Urban light rail -- and a construction site that's been allowed to eliminate a whole block's sidewalk, not even building a protected detour for pedestrians.]]>
As Andrew asks: if this has been going on, with (up until today) no consequences to its perpetrator, what else don't we know about? ]]>
Urban light rail -- and a construction site that's been allowed to eliminate a whole block's sidewalk, not even building a protected detour for pedestrians.]]>
Steak Pie I like puff pastry crusts for meat pies--I like a high crust-to-meat ratio--so I buy it ready-made; making puff pastry is so time-consuming (all that buttering and folding and rolling and resting in the fridge and buttering and folding and rolling and resting in the fridge), and I've actually never gotten great results. Pepperidge Farm makes a really nice ready-made puff pastry; you can find it in the fridge or freezer section in any grocery store (I also did smaller pies using their little round hors'd'ouvres pastry crusts: one with ground beef and one with shredded chicken, which are much quicker than the steak pie). (Here in the UK I use Jus-Rol, but Pepperidge Farm is the way to go in the US.)
I have made a nice hot-water pastry for meat pies, too, but I like puff. All those flaky layers.
So, here's what I do, for a regular 9-inch pie. You'll want to do this either quite early in the day, or the day before, because ideally the filling will be cool when it goes into the crust:
3 lbs stewing beef (if you want, you can buy a chuck roast and cut it into chunks)
1 16-oz can/bottle dark (stout) beer; I prefer Murphy's Irish Stout to Guinness (really, I've used both and for me there's no comparison)1 onion, chopped fine (if you want; I use onion powder, usually)
In a large frying pan/saucepan/braiser with a good lid, brown the beef in a Tbsp or so of butter, with a tsp of olive or vegetable oil to keep it from scorching. Brown it in batches (I put the browned meat in the upturned lid to save washing dishes).
If you're using chopped onion (I've minced a shallot in there, too, on occasion), add it after the meat is browned and stir it until it's soft. Then add the beef back in, and add a handful or two of
flour
Stir well to make a sort-of roux; this will help thicken the filling later.
Once the flour is cooked (just a minute or two), add salt and pepper; not too much at first, maybe a tsp of salt and half a tsp of pepper?
Then add your herbs etc. I usually use (all of these are dried, as this is a long-simmered dish):
½ tsp or so of:
rosemary
thyme¼ tsp or so of:
marjoram
sagea dash of nutmeg/rub the nutmeg over the microplane grater once or twice
Now add at least a tsp or two of Worcestershire (VERY important!). Sometimes I add a splash of soy, too. If you have some Kitchen Bouquet that's great to add. I also often add a bit of beef stock concentrate, just as a flavor boost.
This next bit depends on how hot your burners run. Mine run very hot--it's hard to get a good low simmer--so I add the entire can of beer (slowly so it doesn't foam over). When I had a burner that ran lower I'd add about ⅔ of it and wait to see if it needed more. So that would be my recommendation unless you have a hard time simmering something low.
Scrape up all the fond (most of it probably came up already with the flour/Worcestershire, and especially if you used diced onion).
Add two or three bay leaves (I use three).
Cover and let simmer 2½ - 3 hours. I like the meat VERY tender; you may want to stop simmering sooner, but as with any stew beef recipe you'll want to give it at least a couple of hours. Check it every once in a while to see how the liquid level is doing. When it's done, taste it and adjust the seasonings. Remember that the pastry crust is rather bland, so it's okay for the meat to be a little more highly flavored.
At some point during the cooking, preheat your oven to 400° F and thaw one of the pastry sheets. You want it to still be cold, but not frozen hard. Personally, I just sort of push and manipulate it with my hands to fit it into the pie dish; you may want to roll it out, but I've made this at least a hundred times over the years so no longer bother with all of that. I just plop it into the dish, push it into the edges, and trim the excess (which I then squeeze into the parts where it isn't covering the rim of the dish). A good way to keep it from shrinking too much is to fold the tiniest bit over the rim of the pie dish. It will still shrink some but that won't matter too much.
Some people only use a top crust. IMO that's not a pie, that's beef stew with a pastry lid. (Like I said, I am a pastry girl and like a high crust-meat ratio.)
Anyway. Shove that bottom crust into the oven and bake it about fifteen minutes (or according to package directions, but don't give it the full time, just most of it). This will help keep the bottom crust from getting too soggy. Again, you'll want to do this fairly early on, because ideally this bottom crust will be cool when you add the filling. (I have often added hot filling to hot crust, and it's fine if you just don't have time to let it all cool etc.--it won't ruin the pie or anything--but it really is nicer if you can let it all cool, both for a less-soggy crust and a thicker filling.)
