Vegas, Baby

I'm gearing up for a Vegas birthday trip in a few weeks, so the posting is going to get kinda sparse.  Not eighteen-months-without-a-post-sparse, but not exactly gushing words like blog diarrhea, either. My main fascination with Vegas, besides all the drinking and general mayhem, is a table game known as Blackjack. 

Blackjack is also known as 21. The french know it as 'vengt-et-un', which translates to 'the dealer is a bastard'.  The object of Blackjack is to get 21, or, at the least, score more than the dealer without going over 21.  I won't go into the strategy of Blackjack, as there are somewhere between 12 and 13 schmegtillion books on the subject, all claiming that you can actually beat the house.

You can't, unless you're either: a) stupendously lucky or b) have attended MIT and earned a Masters degree in everything.

But - you can drink yourself into oblivion with free beer while losing your money at a glacial pace, which makes it the perfect game for me. It is for this reason that I will spend every hour of the next few weeks using an iPhone app to hone my Blackjack skills in the vain hope that I can actually break even.