed full of great scenes and moments, and “Slaughterhouse” is positively brimming with them. The return of Harlan Roulette in Wynn Duffy’s trailer is just one, and I particularly loved Wynn’s shocked little yips as he realized that, yeah, Raylan was really going to go through with this. There’s also Ava’s angry inquisition of the prostitute she believes sold out Boyd to Limehouse, giving Limehouse the information he needed to get the authorities to haul Boyd off on murder charges. It’s an electrifying scene, and it shows just how thoroughly Ava has become Boyd’s right-hand woman in his operations. And finally, there’s that wonderful moment when Arlo confesses to the murder of Devil, letting Boyd off the hook in favor of a feeble old man who’s losing his mind. It’s both operatic and tragic, the two modes “Justified” works best in.
Yeah, there’s plenty of room left for the plot to twist in next season. For one thing, Limehouse is still out there and is a fascinating character the show has only very briefly explored. (The reveal that he was keeping his cash in a literal piggy bank was another great moment.) For another, we’ve discovered that Johnny’s still working at cross-purposes with Boyd, even if he claims to not be. And, finally, we’ve got the big, open wound that is whatever Raylan and Winona used to have, a relationship that seems to be in tatters now.
But the finale does more than just remind us of what the plot is. It gives the rest of the season the thematic heft it was missing. All of these people have been searching for a home to return to. All were willing to do anything it took to find it. Yet very few of them have been able to gain what they wanted, and it forever slips just past their fingers as they grasp for it. That’s just the nature of where they went looking for that home: Harlan County, a place where the ground is soaked with blood.
Maybe, in the end, Limehouse had the right idea: Find a safe spot, hunker down, and make sure everybody leaves you alone. Yet Harlan has a way of always bringing the bloodshed right back to your doorstep.
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Photo: Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) finds himself very alone at the end of the third season finale. Photo credit: FX
ModNation Racers Road Trip: “Pick Up And Play” Redefined
April 30, 2012
(He says with a smile…) As the self-appointed spokesperson for men everywhere I can personally attest to the widely unspoken truth than men indeed do some of their best work in their secondary “office.” In fact, had I been given permission to test there, I guarantee I would have scored 175-250 points higher on my S.A.T.’s leading to my unfulfilled dream of attending an “accredited” college. Since that dream has long passed me by, I am left with the dilemma: such a throne of inspiration and enlightenment now left to its utilitarian purpose, what to do? Left to task, those minutes can seem like an eternity. Put to proper use they can be redeemed into many leg-numbingly wonderful times!
The “Pick Up and Play” Gamers Oath: On a bus, on a train. On a boat, on a plane.On a ladder, or a stool. In a garden, by the pool.Standing up, lying prone, or sitting quietly, on a throne.
Okay, all kidding aside, ModNation Racers: Road Trip is a great “pick up and play” game for your new PS Vita. Whether you have a quick few minutes (one race) or the next millennium off from work or school (500,000+ user created tracks) we’ve got you covered.
So put down that newspaper, take a break from doing your taxes or homework and treat yourself to a little gem we call ModNation Racers: Road Trip. You’ll be glad you did!
“Road Trip” Community Hot Lap Challenge
Each week we will host a Community Hot Lap Challenge to see who can post the best time on selected tracks. The top three times will be mentioned here in this ModNation Monday blog for the world to see.
Think you’re the best racer in Road Trip? Two words: bring it!
Check here next week for the results and the next track in the series. If you have a track that you would like to nominate as “The Hot Lap Challenge Track of the Week” please let us know HERE
“Road Trip-ers” – Enjoy Double XP Week! That’s right Mods and Modettes — it’s Double XP time! All systems (Vita, PS3, PSP) will receive Double XP from Monday, April 2nd – Monday, April 9th! Go ahead, knock yourselves out! (Mama said). ModNation Racers: Road Trip “Track of the Week” TheGiantCamelChronicals5 by BorisTheBear7
ModNation Racers For PS3
Top Tracks: Best of its2l84that 
All-Time 10 Best User-Created Tracks? In just a few short weeks The ModNation Racers franchise celebrates its two year anniversary! Help us by nominating what you think are the 10 best user made tracks in the game.Your nominations can be posted HERE.
Hot Lap Track of the Week: Roulette Raceway Casino by IndustrialSavior
Monday: Zenkane City by City_Zen_Kane Tuesday: Antarctica by Xv_AmBiTionZ_vX Wednesday: Urban Dash by mini_schnauzer67 Thursday: Garbage Dump Athletic by statickey_660 Friday: Pueblo Modina by City_Zen_Kane Saturday: Roulette Raceway Casino by IndustrialSavior Sunday: WAVE RACER by SpeedDemon
Have a great week everyone,Mark
PS3: ModNationSDVita: ModNationSDVita
ModNation Racers Road Trip: “Pick Up And Play” Redefined
Welcome Back to the Mailbag
April 29, 2012
AP Photo/Elise AmendolaFrom Fenway’s birthday to NBA MVP to a Price Is Right merger with the NHL, it’s actual letters from actual readersBy Bill Simmons on April 20, 2012
When I heard about the “Fenway 100″ anniversary celebration before Friday’s Red Sox–Yankees game, my guard went flying up at the speed of a vintage Pedro fastball. See, we went from having neglectful owners (the 1970s) to incompetent owners (the 1980s and 1990s) to opportunistic owners who transformed the franchise (in a good way — we won two titles) while scraping every possible penny of profit out of their investment, to the point that Yaz was probably afraid to come to Fenway today because he didn’t want to be murdered, chopped up and turned into commemorative Yaz-flavored kielbasa pieces for $499.95 per bite. The thought of a “Fenway 100″ celebration made me nervous.