Once the meat is done, let it sit uncovered for a while, stirring occasionally. It will thicken as it stands. It'll still be a bit liquidy, FYI, but it won't be AS liquidy. Take out the top crust when the package tells you to, in terms of how far in advance.
I have a little Le Creuset pie bird. They're very inexpensive, and good/kind of fun to have, but they're not necessary. If you have one, plunk it into the center of the bottom crust and add the filling around it. If not, just add the filling. I recommend spooning the filling into the crust, because you can control the liquid level better. Honestly, you probably only want like ¼ cup of the liquid in there.
The top crust is easier than the bottom crust, and again, I just trim the ends off and plunk it on there. Also again, make sure it's still quite cold! Otherwise it won't rise and flake as nicely. If you have a pie bird, fit the center around the bird's beak and cut a few more vent slices in the top crust. If you don't, make an X in the very center and reflect back the points so you have a little hole, and cut some vents--I usually do four vents, which makes it look pretty. The vents also really help the top crust puff and flake up.
Pop the pie into a 400° F oven. Set your timer for ten minutes. Take a look at the ten minute mark; is it browning? It's not uncommon for the edges to puff and brown before the center (which will look sunken and bumpy as it "melts" over the meat before puffing up), so there's nothing wrong if it's doing that but at some point you may want to cover the edges with foil to keep them from burning. Also at that ten-minute point, give it a turn to help even cooking.
Check it again at twenty minutes. If the top crust isn't fully puffed and golden, give it another turn and another five-ten minutes. This really depends on your oven and even stuff like humidity etc. Usually my pies take about twenty-five - thirty minutes for the top crust to be all nice and flaky/puffy.
Let the pie sit five minutes or so before cutting (longer if you can, up to about fifteen).
You can use the leftover cooking liquid to make gravy, but keep in mind how highly flavored that liquid probably is; you'll want to add water and simmer it down. Sometimes I use gravy mix and add a few Tbsp of that liquid to that, because I'm lazy and because at that point I've got my big burner going with potatoes to mash and at least one smaller burner with vegetables, and there's not room for the big braiser I did the meat in, too. But that's up to you.
This is just as good as leftovers, and really, you can easily make the meat the day before and just assemble the pie as usual. I've actually put the filled bottom crust into the fridge before when dinner plans suddenly changed, and just popped the top crust on and cooked it the next day, and that worked great, too.
You can add whatever seasonings you want, of course. Sometimes I add a bit of mustard powder. Whatever you like. I stick to the savory herbs, because that's what I like. And I really don't recommend garlic in this; I'm not sure why but it just always tastes weird to me to have garlic in here. But hey, give it a try if you like.
Sorry if these are a tad disjointed; again, I've made this so many times I don't really even have to think anymore about what I'm doing. But that's the basic recipe/method, and again, one of my absolute favorite dinners and something we all like and have a lot. So I'd love to hear what you think!
I'd seen Jason and the Argonauts the previous year, in a theater, and the skeleton fight had made me into a Harryhausen fan.
Every Sunday the New York Times had a TV section listing for the following week: Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. Channels 9 (WOR) and 11 (WPIX) had the Creature Features. 13 was PBS. 2, 4, and 7 were WCBS, WNBC, and WABC. Channel 5 was WNEW. I'd take the listing, and circle in red pencil the shows I wanted to watch. WOR and WPIX had most of them. Any time a Harryhausen film film was listed, it got circled.
(Channel 5 had Soupy Sales in the afternoon, which was the only thing worth watching if there weren't any decent movies showing. Channel 11 had Ivanhoe, starring a very young Roger Moore.)
I remember seeing It Came From Beneath the Sea on a black-and-white TV that my father built. It Came From Beneath the Sea featured the giant octopus (which only had six arms if you got around to counting them) attacking San Francisco.
One of the disappointments of my youth was going to The Bedford Playhouse (in Bedford, New York, years before it was cut up into a two-screen theater, when movies were a dollar, and, on Wednesdays, when the show changed, they'd have a double feature for that same dollar) one Saturday afternoon, because they had a hand-lettered sign out front promising The Mysterious Island. Alas, the film that actual showed was some Brit invasion-from-outer-space/bodysnatchers-ripoff film.
On my wedding day my new bride and I, after the ceremony, went to a double-feature of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Warlords of Atlantis (along with many members of the wedding party).
