I shouldn’t poke too much fun, because I love weird ceremonies, and my grandfather was a member of the royal guard in Ottawa. But when they marched the goat out at the beginning of the changing of the guard, Natasha and I looked at eachother with raised eyebrows, and re-checked the tourist guide to be sure we were in the right place.

Really? A goat?

(There’s two conflicting sources naming the goat – Vandoos.com claims it’s Baptiste- meaning Baptist, La Citadelle’s website claims it’s Bâtisse – meaning ‘fortress’. The first mascot goat was given to the Vandoos by the queen in 1955, subsequent goats, including Baptiste X, are direct descendants.)

The game:

Everyone places at least the minimum bet on an area of the table called the pass line.

As the round begins a shooter (dice roller) is chosen. The shooter hands the dice to the left on subsequent rounds.

During the “Come out” phase, the shooter makes one or more rolls. If the shooter rolls 2, 3 or 12, the dealer takes all the pass line money and the round ends. If the shooter rolls 7 or 11, everyone’s money on the pass line is doubled. If the shooter rolls a 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10, this number becomes “the point”.

Once a point is chosen, point bets can be made or rescinded by placing your wager into boxes numbered 3-11 (without a 7). Any subsequent rolls by the shooter will double the money of anyone’s bet in the corresponding number. If the shooter rolls “the point” number, everyone’s money on the pass line is doubled. If the shooter rolls a 7, the round ends and the dealer collects all the money still on the table.

The goal is to wager on numbers that the shooter will roll before a seven comes up. There are a bunch of special-case rules (one-off bets, rare odds bets, etc) that don’t significantly change the structure of the game, but change from table to table depending on the rules you’re playing by.

The results:

The math in Craps is neat and tidy. You’ll quickly see that it’s a losing game – like most casino games there’s no case where the odds are in your favor. You have marginally better odds playing the 6 or 8, which are second only in rolling frequency to the 7. Wikipedia have a good breakdown of various bet odds, and they’re all bad. It’s telling that they include a section devoted to calculations of “Loss per hour”.

It didn’t take me long to blow through my pile of funny money, while watching people around me get lucky breaks all evening. My strategy was to cover 6 and 8, usually two at a time, but our table threw a statistically improbable number of 9s, making the superstitious folks with bad math skills at the table filthy rich. Mathematicians make terrible gamblers, I guess.

The game ended when a guy who’d won big at the poker table descended on our game late in the evening and bet everything he had on number 5, and it came up for him, bankrupting the dealer and pretty much finishing off our game.

It’s actually a fun game, with lots of minor winning going on while your chip pile slowly bleeds to death. You’ll have a slight edge if you’ve ever puzzled out dice-rolling odds during a tedious game of Dungeons and Dragons. If you’re looking to actually win money, though, you’re almost definitely better off playing Poker or Blackjack. (…or bet it all on the 5!)

I usually “ding” people with my bell if they’re walking dogs or they have little kids running around, but I don’t bother if I’m going slow and it looks like there’s lots of room (I make enough noise wheezing and panting). So as I stood up and took my first hard pedal to pass him, I wondered to myself “What are the odds someone’s coming around that bushy corner?”

Turns out 100%. One of those 10-speed velo-drone racer types going full-out through the woods in his full-body spandex racing outfit came whipping downhill out of nowhere. I veered back into my lane (and off the other side) and jammed on my brakes, my tires locked up and chirped loudly while I skittered up alongside the poor walking bugger who was minding his own business. I apologised profusely and he later seemed fine, but you should have seen the way he leapt off the road and dove for cover. Bad judgment call on my part. I literally only saw one bicycle on the entire ride in to work, and it was right at the moment I couldn’t see ahead in the lane. Good thing I was going slow.

Anyhow – for scaring the bejesus out of an old man this morning – I feel some Karmic Punishment coming on.

Bike picture stolen from Joe Tordiff, snarky dialog bubble by me.

And even worse – he told terrible jokes. A comedian! What a nightmare!

I’ve been observing the 100-mile and slow-food philosophies for a while, and I’ve taken some good lessons away from it. With our various food allergies it makes sense for us to do a lot of “from scratch” cooking, which in turn leads us to look around for good seasonal produce and meats, a lot of which are best from local sources. I’ve got a much broader awareness now of what’s in season, and I’ve become considerably more open-minded about trying all kinds of fantastic foods.