And then the players came pouring out on the field, one after the other, and … well …
What can you say? What can you say when every checkpoint from your entire life happens to be huddled as one big mass of Red Sox jerseys in the only hometown park you ever had? There were Fisk, Rice, Pedro, Big Mo, Nomar, Remy, Rico … it was like a 35-man tie for “Guy I Was Most Excited to See Again.” Even better, they invited everybody, so for every childhood hero, there was also a Mike Stenhouse, a Shag Crawford, even a Steve Lomasney. I ended up getting greedy and being bummed out that El Guapo and Freddie Lynn didn’t show up. Talking about it with my father later, he mentioned the moment when Fisk, Yaz and Rice helped out with the first pitch — how he couldn’t help but notice that Freddie Lynn was missing, how there was something fitting about Lynn not being there for that moment, either.
“He never should have left Fenway,” my dad said for the 10,257th time. “Perfect park for him. He would have made the Hall of Fame if he stayed.”
We have been having the same conversation about Freddie Lynn since I was 13. He should have stayed. These are the things you think about when your entire life is flashing before your eyes. Football is more popular, basketball is more marketable, hockey is more exciting, soccer means more throughout the world. But baseball has a way of making you think about everything that ever happened to you, every conversation you ever had, every place you ever lived, everything. I saw Millar and thought of standing in the tunnel at Fenway in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, when he was drawing that walk against Rivera. I saw Yaz and thought about him popping that ball up against Gossage, seeing it coming down, praying for a miracle that wouldn’t come. I saw Pedro and thought of those precious nights at Fenway when he’d give up his first hit and the crowd would collectively sigh, as in, “Damn, I’m not seeing a no-hitter tonight.” I saw Mo and thought about that hideous strike season, a year after I had moved back to Boston, when Big Mo was the only Red Sox player worth seeing. I saw Nomar and thought about how, once upon a time, it was Nomar, then A-Rod, then Jeter (in that order). I saw Remy and Rice and thought about the time Remy blew out his knee and Rice had to carry him back to the dugout, and I saw Evans and thought about the time he got beaned in the Seattle game and my dad and I thought he was dead. I saw Fisk and thought about that first White Sox game when he came back and rammed it right between our eyes.
I didn’t see Freddie Lynn, and that mattered, too. So did the fact that I didn’t even realize Clemens was missing until about 20 minutes after the ceremony. All of this mattered. All of it. The Red Sox have been screwing just about everything up lately, but today wasn’t one of those times. Let’s hope that ceremony doesn’t end up being the highlight of the 2012 season.
Q: I’m turning 30 and the only thing I want for my birthday is a new mailbag. The only thing. I even told my fiance not to worry about giving me a gift. I hope you can come through for me, for all of us.— Jana Fischer, Boise, ID
SG: I don’t know, Jana. Lots of people turn 30. I need a little more prodding.
Q: When a soon to be Holy Cross freshman is getting action in a 1966 Driver’s Ed class on episode of TV’s best show (Mad Men), I think that means it is time for a mailbag. Given that it is Holy Cross, it wasn’t co-ed yet and that it was before the “free love” era, what are the odds that was the best that guy was going to do until he got back home next summer?— John, Dunwoody, GA
SG: The odds are lower than you think. My dad went to Holy Cross in the late-’60s — every Friday, he would flee campus to visit any other local school that had coeds, becoming so infamous for that ploy that his friends gave him the nickname “Suitcase.” Ironically, it became harder for male Holy Cross students to hook up AFTER the school started admitting girls. Either way, I’m not sure Hanson the Horny Future HC Student deserves credit for spawning a mailbag.
Q: It’s 4/20 on Friday. You almost always write Fridays and you have owed us a mailbag for weeks. Also half your audience will get high before they read that mailbag anyway. Do I have to spell this out for you Simmons? 4/20 MAILBAG!— MG, NY NY
SG: OK, now we’re talking. I’m almost convinced. I’m on the brink.
Q: Sports guy. Deployed in Kuwait right now. Entering the 2-3 month point when you realize your life is depressing. How do you feel about a mailbag? I’m begging.— Andrew Gerry, Udairi, Kuwait
SG: Now that’s a good reason for a mailbag! Stay safe out there, Andrew. As always, these are actual questions from actual readers.
Q: Now that Dwight is out for the season, how likely is it that The Ewing Theory will soon become The Howard Theory?— Kyle, Toronto, Ontario
SG: It’s a perfect storm: You have the possibly overhyped superstar who never won anything; everyone writing off his team for the playoffs; a group of players who probably weren’t crazy about becoming part of Howard’s soap opera these past few months; a first-round matchup against a totally unproven Pacers team; and a coach who’d love nothing more than to shove it to the guy who wanted him out all season.1 The Ewing Theory Committee is on high alert. Couldn’t you see Orlando making, like, 20 of 35 3s in Game 1 or Game 2, then doing the same thing in Game 3, followed by Indiana getting tight and everyone saying, “Wait a second, Orlando can’t actually win this series without Dwight, right????” More important …
Q: With Howard out for the Olympics, Stiemsma has to take his spot right?— @bobfuton (via Twitter)
SG: Look, Greg Stiemsma already went from never averaging 12 minutes a game for a Big Ten school to averaging 20 minutes a game as a valuable backup big man for an NBA title contender. You’re really telling me that “Greg Stiemsma, Gold Medalist, USA” is far-fetched at this point?
Anyway, I’m glad Mr. Futon brought this up because I spent the morning freaking out about our gold-medal chances. Here are the nine definites for Team USA …
LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, Derrick Rose, Chris Paul, Kevin Love, Carmelo Anthony (played his way back onto the team these past three weeks) and Tyson Chandler (the team’s new defensive anchor with Howard out).
I also think Russell Westbrook is sneaking in as the team’s luxury uber-athletic combo guard/defensive stopper whenever Coach K wants to turn up the jets with the press. That makes 10. If you notice, we’re more than a little small, which means we have to cross off the token extra shooter (Steph Curry, Eric Gordon, etc.) and token luxury perimeter defender (Andre Iguodala) so we can add a taller forward and one more center/defensive anchor.
Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Our 2012 gold medal is riding on that one 40-minute game against Spain. They’re throwing both Gasols AND Serge Ibaka at us.2 They’re going to pound us down low and relentlessly bang the offensive boards. It’s just a fact. We can respond by being cute and saying, “We’re going small and beating them with LeBron/Durant/Carmelo playing the four,” but if the Gasols get in a groove (and we’ve seen them do it in these international games), we’re going to need size beyond Chandler and Love (and protection in case either of them gets into foul trouble). The candidates …
Blake Griffin: Rebounds, garbage-time dunks and marketing. That’s what you’re getting. Can’t imagine him playing a lick against Spain when he’s a mediocre low-post defender and can’t make 15-footers on the other end. With Howard onboard, you could have snuck Blake onto the team as the 12th guy. No more. If they pick Blake, they’re picking an All-Star team … something they swore they wouldn’t do. I’m crossing him off.
Chris Bosh: A better fit internationally because he can make 17-footers. On the other hand, I don’t trust Bosh as the third-best guy on an NBA contender … I’m going to trust him in the Spain game trying to defend the Gasols? Thanks but no thanks. Let’s leave Bosh’s Pit in Miami, please.
LaMarcus Aldridge: Just had hip surgery and was never exactly a defensive stopper. Cross him off.
Andrew Bynum: Most talented big man on the board … but man, given all the maturity issues/health problems he’d had over the past few years, can you really see Coach K rolling the dice with him? Why does this make me so nervous? Read this article. And this one. And this one. You really want to trust Bynum against Spain? He has two months to change our minds.
Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan: Both passed the “No way I’m putting those extra miles on my legs during the summer when I’m supposed to be resting for next season and I’m old, anyway” checkpoint about four years ago. Hold this thought, though.
Stiemsma: Why are you laughing? Do you realize that the Stiemer is leading all American big guys in blocks-per-48 minutes? Plus, wouldn’t you want to own a Stiemsma Olympic jersey?
In all seriousness, here’s what we should actually do. First, we send Kobe, LeBron, Wade, Coach K and Durant to KG’s Malibu house right after the Finals. They deliver the following message:
We only need you for TWO games. You’re going to be using the summer to stay in shape, anyway — what better way to stay in shape than a few weeks of July practices against the best players in the world in Vegas? From there, we’ll go to London and stick you in a fire extinguisher case for the preliminaries — “ONLY BREAK IF YOU REALLY NEED KG.” You can cheer on the guys, F-bomb our opponents from the bench, scream encouragement like a lunatic and do KG things. Then, we’ll bring you out for the medal games against France and Spain. You can finally get revenge on Pau Gasol for the 2010 Finals when you were playing on one leg. You can win a gold medal and add to your legacy. And by the way? WE NEED YOU. Win this with us.
No way Garnett turns them down. He’s too competitive and too good of a teammate. So there’s your 11th. As for our 12th guy, it’s such a glaringly obvious answer that, when I give you his name, you will shake your head and say, “Why didn’t I think of that???” I present to you the one and only logical choice for that 12th spot, something that we need to get done as soon as possible so I don’t have to spend my summer worrying about us blowing the Spain game …
(Hold on, I’m letting it sink in for you.)
… that’s right, we’re bringing in the Unibrow!
It’s the no-brainer of no-brainers! Anthony Davis just won an NCAA title. He protects the rim like nobody we’ve seen since a young Dikembe Mutombo. He’s the ultimate teammate, someone who can affect basketball games without taking a single shot. Unlike Bynum, we won’t have to worry about him screwing up team chemistry. He’ll be the ultimate happy-to-be-there young guy. He’ll even happily settle into that always-enjoyable role as the whipping boy rookie who has to carry everyone else’s bags and stuff. And by the way? We might actually need him! What am I missing? GIVE US THE ‘BROW! USA! USA! USA! USA!
The team one last time: Paul, Rose, Westbrook, Wade, Kobe (guards); LeBron, Durant, Carmelo, Love (forwards); Chandler, Garnett, The ‘Brow (centers). Do you feel better? I feel better. Let’s move on.
Q: How long do you think it will take for Bill O’Brien to get the “old person smell” out of his office?— Mike P, Philly
SG: (Afraid to say anything.)
Q: Is it me or is Kill Frank Gore’s Head going to be the most popular team name in fantasy next year?— Butter, West Palm Beach
SG: Absolutely. I’m also excited for the obligatory terrible metal rock song with the chorus, “KILL THE HEAD (AND THE BODY WILL DIE)!!! KILL THE HEAD (AND THE BODY WILL DIE)!!!” That reminds me, where was the WWE during this Gregg Williams saga? How did they not create a wrestling manager/Williams parody who keeps “crossing the line,” offers bounties for his wrestlers to injure other wrestlers, stirs up an ongoing moral dilemma and comes out to the entrance song, “Kill the Head (and the Body Will Die)”? How long do we have to wait?
Q: A few years back you wrote how Jennifer Love Hewitt was poison to the ears of women. Just the sound of her name would cause any women within earshot to perk up and say “her neck is too tall,” “her boobs are too big,” “her body is too disproportionate … ” Well, I have found that Khloe Kardashian elicits the exact opposite reaction. She’s the anti-JLov. Every time I mention something along the lines of Khloe being the ugly Kardashian, every nearby woman comes to her defense. They always say “what?!?! She is sooo pretty!!” or “I weigh more than she does!” This is almost never true.— Ken S., Brighton, MA
SG: I asked my wife about this. We had this exchange.
Her: “I hate all the Kardashians and I hate their show. But Khloe’s the most tolerable of the three.”
Me: “Why do you think women like her?
Her: “She’s funny and she’s honest — she tells it like it is. (Thinking.) You know, I actually like Khloe, I just hate her sisters.”
Me: “Do you feel bad for Khloe that she’s considered to be the fat sister?”
Her: “She’s not that fat!”
(And there you go. Meanwhile … )
Q: How is Grantland not reviewing Jennifer Love Hewitt’s new show The Client List? It is female porn. There are so many guys with six pack abs that all need Jennifer to “massage” them in all the right places. Insecure men leaving their women. Overdone Texas stereotypes. Please get someone on this show asap.— Jeffrey, Austin
SG: Done and done. We’re launching a weekly “Hate Watching: The Client List” recap post next week on our Hollywood Prospectus blog. By the way, just when you think J-Love had run out of ways to get women to abhor her, she launched a Lifetime show in which she gives out happy endings and potentially ruins marriages during the same month she posted a Twitter picture of herself without makeup (looking great, of course). That’s almost like declaring war on housewives everywhere, right?