You can keep your CGI for all that -- the stop-motion animation that Ray Harryhausen did... that was real movie magic.]]>
The latest Locus features an interview with us. It's not online--the contents of the printed magazine and their web site mostly don't overlap--but you can buy a printed copy (or a downloadable ePub, Mobi, or PDF version) here.
It was a slightly disquieting experience, not least because I've been reading Locus for (unbelievably but truly) 43 years. The interview was taken in Liza Trombi's hotel room one morning at last year's Worldcon. Their basic method is to have a lively conversation with the interview subject, transcribe the whole thing, and then remove all their own questions and prompts, so it looks as if the person being interviewed is a prodigiously voluble monologuist. Or, in our case, a pair of prodigiously voluble monologuists. (Low-hanging fruit. Go for it.) Then they send the transcript back to the subject, for fact-checking and horrified second thoughts.
By and large, their method works well. When we'd finished chatting with Liza, we both had the sense that we'd been dismally incoherent, but when the transcript arrived in our email a few months later, somehow they'd managed to make us look much smarter than we remembered being. It did turn out to be a lot more about our long-ago past in fandom, and 1980s NYC publishing, than I think I expected when I walked in the door. But that's really okay.
(I posted a brief excerpt from the interview to our calling-card page at nielsenhayden.com, which was about a year and a half overdue to be updated anyway.) ]]>
If you're going to have security theater, you need props. Allow me to introduce Mr. James McCormick, sentenced yesterday in the UK to three ten-year jail terms (to be served concurrently, eligible for parole in five), for selling magic wands.
The ADE 651 is the device that made Mr. McCormick's fortune. ADE stands for Advanced Detection Equipment. It's the fourth device in the series, following the ADE 100, the ADE 101, and the ADE 650.
Let's back up a bit. Allow me to introduce the Gopher. This is a gag golf-ball detector, sold in joke-and-party stores in the US for under twenty bucks. What it is, is a plastic handle with a metal rod attached to the front on a hinge so it can swing left and right. When your golf ball goes into the rough and you can't locate it, pull out your handy Gopher and the rod will swing to indicate which way it lies!
This works by the same principle that moves the planchette on a Ouija board. Tiny involuntary muscle movements make your hand tremble, causing the rod to swing. As to how well it works, the words "random chance" should appear in your mind.
The War On Terror brought a huge market for bomb-detection technology. McCormick saw his chance, bought up a bunch of Gophers, peeled off the labels and replaced them with labels of his own. He repackaged them, and sold them for $6,000 and up (up to $30,000-$60,000 each) to security forces in twenty different countries. It was proved in open court that mold-marks and imperfections in the Gopher handles were identical with the mold-marks and imperfections in the handles of the ADE 100.
Over the ten years that McCormick sold the things he made improvements. To make the device seem more trustworthy he made the handle heavier. Later versions came in hard-sided carrying cases with pre-cut foam packing. The device now had two parts; the handle with the swinging rod attached by a cable to a belt pouch where the detector box was located. That box had a slot into which you'd put a plastic card identifying what it was you were looking for. The box, though, contained no components. The cards, colorfully printed on one side and with an RFID pasted to the other, were just pieces of plastic.
As to how Mr. McCormick sold the things: A combination of high-pressure sales tactics and sleight-of-hand. He claimed that his detector could find any explosives within a kilometer; through lead; through ten feet of earth or twenty feet of water; or from an airplane. The detectors could also supposedly find bank notes, ivory, blood, and a wide variety of drugs. He used fancy words like electrostatic ion attraction and electrochemical (Thermo-Redox) detection to describe how they supposedly worked.
The ADE didn't have any apparent power source. McCormick explained this by saying it was powered by the static electricity generated by the operator.
He also used old-fashioned bribery. He supposedly sold $122 million worth of the devices to the Iraqi government, but at the cost of $65 million in bribes, leaving him with just $57 million in profit (from which he'd have to subtract the manufacturing cost of up to $60 each).
McCormick bought a house and a yacht. Not just a house, an $8 million house in Bath, England. And a vacation home in Florida. And another in Cyprus. That's a pretty nice-looking yacht, too.
