Do You Work Here?

Good morning everyone.  Before I start my normal rambling for a Monday, I wanted to take a moment to compare my predicted 'Elite Eight' final scores from my Saturday post to the actual outcomes for the games, which should offer you a little insight as to why I'm chomping at the bit to get back to Las Vegas...



                             My Predictions                                                   Actual Final Scores


Louisville                 71         Florida           65               Louisville        72           Florida         68                
Ohio State               79         Syracuse        73               Ohio State       77          Syracuse      70
Kentucky                82          Baylor            74               Kentucky        82          Baylor          70
North Carolina      69          Kansas           61                Kansas            80           UNC            67



You can save your applause, and I know what y'all are thinking...  "How were you so wrong on the Kansas score???"  :)  These games complete a recent run where I was 7-1 predicting the winners of the 'Sweet 16' games, and 3-1 predicting these 'Elite Eight' games, with uncannily close scores on the latter.  Ironically, the two losing teams, Michigan State and North Carolina, were the LAST TWO 'Final Four' teams that I had on the bracket that I blogged about here.  In another welcome to my life moment, North Carolina is my favorite team, so that would be the game in this set that I would be wrong about...  :)  Anyway, this score group reminds me of my NFL playoff prediction run, and has me wanting even more (if that's possible) to return to the desert to visit some of my favorite sportsbooks...

I will make my 'Final Four' predictions on Friday, but now it's time to ramble.  I survived my trouble sleeping during my normal sleeping hours at the end of this week to complete my 2-hour, 10-player, 28-round fantasy baseball draft yesterday.  I want to welcome those members of my new fantasy league who said that they would stop by and visit my blog (the draft room opened 15 minutes before the draft started and had a chat room, and for those of you who know me, I WAS THERE 15 minutes before the draft began)...  :)  And I did enjoy chatting with you 'Red October' and 'Confused Red Flour Beetles'.  For those of you who MUST BE wondering what I named my team, we will proudly be taking the field this season as the 'Bikini Hill Giants'.  You may know by now that I am a Red Sox fan, but the Giants moniker is in honor of my friend who paid for my fantasy baseball magazine at the counter of the local video store/bookstore after I taxied him around town that afternoon (he is a New York Giants fan and I thought that I should AT LEAST TRY to steal some of that good karma)...  ;)  After I publish this post I will be blogging a review of yesterday's draft and showing the 28 player team that I drafted, and explaining why 12 of the first 14 players that I drafted were pitchers...  I'm sure that the red flour beetles must have been confused yesterday, along with the other 8 members of my league...  While on the subject of fantasy leagues, I love drafting teams so much that I wanted to sign up for another league yesterday.  I didn't end up doing this, mostly due to the fact that I have discovered that when I have multiple fantasy teams in one season for a sport (football, baseball, etc..), I have found that I do not like having a player on my team in one of my leagues while I have to compete against him in another league.  I also have this nasty habit of executing a good draft, only to watch my players get injured during the course of the season, which is why I prefer sports betting to fantasy sports now, and wish that I would have invested more time researching my sports wagers when I lived out in Las Vegas before.  The thing that the fantasy baseball will accomplished is that it will bridge that gap until football season arrives, which will also hopefully find me posting my football predictions from the desert by that time.  ;)  As I shot down my idea of entering another fantasy baseball league, I started wondering who these people are who enter these ONE-THOUSAND DOLLAR (and above) fantasy leagues.  Could you imagine being in one of these leagues and losing your top draft picks to injuries???  It's one early September Sunday, and you see Tom Brady and LeSean McCoy (for example), your top two draft picks, go down for the season...  $ 1,000.00 - ughhh, no thanks...  So I'm changing out a trash bag at work (yes, I lead a glamourous life), it's our busiest night of the week, and a customer approaches me and asks, "do you work here?"  In my genuinely helpful and sincere spirit, I answered them and solved their problem.  After they walked away, when I had a moment to reflect on their question, my mind started working on alternative answers as I continued tying the trash bag before taking it outside.... "Nah, I don't work here - this music venue is really hopping, and there are hundreds of people here, but I was getting a little bored and decided that the amount of trash in this can here isn't to my liking, so......"   :)  I also received this question earlier in the week, when I was standing on the stage at closing time, after I had been hustling around the venue for about six hours, and was now standing with my arms folded as I was surveying the crowd to make sure that everyone proceeded to leave the venue in a timely fashion, a stage that we never allow any customer to stand on...  I do love San Marcos, America...  :)  Before I proceed to SLAM a few more t.v. commercials, I would like to take the time to give one some recognition, one that caught my attention to the point that I would like to rip it off at a Las Vegas poker table in the future.  Imagine that I'm sitting at a low-limit poker game in Vegas, and I win a very small pot (the pot being small to convey that my following antics are CLEARLY a joke, and not meant to offend anybody), and as I bring in my meager winnings, you hear..... "uh... who's laughing now?.....   GA   ZELLE....   AH,  HA  HA  HA!!!!"  That's from the relatively new MiO energy drink commercial in case you haven't seen it - good job MiO, there's some potential there...  ;)  It seems to me that I may have derided this next commercial before, but if so, here it comes again because it's still being shown...  You see a passenger on an airplane, flagging down the stewardess because he has a headache, and when she offers him some Bayer aspirin, he replies, "I'm not having a heart-attack..."  Bayer aspirin, .... GET OVER YOURSELF...  Ugghhh...  And then a couple of days ago, literally right before I leave for work, as I'm getting things together, hearing but not watching the t.v., the voice in the commercial EXCLAIMS, "BEST OF ALL, THE TEN DOLLAR DINNER BOX IS ONLY TEN DOLLARS!!"  This is followed by something (???...)  ..."Pizza Hut"...  My already rolling eyes look up toward the t.v., and I stop dead in my tracks thinking, REALLY?!  Now for those of you familiar with poker terminology, that would be a bad beat, wouldn't it, if the ten dollar dinner box WASN'T ten dollars?....  "Best of all, the ten dollar dinner box is only twenty-five dollars!..."  WHO is getting paid to write this stuff, and WHO is paying them?!...  #geniuses   That is all that I have for now, except to say that in the future, Wednesdays here at 'Bikini Hill' are likely to become stories about things related to Las Vegas and poker stories (much more likely if I do indeed move back to Las Vegas during the summer).  I hope that you have a great day and I will see you again on Wednesday.