I made a mistake, I bought a jeep.

The time I won at craps.

I don’t gamble. I’ll bet on things or play games of chance for money on occasion, but putting my money on a losing proposition isn’t my idea of a good time. When I go to a casino I go to the poker tables and that’s it.

The whole culture about it just seems so self-defeating and depressing. The superstition, chasing the high of that one-in-a-million lucky event. It’s not for me.

My older brother is mostly the same way, with one notable exception: craps. He’d been talking it up to me for years, telling me how it’s the most fun he’s ever had in a casino, and I should just try it with him and see what it’s like.

It seems too complicated, I told him. He said that you can just bet the Pass Line, which basically means you’re betting that whoever is rolling the dice doesn’t roll a seven. It’s a social activity, he explained, because the whole table is betting the Pass Line and rooting for each other.

The way he described it, a group of a strangers drinking, cheering for each other on their wins, commiserating with each other on their losses, I could almost start to see the appeal.

I downloaded an app and started asking him questions, which he answered patiently. Eagerly even.

Then I saw it.

“What’s the ‘Don’t Pass Line’?”

“It’s a bet against the person rolling the dice. Nobody really bets the Don’t Pass Line. It’s a dick move.”

A plan formed in my mind. “Ok, I’ll play.”

That night, I’m sitting at the craps table. To my right, my brother. To his right, our little sister. They sit me on the far left so I can get a feel for it before it’s my turn to roll.

The rest of the table is a smattering of dead-eyed gamblers. They looked preemptively disappointed, but ready to be amazed. Like they were ready to get caught up in a run of good luck, but they weren’t going to bring it themselves. Not the party I was promised, but there was some promise there.

First up, my sister. She rolls to set the point. We all put our chips on the Pass Line. Some of the gamblers make more specific bets.

She rolls again, and we win! She rolls again and again, and we keep winning. I see the spirits lifting around the table. There’s talking, laughing, cheering, free liquor, free money, and suddenly I get it.

Eventually my sister rolls a seven and her turn ends, but that’s ok because she already won the table a shitload of money. I’m up like $150 myself.

The table knows us a little by now. I’m new, we’re all siblings, and surely my brother will continue the hot streak.

But a plan is a plan.

My brother takes the dice and rolls the point. Everyone places their chips. I place my chips.

The dealer asks me, “Did you mean to put your chips on the Don’t Pass Line?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I meant to do.”

Silence. Then my sister: “You’re an asshole.”

My brother rolls again: seven. The Don’t Pass Line wins me a couple bucks.

I take the dice and proceed to go on a mini hot streak myself. I win like another fifty bucks, but the table never recovers. The mood is dead. I killed it.

That was probably twelve years ago. To this day, if it comes up, my sister will only call me an asshole again. My brother won’t talk about it at all.

I hate scammers. People who call you pretending to be the “IRS” and claiming that you’re about to be arrested for unpaid taxes. Sick bastards who make money ripping off (mostly elderly) people.

One time I started getting those phone calls. I went down to the customer service department where I worked, which still had a fax machine, stuck a blank piece of paper in, dialed the scammers number, set retry x100, and hit send.

I called them back an hour later to see if they were getting the message and the guy gave me an earful. I politely explained that every second of his time that I wasted was one less second he got to spend ripping someone else off. He hung up on me but I kept calling back until they finally disconnected that number.

Totally worth it. Fuck scammers.

Lamborghini was a tractor company before they made cars. Ferruccio Lamborghini was successful and bought 2 Ferraris, one for him and one for his wife. He would drive his business partners to lunch in hhem, but he tended to burn up the clutches. He eventually discovered that they used a same inexpensive part as his tractors, but Ferrari charged 100 times the money for the same part. He spoke to Enzo Ferrari about it and the conversation did not go well. Lamborghini was so insulted by the reply that he started his own car company.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a25169632/lamborghini-supercars-exist-because-of-a-tractor/

Story time!

I forget the origin of the beef, but I remember a guy who grew up with another dude who was just a complete tool to my friend. It wasn’t outright bullying, but general arseholery and making his life difficult when it really didn’t need to be.

Anyway, my friend has a long memory and a longer grudge streak. I was finishing college at a time when print media was still king but social media was exploding in popularity.

My friend has decided “fuck this, I’m going to ruin this dude’s life for a bit”. He put an advert in the local paper or freeads (for non UK spuds: the freeads or classifieds is a newspaper-style private advertisements in one place - like a print version of a snapshot of Facebook Marketplace or Vinted for a local area).

Free TV. Call 07000100100 for details.

Anyone to this day knows that anything advertised for free attracts the most annoying, persistent, and unhinged type of people on earth. The freeads was published the following week. I didn’t socialise with the guy on the business end of my friend’s wrath on account of him being a massive cockwomble, but I understand his phone started to go wild with texts and phone calls asking about a free television - bear in mind that cheap consumer TVs weren’t really a thing and a TV purchase was a “buy it for life” thing at the time, so a free TV was just an amazing deal.