Q: When the 8-seeded Kings took a 3-0 lead on the Canucks, I was reminded of how little advantage Vancouver received for their amazing regular season. Here’s a dramatic and controversial plan that could keep ESPN’s talking heads busy for weeks. I call it “Game 8.” It’s simple and beautiful. The 1 and 2 seeds only need to win 4 out of 7 as usual, but the low seeds need to win 5 games total. How do we do this? They could win 5-0, 5-1 or 5-2 in a normal 7-game series. But, if the low seed is leading 4 games to 3? The sportstalkopalyse: Game 8. At the high seed’s home arena. Winner take all. As you say: Who says no?— Brent T., Los Gatos, CA
SG: Let’s be honest: The only hockey-related ideas that “could keep ESPN’s talking heads busy for weeks” would be Tebow, Peyton or LeBron signing with an NHL team. Anyway, I like the spirit of your idea but don’t agree with the execution — the no. 1 seed shouldn’t have to play an extra playoff game. I’d rather see the NBA, NHL and MLB adopt the following idea: give no. 1 seeds an extra home game in Round 1. In baseball, change Round 1 to a 2-1-2 format; in basketball and hockey, change it to a 2-2-3 format. While we’re fixing things …
Q: I’m listening to Jalen and Jacoby’s latest podcast and they’re discussing flopping and possible deterrents. How about the NBA creates the proposed Flop Committee? If you accrue flops during the season, you start the next game with an automatic foul. And that keeps going every two flops after the first six.— Sam, New Orleans
SG: I’d go even further — once you get to 10 flops for the season, after every ensuing flop, you start the next game with TWO automatic fouls. Can I be the chair of the Flop Committee? I want to be able to put this on my résumé and everything. Hold on, we’re not done fixing things.
Q: Hey Sports Czar — what’s your fix for NFL kickoffs? You can’t run for Sports Czar if you are sitting this one out.— Jeremy, Omaha
SG: We can’t get rid of kickoffs entirely, right? For such a violent sport, we can’t suddenly start picking which violent parts make more sense than others. At the same time, this seems like a good chance to tweak the sport so there’s more incentive to go for touchdowns instead of field goals. Why? Because fans perk up when they hear the words “fourth down and they’re going for it!” and lose interest when they hear the words “and here comes [fill in any kicker] to try a field goal.” So, what if we tweaked the rules …
• No more kickoffs to start the first and third quarters. Instead, each team gets the ball on the 25-yard line and we go from there.
• After any successful field goal, you kick off from your own 25-yard line.
• After any touchdown, you kick off from your own 40-yard line.
The end result (hopefully): fewer field goals, more touchbacks, more “fourth down and they’re going for it!” situations, and (most important) more decisions that will get screwed up by mentally overwhelmed coaches and eventually turn into comedic fodder!
Let’s apply the revamped rules to a game situation. It’s Sunday night and San Diego is playing Philly. The Eagles are trailing by four points with seven minutes to play. They’re on San Diego’s 22-yard line. It’s fourth-and-four. If they make the field goal, they’re still trailing by one, and they have to kick off from their own 25 (conceivably, giving San Diego excellent field position to finish off the game). But if they get the first down? Better chance of scoring the go-ahead touchdown coupled with an overwhelming chance of a touchback kickoff (and San Diego starting their next drive from their own 20).
So what would Andy Reid do? (Thinking.) Well, he’d waste a timeout to think about it — and if he could waste a timeout by challenging the previous play, then spend a second timeout to think about fourth down, even better. Then he’d probably decide on kicking a field goal because that would be the dumbest move. Then we could poke fun at him the next day for the entire sequence. See what I mean? We need more decisions in football; there’s just no downside. We win anytime Andy Reid, Norv Turner, Mike Smith or whoever has to make a decision with multiple variables in the spur of the moment.
Q: Where does Lane punching Pete rank in all time Mad Men moments?— Gavin, Verona, PA
SG: SPOILER ALERT! Stuck my answer in the footnotes.3
Q: Starting in June 2010 Minnesota sports teams have suffered the following injuries: Justin Morneau suffers a concussion. (misses the rest of the year and is not the same player through all of 2011); Joe Mauer gets “bilateral leg weakness” and has a terrible 2011; Adrian Peterson shreds his knee at the end of the 2011 season; Ricky Rubio tears his ACL in 2011-2012 season. Has any other sports city suffered catastrophic injuries to that many stars in less than 2 years, and when is Kevin Love going to need microfracture surgery?— Paul Z, St Paul
SG: And to think, Paul sent that e-mail before Love suffered a concussion and the “Vikings might leave Minnesota” story broke. Is there a way to blame all of this on Brett Favre? Isn’t he Patient Zero for the Minnesota sports collapse?
Q: Any chance we can get Bobby V. to make some pro-Castro comments sometime soon?— @sethrobbins77 (via twitter)
SG: Good one. You got me thinking about Boston’s equivalent sore spot to pro-Castro comments in Miami — what’s the one thing Bobby V could say that would potentially get him driven out of town?
It could go one of two routes. Either he’d have to make the following 10 points in the SAME interview …
“I’ve managed in New York and I’ve managed in Boston … New York just has better and more sophisticated fans. It’s a fact.”
“I have to admit, it’s weird to be managing in Boston given that I believe Magic was better than Bird, Gretzky was better than Orr, Kiss was better than Aerosmith, DiMaggio was better than Williams, and Manhattan clam chowder was better than that creamy white sludge they serve here. I even think Fire Island is better than Provincetown. Again, it’s just weird that I ended up here.”
“I’ve been a fan of Eli Manning’s game for a long time — those boys will go down as one of the best teams ever in any sport.”
“What’s up with the goofy accents here? These people sound like reeee-tahds. [Long laugh.]“
“I can’t believe how much they worship the Kennedys around here. Don’t they realize that JFK was the most overrated American president ever? Oh, and nice job pretending that Chappaquiddick never happened, EVERYBODY.”