Let us suppose that you are trying to sell the Card Color Detector 5000. The most advanced Card Color Detector in the world, operating by Heisenbergian Macro-Wave Format Vibration. Here's how you make one: Take a length of thread. Tie on a finger ring. There you go! Now explain that the CCD 5000 will swing in a straight line over black cards, and in a circle over red cards. To prove it, lay down a series of playing cards face down. Hold the CCD 5000 above each in turn. It works every time! (It's lots easier for you to do this demonstration if you use marked cards.) Now allow the person to whom you're selling it to try. Each time it correctly determines the color, say, "See how well it works!" Each time it doesn't, say, "You weren't relaxed enough." Put it in a nice box, include a four-color glossy brochure, and slap a five-figure price tag on it. Remember: A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demonstration.
The "not relaxed enough" line was the actual excuse for why the thing didn't always function: The operator wasn't relaxed. Nothing says "relaxed" like "trying to detect terrorist bombs at a police checkpoint in Pakistan."
As Judge Richard Hone at the Old Bailey said:
"The jury found that you knew the devices did not work, yet the soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere believed in them, in part due to your powers of salesmanship and in part the extravagant and fraudulent claims made in your promotional material."After a six-week trial, I am wholly satisfied that your fraudulent conduct in selling so many useless devices for simply enormous profit promoted a false sense of security and in all probability materially contributed to causing death and injury to innocent individuals."
Worried that you won't be able to detect explosives now? You can smile! The GT200, manufactured by a different conman company is still on sale! They're being used right now today in Mexico (among many other countries) to find weapons and drug caches.
And, presumably, golf balls.]]>
It's the end of an era for the famous (and at times infamous) Hotmail service. Hotmail pioneered Web-based email prior to its acquisition by Microsoft in 1997. In making the move to Outlook.com, Microsoft's online team will leverage the brand of the company's widely used Outlook software, while seeking to bring its consumer email service into modern world of tablets, smartphones and other devices."We'll have one clean story across Microsoft for how you get mail," said Microsoft's Dharmesh Mehta. "Outlook equals mail from Microsoft."
It started in 1996 as HoTMaiL. Web-based email. Now ... it isn't. As of 03 May 2013 @hotmail.com is deprecated. ]]>
Truth-shouters look to arguments to bring out the things that they're unable to express any other way. There are some truths that cannot be spoken (or even, sometimes, thought clearly). But the emotional singularity of an argument, when the rules of discourse change, means that these things are suddenly articulable. They can be shouted. (Note that "truth" in this context is "as factually understood by the shouter". Sadly, anger does not turn truth-shouters into Thomas the Rhymer†‡)
Cutlery-loaders are completely different. For them, arguments are a chance to blow off steam, to express their emotions without spending as much attention on the words they use to do it as they would otherwise. They're like the characters in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie who, running out of cannonballs, load the ship's cutlery into the cannon and fire that off.
Needless to say, arguments between these two types do not go well. A truth-shouter will take the cutlery-loader seriously (because arguments are the place for difficult truths.) Meanwhile, a cutlery-loader will assume that a shouted truth is just some random fork and ignore it or, worse yet, counter it with something worse and less true. And it can drive cutlery-loaders nuts to be called on things they said for emotional effect rather than content.
(There are probably other ways that truth-shouters hurt cutlery-loaders in arguments. Being a truth-shouter, I don't necessarily know them, and hope for instruction. Also, I've probably biased this discussion towards truth-shouters. I'd be happy to have a more cutlery-loading view as well.)
The most hideous fights I've suffered through or witnessed have been across argument-type lines, particularly when some piece of fired-off cutlery triggers a truth-shouter's Goddamned Tapes.
I bring this up because a number of discussions in recent DF threads sound to me like truth-shouters trying to deal with cutlery-loaders. It's worth asking yourself, when an argument goes particularly spectacularly badly, whether the other person is shooting forks while you're shouting truths (or vice versa).
* In the sense of quarrel, not in the sense of box
† Besides, at least as Kushner wrote him, True Thomas was a cutlery-loader. Awkward.
‡ However neat a Thomas the Rhymer/Hulk crossover fic would be.
This is part of the sequence of Dysfunctional Families discussions. We have a few special rules, specific to the needs and nature of the conversations we have here.
Previous posts (note that comments are closed on them to keep the conversation in one place):
No, the subject of my gratuitous, out-of-left-field rant is capitalization, specifically the capitalization in the basic mission statement on the front page of the Arthur C. Clarke Award's site:
The Arthur C Clarke Award is the most prestigious award for Science Fiction in Britain, presented annually for the best Science Fiction novel of the year.This is silly. Science fiction is many things, but it is not a proper name. It is not a painting, a country, or a ship of the line. It is a kind of narrative. It does not take upper-and-lower-case style.