The 100-mile limit is somewhat arbitrary though, and the organic politics are frustrating. This is where I diverge from the typical tree-hugger foodie party line – I think the trend towards organic local farming is short-sighted and self-indulgent. Organic food grown close to home tastes great and is arguably more nutritious (or not?), but we have a responsibility to make the most efficient use of dwindling arable land to feed more than just ourselves. The green revolution was anything but “green” – massive monocropping, advances in genetics, mechanization, transportation, extensive use of pesticides and fertilizers came with an environmental cost, but helped put an end (sortof) to famines and increased world food security even though the world population is still increasing at a tremendous rate. Maybe these are necessary tradeoffs? I’m willing to eat less tasty (and less ethical) food sometimes if I know I’ll be able to eat again tomorrow.

On the show last night we watched some of the participants use what looked like half a tank of propane to boil down a bucket of ocean water for a teaspoon of “natural” salt. Food production and efficiency have a complicated relationship.

The display is incredible, amazing, spectacular. Once you get over the initial heebie-jeebies of looking at dead people, there’s so much to learn. Organs are so small and neatly packed into your torso. The circulatory system is incredibly intricate. Muscles and bones all fit together so perfectly.

No photos were allowed in the exhibit (the one above’s been stolen from the interwebs) but one image will stay with me forever – they had somehow managed to extract someone’s entire nervous system, in one piece, and lay it out on a table. A little brain and eyes looking up, connected by the base to the spinal cord, a taproot of little yellow nerves that branched all the way down into finer and finer hairs. That was  it – all of your thinking parts (the you part of you) laid out like a pound and a half of corn silk. It blew my mind!

Do you remember the Chemical Brothers “Hey Boy, Hey Girl” video where the girl sees the skeleton and then breaks her arm – and everyone she sees later looks like skeletons? Totally the same effect when you come out – all weekend I couldn’t shake the thought that I was talking to people made of meat.

But man – can that thing ever collect dust!

Maybe it can be a sometimes broom. Like, for special sweeping occasions.

Comics

Centerpointe Library has a pretty great stack of French comics, so I’ve been voraciously chewing through them on my weekly visits. A real highlight I’ve stumbled across is the “Gardiens Du Maser” series by Massimiliano Frezzatto (an Italian publishing a French comic being read by a Canadian – international!). The art is spectacular, and while the story points sometimes get away from me (one of the characters speaks with a lisp – so double the difficulty of an already abstract psych-sci-fi series), there’s just so much packed into every page that you can’t help but get caught up in all the detail. One of the main characters is brilliant – a reluctant backpack robot who doesn’t want to be brought along on adventures. He reminded me of C3P0 stuck to Chewie’s back in Empire, but much less of a twit. Tons of action and weird technology and incredible designs. Totally in love. I heard there’s a Prequel and an English translation available that I might try to find.

TV

During the heat wave, while we were hiding out in our basement, we flipped on the TV and channel surfed through the french channels where we stumbled on Les Chefs. It’s fantastic! The show is basically a direct ripoff of the format of Top Chef or Hell’s Kitchen, except everyone is super competent and they’re all actually nice to eachother. Even at the end of the show, when they ruthlessly eliminate a player, they give them a frying pan and a bunch of hugs. I can hear Gordon Ramsay cursing all of this civility! In the last episode we watched, we learned how to make gourmet Pogos, and what to do with Mini-bébé-bok-choy (which sounds hilarious when you say it over and over). We intend to watch the rest of the series online when we get a chance over our vacation. Great show!

I still can’t name any French celebrities, but I can at least find a good place to eat Pogos and Bok-choy in Quebec.

So then I started (obviously) writing a tool to see if I could re-construct the scanned broccoli by stacking the slices in volumetric layers – and it turns out that yes, I could. But then I found out that Photoshop can also do it. Lame. As soon as you don’t need to write custom software to do something, that idea is officially no longer cool. (My version had extra features, though… and I intend to add some proper shading.)

(Edit: Sorry about the big file size – compressed it down a little)