Arnold Snyder’s new novel Risk of Ruin is set in the biker, blackjack, and body-ink subcultures and features as one of the main characters God Almighty — in the form of a 15-year-old runaway Vegas stripper. In other words, our kind of book! The beauty of RoR is how elegantly the author entwines some sensationally subversive...
Let’s start a business! Who’s in? We can accept up to 31 partners, maybe more if we expand one day. It will take a few decades, but our venture will eventually be worth nearly $10 billion. How’s that for success? We’ll be rich! And admired and feared and begrudgingly respected. We’ll be winners! Mostly we’ll...
I was young like you once. Don’t laugh. It seems impossible, I know. An old codger like me of 77! You probably can’t picture when I was only 47 and healthy, with all my own teeth and a libido that didn’t yet require boner pills. Sure, that was three decades ago, and I look a...
Apologies in advance if this gets all Orwellian right quickly. We try hard not to sound like a nut-job or Coast-to-Coast Radio conspiracy fetishist — is that redundant? — especially when examining the lengths some folks will go to control the lives of others, but this stuff is real, man. Old George – or, Mr....
Dear Inverstors in MichaelKonik.com, We’re really sorry about our most recent trading loss. People will say we require more oversight, and, in this case, maybe they’re right. It shouldn’t have happened, and we’ll take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen for a third time. The $4,000 or so ($4,882) of your money that we...
Braving odds of 176 million-to-1, scores of otherwise sensible Americans, including several of our intelligent friends, were infected with Lottery Fever this past week, standing in lines of up to three hours to buy a ticket at “lucky” liquor stores and gas stations. The prospect of a $640 million jackpot and the assurance that some...
NPR’s “Snap Judgment,” with guest Michael Konik discussing Vegas gambling legends Check local listings for an NPR station in your area http://snapjudgment.org/
We pause today from our usual examination of Things That Matter (or at least sometimes seem to) and turn our focus to something that actually really does matter, something that matters profoundly, and to more people than we can probably imagine: football. Although our feeble, cannabis-influenced brain can’t properly formulate a satisfying answer to the...
A nearly destitute rancher, living in one of the ten poorest counties in the United States, in South Dakota, just won $232 million in the inter-state Powerball lottery. He will take home a lump sum of nearly $89 million after taxes. More important to some — namely, those who market state lotteries and those who...
Is it worth keeping millions of Americans employed in an industry that produces products which harm our country? Would those laborers be better utilized making something that’s good for society? Or is it simply more important to provide jobs — to maintain jobs — no matter how pointless and unhelpful they are? Other than the...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Clarinetist Glenn Dickson, master of klezmer, has made a solo recording, “Wider Than the Sky,” that’s been on perpetual repeat at our home office. Using over-dubs and electronic digital effects, Dickson fills the aural soundscape with a rich melange of chordal textures supporting the melody. His celebrated virtuosity is subsumed here to long, elegiac musical...
