There is an organisation here a bit like the BBC. It's called National Public Radio, NPR for short. Rozzie doesn't have a satellite radio, which allows you to listen to one station as you drive across the vast distances of this country, but NPR is available most places I've been. I have to keep retuning every twenty miles or so, but it does seem to work better than a cell phone out in the sticks.
Most of its programming is available at http://www.npr.org . Yesterday morning I was enjoying "Wait, Wait … Don't Tell Me!", which is a bit like the BBC's "News Quiz". At the moment, I'm listening to something uniquely NPR, the Del McCoury band's session yesterday at the Newport Folk Festival (where I learned 'Quarters' a few months back). This is Bluegrass music at it's best.
Of course, there is one major difference between NPR and the BBC: whereas the BBC has billions coming out of its ears, NPR is as poor as a church mouse. It seems to spend half its life begging from its listeners.
I have discovered another great American spectator sport, to stand alongside baseball: it's gambling. I was talking the other day about watching the poor souls chained to their fruit machines. But, in another part of the casino you will hear a lot of whooping and hollering. If you head towards the noise, you will find the Craps tables. This is sport, indeed: with seriously active audience participation. The casino needs four people to run each table. And they have to change them frequently (they march a new team in, just like Buckingham Palace) to avoid them going native, and joining in the fun.
Like baseball, it's pretty obscure, unless you study the rules and have a good idea what's going on. Of course, it's pretty 'hardball', as they like to say here: you would risk serious injury to your wallet if you joined in without knowing what you're doing.
Fortunately, in the internet age, there are any number of sites where you can play online, and most of them seem to offer a free training area, where they give you pretend money, and you pretend to lose it (what am I saying – you actually lose it!). But you can doggedly follow some betting strategy until you have some understanding of what the players are doing. I can't quite understand why they give you this experience, since it's certainly made clear to me just how fast the pretend money can go south while I'm having fun.
The conventional wisdom has it that the name comes from the French crapaud, a toad, in case you thought it a purely American origin. What it has to do with toads, I can't imagine, but that's what the French called their version of the old English Hazard, which is where it has its origins.
Did you know American beer has no protein, and no fat. It solemnly lists all the contents, declaring there to be 0.00% protein and fat. Which comes as a relief , at least to me. But they don't (usually) tell you how much alcohol there is in it. Doesn't make sense, does it?
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