That's Entertainment?

The things some people do for entertainment!

There are numerous enormously popular activities that I just don’t get.

Slot Machines

Around here in Alabama Casinos are not legal so they say. However, there is apparently some sort of loophole in these laws because we have dog tracks and at at least one of these tracks there is what appears to me to be a casino. Not a full-blown casino with all the trappings, but basically a big huge giant room filled with slot machines.

We also, apparently on a county by county basis, seem to go back and forth between allowing or not allowing ‘arcade’ rooms which are essentially slot machine casinos on a very small scale, yet with no cash award but something else such as gift certificates, etc.

Finally, Alabama also has at least one gaming institution on Indian (Native American) Land.
The point is, that this stuff is extremely popular. Even in Alabama where gaming is supposedly not legal, some form of it is legal and operates on a big scale. Not to mention how many people frequently drive over to Mississippi where it is legal. Whenever any of the arcade places are open, they are packed – especially in the late night hours. I have been into the Choctaw Indian casino before and there were lots of people in there – and this during daytime hours. It was just becoming prime time when we left and the crowd was growing fast. I have had the same experience at one of the dog tracks, which has a huge room of slot machines. I have also been on the casino on a couple of cruise ships and they are always busy. Finally, I have been to both Atlantic City and Lake Tahoe and was just amazed at the amount of activity.

All this may sound like I actually go to these places a lot. Actually, I do not and am not at all interested in them. Every time I have been in one of these places, I have been with other people who wanted to go. I had little or no interest and did little or no gaming. It’s not that I have a huge moral problem with gambling per se, it’s just that it does not interest me.

However, I could give you a long list of names of people I personally know who just can’t get enough of it. Presumably, they all believe they will strike it rich one day. They all claim that for their entire history of gaming, they have come out ahead – though none of them has kept records proving it, and if everyone who played came out ahead, the casinos would be out of business! All of them have at one time or another hit a big jackpot of hundreds of dollars. One of them has even once hit a jackpot of over fifteen thousand dollars. Yet, I’ll bet every one of them has in the end lost money on gaming. Yet they all keep going. Why? I just don’t get it.
And I only know a relative handful of people. There are thousands of folks doing this stuff all over the country every single day. They all think they are going to hit it big. They all seem frustrated every time they come out of the place. However, one thing is for certain. The CASINO is making money. The whole thing is set up so that they take in much more money than they pay out. That is obvious. These things are huge and elaborate and must cost a fortune. That money comes from the gamers who think they are going there to get rich. Every gamer I know understands all this. He or she just thinks that the next time they go they will beat the odds and win big and it will all be worthwhile. It is true that a few individual gamers do hit it big. But if they do, they need to quit right then and there. It is an absolute law of how these things operate that if anyone played continuously for all there lives, they would come out very much in the negative. In other words, the more you play, the more you lose. There is no way around that. So, if you just happen to have one great day and win thousands you need to walk away and never come back. I have yet to meet a gamer who has done so. The industry knows this and is laughing all the way to the bank with the money.

The picture I have in my mind of playing the slots is the picture of standing in front of a garbage can and little by little throwing your money in it. If that’s what you call entertainment, then by all means, go for it. Just count me out.

Soccer

The next thing is soccer. I won’t elaborate much, because in spite some of the predictions of soccer fanatics, the sport still has not become huge in the US. I remember reading a Lewis Grizzard column once where he stated that someone had told him that ‘in 25 years soccer will be bigger in America than football, baseball, and basketball combined.’ He replied that someone had told him the same thing 25 years earlier. Well, it’s probably been close to 25 years since Grizzard wrote that article and soccer is still not huge in the US. You know why? Because we actually have sports that are entertaining. Football, basketball, auto racing – heck, even baseball seems about as fast paced and exciting as an Indiana Jones movie next to big league soccer. I would probably even prefer watching golf on television to watching soccer. I just can’t imagine that the sports gods could develop an actual team sport that involved a ball, pads, and cleats that was more boring to watch than soccer.

