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editor
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 Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2004 2:47 pm Post subject: Loaded Dice |
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WELCOME!
Loaded Dice:
Making Movies
Audio CD
Featuring Romeo and Juliet by Mark Knopfler
Listen to the song interspersed with movie clips from Baz
Lurhrman's 1996 film based on Shakespeare's classic.
| Quote: | Romeo and Juliet
Juliet the dice were loaded from the start
And I bet and you exploded in my heart
And I forget I forget the movie song
When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong Juliet? |
We especially like the song's nods to these (in our view) superior musical takes on Shakespeare's famous lovers:
West Side Story
DVD
View the clip of Somewhere at YouTube.com
... and this one, too, with a sumptuous score by Nino Rota:
Romeo and Juliet
Directed by one of opera's greatest artistic directors,
Franco Zeffirelli
DVD
View the trailer at YouTube.com.
But the lovers' final scene is its bloodiest best by a mile in this one, featuring Prokofiev's thunderous staccato:
Romeo and Juliet
DVD
Featuring ELECTRIFYING choreography by Angelin Preljocaj
performed by Opera Ballet Lyon
View a sample at YouTube.com.
More PokerPulse favorite takes on Shakespeare's famous lovers:
New York
CD Audio
Featuring Lou Reed's Romeo Had Juliette
Unza Unza Time
Audio CD
Featuring the film director Emir Kusturica and the
legendary No Smoking Orchestra of then
Yugoslavia on Is Romeo Really a Jerk
We haven't yet found a favorite recording of Gounod's magnificent opera, but when we do, we'll post it here.
NEW! The PokerPulse People's Choice Award:
| Quote: | Star Crossed Lovers
Audio CD
Featuring opera legends Placido Domingo, who improves
with age, and Renee Fleming, alas, who doesn't
|
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Critics
Turf Wars
By John Lahr
March 30/09
| Quote: | "West Side Story” (at the Palace, under the sure-handed direction of Arthur Laurents, who wrote the musical’s original book) is so exciting it makes you ache with pleasure. All the defining forces of the American fifties—velocity, mobility, confidence—are condensed into this superb retelling of the Romeo and Juliet legend, which plays out against the background of Latino-versus-Anglo gang violence. Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, “West Side Story” incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century. Everything about the show is streamlined: the fluid jolt of Jerome Robbins’s choreography; the exhilarating syncopation of Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic score; the bravura concision of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics; the swiftness of Laurents’s storytelling—the book is one of the shortest in the history of the musical. The début of the show, in 1957—a production I saw—also marked the moment when the musical asserted its right to treat just about any subject (murder, rape, bigotry) as grist for popular entertainment. “West Side Story” is somehow both airborne and transcendent. ...
It is Laurents’s great good fortune to have found for his tale of star-crossed love the radiant Josefina Scaglione, a twenty-one-year-old Argentinian, who is at once fine-voiced and sweet-faced. She is plausibly a teen-ager and absolutely a star. Unlike many North American ingénues, who are technically expert but internally vacant, Scaglione is a whole person. Passionate, playful, and demure, she sings out of a centered, secure notion of womanhood. When Tony (the excellent Matt Cavenaugh) spots Maria at the local high-school dance—one of Joey McKneely’s many sensational reproduced choreographic moments—he is instantly under her spell, and we are, too. Scaglione’s innocence and sweetness are underlined by the shrewd casting of the rollicking Karen Olivo as Maria’s older confidante, Anita, who is also the flamboyant, knowing girlfriend of Maria’s brother, Bernardo (George Akram), whom Tony accidentally stabs during a gang dustup. With such a sweeping canvas, the musical’s characterizations are necessarily two-dimensional; the actors must bring a vivid sense of personality to their roles. Here, for the most part, they succeed. (-- p. 60) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 12:52 pm Post subject: |
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Mr. Lucky
VHS
It's World War II and suave sophistocate Gary Grunt is Joe Adams, soon-to-be sole proprietor of the Fortuna, an infamous gambling cruise ship headed for Havana. Except there's a problem. Joe just got his draft notice.
But wait. The boys at the poker table produce a dying shipmate's draft card, declaring the guy 4F (unfit for duty). Gary and his partner, Zepp, decide to gamble for it.
| Quote: | Zepp: Awright, boys. Get lost. (The guys leave). One of us has entered the army, Joe.
