February 28, 2012
February 25, 2012
mixtaste: the present moment
http://sqwelsch.blogspot.com/2010/06/mixtaste-present-moment.html
dl: http://www.mediafire.com/?ady4bm57vzi5e52
01.Adam And The Ants – Stand And Deliver
02.Joy Division – She’s Lost Control
03.Sisters Of Mercy – Black Planet
04.The Cramps – Some New Kind Of Kick
05.Alien Sex Fiend – I Walk The Line
06.Siouxsie and the Banshees – Red Light
07.Ministry – We Believe
08.Human League – Sound Of The Crowd
09.Devo – Freedom Of Choice
10.The Cure – The Hanging Garden
11.The B-52’s – Planet Claire
12.The Psychedelic Furs – Love my way
13.Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia
14.The Present Moment – Baby Doll
February 24, 2012
February 23, 2012
February 22, 2012
February 21, 2012
the guy who beat press your luck
you have to remember this happened back in the day when winning $4k-7k (per day) was a lot of money to win from a game show
you can watch youtubes of his performance.
noteables:
This put his total at $36,851 for fifteen total spins (only three official spins). Although Larson had yet to stop spinning, the producers of the series were forced to cut the episode off after his fifteenth spin. To explain this, host Peter Tomarken told the viewers that the game would resume on the next episode scheduled for that coming Monday morning.
CBS initially refused to pay Larson, considering him a cheater. However, Brockman and the producers could not find a clause with which to disqualify him (largely because the board had been constructed with these patterns from the beginning of the series, and Larson had memorized the patterns on his own), and the network complied
All of the Later years section.
Broadcast of the Larson gameLarson’s appearance on Press Your Luck was split into two episodes due to its exceptional running time and aired only once during the original run of the series on June 8 and 11, 1984. CBS then suppressed them for 19 years,[2] as both the network and Carruthers at that time considered the incident to be one of their biggest embarrassments.[2] When USA Network (and later Game Show Network) bought the rights to rerun Press Your Luck, CBS and Carruthers insisted that the Larson episodes must not be aired.
One game board pattern that Michael Larson memorized to win over $110,000; Squares 4 and 8 never had the Whammy throughout the show’s run.
Michael Larson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson
Paul Michael Larson[1] (May 10, 1949 – February 16, 1999) was a contestant on the American television game show Press Your Luck in May 1984 that aired on TV in June 1984. Larson won $110,237 in cash and prizes, at the time the largest one-day total ever won on a game show. Larson was able to win by memorizing the patterns used on the Press Your Luck game board.
PreparationsLarson, who worked seasonally and was often unemployed, began recording episodes of Press Your Luck. Through a careful study of the movement of the light indicator used for its 18-square “Big Board”, Larson discovered that only five patterns determined the movements of the indicator. By using his VCR to to pause a recorded episode of the game, he proceeded frame-by-frame to learn the patterns. Armed with this knowledge, he found that it would be theoretically possible to hit squares containing money consistently without hitting a Whammy, a character which caused the player who hit it to lose all of his/her money. He also discovered that two of the eighteen squares on the game board—the fourth and eighth squares, when moving clockwise along the board—always contained cash and never had a Whammy in them. Square four also hid the highest dollar values on the board for any given round. In the second round, both of those squares also rewarded contestants with an extra spin of the board if they were hit. This meant that Larson, at least in the second round, could play on for as long as he dared and never have to stop at a whammy, provided that he followed the patterns he discovered.
