Reviews and More

All my recent posts about poker and blackjack have given me the bug again (so to speak), so I’ve been checking out some new gambling-related sites. Today I learned about OGPaper.com, which looks like a great place to read up on the latest gambling news.

OGPaper.com is updated regularly and carries news about both online and offline (land-based) gambling, so it can be useful to you no matter which form of gaming you prefer. In addition, it contains articles about various casino games such as blackjack, craps, video poker, and slots so you can brush up on your knowledge or get some new insight into different strategies to try.

This seems like an excellent, authoritative site on everything related to gambling, and it’s a resource I’m sure I’ll use very often.

One thing that I like to do when I travel is visit the graves of famous people whenever possible. For example, when I went to Paris, one of my first stops was Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where I caught up with the likes of Moliere, Jean-Francois Champollion, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, and of course Jim Morrison. In Rome, it was off to the Protestant Cemetery to pay my respects to John Keats and PB Shelley. So when I heard about the Find a Grave website, I knew I had to check it out.

FindaGrave.com has a searchable database of millions of cemetery records, making it a great resource for both “tombstone travellers” and genealogy aficionados alike. You can search by such variables as claim to fame, “born on” dates, “died on” dates, or cemetery location. I always check FindaGrave.com before going on a trip to see if anyone famous is buried at the place that I’ll be visiting. In fact, the last time I went to Maryland, I went a bit out of my way to go to Rockland and see the gravesite of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of my favorite writers.

All in all, this is a fun site and, contrary to what the name might imply, is not the least bit morbid. Check it out!

I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who mistakenly believe that they must stay at either a hotel or a motel when they travel. At $80-$100 per night or more, that can get very expensive — particularly on longer vacations when you consider that you have to pay for every meal as well.

But there are alternatives to this. For example, many budget-oriented families might find it worthwhile to rent a condo or a villa instead of staying at a hotel. That way, they can get decent weekly rates and be able to cook their own food instead of eating at restaurants all the time. Look into an Orlando vacation rental for your next trip to Florida and see if that’ll save you any money.

I don’t watch comedies very often, so I’m not surprised that I completely missed 1999’s Dick, starring Kirsten Dunst, Michelle Williams, Will Ferrell, Dan Hedaya, and Teri Garr. What’s more, I’d never even heard of this movie before. I just happened to come across the title while browsing through IMDB.com, and decided to check it out since it has such a well-known cast.

Dunst and Williams play Washington, D.C. high school girls named Betsy and Arlene, respectively. The basic premise of the movie is that these two girls played major roles in providing evidence to Bob Woodward (Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch) of the Washington Post that blew apart the Nixon Administration and caused the president to resign. (Remember — it’s a comedy. And at the time it came out, Deep Throat’s identity hadn’t yet been revealed.)

Betsy and Arlene’s adventures start at the Watergate hotel, where Arlene lives with her mother (Garr). The girls sneak out late one night to mail a fan letter to Bobby Sherman. They put masking tape over the door lock so they’ll be able to get back in without waking Arlene’s mother, but a security guard discovers it and calls the police, who then arrive to bust a burglary in progress at the DNC headquarters.

Later, on a class trip to the White House, the girls get separated from their tour group and end up in the West Wing, where they eventually meet President Nixon (Hedaya) and his dog Checkers. Nixon can’t get Checkers to listen to him, but the dog likes the girls, so Nixon asks them to be “Presidential Dog Walkers.”

From that point on, the film shows how important features of the Watergate scandal came to be and we see that the girls were responsible for it all.

I was surprised at how much I liked this movie! I was too young for Watergate to have much meaning for me, so I probably missed a lot of the jokes in Dick. But I did get all the references to the major points, like the erased portion of a critical tape.

I thought the performances were great, and I especially liked Michelle Williams as the nerdy Arlene. The only other thing I know this actress from is Brokeback Mountain, so obviously this was a vastly different character for her.

There were a lot of laughs in Dick, and at 94 minutes long, the filmmakers can’t be accused of dragging it out. I liked this movie and give it 7 stars out of 10.

There have been several major natural disasters over the past few years, not the least of which was Hurricane Katrina. I still can’t get all the images of that catastrophe out of my mind, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to personally go through something like that.

But one thing Hurricane Katrina did do was make me think about my family’s own level of emergency preparedness. We frequently get tornado warnings here in the Chicago suburbs, and of course have earthquake problems at our place in Japan, so I have disaster kits ready in each house. They are located by both the front and back doors, so we can just grab them and remove ourselves to a safe location.

I recommend having your own emergency kits available so that you’ll be ready when disaster strikes. There’s no such thing as being too prepared!