Joe: Who declared you in?
Zepp: Well, we're partners, ain't we? That's a 50-50 proposition in my book.
Joe: What do you want - half the card?
Zepp: I'll trade you my half of the boat for the card, Joe.
Joe: What good would a boat do me in the army? The one that gets the card gets the boat along with it.
Zepp: Who gets it, Joe?
Joe: Wanna' cut for it?
Zepp: Poker dice.
Joe: You got a deal.
Crunk: I'll get the box.
Joe: Wait a minute. Can't you wait and make the thing legal?
Zepp: What's wrong with poker dice?
Joe: Not a thing. Only the guy ain't dead yet. I never took anything off a pal in my life. After he joins the circus, that's different. |
We watched three times and never once caught the elephant with muddy feet. Nevertheless, and no big surprise, Mr. Lucky wins. The big question is whether the Ladies' Charity Ball is going to allow gambling in the back room and, if they do, will Gary and his crew blow south with all the dough? As if that's not enough, Archie Leach gives us an unexpected lesson in rhyming cockney slang, which proves an invalvuable a tool for dodging a certain three bottles and stoppers prowling the charity office.
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 3:30 pm Post subject: |
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The Gamester
Hardcover
By Rafael Sabatini
| Quote: | In France it had been his mysterious skill with cards and dice, and the vast sums he had won by holding a bank at faro at the house of that famous courtesan, La Duclos, which had led to his being requested by Monsieur d'Argenson, the King's Lieutenant-General of Police, to leave the country. There was no suggestion that he loaded his dice or marked his cards. It was universally recognized that his play was scrupulously correct, and that his good fortune was to be attributed solely to a mathematical genius and an incredible ability and speed in estimating odds. He played by a martingale of his own invention, a system for which he claimed ultimate infallibility when practised by himself, however it might fail at the hands of less gifted calculators, and to facilitate his reckoning he employed gold counters of the value of eighty livres, especially minted for him.
Upon his expulsion from France, and perhaps because of it, had followed a similar lack of appreciation of his activities in the states of Venice, Florence and Genoa; and so notorious was he become that it is unlikely that without the credentials supplied him by the Duke of Orleans he would have been allowed to linger in the dominions of King Victor Amadeus as a more or less honoured guest. Something may certainly have been due to the singular charm of a personality which commanded the favour of His Savoyard Majesty as it had earlier commanded that of his brother-in-law.
Very tall and spare and of an excellent shape, he moved with the easy grace of a man proficient in every bodily exercise. His countenance was of a patrician cast, which, after all, did not belie his origin, for if his father -- from whom no doubt he inherited his mathematical skill -- was no better than an Edinburgh goldsmith and banker, his mother, whom his looks favoured, issued from the noble house of Argyle. An early attack of the smallpox had, as sometimes happens, left his face of a pallor that added curiously to its attractiveness and deepened the air of mystery that seemed to cloak him. Il etait trop beau, said of him a French contemporary, and so the women seemed to have found him, largely to his undoing in his early years, when, after his father's death, he took his share of the family's fortune to London and dissipated it there in three or four years of reckless living. (-- p. 3) |
Our mystery man is none other than John Law, the father of modern finance. Scroll down here for more.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2158#2158
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2005 11:38 am Post subject: |
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Loaded Dice
CD Audio
By James Swain
Read by Tony Roberts
| Quote: | | By 10 p.m. Gerry was down to $50 and sweating through his clothes. Ahmin was up. Way up. To hide his winnings, something gamblers call rat-holing, Ahmin had been palming his $100 chips then dumping them in Gerry's half-filled coffee mug. If anyone in surveillance had been paying attention, they would have noticed that Gerry's drink was growing as the evening progressed. (From Disc 2) |
Plenty of Vegas cheat strategies and jargon in this one though we can't vouch for their accuracy. A nice read by Roberts.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2278#2278
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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I'm Your Man
CD Audio
Everybody Knows
By Frostback Fantasy Man Leonard Cohen
| Quote: | Everybody Knows
(co-written by Sharon Robinson)
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2291#2291
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:09 pm Post subject: |
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The Penelopiad
Hardcover
By Margaret Atwood
| Quote: | | Whatever was behind it, Odysseus cheated and won the race. I saw Helen smiling maliciously as she watched the marriage rites. She thought I was being pawned off on an uncouth dolt who would haul me off to a dreary backwater, and she was not displeased. She'd probably known well beforehand that the fix was in. (-- p. 38) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 11:06 am Post subject: |
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A Damsel in Distress
Paperback
Another gem by that cheerful old sinner,
P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | George was still puzzled.
