This weekend I finished reading Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich, the same guy that wrote Bringing Down the House. It’s pretty much the same story: M.I.T. math geeks take on the gambling industry. David and Goliath, etc. It’s a good, quick read. I’d definitely grab Bringing Down the House first, though. It was much more in-depth and — although both are allegedly true stories — it felt much less like a fictionalized account. “Busting Vegas” tends to focus more on the relationships and touchy-feely parts of the story; there are chapters written by the author in the first person and there’s a smallish love-story sub-plot. Either way I should warn you that the chances of learning any magic Blackjack skills and winning big are slim. But it’s still a fun book and perfect for reading while you’re on the beach this summer baking in the sun.

Last night I finished reading When the Mob Ran Vegas, a great book that I grabbed at the McCarran Airport on my last trip to Sin City. At times the book suffers from some pretty poor grammar and editing, but the stories are so fascinating that you can forgive the author’s quirky, personal style. Plus, I mean, the guy has got to have a contract on his head; there are dozens of personal anecdotes involving organized crime and its perpetrators, and he really lays the lumber to Sinatra a few times. My mom’s side of the family is 100% Italian — the old school Rhode Island kind <wink wink> — so I recognized pretty much all the characters. (Tales of “the Family” were frequent dinner conversation at my house when I was a kid.) I really enjoyed reading about all the connections to Hollywood and the movie industry, too. If you order a copy from the author’s website, he’ll send you an autographed copy.

My friend Andy loaned me the latest Michael Lewis book, The Blind Side, last week. (I seem to remember reading an excerpt from it in Sports Illustrated earlier this year.) It’s a great look at the high school / college football recruiting process in the SEC. The author does an excellent job of jumping between the histories of ‘legacy’ players in the NFL, the evolution of the left tackle position, and the story of Michael Oher, a freakishly large kid who wants to play ‘in the league’. If you’re a football fan you’ll definitely enjoy this one. And now I’ll have to start paying attention to Ole Miss to see how this kid performs this year.

Are you wondering what media I consumed this weekend? I knew you were. And so I shall tell you.

• Heat ****
• Sopranos *****
• Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey ****½
• Oceans 13 ***½
• John from Cincinnati ***½
• A Prairie Home Companion, featuring Martin Sheen, Randy Newman, and Paula Poundstone (live at The Greek) ******
• Saturday Night Live (rerun) ***½
• SNL Tribute: Chris Farley ****

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year since I read Krakatoa — The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, by Simon Winchester. Because I loved that book so much, at some point around Christmas I bought A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. I was not disappointed. Winchester managed again to make plate tectonics quite thrilling. It’s a fabulous book and — like Krakatoa — it’s amazing to learn how much of today’s political, religious, and socio-economic landscape has been influenced by monumental shifts (literally) in the planet’s physical landscape.

I finished the tale of San Francisco’s epic disaster late Sunday night and was pleasantly surprised to find that my fiancée had another of Winchester’s works sitting on one of our bookshelves. I read The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary on Memorial Day. I forgive the author his predilection for obscenely long titles because his writing is so brilliant. This third book was as awesome as the first two I read and I’ve added everything else he’s written to my Amazon wishlist.

Somehow I managed to forget to write about this wonderful book. I read Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime over a year ago and it is brilliant. I’ve been thinking about it lately because of the awesome song “Maps” by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. You see, I have been in love with this song for months and I just can’t make any sense out of it. Let’s ignore the fact that I had heard the song a dozen times — and loved it — before I (a) knew the title and (b) realized that what she is singing in the chorus is “Maps / They don’t love you like I love you.” Maps? MAPS? What the hell does that mean?

So I’ve decided that she’s madly in love with this guy. She found a bunch of maps in his possession and now assumes he is going to leave her for someone else far away. The “they” in the song refers to the people at his destination. The “maps” is just an anguished exclamation. It works.

But a few days ago I started thinking that maybe she’d read this book. Maybe that’s what this song is. She’s madly in love with the main character in the book and is desperately trying to convince him to stop stealing maps and (re)turn his attention to her. The maps don’t love him. (He’s a little bit twisted.) Either way: Great song. Great book. I recommend them both.

I am not even 100 pages into my latest William Poundstone book and I already know it’s going to be a favorite. Fortune’s Formula, The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street is the fourth Poundstone book I’ve read. The man is a genius of a writer. Labyrinths of Reason and Prisoner’s Dilemma have been in my personal top ten list for years and years and I urge people to read them every chance I get.