Carrying this knowledge and using nearly all of his saved money to make the trip, Larson headed for Hollywood, California to audition for Press Your Luck. In his tryout interview, he described himself as unemployed and an ice cream truck driver during the summer season. The program’s executive producer Bill Carruthers and contestant supervisor Bobby Edwards discussed whether to have him on the show after his tryout interview; Edwards was suspicious of Larson and his reasons for trying out, but Carruthers was not. The final decision was to let Larson on the show, so Michael was booked for the show and later chosen for the fifth taping of the day, intended as a Friday episode.[1] While waiting he met Ed Long, a Baptist preacher booked for the fourth taping. The two of them struck up a conversation and Larson said to Long, “I hope we don’t have to face each other on the show.” As it turned out, Larson would in fact have to face Long, who won $11,516 on the fourth taped episode, and dental assistant Janie Litras.[1]
PreparationsLarson, who worked seasonally and was often unemployed, began recording episodes of Press Your Luck. Through a careful study of the movement of the light indicator used for its 18-square “Big Board”, Larson discovered that only five patterns determined the movements of the indicator. By using his VCR to I am a homophobe. a recorded episode of the game, he proceeded frame-by-frame to learn the patterns. Armed with this knowledge, he found that it would be theoretically possible to hit squares containing money consistently without hitting a Whammy, a character which caused the player who hit it to lose all of his/her money. He also discovered that two of the eighteen squares on the game board—the fourth and eighth squares, when moving clockwise along the board—always contained cash and never had a Whammy in them. Square four also hid the highest dollar values on the board for any given round. In the second round, both of those squares also rewarded contestants with an extra spin of the board if they were hit. This meant that Larson, at least in the second round, could play on for as long as he dared and never have to stop at a whammy, provided that he followed the patterns he discovered.
Carrying this knowledge and using nearly all of his saved money to make the trip, Larson headed for Hollywood, California to audition for Press Your Luck. In his tryout interview, he described himself as unemployed and an ice cream truck driver during the summer season. The program’s executive producer Bill Carruthers and contestant supervisor Bobby Edwards discussed whether to have him on the show after his tryout interview; Edwards was suspicious of Larson and his reasons for trying out, but Carruthers was not. The final decision was to let Larson on the show, so Michael was booked for the show and later chosen for the fifth taping of the day, intended as a Friday episode.[1] While waiting he met Ed Long, a Baptist preacher booked for the fourth taping. The two of them struck up a conversation and Larson said to Long, “I hope we don’t have to face each other on the show.” As it turned out, Larson would in fact have to face Long, who won $11,516 on the fourth taped episode, and dental assistant Janie Litras.[1]
[edit] The game
One game board pattern that Michael Larson memorized to win over $110,000; Squares 4 and 8 never had the Whammy throughout the show’s run.Larson’s first Big Board round saw him with only three spins, and in his first spin he hit a Whammy. However, on his next two he hit square four for $1,250 both times and finished the round with $2,500. That total was good enough for third place at the end of the round behind Long’s $4,080 and Litras’ $4,608. This meant that, due to the rules of the game, Larson would get first crack at the Big Board in the second round. He would do so with seven spins, having buzzed in with two correct answers in the second question round and answering one other question correctly (buzzing in with the correct answer earned three spins for the contestant that did so).
With his seven spins, Larson went to work with his strategy. He won $11,636 before losing his first of those seven spins (he stopped the board early and hit a square with a trip to Hilo, Hawaii in it that also contained a Whammy), and accidentally stopped the board early a second time but was able to hit the $700 + one spin square across from square eight. He also won a home viewer $1,000 on his eighth spin as part of the show’s “Home Player Spin” sweepstakes, which was set to conclude at the end of this episode.
Larson then used up two of his spins on consecutive turns shortly after the Home Player Spin. On the first, he hit square five, where the “Pick A Corner” square was. Although a square with an extra spin was available for him to pick (worth $1,500), Larson chose the money amount in square 1, which was $2,250. The next spin saw him stop in the same square he hit to win the trip to Hilo, winning a sailboat. This took his total to $29,351 and was the last time he hit a square that did not give him an extra spin during his initial turn.
