Those clever casinos

     In the 1970s Vegas and Atlantic City were the only two gambling Meccas in the U.S.  Today there are 1,400 casinos scattered over 40 states, many of these money-rakers located on native-American lands.  Their reported income in ’14 was $66 billion from 101 million visitors.  (It’s a cash business, notorious for skimming, book-cooking, and for grossly under-reporting.)

     The allure for visitors is simple: Potential riches with no work involved.  And it’s all cleverly promoted with glittery tinsel and euphemisms.  They’re called resorts, for example, and what they offer is only innocent gaming, not gambling. 

     The psychology is far more complex.  If you’re winning you don’t want to quit.  If you’re losing you’ll keep gambling trying to win back the losses.  People who come away having lost money are reluctant to admit it to family and friends, which works to the casinos’ advantage.  Inside the casinos there are no clocks and no windows.  Players are comfortably insulated against the outside world.  There are enticing photos of a relative few big winners on the wall.  Each time a slot pays off, no matter how little the amount, bells sound and lights flash and coins clatter loudly into trays, creating the illusion that players are winning much of the time.  Players are made to feel welcome with everything from inexpensive food and drink and accommodations to pleasant lighting and comfy seating and live entertainment.

     But the reality is that the odds always heavily favor the casinos.  So they’re not really gambling at all, and the more a player tries to win—the longer a person plays—the more that player is likely to lose.  The overwhelmingly vast majority do lose.

     Few visitors ever question where the billions must come from to create and sustain such lavish surroundings.  That money can only come from those thousands upon thousands of losers, of course.

     And the casinos prey not only on pampered high rollers, but more often also on those least able to afford the losses.  So rents and car payments and other bills go unpaid in order to feed that ephemeral dazzling atmosphere and those insatiable tables and those glitzy machines—and the anonymous wealthy people in the shadows behind them.

     I don’t treat casinos kindly in my fiction.

Phil   

Ten noted writers on money (and success):

“Fortune sides with him who dares.”—Virgil

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”—Henry David Thoreau

“Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.”—Benjamin Franklin

“Empty pockets never held anyone back.  Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.”

—Noman Vincent Peale

“Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“You can only become truly accomplished at something you love.  Don’t make money your goal.”—Maya Angelou

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

—Thomas Edison

“Money often costs too much.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do.  When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.”—Julia Cameron

“A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”—Yogi Berra

Phil

BIG data 

A bit is a basic unit of binary information, having one of only two values.  Could be yes or no, on or off, plus or minus.  In digital computing, communication, and storage, it’s either 0 or 1.  One byte is 8 bits.  A kilobyte is about a thousand bytes.  A megabyte is about a million bytes—the length of an average novel.  A gigabyte is roughly a billion bytes.  My computer has 10 gigs of storage capacity, which I have not come close to using in the four years since I bought it.  A common smartphone, of course, processes that much data a month easily.

A terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes, or about the same information stored in a large public library or on 1,600 regular CDs.

A petabyte is 1,024 terabytes.  Put that much content on CDs and it would create a stack 878 feet tall (223,000 discs).  It is 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes.

There’s a telescope under construction near La Serena in Chile (been there), called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will automatically collect fifteen terabytes of data PER NIGHT.  During its first decade it will amass 54,750 terabytes, or 53.5 petabytes.  That’s enough to fill stacked Blue-ray discs to a height of 15,750 feet.  An incredibly rich tower of data.  In that time its instruments will capture 40 billion objects in fine detail (its camera alone has 3.2 billion pixels), map the structure and evolution of our Milky Way Galaxy, count asteroids, explore transient events like supernovae, and create a stop-motion movie of much of the celestial sphere.  It will vastly increase our knowledge of this universe we live in.

We have other telescopes around the planet and in space that are constantly gathering ever more refined data, as well.

In astronomy, as increasingly in other scientific disciplines, the task has rapidly evolved from collecting enough data to draw meaningful conclusions, to being able to efficiently mine the fantastic avalanche of raw data now streaming in for the priceless knowledge certainly veined therein.

The years ahead will be exciting.

Phil

Fiction or non

     Whenever I’m selling books at some venue or other, I always ask each person who comes by my table, “Do you like to read suspense?”  They’re either going to answer yes or no.  If it’s yes, I launch into a brief spiel about my series novels.  I hand them a book so they can read the blurb on the back, and then I shut up while they do.  A gratifying percentage of the time they’ll buy.

