When I say evolving, I’m referring to solid and progressive aspects that keep Jimbos’ bingo refreshing. The jackpots are twice what they were six months ago. There is a steady clientele of progressively younger people showing up as word gets around. The sound effects are incredible. I now use a complete array of laptops and MP3 players, with an amazing ability to operate everything at once on stage while I’m keeping up with the game. I have to react to events in real time, it is like being a super disk jockey while doing ten other things at once.Favorite sound tracks include the Tarzan yell, the bugle charge, Happy Birthday, and that heart-pounding Jaws “Doo-doon” sound. It is amazing to just watch, almost as if the caller had been performing a solo music act for years.
I’ve also learned when to time the intermissions, which are random. I can often bring in a series of Karaoke-like tunes to fill the gap. Keeps people interested and in some cases like tonight, really makes the grade, causing a nice five-minute pause while everybody sang “These Boots”. Bingo has become a serious contender for my entertainment income, climbing a few percentages of my total income each week (although that cannot continue forever even though I wish it could).
Most promising development is the “half game”. Bingo is normally ten rounds, the final game having a big fat jackpot. Last night, we added another sudden death round. Any bingo wins (regular, four corners, postage stamp) and the winner splits the pot with the caller. Since the Powerball doesn’t apply and the prize is split, it is a “half game”. If it catches on, and I believe it will, I may have to rethink my priorities for future Saturday nights.
Here’s the test for local humor. Either you get it or you don’t. First I need a visual. Imagine three toothless south Florida types in a taxi; headed for my bingo. Got it? Now read this sentence closely: “It Was the Night They Drove Down Old Dixie.”
I was in the shop all morning researching legal terms and medical procedures. It turns out a new condition is being investigated which appears to describe exactly what happened to me. Caused by subconscious stress, it is responsible for weight gain via triglyceride accumulation in the lower abdomen and constricted heart vessels. Various photos and diagrams pinpoint the identical trouble areas which began to affect me during late 2003. Maybe now there will be some better way to describe my heart patterns than “abnormal”.
Medical reading gives today’s trivia. For some reason, it costs 18 times more to deliver quadruplets than a single birth. Overtime? And, there is a pill that duplicates the effect of marijuana smoking for those incurable conditions that happen mainly to, well, marijuana smokers. Everyone is familiar with how the symptoms can strike at late night college parties, behind neighborhood saloons, and while listening to Hendrix on payday.
Now here is something truly fascinating. I concluded from direct observations by the time that I was around eight [years old] that being “smart” is a conscious decision made at an early age. I maintain each person decides in their own way whether they want to be smart or dumb in life, and I do so because I have personally witnessed it so many times. That is why I am so rarely fooled by those who have developed cover-ups for their personal stupidity later in life. My least favorite cover-up: New Agers.
Now a researcher named Simonton has pin-pointed a direct link between genius and work that reinforces my traditional position on this matter. He describes a genius as simply a person who dedicates the required amount of effort and intelligence toward a subject that is in popular demand. Like myself, he underlines that intelligence is a primary requirement, it is by far not the only ingredient of being “smart”. Most crackpots are highly intelligent but totally mixed up on priorities.
The bad news for dummies is that the “required effort” is around 10,000 hours of concentration, hard work and study. That’s all it takes to be rated a genius at something, folks. I estimate I have studied the single topic of computers for 5,230 hours in my life. Although I have never found my calling, I further estimate I study approximately 1,100 hours each year. Not just read. Study. Oddly, even in grade school, I rarely studied the assigned material.
Well, so as not to cause too many depression attacks, let’s end with a little Dave Barry, who said, “Magnetism is a force which, as we all learned in physics class, causes small objects to be attracted to large objects such as refrigerators.”
