The $127 million losing streak.

Terrance Watanabe, you old fool.

Mr. Watanabe's situation illustrates the often-uneasy relationships casinos have with their biggest clients, also known as "whales." Casinos vie to lure these high rollers by doling out luxury suites, use of private jets, and a cadre of personal handlers to fulfill every flight of fancy, from wire transfers to fishing trips to Alaska....

In a series of emails signed by Mr. Ning, the Harrah's marketing executive, the casino company laid out the terms that it was willing to offer him, which included "a special formula just for Mr. Watanabe."

Mr. Ning specified such offers as tickets to the Rolling Stones, $12,500 a month for airfare and $500,000 in credit at the gift stores. Harrah's also offered 15% cash back on table losses greater than $500,000, special high-limit games and other incentives....

Well, is there some point at which you would blame the casino?

"The little mouse, Jerry, I believe, gets ahold of thread and runs with it causing an entire sweater to unravel from the bottom to the top..."

"... and leaving a cat, Tom probably, naked in front of a crowd in an auditorium. Ha ha ha ha ha. This is great."

That's Chip Ahoy, somewhere in the depths of the "What an asshole"/global warming thread. Since this is a day on the blog that began with the suggestion that we ought to declare Sweater Christmas, it made me want to do a new post knitting it all together by embedding "Undone — The Sweater Song," but embedding is disabled, so you'll have to pull the thread and walk away over at YouTube. And I did look for that Tom and Jerry unraveling. Unsuccessfully.

I'm in the NYT.

And they give me the last word about Tiger Woods and race.

"To hold it in your hands is really quite thrilling."

"It was really, really exciting. I just sat with it for a few minutes and looked it over and savored the moment."

What the Climategate scientist said to the global warming skeptic.

Scroll back to the beginning for the context, or read this.

"It was just sort of a recognition that, 'Duh, that's what in effect the commander understands he's been told to do.' Everybody said, 'He's right.'"

The "'whoa' moment" in the deliberations over the Afghanistan strategy:

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a PowerPoint slide: "Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population."

"Is that really what you think your mission is?" one of the participants asked.

In the first place, it was impossible -- the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a major part of the population. "We don't need to do that," Gates said, according to one participant. "That's an open-ended, forever commitment."

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan -- the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.

"In her luminous memoir..."

I thought the memo had gone out that the word "luminous" had been banned from book reviews:

Several years ago, overwhelmed by the flood of material unleashed annually by the publishing industry, I decided to establish a screening program by purchasing only books that at least one reviewer had described as ''astonishing.''

Previously, I had limited my purchases to merchandise deemed ''luminous'' or ''incandescent,'' but this meant I ended up with an awful lot of novels about bees, Provence or Vermeer. The problem with incandescent or luminous books is that they veer toward the introspective, the arcane or the wise, while I prefer books that go off like a Roman candle. When I buy a book, I don't want to come away wiser or happier or even better informed. I want to get blown right out of the water by the author's breathtaking pyrotechnics. I want to come away astonished.

That's Joe Queenan, writing in the New York Times in 2007, but now here's the New York Times with its 10 Best Books of 2009, calling a memoir "luminous." How can I trust their judgment? To be fair, they didn't call anything "incandescent" or "astonishing."

"Those were the days my friend. We thought they'd never end."

The days have ended for Liam Clancy.



"Liam Clancy, the man Bob Dylan described as the 'best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life,' has died. He was 74."

Oh, my friend we're older but no wiser, for in our hearts the dreams are still the same...

I have an idea: Sweater Christmas!

Let's buy Christmas (and Hanukkah) presents. Why not agree amongst your loved ones that everyone will buy a particular type of present? For example: Everyone buys everyone a sweater...



... or a scarf. Have Sweater Christmas. Or Scarf Christmas. Or Sweater/Scarf/Gloves Christmas. It would be so much simpler and nicely reciprocal. And if people are traveling by plane, it will be easy to slip these things into the suitcases and nothing's going to get broken.

Or do you think you need to be more creative? If so, I have a suggestion! It's The Hoof Candle, from D.L. & Co.:



$150.00!

