Monday 27 July 2009

Sunday 26th July 2009 – Sins Come in Sets

It being a Sunday, and hot, I settled down in air-conditioned comfort to watch the Grand Prix.  It's Hungary this week.  They run the highlights about 12 hours late here, but there is no danger of anyone even knowing the result, let alone talking about it.

There was NASCAR on before it, with Juan-Pablo Montoya on the front row.  They made much of his having already won the great indy car race, the Indianapolis 500, and they mentioned that he had also won the Grand Prix of Monaco, but they made that sound like he had been awarded some tawdry medal by some minor teutonic prince. 

He was sharing the front row with a fifty-year-old, so it's clear America makes its sportsmen to last.

 

Later that night, I had to go gambling.  If you want to drink beer on a Sunday socially in Missouri, you have to go to a casino.  There is, fortunately, a casino just round the corner (that's about twenty miles away, here).  And there was one of America's plentiful supply of grown-up ladies to escort me and ensure my safety.

There were signs up all over the casino saying you weren't allowed to gamble if you were intoxicated.  Which was rather paradoxical, since you weren't allowed to get intoxicated unless you gambled.  I have long held the view that when you have uncovered a paradox, you have uncovered the truth, even if you don't understand it.  The truth in this case being that it was OK to drink, as long as I didn't gamble.

Which suited me just fine: I could rove around and watch the others at it.   Which is what I did.  It wasn't quite on the Las Vegas scale, but it was close.

There were ladies in black tights plying drinks to ladies who would (mostly) not have looked their best in black tights.  Actually, come to think of it, they didn't seem to be concentrating on looking their best (I hope).

The room was a cacophony of fruit machines.  Some of the players seemed to be chained to their machine.  It seemed they might be condemned to some thirteenth labour of Hercules, to lose all their money before they die.  Just as they got close to broke, the machine would taunt them with little dribbles of money back, forcing them to carry on and on.  It must have been awful.  And at the end of the chain was an Identity card, perhaps to help the casino with the funeral arrangements.

In the bathroom (which is the word they also use here) everything worked automatically (except me, of course).  The urinals flushed themselves, the taps turned on and off, the soap dispensed itself. 

And as you looked up to admire yourself in the mirror, an advert appeared where your face should be.  Now I don't know about you, but replacing my handsome features with an advert just when I was getting into admiring overdrive did not give me positive feelings about the product.

 

There was what seemed to be the usual machine in the gents, but on closer inspection, it turned out to be dispensing Tylenol and Advil, which I think are pain-killers.  I mean, if she says she's got a headache, producing an asprin isn't going to get you there, is it?

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