'But I don't understand. How do you mean you drew me in a sweepstake - I mean a sweepstake? What sweepstake?'
'Down in the servants' 'all. Keggs, the butler, started it. I 'eard 'im say he always 'ad one every place 'e was in as a butler - leastways, whenever there was any dorters of the 'ouse. There's always a chance, when there's a 'ouse party, of one of the dorters of the 'ouse gettin' married to one of the gents in the party, so Keggs 'e puts all of the gents' names in an 'at, and you pay five shillings for a chance, and the one that draws the winning name gets the money. And if the dorter of the 'ouse don't get married that time, the money's put away and added to the pool for the next 'ouse-party.'
George gasped. This revelation of life below stairs in the stately homes of England took his breath away. Then astonishment gave way to indignation.
'Do you mean to tell me that you - you worms - made Lady Maud the - the prize of a sweepstake!'
Albert was hurt.
'Who're yer calling worms?'
George perceived the need of diplomacy. After all much depended on this child's goodwill.
'I was referring to the butler - what's his name - Keggs.'
'''E ain't a worm. 'E's a serpint.' Albert drew at his cigarette. His brow darkened. ''E does the drawing, Keggs does, and I'd like to know 'ow it is 'e always manages to cop the fav'rit!' (-- p. 109) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2578#2578
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2006 12:29 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Talk of the Town
Hearts and Brains
By Hendrik Herzberg
Nov. 6/06
| Quote: | | In a normal democracy, given the state of public opinion and the record of the incumbent government, it would be taken for granted that come next Tuesday the ruling party would be turned out. But, for reasons that have less to do with the wizardry of Karl Rove than with the structural biases of America's electoral machinery, Democrats enter every race carrying a bag of sand. The Senate's fifty-five Republicans represent fewer Americans than do its forty-five Democrats. On the House side, Democratic candidates have a higher propportion of the average district vote than Republicans in four of the five biennial elections since 1994, but - thanks to a combination of gerrymandering and demographics - Republicans remain in the majority. To win back the House, Democrats need something close to a landslide. Their opponents, to judge from their behavior, seem to think they might get one. (-- pgs. 45-48) |
Seccession, anyone?
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:58 am Post subject: |
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Uncle Fred in the Springtime
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | Of all the residents of Blandings Castle who had been doing a bit of intensive thinking during dinner -- and there were several -- Claude Pott was the one who had been thinking hardest. And the result of his thoughts had been to send him hastening to the Duke's room. It was his hope that he would be able to persuade him to play a hand or two of a game called Slippery Joe.
The evening's disaster had left Mr. Pott not only out of pocket and humiliated, but full of the liveliest suspicion. How the miracle had been accomplished, he was unable to say, but the more he brooded over the Duke's triumph, the more convinced did he become that he had been cheated and hornswoggled. Honest men, he told himself, did not beat him at Persian Monarchs, and he blamed himself for having selected a game at which it was possible, apparently, for an unscrupulous opponent to put something over. Slippery Joe was open to no such objection. Years of experience had taught him that at Slippery Joe he could always deal himself an unbeatable hand. (-- pg. 189) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 11:25 am Post subject: |
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Casablanca
DVD
The scene is Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca, where our hero has the roulette table in the back room rigged to prevent a young Bulgarian newlywed from soiling herself with the not-so-charming French prefect, Louis Renault, in return for two much sought after exit visas
| Quote: | Emile, the croupier: Marquons les jeux mesdames et messieurs...les jeux sont fais. La partie continue. Huit! (To the Bulgarian husband, who has lost everything) Do you wish to place another bet, sir?
Husband: No, I guess not.
Rick (to the husband): Have you tried 22 tonight? I said 22.