I have long been fascinated by the idea of “meaning” in communication. I’ve held the belief for as long as I can remember that the responsibility for communicating meaning is always placed on the person creating the message. If I am trying to tell you something, it is never your fault if you don’t understand. I just read a passage in Fortune’s Formula that really rocked me. It’s so good that I can’t help but quote it here:

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Late Friday night I finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. This one’s been in my personal queue for several years; I sort of randomly found it on the shelf while looking for something to read on the plane to New York last week. It’s a psuedo-scientific exploration of what it’s like to live on minimum wage in America, and I can’t say that I was very impressed. Ehrenreich is a competent author and she weaves a half-interesting tale, but as a Democratic-tainted exposé it was nowhere near as good as Rivethead or any of Michael Moore’s mockumentaries. More than anything it seemed like just a whining liberal complaining about how darn mean all those big corporations are. She comes down heavy on Wal-Mart — Who could blame her? — but there’s nothing earth-shattering in her story. I’ve worked plenty of minimum wage jobs in my day. It’s back-breaking and demoralizing and all that, sure. I know that. Doesn’t everyone? There’s just a lack of any true revelations or fact-reporting in this book for me to recommend it. If you want to read about the plight of the common American, the state of “the poor”, or anything truly brilliant concerning the U.S. economy you should grab P.J. O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich, Levitt’s Freakanomics, or Schlosser’s Reefer Madness. And this is as good a time as any for me to give another round of applause to Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox. Read that.

The PicoPad® is pure genius. It’s a pad of sticky notes — with a tiny pen — in a case the size of a credit card that you can easily slip it into your wallet. The PicoPad and its refills are also incredibly inexpensive. I am always scribbling notes on the backs of business cards and receipts in my wallet, so this is a product near and dear to my heart. My girlfriend gave me one last week and I’ve already used it several times.

I love books, for example, and can’t enter a bookstore without finding more than a few that I am dying to read. Instead of spending megabucks at the brick and mortar, though, here’s what I do: I jot down the ISBN and then, when I get home, find the title at Amazon. If I simply must have it, I’ll grab a used copy there for much, much less. Otherwise I add it to my wishlist for a rainy day.

Last night I finished reading Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL, by John Feinstein. It took me well over a month to get through this 400+ page epic covering the 2004 Baltimore Ravens season. Regardless of how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get into it. I am a huge football fan, so that should tell you something. I very much enjoyed Feinstein’s 1996 football work, the incredibly long-titled A Civil War: Army Vs. Navy : A Year Inside College Football’s Purest Rivalry, so that should tell you something as well.

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Last week I finally read The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, by Mark Kurlansky. My dad gave it to me while we were in Vegas last month but I didn’t get to seriously dig into it because I’ve been a bit swamped at work lately. Kurlansky is a wonderful writer and this is the third of his books that I’ve read. The Big Oyster is every bit as fascinating as Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and Salt: A World History. Most of my friends roll their eyes at me when I tell them this, but it’s true. Since I’m from Rhode Island, I have always sort of thought of oysters as second-class bivalves, bastard, grotesque step-brothers of my beloved littleneck clams. Now I have a new respect for them and even slurped a raw one tonight — we had dinner at The Palm with my girlfriend’s parents.

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When I got to the office today there was a package sitting on my desk. I received my sixth copy of Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” — I keep giving them away! — via Amazon’s used book marketplace. The book is in near-perfect condition, perhaps because it seems to have been stolen from the Naperville, Illinois Public Library. Either someone stole the book from the library and then sold it on Amazon, a Naperville Public Library employee is stealing books and selling them on Amazon, or the administrators of the Naperville Public Library are knowingly reselling their library books on Amazon. I don’t think that stealing library books is a crime that any police department seriously enforces, so people could presumably make quite a bit of money stealing library books and posting them for sale on Amazon. How odd.

Last night I finished reading Bleachers, by John Grisham. (I read it in three or four 50-page bursts; it’s not very long.) It’s a story about the legacy of a dying high school football coach. The main character is the star quarterback who returns home fifteen years after graduation to pay his respects and come to terms with his relationship with his former mentor. I’d give it three out of five stars. I’m not particularly fond of Grisham’s writing style, but this was a very good story. My mom gave me the book for Christmas last year, in ‘05, and I just happened to grab it on my way out the door a few days ago. If you see it sitting on a shelf, it’s worth a few hours of your time.

I was in football nirvana this weekend. I watched no less than a dozen games — college and pro — since I left the office Friday night. The best by far was last night’s Boise State / Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl, one of the top ten football games I’ve ever seen. While watching Saturday night’s Giants / Redskins contest on the NFLN I kept wondering about all the commercials they kept airing for themselves. “Why in the world,” I asked, “do they keep showing me commercials for something they know I already have?”

The only people who could have possibly seen all the ads for the NFLN were the people that currently have the NFLN. And it wasn’t just the 30-second commercials spots, either. During the game they were constantly bombarding me with teasers and float-overs talking about how wonderful they are. Aside from the fact that it was mildly annoying, it was also pointless!

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This is an essay I wrote a loooong time ago … I must have been 13 or 14 … good old St. Paul’s Catholic Elementary School in Daytona Beach, FL …

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