“I can’t believe how much Dennis & Callahan’s political views echo my own.”
“Irish people are fat, freckled, drunken morons. And always have been, by the way.”
“Kevin Youkilis isn’t as physically and emotionally into the game.”
“I agree with Luke Scott — Fenway is a dump and they should have torn it down 20 years ago.”
“Sam Adams tastes like elephant piss and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee tastes like elephant shit. Sometimes I like to drink them both at once just to see how fast I can throw up.”
He’d have to answer a question about Boston’s busing riots in 1974 by saying something like, “I know that stuff happened almost 40 years ago, but I don’t care — I’ll always believe Boston is a racist city and you’ll never be able to tell me differently.” Every city has one sore spot. For Miami, it’s Castro. For Boston, it’s the racism thing.
(Wow, this turned somber fast. I think we need a little Mike Tyson.)
Q: After Mike Tyson revealed on ESPN that he got a prison official pregnant WHILE IN PRISON, can we officially stop taking challengers to the Tyson Zone throne? Charlie Sheen ain’t got nothing on Iron Mike.— Mike Bell, Riverside, CA
SG: And you didn’t even mention Tyson’s recent (and disturbing) “I beat up seven hookers while zonked out on cocaine” revelation. Look, I have a lot of regrets about getting carried away during Sheen’s media frenzy and assuming that a few crazy Chaz Sheen weeks could trump 25 crazy years of Tyson. If Kevin Durant averaged 37 points a game in the playoffs and won the NBA title, I wouldn’t suddenly declare him the best NBA player ever. I have a lot of regrets. Sorry, Mike Tyson. Please accept my apologies.
Q: Billy, how come you didn’t do a post Super Bowl mailbag when you’re supposed to do a post Super Bowl mailbag? My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and do a mailbag at the same time!— Gisele, Boston
SG: Gisele just reminded me of something: If there was ever a week for Tom Brady to give an interview and say, “You know, I’m 35 years old, I’m at the tail end of my prime, I don’t know how many years I have left here … man, I wish we’d stop rolling over these no. 1 picks to next year’s draft and just bring in a couple of blue-chippers once and for all,” isn’t this the week? Speaking of aging superstars facing the tail end of their primes …
Q: What are the odds that Kobe isn’t really hurt, just sitting out the last few games because he doesn’t want to lose the scoring title?— Crooney, Miami
SG: Are you crazy? Don’t you realize that every time Kobe misses a game, he thinks to himself, I just lost 29 more career points? I wouldn’t be surprised if his office at home has a wall covered with some sort of Beautiful Mind–type scribbling that calculates in great detail every single scoring checkpoint he needs to hit from now until 2018 to catch Kareem. Kobe cares about two things and two things only: winning a sixth ring (to tie MJ) and breaking that scoring record (which would make him immortal, and he knows it). Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Q: I already saw it as I commuted into the office at 8:00 am … I could sense it as I popped up out of the State Street stop … the abnormal warmth, the pep in the step of the women who passed by, the smiles … today is the day! it’s “Halter Top Day!!! Expected high of 87 on Marathon Monday … a bevy of beautiful women roaming the city in sun dresses or booty shorts and yes halter tops! Will there be sunbathing in Columbus park and the Common? Oh yes, because in this year of 2012 remember April 16th as Halter Top Day in Boston!— Brandon, Boston
SG: The greatest Boston day (Patriots’ Day) merged with the second-greatest Boston day (Halter Top Day)???? And the Red Sox lost??? How could the Red Sox lose on Halter Top Patriots’ Day???? We’re headed for 72-90, I’m convinced.
Q: It was just reported that David Lee is out for the season with “groin pain caused by a hip ailment.” I couldn’t stop laughing after reading your article 24 hours earlier where you predicted a bogus injury would remove David Lee. I’m starting to think we should feature you on CSI: Miami sometime to find a serial killer or something.— Chris, Toronto
SG: Just one measly CSI: Miami episode? You don’t think it could be its own CBS drama? What if I played a sports columnist who uses his telepathic powers to protect the NBA’s credibility in The Tankologist? Who’s playing me? Get Matthew Perry on the phone!
Q: With no clear MVP, doesn’t Steve Nash have to be at least considered if the Suns make the playoffs? If he’s not on that team, they’re probably competing with Charlotte for the ‘Brow. How many of his teammates would start for any of the other 7 west playoff teams. One?— Steven, San Jose
SG: When I posted my MVP column 17 days ago, I had LeBron and Durant ranked 1-2, then Kevin Love, Chris Paul, Kobe and Dwight Howard, in that order. Since then, Love dropped out of the top six (because of his concussion), so did Howard (for a variety of reasons), and so did Kobe (missed too many games). What’s the top five right now?
1. LeBron James: Leads Miami in points (27.1), rebounds (7.9) and assists (6.3); finished with a 30+ PER for the third time (it’s only happened 16 times, and only seven players have done it; first-team All-Defense; best player on one of the league’s three best teams. Slightly better than the dreaded “somebody had to win it” MVP season — I think he’s earned a five-pound trophy (and not the Wimbledon platter).
2. Chris Paul: Quality numbers (19.4 PPG, 9.0 APG, 2.5 SPG, 48/37/86 shooting splits, third in PER) coupled with ludicrously good crunch-time numbers (only Chris ranks top-five for points-per-48 minutes AND top 10 for assists-per-48 minutes, backing up the whole “Chris does everything for them in crunch time” notion), and that’s before you throw in the “helped keep the Clips together in mid-March when they were quitting on Vinny Del Negro” and “Oh, in case you forgot, the Clips have always been the league’s laughingstock” parts.4 Chris Paul single-handedly gave the Clippers credibility. Read that sentence again.
3. Kevin Durant: Had a two-week window in which he could have hijacked LeBron’s MVP and couldn’t pull it off. Here’s why I ranked Paul ahead of Durant: If you replaced Paul with, say, Jrue Holiday, they finish 19-47. But if you replaced Durant with, say, Thaddeus Young? Don’t the Zombies still finish .500 or better?