Emile (puzzled): Twenty-two. (Husband wns).
Rick (again to husband): Leave it there.
Emile: 22. (Husband wins again).
Rick: Cash it in and don't come back.
Patron: Are you sure this place is honest?
Carl, the head waiter: Honest? As honest as the day is long.
Rick (to Emile: How are we doing tonight?
Emile: A couple thousand less than I thought there would be.
(Later inside the restaurant, the Bulgarian woman impulsively throws her arms around Rick to show her gratitude).
Rick: (warily peeling her off his chest) He's just a lucky guy.
Carl: Mr. Rick, may I get you a cup of coffee?
Rick: No thanks, Carl.
(Bulgarian man approaches Louis with his winnings in the restaurant in an effort to purchase the exit visas).
Louis: Oh, not here, please. Come to my office in the morning. We'll do everything business-like.
Bulgarian man: We'll be there at 6.
Louis: I'll be there at 10. I'm very happy for both of you. Still, it's very strange that you won. Well, maybe not that strange. I'll see you in the morning.
Bulgarian woman: Thank you so much, Captain Renault.
Sasha, the bartender (embracing Rick and kissing him on each cheek): Boss, you've done a beautiful thing.
Rick: Go away, you crazy Russian.
Louis: As I suspected, you're a rank sentimentalist
Rick: Yeah? Why?
Louis: Why do you interfere with my little romances?
Rick: Put it down as a gesture to love.
Louis: Well, I'll forgive you this time. But I'll be in tomorrow with a breath-taking blonde. And it'll make me very happy if she loses. |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 2:55 pm Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Editor's Letter
The Measure of the Man (or Woman)
By Graydon Carter
February, 2007
| Quote: | I have always thought you could take the measure of a man by his sports manners - that is to say, the way in which he conducts himself on the playing field, or even over a game of chess or cards. Former president Bill Clinton was famous for taking a mulligan, or an extra try, on almost every shot, then playing the ball that had landed in the better spot. He essentially plays a two-man, two-ball "scramble" - but solo. A former employer of mine ensured that he won in tennis against family and underlings by always calling line shots in his own favor. And so it is with our current present, who will scratch, claw, kick, scream, move the goalposts - pretty much do anything to effect a win. He is a sore winner. And a horrible loser.
...When Barbara Bush took her 13-year-old son and his best friend, Doug Hannah, to play golf at her Houston club, George would start cursing if he didn't tee off well. His mother would tell him to quit it. By the third or fourth hole he would be yelling "Fuck this" until he had ensured that his mother would send him to the car.
"It fit his needs," says Hannah. "He couldn't lose."
Once, after his mother banished him from the golf course, she turned to Hannah and declared, "That boy is going to have optical rectosis." What did that mean? "She said, 'A shitty outlook on life.'"
Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off...It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that."...
Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite side of the net. "There was only one problem - my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "OK, then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you - he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.
It is something of an in-joke with Bush's friends and family. "In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens," says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis "Bo" Polk Jr. "George would say, 'Play that one over,' or 'I wasn't quite ready.' The overtimes are what's fun, so you make your own. When you that extra mile or tyhat extra point...you go to a whole new point...you go to a whole new level."
Inasmuch as I'm writing this the week before Christmas, any sort of prediction is a dicey proposition, but * my guess is that Bush will double-down on Iraq. He has lost, but his past would indicate that he will figure that he can just keep the game going a little longer. (-- at p. 52. Excerpts in quotations refer to Gail Sheehy's article, The Accidental Candidate, in the October, 2000 issue.) |
| Quote: | Associated Press
* State Iraq Resolution Opposes More Troops To Iraq
By Colleen Slevin
Feb. 28/07
| Quote: | | DENVER - State senators will be asked to approve a resolution that objects to President Bush's decision to send more troops Iraq but expresses support for military personnel. A revised draft of the resolution provided to The Associated Press Wednesday says the war has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, hurting efforts to bring peace and democracy to the country. The sponsors, Democratic Sens. Ron Tupa of Boulder and Ken Gordon of Denver, were expected to introduce the measure later Wednesday. |
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More on America's successful continued...er...continuing of the Iraq war under Losing Streak.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2735#2735
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2007 10:37 am Post subject: |
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Gobe and Mail
Still another dull corporate Toronto daily
China's market myths
The story of its rise is epic in
proportion, but take a peek behind
the curtain: Rumor and speculation
still drive the country's investors
By Geoffrey York, Sinclair Stewart
and Boyd Erman
March 3/07
| Quote: | A few hundred small-time traders in ski jackets and baseball caps are crowded into a shabby hall in central Beijing, puffing on cigarettes and noisily kibitzing. The stock tickers and computer screens are modern, but the air is smoky, the paint is peeling, and the walls are lined with red Communist propaganda banners. In the corner, men are playing cards and Chinese chess, while a stream of housewives and elderly pensioners, some dressed in Mao suits, casually wander in from the street. They look innocent enough - certainly, it's difficult to believe this group helped to incite a global market panic this week, one that erased hundreds of billions of dollars worth of value from the world's stock exchange in a single day.