     If the answer is no, I ask them what they do like to read, then chat with them a moment or two and thank them for stopping by.

     A certain number will say they only read non-fiction, and I automatically give up right then, because I’ve found people most often read one or the other, hardly ever both.  Although for some reason non-fiction readers who will never read a novel will go to a (fictional) movie in a heartbeat.  I guess that’s because we all tend to more readily believe what we see and hear, even if we know down deep it’s all an act.

     Then you always have that person who says, “Nope.  Don’t read no fiction.  I just read the Bible.”

Phil

Artful hooking

     Early in my lifelong writing side-career, when I was cranking out articles and short stories for magazines, I learned that you must hook a reader somehow to make the person stop casually flipping through the magazine pages, and read your offering.  This can be done with an arresting photo, or an unusual, intriguing title that maybe uses quirky alliteration, or that hints at some major conflict, or that provokes a grin.  Or it can be done with an irresistible opening sentence that absolutely demands further reading.  I often like to start with a bit of dialog, for example, because it invariably grabs interest, the way a whisper from a dark alley is bound to rivet you as you walk past.

     Here are a few effective introductory hooks from some masters:

“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth and the retreating fog revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”  The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

“The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”  The Gunslinger by Stephen King

“It was a bitter cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”  1984 by George Orwell

“They shoot the white girl first.”  Paradise by Toni Morrison

“You better not never tell nobody but God.”  The Color Purple by Alice Walker

“A screaming comes across the sky.”  Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

     In each of these cases, the author in effect poses a startling unusual question, and we’re drawn in to read further in search of an answer.

     In successful writing, at least, hooking can be elevated to an art form.

Phil

The Right to Bear Arms

     In medieval times, heralds had the dicey job of running messages between rival warlords across a tense battlefield under a flag of truce.  Between bloody wars they had the much safer job of colorfully announcing the contestants in entertaining tournaments and jousts.  The only problem was the contestants were anonymously clad head to toe in body armor.  So each considerately carried some sort of identifying symbolism on his shield.  A bear and a ragged staff meant the Earl of Warwick was tucked away inside all that clanking, creaking metal.

     So the heralds became experts and eventually even the respected arbiters of who was who among the elite, judging who had the right to claim membership in any particular bloodline.  Often this involved the bestowing of great wealth upon whomever a herald decreed was the rightful heir among sometimes many rival legitimate and illegitimate claimants.  Each of the great clans evolved a unique coat of arms incorporating symbols depicting that particular ancestry.

     In 1484 King Richard III set up the College of Arms in London.  It’s still one of the few heraldic authorities in the world, consulting on ceremonial matters, researching bloodlines, keeping meticulous records.  Still deciding who has “the right to bear arms.”

     Nothing whatever to do with weaponry.

     Interesting how certain such phrases in our complex language have morphed into entirely different meanings over time.

Phil  

Creating consequences

     The greatest satisfaction to me as a writer is touching other souls out there with a bit of knowledge new to them, or with some emotion that warms them or moves them to think a little more deeply about some aspect of life.  Or simply provides them with a vicarious escape into adventure or intrigue for a few hours.  I keep a nice thick file of e-mails and notes from readers who’ve liked my work.

     I sincerely hope my writing will never incite anyone to violence or cause anyone undue distress.

     Sadly, I don’t think our modern media has any such reservations, and I wonder if they take any responsibility at all for so often severely slanting the news that violence or despair or depression among many is the tragic result.

     When, for example, the beautiful TV talking heads in recent times have harped on single inflammatory phrases such as “unarmed black teenager” over and over and over, without ever telling the whole story, it is little wonder that riots have followed and that police have come under violent attack.  Equally dangerous are those TV stories that expose some weakness in our system that could be exploited by terrorists.  And the media will jump all over any story about terror incidents, granting the terrorists vast publicity—exactly what they were seeking.  Yet the media seem to admit no culpability whatsoever in any of this.

     Our words in fiction or in the media have tremendous power to help people.  Or to goad them to do wrong.

     Those of us who write fictional stories or report on real ones have an unwritten obligation to always take most seriously the potential consequences of our words.

Phil