Anyway, there’s a dropoff after those first three guys … which leads us to Mr. Nash. If Phoenix sneaks into the playoffs in THAT conference with THAT team (basically, a 38-year-old point guard setting up a slew of role players, none of whom had ever been regular starters before except for Grant Hill, who, by the way, is 39 years old) after THAT start (they were 12-19 at one point), it could have only happened because of teamwork/chemistry/efficiency, and if that’s the case, then gee, I wonder who made that possible?5
Q: Looking back to Boston’s offseason what did you say when you acquired Mark Melancon from the Houston Astros? For me it was “Wow, I guess they didn’t know how much he sucks.” And you know what … you didn’t. Go ‘Stros, and yes, I know we blow enormous elephant sized shlongs.—James B., Houston
SG: That’s right, it’s a new low for the 2012 Red Sox season — the time we were trash-talked by a Houston Astros fan.
Q: Last week I was talking to a co-worker and said, “what if there was a Hunger Games between Ravens fans, Eagles fans and Raiders fans? Put them all together in an arena and fight to the death. Who would win?” My co-worker, a Ravens fan, immediately said, “I would totally sign up for that.” What fans would make up the most epic Hunger Games, and what would your criteria be? And who would be your winner? My criteria was a rabid fan base, and a fan base that would immediately respond: “Where do I sign up?” P.S. I don’t know what’s worse: that I thought about making the Hunger Games real, or that I thought about not writing this to you because I was afraid these fans bases might actually do it.— Amanda S., Los Angeles
SG: What a great question. The only thing we know for sure about the Fan Hunger Games: Cleveland fans would definitely make it to the Final Four before getting killed in the most agonizing way possible. For the other favorites, I’m leaning toward cold-weather fan bases like Boston (a history of dropping the gloves dating back to the 1770s), New Jersey (no need to explain), New York (biggest base to pick from), and Detroit/Baltimore (blue-collar). You also can’t underestimate some of the hockey-crazed Canadian cities if only because the NHL playoffs prove every spring that Canadians are supernaturally tough and can keep chugging along even when they’re semi-concussed or bleeding from three different places.
Still, I think Philly fans would have to be ranked as the favorites for two reasons. First, if you asked 100 random people the question, “What fan base is the most likely fan base to start a real-life Fan Hunger Games?,” Philly fans would run away with the vote. They just would. That has to mean something. And second, Philly fans are the only fans who would take it personally if they weren’t the favorites for the Fan Hunger Games. Boston fans would quietly smolder about being overlooked, then bide their time, relish being under the radar and get their revenge when the Games started. But Philly fans? They’d feel like it was a total slap in the face if they weren’t favored.
So who’d actually win? Here’s the wild-card component: Boston fans and New York fans would deliberately seek each other out and fight to the death. There would be no winners. Same for Philly fans and New Jersey fans. All four fan bases would be wiped out in the first 25 minutes. That leaves a Final Four of Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland and (in a huge upset) … Portland! Have you ever seen the Trail Blazers message boards? Those frustrated fans are more than ready to take out 35 years of Walton/Bowie/Jordan/Oden/Durant/Roy bitterness in the form of controlled bloodshed. I have them shocking Baltimore in the semis before falling to Detroit in the Finals. But hey, if you disagree and want to cast your own vote, click on Grantland’s Facebook page and weigh in.
Q: I have been a Cowboys fan my whole life. After my graduation from Baylor in ’09, I have also watched RG3 become the most important Baylor athlete of all time. He brought a Heisman to Waco, but more importantly brought credibility to a program that has lacked it for so long. Simply put, RG3 has become my favorite athlete. I am about to watch my favorite sports figure get drafted by the team I “sports hate” the most. I want Griffin to retire with multiple Super Bowl victories but don’t want the Redskins to have any. What do I do?— Matt, San Antonio
SG: Always side with the team over the player. You’ll watch Griffin for the next 15 years; you’ll watch the Cowboys for the next 60. There are only four ways a favorite player can trump a favorite team: If you’re related to the player; if you’re dating the player; if you’re close friends with the player; or if the player just knocked you up and agreed to pay for alimony. That’s it.
Q: After Nashville’s Weber received a $2,500 fine for slamming Zetterberg’s face into the glass but Chicago’s Shaw got a three game suspension for a collision in which he was obviously not trying to injure Phoenix’s Smith, I’m starting to think the NHL has a giant wheel that they spin whenever they need to dole out playoff punishment. Sometimes it will land on an much to heavy suspension and other times you’ll get out of jail free. What other explanation can there be?— Peter, Chicago
SG: Even if Peter was kidding, he inadvertently stumbled onto a killer idea. Since there’s no rhyme or reason to these suspensions, anyway, why not build a giant punishment roulette wheel and have Brendan Shanahan spin it to decide every suspension? The wheel could look like the Price Is Right‘s “Showcase” wheel and have 10 different penalty spots repeated two times each — $2,500 fine, $5,000 fine, $10,000 fine, $25,000 fine, $50,000 fine, one-game suspension, two-game suspension, three-game suspension, four-game suspension and a series suspension — along with two “get out of jail free”–type spots (which would save the player from any penalty) and one “banned from the playoffs” spot (so you’d have a 1-in-23 chance of getting bounced). Three things I like about this idea …
1. Wouldn’t we see fewer cheap shots because everyone would be afraid of taking their chances with the punishment wheel? Cross-check someone in the face and you might miss a couple of games. But with those 1-in-23 “banned from the playoffs” odds looming? Maybe you’d think twice.
2. You know how awkward between-period interviews are? Can you imagine how awkward the before-during-after sequence of Shanahan spinning the punishment wheel live on the NHL Network or WET6 would be? I would watch this EVERY time.
3. Isn’t this admittedly absurd idea no less absurd than the haphazard way in which they doled out punishment during these playoffs? Really, you get $2,500 for slamming someone’s head against the glass like Triple H slamming Undertaker’s head against the side of a steel cage, but three games for semi-accidentally running into a goalie?