"It's even worse than a casino," complained Li Dqing, one of the investors at this tradfing hall, who has been investing in the Chinese market since 1996. "At least a casino has some rules. The Chinese stock market has no rules. I hate this market. It's controlled by the government. It can't be a fair game if the referee is also one of the players."
...To be fair, there are some investors who are mindful of the Asian financial crisis of 1998, and worry that sudden weakness in the Chinese market could prefigure a similar outcome. But that fear is misplaced given how small a role the Chinese stock market plays in the country, said economist Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. Of the 1.3 billion people in China, an overwhelming majority of those live on farms and rural areas and don't own shares.
"It's an enclave of people living in Shanghai and other cities who are affected by this, but that's not the real China," he said. "There is more free-floating anxiety than factual knowledge." It's also important to remember that the Chinese market remains dominated by lumbering state-owned companies - not the private sector enterprises that are the real engine of economic growth, or many of the global companies that dominate exports. ..."The market prices aren't set by any transparent process," he said. "The prices of the stocks are unrelated ot their value. Nobody really knows who owns the stocks. This is basically the same old casino that it always was."
Mr. Li recalls that only two or three years ago, economists were warning Chinese investors to stay away from the stock market because it resembled a casino. Today, nobody seems to listen. "Now look at these old men and women, struggling to pour into the market," he said, nodding at the people around him in the cramped trading hall. "Did they forget all those warnings? The stock market is like a lion that eats meat, and I believe that most of the newcomers and old people will " (Excerpt from p. B4) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2752#2752
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 8:56 am Post subject: |
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Roses Are Difficult Here
Hardcover
By W.O. Mitchell
| Quote: | He was willing to bet that the woman was good at her work - interviewing, observing people, whatever anthropologists or sociologists did. It wasn't that she stared at a person, so much as that her face held a steady and quite impersonal candour that could not be soon or easily accepted. It was something you had to adjust to, as when brilliant light has been thrown upon the pupils after a long time in darkness. One thing it did: it told a man instantly that he was a man and that she was a woman, and since that impertinent difference had been disposed of, they could get on with more important matters.
He left the office with her, crossed to the Post Office side of the street, then past the Palm Cafe, Willie MacCrimmon's Shoe and Harness, to the Cayley or, as it was better known, the Aunt Fan building. It was two storeys of tan sandstone, tilting visibly on foundations that had been sapped by year after year of floods. Tall, narrow, and squeezed between Finlay's Vulcanizing and the Beauty Parlour, it looked somehow a little like an elderly maiden lady who had come upon distressing times and companions. Aunt Fan Cayley had arrived from England thirty years before with a young brother, Hubert. He had drunk up his own and most of his sister's money, leaving her only the Cayley building, which he had won from Ollie Pringle in a game of Saskatchewan Show at the Ranchmen's Club over the Palm Cafe two years after his arrival in the district and one year before he had been barred from the club for the use of a deck of cards whose backs he had meticulously pricked with a needle. (Chapter III, pgs. 36-37) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2824#2824
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Wed May 23, 2007 10:03 am Post subject: |
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Conrad and Lady Black:
Dancing on the Edge
Hardcover
By *Tom Bower
| Quote: | ...The new challenge - 'Murdoch vs Black," the clash of the Titans - enhanced the minnow's status.