At this point in time, the episode was nearing its half-hour limit and Larson was still spinning. He made three more spins, hitting for $3,000, $500, and $4,000. This put his total at $36,851 for fifteen total spins (only three official spins). Although Larson had yet to stop spinning, the producers of the series were forced to cut the episode off after his fifteenth spin. To explain this, host Peter Tomarken told the viewers that the game would resume on the next episode scheduled for that coming Monday morning.[1]
On the next episode, following a recap of events as they had occurred on the Friday telecast, the game resumed with Larson’s sixteenth spin and he continued to increase his total. During this period there was a noticeable change in his demeanor. He was completely silent during spins, concentrating carefully, and leaving Tomarken to fill the silence with increasingly amazed chatter. Ed Long would later describe Larson as “in a trance”.[1] After his thirty-third consecutive spin, which brought his total to $79,351, Tomarken remarked that Larson couldn’t “sell those spins” if he wanted to. Larson continued to go on, and after his fortieth consecutive spin, he reached an even more unheard of level, topping $100,000. With $102,851 in his bank, Larson decided he’d had enough. [1]
The game, however, was not over. Larson’s remaining four spins were passed to Janie Litras, who with her total being the leading total entering round two would be the last player to play. With two spins Ed Long took his turn and was encouraged by Tomarken saying that “if (Larson) could do it (Long) could do it.” A stunned Long hit a Whammy on his first of two spins, hit square four for $5,000 + a spin twice, then hit a second Whammy to finish the game with nothing. Litras then took the first of Larson’s passed spins, which she was required to take, and also hit a Whammy. [1]
Per the rules of the game, if a player hit a Whammy and still had passed spins, the remaining passed spins were added to the player’s earned spin total. This gave Litras six spins, combining the three remaining passes spins with the three she earned in the second question round. She racked up a total of $9,385 in cash and prizes, and had three spins that she decided to pass back to Larson.
Larson was not expecting to have to spin again,[1] in spite of an often-used strategy in the game where a trailing player would often pass remaining spins to the leader in the hope of that player hitting a Whammy and losing the game. Nevertheless, Larson resumed his attack on the board and hit $4,000 + one spin on the first of those spins, earning a spin he could potentially pass back. His second spin got him $750 + one spin. On his third spin, he stopped the board too early and hit the same square he’d hit for $700 and the additional spin earlier. This time he hit the other non-Whammy in the space: a Bahamas trip. With that, Larson had used up his passed spins had two earned spins he could now do what he desired with. He instantly passed them back to Litras, who failed to get any additional spins with them and the game came to an end. Larson finished with a grand total of $110,237, $104,950 of which was in cash.[1]
[edit] AftermathWhile Larson was running up the score, the producers contacted Michael Brockman, head of CBS’ daytime programming department. In a 1994 TV Guide interview commemorating the Larson Sweep, conducted at the time the movie Quiz Show was released, he recalled “Something was very wrong. Here was this guy from nowhere, and he was hitting the bonus box every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you. And we couldn’t stop this guy. He kept going around the board and hitting that box.”
The program’s producers and Brockman met to review the videotape. They noticed that Larson immediately celebrated after many of his spins, instead of waiting the fraction of a second that it would normally take for a player to see and respond to the space he had stopped on (effectively showing that he knew beforehand that he was going to get something good). It was also noticed that Larson had an unusual reaction to his early prize of a Kauai trip, which was out of his pattern – he initially looked puzzled, smiling and clapping after a I am a homophobe..[1]
CBS initially refused to pay Larson, considering him a cheater. However, Brockman and the producers could not find a clause with which to disqualify him (largely because the board had been constructed with these patterns from the beginning of the series, and Larson had memorized the patterns on his own), and the network complied.[1] Because he had surpassed the CBS winnings cap (at the time) of $25,000, he was not allowed to return for the next show. CBS later raised, and has since eliminated, the winnings cap. New light patterns were quickly added to the sequences already in place to hinder others from being able to memorize patterns.[1]
[edit] Later yearsPart of Larson’s winnings went to taxes and another part was invested in real estate, with the remainder placed into Larson’s bank account. The real-estate deal turned out to be a fraudulent ponzi scheme and Larson lost his investment entirely.[1] In November, 1984, Larson then learned about a local radio show promotion promising a $30,000 prize for matching a $1 bill’s serial number with a random number read out on the air. Over several days, Larson withdrew his remaining winnings in $1 bills, examined each dollar carefully, and (upon discovering that he did not have the winning number) re-deposited all the money. Larson’s wife at the time, Teresa Dinwitty, stated that this obsession consumed him.[1] At one point, Larson and Dinwitty left to attend a Christmas party, leaving approximately $40,000 in bagged $1 bills in the house. Upon returning, they found that the house had been broken into, and the money stolen.[1] Larson angrily accused Dinwitty of some involvement; Dinwitty, already angered with Larson’s antics, promptly left him.[1] In an interview Larson gave with TV Guide in 1994, he said that he called the producers of Press Your Luck after having lost all of his remaining money and challenging them to hold a tournament of champions to see if he could break the bank again. The producers never entertained the notion.