Now, when two of my kids were younger, they actually played soccer. I’m talking about, say, 2nd, 3rd, 4th grade or thereabouts. It was actually fun to watch. Obviously, it is fun for a parent to watch his own kids, but even beyond this, it was fun just watching all the kids play. There was actually tons of action. There were scores like 10-8 and stuff like that. But soccer seems to be the one game in the whole world that gets progressively more boring as you move up in skill level. By the time we get to major league soccer or world cup soccer, it is just painful to watch. It is simply a bunch of guys kicking a ball all over a huge field. Yawn.

You know its boring when the announcers have to scream like a banshee every time someone scores. That’s because a score is so rare. Every soccer game I have ever watched has a final of 1-0. Heaven forbid if it winds up 1-1. It then goes into some sort of overtime that could not be called ‘sudden death.’ Maybe ‘long drawn-out painful boring death’ overtime is what they call it in soccer. If they ever have a game that ends 2-1 that is considered an offensive shoot out. It’s offensive alright!

So, if there is a soccer game on tv, count me out. I think I have some drying paint to watch.

Deer Hunting

Let me be clear about this. I am a man. I love man things. Football. Beer. Rock and Roll. Women. (Well, actually I love one woman very much!) I don’t like musicals, chick flicks, shopping for clothes, or anything like that.

I preface this section in this way because apparently to a large number of dudes out there, deer hunting is the height of manhood. Conversely then, if a man does not like to go deer hunting, he is not much of a man.

Now, if you want to kill Bambi then by all means, go ahead. I just don’t get it though. Every friend of mine who has described his hunting trip to me gives me the same description. I’ll see if I can summarize it here:

You sleep in a musty, dusty, stinky, hunting camp cabin in the middle of nowhere that only gets used a few times a year

You wake up hours before the sun does.

You find your way out into the middle of the woods

You climb up in a tree stand – a device that has been specifically engineered for your discomfort.

You sit there for hours freezing you valued manhood off – because it’s only legal, apparently, to hunt deer during record cold temperatures

You’re sitting there freezing for hours just on the chance, the slight chance, the miniscule chance, that some prize buck will pass by within shooting distance. More often than not you a) see nothing b) see only a doe and its not doe season c) see a buck that’s not worth the effort d) see a prize buck who is about seventy three thousand yards away

After hours of this, you climb down and go back to the musty, dusty, cabin and drink your fill of Wild Turkey. This, actually, is a good hunting day.

A bad day, I believe, is the one day out of fifty that you get a good shot at a good deer because then….

You see the deer you want so you take your frost-bitten fingers and grasp your freezing cold weapon.

You raise it and try to aim at some specific spot on the deer who is always, as I said, about 73 thousand yards away. You are trying to aim while at the same time shivering.

Nine times out of ten he gets spooked and runs off before you get a shot.

Nine times out of ten if you get a shot you can’t actually pull the trigger because you can’t actually feel your fingers

Nine times out of ten if you actually fire a shot, you miss

Nine times out of ten if you do hit him, you injure him, but he doesn’t just fall over dead right there. So, here starts the second phase of ‘hunting’ – hunting for the place where your injured specimen hopefully falls over and dies.

Nine times out of ten you don’t find him

If you do find him, nine times out of ten he is still alive, barely, then you have to kill him on the spot – if he doesn’t jump up and attack you first – a thing the deer does about seven times out of ten at this point.

Ok, so now you’ve gotten success. You’ve got a kill. (Do the math, here, the chances of you getting to this point are one in 166,666,667) BUT, what the heck do you do with him? Where the heck are you? How the heck do you get him back to the musty dusty cabin? How do you get him home? All of this involves knives, blood, guts, smells, sights, ugh! There is a six in ten chance you'll puke in the process. If this is at least your second day of the trip and you have been guzzling Wild Turkey the night before, these odds go up to 9.9 out ot ten!!

Now, if you ever find your way back and if you ever make it home with some semblence of a usable animal, you have to go pay someone to process the animal into edible meat. How much does that cost?

So, you now have freezer full of meat. No room for stuff like chicken, beef and pork. Bucky’s moved in!

Your wife (if you still have one) cooks you a nice deer roast.

It tastes something akin to what you would imagine road kill would taste like.

Great. Yeah. You’ve got me convinced! Can I please go with you next time? Oh, wait. Never mind. There’s a sale at Macy’s.