Black concealed his true dilemma. As a capitalist, he should have instantly cut the Telegraph's price and spent money on improving the newspaper's editorial content and promotional campaigns to blast The Times's challenge into oblivion. The cost excluded that option. Unlike Murdoch's media empire, which generated $7.5 billion a year, Black's kingdom was dependent on the Telegraph for more than half its annual profits, and despite the income, Hollinger had accululated debts rather than cash. Without any capital, Black relied on the previous day's cash flow to survive. Matching Murdoch's price cut, he knew, would not only jeopardize his finances, but would break a lifetime's habit. Black was fighting a war on uncertain terrain.
As a student at Oxford, Murdoch was renowned as a poker player. Ever since, his commercial career had been marked by risking huge sums to win, and occasionally bearing a loss. Black did not understand a game of chance among equals. He could only win if his opponent was in trouble and the odds were stacked in his favor. If he had gathered around himself serious advisers and directors rather than relying on Dan Colson, David Radler and Jack Boultbee, he would have understood this new battle. But openness was anathema to the cabal, a weakness spotted by Murdoch, who smelt blood. (From Chapter 9, ,The Torpedo, at pgs. 199-200) |
*cbc.ca
Public News Source
Conrad Black Timeline
Last updated March, 2007
| Quote: | Feb. 19, 2007:
Conrad Black files an $11-million libel suit against British author Tom Bower, whose unflattering book, Conrad & Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge, outraged the couple. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2863#2863
Last edited by editor on Tue Dec 23, 2008 11:03 am; edited 2 times in total |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 11:05 am Post subject: |
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The Globe and Mail
Report on Business
Magazine Supplement
A Game of Risk
Lukas Lundin is betting the family business
on a breakneck expansion plan, high-stake
ventures into politically unstable regions and a
fervent hope the resource boom doesn't go bust.
His father would have been proud.
By Timothy Taylor
June, 2007
| Quote: | There is a story Lucas Lundin tells about how he and his brother Ian ended up running the family business, the Lundin Group of Companies, which includes the Fancouver-based Lundin Mining Corp. His father, Adolf, the Swedish oil and mining entrepreneur who passed away late last year, had taken the family ot the French Riviera for a holiday. He took his boys - Lukas was 12 at the time, Ian 10 - to a cafe for lunch. Over dessert, Adolf, who had only just begun his own entrepreneurial career in investments, looked across the table at his boys and announced that the time for a decision had come. "Which of you will be my mining engineer, and which of you will take care of the oil? You have 10 minutes."
... "He (Adolf) really went belly up," Lukas says, with a shake of the head. But with a small chuckle, too, as he is now able to really empathize with his father's position, understanding that in a business renowned for radical ups and downs, you must take the long view. "We had a fancy house on the lake in Geneva," he continues. "So we sold that. We moved into some farmhouse in France. My mother was a good sport, but it must have been very hard on him."
No guts, no glory, Adolf Lundin would have siad, citing his personal motto. Still, he might also have acknowledged that a little old-fashioned luck never hurt, either. That same year, returning to Geneva from Canada, Adolf had one of those life-changing encounters of which Hollywood screenwriters are so fond . Ahmed El Dib was the man's name.
They met at Paris's Orly airport and got to talking, the way two travellers do. It turned out Ahmed had just been let go by an oil exploration company called Basic Resources, and had the foresight to take an option on a Qatari oil concession as severance payment. Ahmed, Adolf learned, listening raptly in the departure lounge that day, was in the market for partners with the appetite for risk and some negotiating savvy.
And he had found one. Later that same year, Adolf nailed down the deal. Not easily, of course. The Emir of Qatar needed $1 million (U.S.) for his trouble, but the money couldn't merely be handed over directly. That would have been bribery and beneath the royal dignity.
"So my father bet the Emir that it would rain the next day," Lukas says. "Of course, it never rains in Qatar, so...the Emir got his million and Dad got the concession."
The project became Gulfstream Resources, which became the North Dome gas discovery in the Persian Gulf, which by 1979 represented $15 million worth of share value in Adolf Lundin's pocket. (-- pgs. 57-59) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2873#2873
Last edited by editor on Tue Dec 23, 2008 11:05 am; edited 2 times in total |
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