Q: After the Bobby Petrino scandal, I realize we have been missing a big part of why a coach decides to stay or leave one program for another — I think we should call the formula “The Tang Factor,” based on the hotness of the coeds at the school combined with how much the coach will make there. What do you think?— Darrin, Palm Springs, FL
SG: I think you just stumbled across the best advanced metric since OPS. I didn’t have enough time to rank all 300 colleges — suffice it to say that the NESCAC is the Bizarro SEC.
Q: So, Bailey and Ellsbury are hurt, Melancon and Albers are getting lit up, Salty and Youk are hitting under .100, and Valentine is already losing control of the clubhouse. In April. On Patriot Day. After the 100th anniversary weekend. I’m tired of losing. Have another kid. Please.— William G., Santa Fe, NM
SG: Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it. For those who might not remember, my wife was pregnant with our first child in October ’04 and our second child in October ’07. We stopped after two kids for three reasons.
• My wife hates being pregnant. Something about crazy hormones, gaining weight, being uncomfortable and feeling lousy for nine months, then trying to pass another human being out of a hole that’s a fraction of the size of that human being. I don’t really get it. Feels like she’s totally overreacting here.
• We have (hmmmm … what’s a nice way to put this … ) energetic kids. Our kids can swim in a pool for five straight hours, towel off, then ask, “What are we doing now? We’re bored.” So we feel like we have three kids, anyway — each one counts for one and a half.
• Everyone we know with three or more kids responds to the question “What’s it like?” one of four ways: Either they’re totally honest (and tell you, “I’d never, ever, in a million years, do this again”); they start laughing the same way Mike Tyson’s manager would laugh if you asked him, “What’s Mike like?,” then come up with some fake story about how it’s not that bad even though you know they’re lying and they’re clearly hoping someone else is stupid enough to have three kids so at least they’re not alone in their personal hell; they make the “It’s like going from man-to-man to playing zone” joke, which is a nice way of saying, “We’re just trying to get through the next 10 years without a catastrophe or someone losing an appendage”; or, they’re Irish-Catholic, which means they’re confused by the question because it’s like asking, “What’s it like to breathe?”
Anyway, I love the Red Sox. Really, I do. But enough to create a third miracle fetus and switch to zone D? No. Can’t do it. Sorry, William G — we’ll always have the 2004 and 2007 World Series videos.
Q: Zombies may or may not poop. But one thing I’m certain of is that vampires don’t have sex. That is, at the very least, vampires from Twilight shouldn’t be able to. I say this because it explicitly says in the book that vampires don’t have blood (uhhh, I overheard a group of teenage girls talking about this). No blood, no erection. No erection, no sex. And yet, Robert Pattinson both has sex with, and impregnates Kristen Stewart in the fourth installment of the series. Indeed, Robert may be the first man in history to reproduce without ever having had an erection. I am a male in college, and yes, I realize that it is pathetic that I have spent enough time thinking about twilight to be bothered by this.— Stevie, Eugene, OR
SG: Oh, boy. I guess we’re in range.
Q: This may surprise you, but many of us count on the “Yup, these are my readers” portion of your mailbag. Now, I realize that, being the artist that you are, you feel compelled to experiment with your format, but I still must protest your latest venture. It was acceptable, and even funny, when you started teasing us with “in range” and “almost there”. At least we knew that “Yup” was coming. Now, you’ve not only taken to putting “Yup” in the middle of mailbags, you actually left them out completely or used different wording. I find this all very confusing. How are we supposed to know when the column ends ?!? Please, quit f-ing around and just put “Yup” at the end, the way it was always meant to be.— John Nolife, Ft. Lauderdale
Q: My buddy and I are currently playing a game called “I’m 22, unemployed, and living at home.” He sent me this text: “Highlight of my day: the girl with the big plugs from my local pizza place recognized me.” My response crushed his: “I’m emotionally invested in the red-blue bachelor baseball game. Jennifer the ginger struck out swinging to lose the game, typical. The next scene, model Courtney says “there’s no crying in baseball, rub some dirt in it,” and i had a hard time concealing my partial erection from my mom. Also, I have yet to take off my house shoes all day. I’m 22, unemployed, and living at home.” Our next endeavor is to try to buy jet skis and recreate the last scene of the first season of Kenny Powers, and send the pictures to our dads. We wanna start a new game called “disappointed looks of our fathers.” Can’t we start a club where all recently graduated males in a town can get together wearing their slippers and robes and share their experiences? We can’t be the only ones right? It’ll be like a loser AA.— James G, Santa Cruz
SG: Yup, these are my readers.