Perhaps I am the only person in 2013 who reads Excessive Upper-and-Lower-Case Style this way, but I don't think so. When I see people prosing on about "Science Fiction" when they could just as easily be saying "science fiction", what it sounds like to me isn't dignity. What it sounds like is this:
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. (--A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh)Not that there's anything wrong with Winnie-the-Pooh, he said hastily, well aware that there are living humans on planet Earth who remember me at age five obsessively memorizing large chunks of said work of literature, and quoting them back in social contexts not necessarily improved by long discursions into the language of A. A. Milne. But! (There's always a "but.") Is this really the kind of thing--the discourse, if you will--with which we wish to associate our hard-won, long-desired high-quality science fiction?
I rest my extremely silly case. ]]>
The question was, "Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands, O, whaur hae ye been?" The answer is, they were off burning Auchindoun. Y'see, the Earl of Moray was a Mackintosh, and Huntly owned Auchindoun. The rest follows.
The Burning of Auchindoun Child #183
Balvenie Castle1 in Dufftown used stones from the ruins of Auchindoun in its construction.
For those in search of trivia, the Earl of Huntly was George Gordon, who may well have been the "Geordie"2 of that other ballad.
The Gordons cam, and the Gordons ran,
And they were stark and steady,
And ay the word amang them a'
Was, Gordons, keep you ready.
Continued from Open Thread 182.
]]>Epsom man says he was taken for a $2,600 ride at carnival in Manchester
The title of this entry comes from this marvelous page of Carny Lingo put up by Wayne Keyser:
Flat Store or Flat Joint -- Generally, gambling game, a game at which money is the prize rather than goods. The game at a flat joint is always entirely unwinnable. So called because the "wheel of fortune" or whatever other rig is played there, once set vertically for all to see, is now set flat horizontally so that only the player and the agent can see it. After you lose a bunch of money they might throw you some sort of prize to get rid of you. "Almost all of the carnies don't like the flatties because you can't win at their game and they take people for lots of money. I have seen a flattie take people for a week's pay, their car, sometimes even their home. There is no way any other type of agent comes close to making the money a flattie does." (Anonymous) "Always leave the mark with a dollar for gas", say some carnies.
Part of Making Light's beat is fraud, and that's what we have here. This is the story:
MANCHESTER - An Epsom man says all he wanted to do was win his kids a prize at a carnival on Saturday. Instead, he ended up embarrassed, angry and out $2,600.Yeah. The guys were good at it. It's what they do for a living. You do the cigarette-through-coin thirty times a night, table-to-table at a restaurant, you get good at it. You do the short-change swindle four times an hour, hitting every store on every Main Street you come to, you get good at it. You run a flat joint all day every day, town to town, you get good at it. Naturally the townies don't expect it. If the guys dressed like crooks with striped tee-shirts and black masks, or like villains with little waxed mustaches, frock coats, tall silk hats, and spats, you'd be on your guard."You hear about stuff like this, but you don't expect it at a carnival like this," said [Name redacted--JDM] of Epsom. "The two guys at that game knew what they were doing, and they were very good. I know I fell for it. I was feeling good and I never recognized what was happening, but you just don't think about that at something like a carnival like this."
This isn't about blaming the victim: There isn't anyone I know, including me, who can't be taken by the right pitch on the right day.
[Name redacted] attended a Kids Carnival, operated by Fiesta Shows, at the JFK Coliseum on Beech Street Saturday afternoon, when he decided to try to win his kids a prize at a $5 game called "Tubs of Fun." The goal is to toss two softballs into a large tub - also known as the Bushel Basket Toss. [Name redacted] said he came close to winning a prize, but fell just short. That's when he started receiving encouragement from the two carnival workers to keep playing. "They said they would double my money if I could get 10 balls in the bucket," said [Name redacted]. "I was loud and into it, and they said I was helping to draw a crowd over to the booth. They said I would win my kids an X-Box Connect, which are like $400 I think. So I gave it a try."
Yep, you get into the moment. This speaks to situational awareness. It's why a lot of the people at the Station nightclub fire didn't try to leave until it was way too late. You're in the zone, you've got tunnel vision, and ... bad things happen. This guy eventually laid down enough to buy six X-boxes with enough left over for dinner at the best place in town.
The story doesn't stop there. When he got home, he got to thinking ... that he'd been had. Which he had been. He went back to the show the next day:
[Name redacted] said he returned to the carnival Sunday and complained to management. He said a manager gave him $600 and an oversized, dread-locked stuffed banana for his troubles, but was told that was "all they could do" for him.
