Day 106

I found a penny near the dumpster while I was taking out the trash. I spent most of the day inside watching the Indy 500 with Marti. She really took to Danica Patrick and was really getting excited when Patrick was leading near the end. She drove a great race, to bad she just had to hold back to conserve fuel.

After the race we went out to Target to return some wedding gifts. Unfortunally a quick stop off at Chick-Fil-A provied no other coins.


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Last night I was flipping through the channels and stopped off on the Game Show Network to watch Press Your Luck, one of my favorite game shows of the 1980's. I was lucky, because they were showing the special double episode with Michael Larson, an unemployed ice cream truck driver from Ohio, who memorized the patterns of the prize board so he could always hit the $5,000 plus one spin square. He ended up winning over $100,000, although he could have won much more if he kept up the plan. I had read about the episode on the Internet and knew it wasn't a hoax, but I had yet to see the episode. For more information on his story check this out.

Watching the episode was really interesting, and I knew that it was the Larson episode in the second round when he hit about 8 in a row. Even before I figured it out, he did seem a bit odd, bouncing up and down on his chair and clapping for everything. Looking back, he was probably just really nervous! It seemed odd that he was doing so well, yet hitting the same 2 squares EVERY time! After a while you could see him looking for the patterns. If he looked in the upper right of the screen, he would hit $5,000 and a Spin. If he looked to the left he would hit $750 and a Spin. His last spin was very interesting because he actually hit the buzzer a moment to early. He hit a square that just turned from a Whammy to a trip to Hawaii.

One of the only times that someone has gotten over on a game show, so you have to respect him for that. But he has a very sad postscript to his story. Lost some of his money in real estate, then after hearing a radio station contest, where if you could produce 2 dollar bills with consecutive serial numbers, they would pay $30,000. He took out the rest of his savings ($40,000) in one dollar bills, which then got stolen. Can you image if he took it out in quarters? That would be quite a find, and would proabably be found by Chris! Larson died in 1999 of cancer, and was on the run from the law. A sad end to an interesting tale.

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Marti and I are now off to watch Star Wars Episode III.

Total for the Day - $0.01
Total for the Race - $25.79