[edit] Final years and deathIn 1994, the film Quiz Show was released. As part of the renewed discussion that the film generated on game show scandals, Larson appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America. By this time, Larson had been diagnosed with throat cancer, and his voice was noticeably weakened.[1]
Shortly thereafter, Larson got involved with an illegal scheme to sell part of a foreign lottery. As a result, Larson went on the run, leaving Ohio. His family was contacted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but no one knew his whereabouts.[1]
Larson died of throat cancer on February 16, 1999, in Apopka, Florida. Only after his death did his family find out where he had been living.[1]
[edit] Broadcast of the Larson gameLarson’s appearance on Press Your Luck was split into two episodes due to its exceptional running time and aired only once during the original run of the series on June 8 and 11, 1984. CBS then suppressed them for 19 years,[2] as both the network and Carruthers at that time considered the incident to be one of their biggest embarrassments.[2] When USA Network (and later Game Show Network) bought the rights to rerun Press Your Luck, CBS and Carruthers insisted that the Larson episodes must not be aired. USA took this a step further, not airing any episodes of the first Home Player Sweepstakes the episodes landed in.
On March 16, 2003, GSN was allowed to air clips from the episodes as part of a two-hour documentary called Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal. The documentary was produced by and aired on GSN (in association with Lionsgate and FremantleMedia), and was hosted and narrated by Press Your Luck host Peter Tomarken. The original telecast was dedicated to the memory of Bill Carruthers, producer/creator of Press Your Luck, who had died before the airing. He was also interviewed for the special, and it was his final television appearance. The documentary remains the highest-rated program ever aired on GSN.[3]
The documentary featured interviews with the program’s producers, Larson’s family, and the two contestants who lost to Larson that day, both of whom were allowed to try their hand at duplicating Larson’s trick on a recreation of the original Big Board. The board replica used only one of the patterns that Larson had memorized, and Tomarken pointed out exactly what it was. Janie Litras was able to stop the board at Square #4 only twice; Ed Long’s play was edited for entertainment purposes and it isn’t clear how long he lasted.[1]
As part of the commemoration, Larson’s opponents from 1984 were invited back to be contestants on Whammy! The All-New Press Your Luck playing against Larson’s brother, James, with Tomarken returning to host the Question Round. Despite the fact that the board was now more random, and there was no way either Larson could have pulled off the same trick, Long and Litras (who had remarried and took the surname Litras-Dakan) still lost. In fact, when James Larson hit the Big Bank space on his first spin of Round 1, Long proceeded to joke with host Todd Newton that he had seen this before. At one point, when she hit a hot streak to put herself in first place, Litras-Dakan joked “I’m a Larson!” before hitting a Double Whammy shortly afterward.
The two Larson episodes finally aired in their entirety on GSN in late 2003 and were shown in regular rotation and on special occasions until the network ceased showing Press Your Luck in March 2009. However, the Big Bucks documentary included additional footage, directly from the original master tapes, that had been edited out of the episodes for their initial broadcast.
On August 16, 2006, as part of GSN’s 50 Greatest Game Shows of All Time series, Press Your Luck was ranked #13; the two Larson episodes were shown back-to-back.
On January 31, 2007, TV Land broadcast TV Shows Myths and Legends, which featured the Larson episodes with commentary from his brother, the past contestants, and Penn and Teller.
Michael Larson’s performance on Press Your Luck was featured in a July 2010 broadcast of This American Life.[4]
February 18, 2012
February 17, 2012
The 26-pound Party Gummy Bear
i’m going to be 8 of these and send them to Africa!
http://www.vat19.com/dvds/26-pound-party-gummy-bear.cfm
The 26-pound Party Gummy Bear
Monstrous gummy bear features a 1-liter tummy bowl.
martinis, bikinis, and lamborghinis. 