Aunus, the roman version of pan, is the companion of the nymphs and god of shepherds and flocks. His lower half being that of a goat represents our barbaric nature or beastial side of our humanity: indulgence and celebration. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans often designed their furniture with the legs of beasts, this grounded the pieces to the earth and paid homage to the animal nature in all humans. D.L. & Co.'s Effigy Wax Sculptures are exquisite, exceptional works of art, each a timeless treasure to appreciate and admire. Due to the non-linear shape of the sculpture, the wick does not run from the top to the base.

Aunus, my ass. Sweater Christmas, okay? That will serve my "beastial" nature quite well enough.

IN THE COMMENTS: The comments are off to a great start, with Pogo:

I'm gonna have an Ambien n' golf club Xmas.

Hold the Escalade.

And Wardwood, "Sweater and animal":

"Amanda Knox stood looking down as she learned her fate."

"At first there seemed little reaction, then she turned and buried her head into the chest of her lawyer. It was then that her head and shoulders began to shake as sobs came.... As the full verdict was read out, the gaze of each of the six jurors seemed almost fixed to the court's back wall from where a crumbling fresco of the Virgin Mary and Child looked down."

"Uh, Facebook."

So how do we know there haven't been other gate-crashers?

Was Tiger Woods sleep-driving when he crashed?

An emailer writes:

I had a eureka! moment last night. Tiger was not awake when he crashed his car. This is why he was said to be snoring in the street by the neighbor in the police report. He probably is using ambien and "sleepwalked" the whole thing. His wife probably broke the window to attempt to wake him up, following him out of the house, but obviously being behind enough in time that he already had gotten in and started the car. This type of thing is a very common side effect of ambien. He can't sleep because his wife had already found out about the girlfriends.... I'm surprised I haven't seen this explanation offered by anyone.

Here's a news article saying he was sleeping and snoring in the street after the crash:

They found Woods apparently unconscious in the street, while his wife, Elin Nordegren, standing nearby. Woods was shoeless, in a T-shirt and shorts.

"He was actually snoring," [a witness] said.

Sleeping and snoring in the street after all that? You don't snore when you're knocked unconscious, do you? That sounds like a sleeping drug, which also explains how the highly skilled Woods could drive so badly.

Looking for that news article, I found this:

From Radar: "[Rachel] Uchitel told friends that she and Tiger liked to have sex while taking the drug Ambien. Uchitel told one pal, 'You know you have crazier sex on Ambien — you get into that Ambien haze. We have crazy Ambien sex.'" Readers: Is that a thing? We've witnessed people in an Ambien haze, certainly. But Ambien sex? This makes us feel old not knowing this.

Is it all fitting together now?

ADDED: The emailer was Elliott Althouse (no relation). And, in the comments, several people say that a person unconscious with a head injury might snore.

Hey! That's sexism against Sarah Palin!

When Glenn Beck says it.

"Take Your Name Off Your Phone."

The voicemail remix:

"The Obama administration’s ranks are filled with people, fresh from the academy and the think tanks, who talk about the need to manage American decline..."

"... and even boast about how much more sophisticated they are than the Bush people on this score. They do say all this off the record, however. Perhaps they know that many Americans would not applaud them for their sophistication. Let’s hope the man in the Oval Office knows it, too."

Robert Kagan.

Palin goes birther.

Sarah Palin was asked "Would you make [Obama's] birth certificate an issue if you ran?":

"I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue. I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think that members of the electorate still want answers," she replied.

"Do you think it's a fair question to be looking at?" Humphries persisted.

"I think it's a fair question, just like I think past association and past voting records -- all of that is fair game," Palin said. "The McCain-Palin campaign didn't do a good enough job in that area."

McCain's campaign counsel has said the campaign did look into the birth certificate question and, like every other serious examination, dismissed it.

Palin suggested that the questions were fair play because of "the weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn't my real son -- 'You need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid,' which we have done."

But I thought she thought the question of Trig's parentage was not fair. Do 2 unfairs make a fair in her thinking? Is she saying that since people got all "weird" and "freaky" on her, she wants equal treatment for Obama in the "weird" and "freaky" department?