Chance

A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market & Just About Everything Else

Finally, a simple guide to probability that even I could follow. The chapters are very brief, and the book itself is only 160 pages long. Some of the concepts discussed are:

Normal Curve - The bell is so ubiquitous it seems "a divine law of nature."

Inspection Paradox - Why buses take longer to arrive than they should, and why you and I will probably live longer than our expected lifespan.

Gambler's Ruin Theorem - In a game with even odds, the probability of losing against a much wealthier opponent is 100%.

Bayes's Theorem - An 18th century minister was so unnerved by a formula he discovered that he never showed it to anyone. It was found in a drawer after his death, and is now "immensely important...with far-reaching and completely unexpected implications..."

Other tidbits include:

• the number of times to shuffle cards to randomize their order (six)
• the number of people to date before choosing a partner (37% of the available pool)
• in legalized gambling, poker and sports betting offer the best chance of success
• the performance of the stock market over a short period of time resembles the movement of particles in a fluid (Brownian motion)

The book's cover resembles the back of a playing card.

Life of Johnson

The greatest achievement of Samuel Johnson, the most famous man of English letters, was the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, a task that he accomplished almost single-handedly.

He is also remembered for:
• his essays in two periodicals, The Rambler and The Idler
• an influential edition of the plays of Shakespeare
• a series of biographical and critical sketches called Lives of the Poets
• a novel called Rasselas, which he wrote in a week
• a travelogue called A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

But that’s not all. He was a celebrity in his own time, not just as a literary figure, but also as a conversationalist who could deliver incisive, well-formed sentences on any subject, and so loved verbal combat that people were sometimes were afraid to open their mouths around him. He had an almost oracular status.

Johnson achieved fame despite the handicaps of poverty and ill health. He was afflicted with scrofula, gout, dropsy, depression, asthma, weak eyes, and odd compulsive behaviour later diagnosed as Tourette’s Syndrome. He was forced to leave Oxford without taking a degree due to lack of funds, and later in life was arrested for non-payment of debts.

When he was 53, Johnson met a young Scottish man named James Boswell, and they formed a deep and lasting affection for each other. "Bozzy" immediately began recording Johnson’s conversation with the ultimate aim of producing a biography. The result is a work that has transmitted Johnson’s fame through the centuries.

Life of Johnson

First published in 1791, Boswell’s work has been called the most famous biography ever written. It's also one of the longest -- my edition clocked in at 1400 pages, not including an 90-page index.

There are some rather dry stretches, due in part to issues that are no longer relevant, and to a style of writing that can be pompous and long-winded. And at times Boswell injects more of himself into the book than is warranted. For example, he launches into a lengthy defense when Johnson criticizes his Latin.

What I enjoyed most about this book was seeing Johnson's human side, particularly his wit, courage, and generosity. This great grotesque man is worthy of our respect and study. I was left with a desire to dig deeper into his writings, and to read a more modern biography.

In search of the latter I found this excellent article in The New Yorker.

Life of Boswell

Boswell was a likeable but somewhat aimless fellow, who during the course of his life met some of the greatest minds who ever lived. He was literally a student of Adam Smith at the University of Glasgow. During his travels on the continent he met Rousseau and Voltaire. Back in England, as part of Johnson’s circle of friends, he was on familiar terms with Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was also acquainted with David Hume and Laurence Sterne, and chatted with Captain Cook at a dinner party.

Thus it comes as something of a shock to learn that Boswell was a compulsive drinker, gambler, and fornicator. He was also a failure as a lawyer.

Open Net

In 1977 George Plimpton put on the pads for the Bruins in a pre-season game against the Flyers. He was 50 years old and could barely skate. The team welcomed him by cutting the bottom out of his underpants and applying a smelly substance to the rest of his clothes.

As coach, Don Cherry serves up lots of colourful quotes, especially when talking about hockey legend Eddie Shore, who once called a meeting with players and their wives and ordered them to cut out the sex. He would tie his goaltenders to the crossbar to keep them from going down, and make them practice alone in an empty arena, without a puck. He told a player who was in a slump to part his hair on the other side of his head.