It would appear the demand for a free television was too much for the guy. In true mid 2000’s fashion, a social media message went up from the clearly annoyed guy, to the tune of:

Hi all, I’ve started to get loads of prank calls, so I’ve changed my number. It’s 07000200200 now.

With the internet and social interactions online still in the wild west era, this was fairly common. My friend chuckled to himself. The plan worked. Not satisfied with that though, he put another advert in the following week’s freeads:

Free TV. Call 07000200200 for details.

The publication date rolls around a few days later, and tens of thousands of this newspaper gets delivered to stores across the region. Obviously, mere hours after the thin yellow paper booklets are released to the public, the idiot’s phone starts going banzai. Dozens of calls a day from all corners of society, relentlessly asking about collection and delivery of a television at no charge.

The guy was livid.

Livid, but not smart. He had gotten pissed off with the calls, and was unable to stop the barrage of bargain hunters hitting his digits to get a gogglebox gratis. He went back to his phone network operator and makes the appropriate changes. Not one for releasing his number in a private, carefully controlled manner - the gist of the following was posted to social media a few weeks later:

Not sure why I’m getting so many prank calls, and my mobile network are useless. My new number is 07000300300. Let me know if someone asks you for it because I’m getting annoyed.

Most normal folk wouldn’t have risked being burned a third time and released their number in person or by SMS message. That said, I suspect the Venn diagram of twats like this guy who had spent an elder childhood making people’s lives difficult; and those who don’t appreciate the drawbacks of one-to-many communication, aren’t far off a circle.

My friend sees this status update or whatever it was called back then, cuts out the reply slip of the freeads, enclosed his payment, and sends in the following for publication the following week:

Free TV. Call 07000300300 for details. Shout “camel” when I answer so I know you’re genuine.

Hilarity likely ensued. My friend found immense satisfaction that the guy who tried to socially ostracise him and physically manhandle him for “fun” was now getting Guantanamo Bay levels of psychological torture, and 90% of calls that he answered started with someone hollering the name of a type of Saharan quardraped species.

The guy never posted anything after that. Not his new number, not any angry rants, nothing at all.

I respected my pal for that stunt. So much mental torture for so little effort. I lost touch with the friend but I still think of him now and then, and I hope that he still chuckles to himself with that prank under his belt, because I certainly do.

When we were kids, my brother would get mean when bored. Low-grade physical stuff, hard pinches, pulled hair, coming into my room to harass me and break toys, enough to cause pain without evidence if I were to complain. I asked my mom to intervene, she didn’t want to deal with it, so she gave me the old phrase, “if you don’t know what to do, spit in a shoe and do it again at half past two”.

So I spat in my brothers shoe every time he messed with me. And for good measure, I spat in my mom’s shoe too for letting him continue to abuse me.

Almon Brown Strowger was an undertaker and suspected that a rival buisness used their wife’s position as a switchboard operator to steal customers.

So he invented the automatic switchboard and put his competitors wife out of a job.

Fidel Castro offering to send election observers to the US in 2004.

A guy I used to know got annoyed with some student neighbours who were kind of arseholes, but he was mostly annoyed with them for their frequent late, loud parties - like partying until 04:00 in the morning, shouting and screaming, vomitting on the pavement in front of the houses, etc.

Phase 1 spite involved booking in lots of tradespeople to come and visit them early in the morning so, eg, carpet fitters coming to measure up a room in their house at 08:30 on a Saturday morning and so forth.

Phase 2 spite involved pissing in an empty washing up liquid bottle and then squeezing a little stream of piss in through their letter box whenever they weren’t home. Not enough that it wouldn’t dry in a couple of hours, but that was the aim. Their hallway carpet got smellier and smellier as more and more piss dried on it.

Eventually they moved out and the landlord has to replace the carpet. The only problem. was that no carpet fitters would come out to that property any more.

King Harald of Norway, when asked by Trump about getting invited to talk about a Nobel Peace prize, decided to host Obama instead.

I quite liked the internet vs hedgefunds (gamestop) case

Equality House, bought and painted to irritate Westboro Baptist Church. It’s a tie with Mott House, listed on the same page.

Warren Buffett bought Berkshire Hathaway in part to spite its management. He had been buying shares for a while, and at one point offered them a chance to buy them back. They low-balled him on the price, he got pissed, took majority control of the stock, and fired the management.

I was at the cricket and there were two guys sitting nearby. One threw something like a jaffa (solid choclate with a hard shell) into the crowd in front and hit someone. A dick move but unlikely to do any lasting damage. A security guard and then police officer got involved, said he threw a golf ball or something along those lines (similar but worse). He accurately said he didn’t but got thrown out anyway.

His friend sat there for a few minutes then tried to start a Mexican wave. He didn’t the first few tries but was determined and eventually got one going. I didn’t realise until the wave had done a lap of the cricket ground, but during this time he had filled his hand with as much sunscreen as he could, then as it went past he splattered it all over the back of the security guards hair and back before disappearing into the crowd.

Most of the 40,000 people who took part in the Mexican wave had no idea what they were just a part of.

I know there’s been a few cases of people paying fines with wheelbarrows full of loose pennies.