A two-thousand-dollar stuffed banana. With dreadlocks.
From Carny Lingo:
Mark -- A townsperson you focus on as a victim. When a carny spotted a towny with a big bankroll, he would give him a friendly slap on the back leaving a chalk mark so other carnies would know that this customer had lots of money. Often the ticket seller would mark the 'mark.' The booth would have a high counter, above the average person's eyesight, and the ticket seller would short-change the customer, leaving the change on the counter. If the customer didn't notice or didn't count his change, the ticket seller would lean over to give him some "friendly" advice about the best attractions, putting his hand on the customer's shoulder to point him toward the show he simply must see, simultaneously dusting his back with chalk from a hidden supply. If the customer instead complained about the wrong change, the ticket seller could always push the remaining change to him and say "I told you to take it." And what do you do when you spot a mark? You "play" him - that's right, just like you play a fish. But a carny truism is, "Always leave the mark a dollar for gas." With gas money he can go home (you don't want him stuck there growing angrier with you every minute).
The mark informed the police and the newspaper. The newspaper investigated, and discovered....
On Sunday night, a woman working the guest services booth at the carnival who gave her name as "Chrissy" said she was aware of the claim, but that the workers involved were not there. She attempted to reach a manager, Dan Delisle, who oversees the game booths, but he did not answer his cell phone."He's already broken down a few rides and games, and is probably headed off to the next spot," said Chrissy. The Fiesta Shows schedule has carnivals in both Sharon, Mass., and Derry later this week.
A call to Fiesta Shows' New Hampshire Sunday night seeking comment was not returned.
Apparently Chrissy didn't give a last name. What a surprise. Yeah, the guy you want to talk to "probably headed off to the next spot." Bet this isn't the first time she's told that story. It isn't even technically lying. She didn't say that he had left, just that he'd probably left. And she didn't say when he'd "already" broken down a few rides and games. Maybe she was referring to the the games and rides he broke down last week. You know how one day blends into another. Three gets you seven that the name on the young lady's birth certificate isn't anything even close to "Chrissy," either.
The police don't offer much hope:
"It will be assigned to the detective division, but where it goes from here is uncertain right now," said Manchester police Lt. Mike Hurley. "It may be difficult to track the people down, because I believe they may be from out of state, but the detectives will get started on it this week. We'll see how it plays out."
Me, I have a bad feeling.
From AARP's Scam Alert
7 Rigged Carnival Games:
"It's not that every carnival game is rigged, but any can be, and many are," says Bill L. Howard, who's been investigating carnival games since 1978 and wrote Carnival Fraud 101, a guidebook for law enforcement officers on tricks of the trade.
5. Tubs of FunThe goal is to toss two softballs into a large tub. You may remember this as the Bushel Basket Toss. But farming baskets have been replaced with plastic "muck" buckets from home improvement stores so that the ball gets extra bounce.
The real trick: "From inside the booth, the carny tosses a softball and from his vantage point, it stays inside the tub," says Howard. "Then he gives you the second softball for a practice throw -- and it stays in for a win." Why? The carny's first ball remains inside the tub to deaden it and prevent your toss from bouncing out. But once you hand over your money, he removes both balls and hands them to you. Without a deadening ball, guess what? Your first toss bounces out.
"You might as well throw your second ball across the midway because no way it will stay inside the tub, either," says Howard..
The next two places this particular carnival will play, this week, are apparently Sharon, Massachusetts, and Derry, New Hampshire. Seven gets you ten that the particular guys that Name Redacted saw won't be anywhere to be found on either lot.
I don't think Name Redacted will get his money back. They gave him the old razzle-dazzle.
From Carny Lingo:
Razzle or Razzle Dazzle -- Usually dressed up as a "football" game in which the player must scores a specific number of "yards". Played by spilling 8 marbles from a cup onto a game board with about 120 numbered holes. The numbers are added up to a total which the jointee compares to a conversion chart to determine the number of "yards" scored. The numbers most likely to come up are worthless or only indicate that the player must add to, or even double, his cash bet. The chart is incomprehensible to the player, who must believe the flattie's constant patter claiming that a win is almost within reach with just one or two more bets. The cost per game builds up exponentially and the winning score is claimed to almost within reach for a big payoff. This game can empty a mark's pockets quickly and completely, and some marks might even get 'put on the send' (q.v.) to come back with more money. A definite swindle covered in the "Games" chapter of my book "On the Midway".]]>