Aristocrat launches first online casino solution
April 28, 2012
Aristocrat launches first online casino solution 27 April 2012 LAS VEGAS (PRESS RELEASE) — Aristocrat Technologies, Inc. is live with a play-for-fun site for Maryland Live! Casino, a new $500M gaming and entertainment destination, currently in development in Hanover, Maryland. The site, myliveonlinecasino.com, is live now and will be used as a vehicle for the brick-and-mortar casino to promote its brand and attract players well in advance of its scheduled opening on June 6, 2012. The site is the first of its kind in the gaming industry, where a play-for-fun solution is integrated with a casino management system. The online casino is linked to the land-based casino through an exclusive tool of Aristocrat’s Oasis 360 casino management system, giving Maryland Live! Casino an incredible competitive advantage. Using an online casino to attract players to a yet-to-open brick-and-mortar casino is also a first. “We are absolutely thrilled to launch Myliveonlinecasino.com, Maryland Live! Casino’s online play-for-fun solution. Aristocrat has consistently led the industry in systems and in games. Now to launch such a site is a very exciting milestone in our company’s history, and in the history of the gaming industry,” said Aristocrat Vice President of System Sales and Marketing Kelly Shaw. Myliveonlinecasino.com was created with the power of Aristocrat’s nLive solution, recently recognized by Casino Journal on its Top 20 Most Innovative Gaming Technology Products Awards for 2011. nLive was the only Internet Gaming System to make the list. nLive is a simple, turnkey solution that empowers casinos to take their brand to players online. nLive sites are branded to the casino, not to Aristocrat, so the casino’s customers can extend their experience with the property brand they know and enjoy. In this case, Myliveonlinecasino.com will be used to increase awareness and attract players to the Maryland Live! Casino brand prior to opening, in order to develop a customer database. “The launch of Myliveonlinecasino.com enables us to pre-enroll customers into our Live! Rewards players club database and begin tailoring rewards to members before they even visit Maryland Live! Casino,” said Robert J. Norton, President & General Manager, Maryland Live! Casino. “The opportunity to reach our customers in advance of our opening is an invaluable benefit of Aristocrat’s nLive solution.” Myliveonlinecasino.com is an online casino fully branded to the Maryland Live! Casino. This play-for-fun casino offers players an incredible range of games, including some of Aristocrat’s favorite games like 5 Dragons, 50 Lions, Big Red, Imperial House, Miss Kitty, More Chilli, Queen of the Nile and Sun and Moon; table games like card keno, hi lo solitaire, jacks or better, pro blackjack and roulette; and skill-based games including backgammon, dominoes, poker, poker dice, solitaire and tournament blackjack. When the brick-and-mortar casino opens, the casino and Myliveonlinecasino.com will be linked with Aristocrat’s nLiveLink via Aristocrat’s Oasis 360 system. nLiveLink will empower Maryland Live! Casino to simultaneously monitor player activity at the actual casino and in the online casino, allowing the property to create rewarding offers based on the player’s total gaming experience, live and virtual. “nLive and nLiveLink are providing the tools to expand a player’s total gaming experience today, and they are generational steps forward. There is a lot of talk from a lot of suppliers about how they are planning to do this or that; however, the fact is, only Aristocrat has delivered real, live, workable solutions that are available now,” Shaw said. Oasis 360, recently named Best Player Tracking System in the 2012 Goldman Sachs Slot Manager Survey, will monitor all 4,750 devices at Maryland Live! Casino.
Aristocrat launches first online casino solution
Derren Brown: the illuminating illusionist
April 27, 2012
Mairi McLeod, contributor
I admit I was kind of expecting illusionist Derren Brown to appear on stage looking dark and mystical – perhaps in a velvet frock coat. But when he walked on stage at the Churchill theatre in Edinburgh earlier this month, he looked pretty much like an ordinary guy.
In fact, as he sat down opposite psychologist and fellow illusionist Richard Wiseman to be interviewed as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, the scene was quite cosy. The pair shared a big pot of steaming tea and chatted over a stand full of delicious looking cakes.
Of course, Brown hasn’t built his reputation as a TV and theatre superstar through his tea-time chatter. Over the last decade or so he has pulled off startling hoaxes – from apparently playing Russian roulette on live TV to manipulating three members of the public into committing armed robbery on a security van in broad daylight.
To create these scenarios and illusions, he claims to use techniques from traditional magic and conjuring to hypnosis, cognitive psychology, memory manipulation, subliminal suggestion and reading body language. So how did he go from being a student of law and German at Bristol University, UK to becoming a renowned illusionist?
“I’d seen a hypnotist in my first year at uni and thought it was a terrific show and I decided – I’m going to learn how to do that,” he told the audience. Reflecting that perhaps his desire to impress people was rooted in some of his own securities, Brown explained that hypnosis and magic soon became his “thing” at university.“I used to go round in a cape and a big blousy shirt and boots I had made. I thought I looked like a magician, but really I think I just looked like a gay leisure pirate.”
From this swashbuckling start in illusions, Brown soon moved on to become an in-house magician at a restaurant in Bristol. It was a tough gig, he recalls, but one that helped him fine-tune magic techniques he later published in books. And then in 2000, he got his break. The British television Channel 4 called to offer him a show all about mind-reading stunts. Content from the show, Mind Control, was promoted on the Channel 4 science website. But was it actually science?
Not according to science writer Simon Singh, who objected to the material’s placement on the science site and roundly criticised the program in the Daily Telegraph. It wasn’t psychology but trickery, Singh claimed.
Pulling himself up in his chair Brown took a gulp of tea and conceded that Singh had a point. “The claims I was making in those first shows were quite sort of broad,” he said. “I wouldn’t say anything like that nowadays.” But Singh’s criticism provided an opportunity to more clearly cast his work as entertainment – a mixture of magic tricks and efforts to expose the psychological methods used to achieve the trickery, Brown said. ”From that point it was easier and I backed off from making any claims.”
Of course, straddling this middle ground seems only to have gained him more critics. Much of Brown’s work has concentrated on exposing techniques used by proponents of the paranormal to convince – or dupe – people into believing they have special powers. He has unveiled the techniques psychics use for finding connections with people’s dead relatives, and travelled to the United States visiting people who claim to have special powers – convincing many that he too had such powers.
Unsurprisingly, none of these stunts earned Brown much good will from self-proclaimed psychics, but at the other end of the spectrum, sceptics believed he’d not taken things far enough. By way of example, Brown told the group gathered in Edinburgh about a time he met Richard Dawkins – who warned him he’d been asked to sign a petition against him.
Another stunt that has earned Brown much flak was his reproduction of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1963 experiment. Roughly in keeping with Milgram’s original results, Brown’s re-enactment showed that 65% of participants were prepared to administer what they thought were lethal levels of electric shocks to others when told to do so by an authority figure. Brown came under criticism from the academic community, but stands by the results of the re-enactment. The objections, he says, are inspired by embarrassment from those who said people would be unwilling to deliver what they believed to be fatal shocks.
Yet for all the televised stunts Brown has carried out, he says that live theatre is really the work that gets his blood pumping. With TV the outcome of a trick can always be improved by editing, but in live shows you don’t have that luxury. Embracing the theatricality of magic in a live performance is exhilarating, Brown says. “It’s fun, it’s high adrenaline.”
He must have found afternoon tea in Edinburgh a relatively relaxed affair, but the crowd loved what turned out to be a fantastic comedy double-act from the two illusionists. More than anything, Brown came across as a very nice, genuine bloke. Mmm… but was he really?
Brown is currently performing his show Svengali at venues around the UK.
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