Other observations recorded by Plimpton:

Phil Esposito on Gilles Gratton: "The craziest player we ever had. Spaced out. One night he wouldn't play because the moon was in the wrong part of the sky."

Don Cherry on Boom-Boom Geoffrion: "He referred to himself by his nickname. In a restaurant, he'd announce, 'Boom-Boom is pleased. Boom-Boom likes this chicken.'"

John Wensink on Keith Magnuson: "The poor man. He ran into one punch after another."

What Bobby Orr's knee looked like: "A bag of handkerchiefs."

And my favourite, from a fan: "It's hard to throw an octopus with pinpoint accuracy."

A fast, entertaining read.

A Camera on the Banks

Frederick William Wallace and the Fishermen of Nova Scotia

Wallace was a young, Montreal-based journalist who made several trips on fishing schooners out of Digby early in the 20th century, during the last age of unassisted sail.

These voyages engaged his heart and mind like nothing else in his life, and provided him with material for a number of books, both fiction (Blue Water, Salt Seas and Sailormen, Tea from China, and Captain Salvation) and non-fiction (Wooden Ships and Iron Men, and Roving Fisherman).

He also took along a camera and captured some extraordinary photos of that tough, dangerous, vanished way of life. Those B&W photos form the core of this book, reproduced on glossy stock. The accompanying text by M. Brook Taylor is as fascinating as the pictures.

Gallery 4

True Grit

The novels of Charles Portis are alike in their southern voice and setting, their humorous dialogue and eccentric characters. Where True Grit differs from the others is that it takes place in the past -- during the 1870s after the American Civil War.

It's an anti-western.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father has been shot down by a hired hand named Tom Chaney. She sets out after him with a Texas Ranger named LaBeouf (pronounced "LaBeef"), and a one-eyed federal marshall named Rooster Cogburn, who eats corn dodgers and drinks "double-rectified busthead."

On one level the book reads like a YA novel, particularly at its climax, which involves a cave inhabited by bats, snakes and a skeleton. But it is rescued from this one misstep by great dialogue, Mattie's pungent observations, and an ending that is far from treacly.

A sample:

I sat at one corner of the table between her and a tall, long-backed man with a doorknob head and a mouthful of prominent teeth. He and Mrs. Floyd did most of the talking. He traveled about selling pocket calculators. He was the only man there wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. He told some interesting stories about his experiences but the others paid little attention to him, being occupied with their food like hogs rooting in a bucket. "Watch out for those chicken and dumplings," he told me. Some of the men stopped eating. "They will hurt your eyes," he said. A dirty man across the table in a smelly deerskin coat said, "How is that?" With a mischievous twinkle the drummer replied. "They will hurt your eyes looking for the chicken." I thought it a clever joke but the dirty man said angrily, "You squirrelheaded son of a bitch," and went back to eating.

The book contains laudatory quotes from Esquire, The New York Times, the Saturday Review; and from Jonathem Lethem, Roald Dahl, and Walker Percy (the man who saved A Confederacy of Dunces from oblivion).

The Museum Guard

Set in Halifax just before WW2, this is a novel about lost souls. The narrator is a museum guard who has already lived through one tragedy, the death of his parents in a zeppelin accident. He has sweet but flawed relationships with his uncle, an engaging dissolute rogue, and a cemetery worker who believes she is a woman in a Dutch painting.

Several of the characters, underlining their rootlessness, live in hotels with bellhops their closest friends. Perhaps the many odd names are a reflection of this -- DeFoe Russet, Imogene Linny, Altoon Markham, Ovid Lamartine, Joop Heijman, Pinnie Oler, Madison Alt, Fordy Unterberg.

The plot swerves in interesting directions, the prose is spare, cleansed of adjectives, and the dialogue is very good. But once the uncle departs the story and the girlfriend sails into the maw of history, the novel loses its vitality. The denouement is described by the museum's curator in several letters that occupy the final 40 pages in a somewhat laboured manner.

Still, the novel was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. Two of author Howard Norman's earlier novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were finalists for the National Book Award. He also wrote a non-fiction volume that I liked very much: My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries, and Preoccupations.