I’ve a good friend, who I’ve known for over twenty years now, that comes over to play cribbage several times a week. Of late, my wife introduced the game of Yahtzee to him which he has also taken a liking to. So now we play several different games as often as possible. One of the games we’ve tried to teach him, is to play backgammon. ” He understands the concept well enough but I’m not exactly a good teacher so I decided to find a website that could show him an easier way to learn to play the game. We have a good backgammon board and even found him a nice one of his own on which to play when he’s elsewhere. Now my friend and I also love to play blackjack, or “twenty-one” as it is often referred to as being. Just about anything that has to do with cards or dice or even quick board games, has an appeal to many of our generation I’m guessing.

There is a site on the web called “Gammonish.com” that is pretty much like the “Bible of Backgammon”, so to speak. On there they talk about some blackjack gaming software that they plan to enlist the famous MIT Blackjack team to try out. Now that ought to be rather interesting to say the least. But I digress, the whole reason for me finding the site was for my buddy to learn how to play backgammon. Well, he did, apparently the site introduced him to several variations of the game as well as instructions on how to play and various strategies and tips from professional players of the game. Now my good ol’ buddy acts like I’m the novice and he’s giving me lessons! Last time over he even challenged me to a game of acey-deucy, but I had a ringer up my sleeve! My lovely wife! Boy did she ever kick his butt at that game! Needless to say, he was a bit surprised that she was so adept at the game. We never told him we’ve played the game for many years.

I cut and pasted the Press Release that I found interesting enough to want to share:

An old friend of mine with whom I’ve shared many a laugh with recently called me at two in the morning just to tell me a joke he’d heard. He said he had to tell me then because he wouldn’t remember it in the morning! Anyway, it did in fact, make me laugh. So I’ll give my rendition of the joke and hope I get it halfway right.

Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and John McCain were taking the same flight to a campaign stop on a rather small aircraft when Barack looked over at Hilary and chuckled a bit saying, “You know, I could throw a hundred dollar bill out the window and make someone very happy”! Hilary upon hearing this, just smiled and replied, ” And I could throw ten, one hundred dollar bills out the window and make ten people very, very happy!” Now John McCain grinned and said, ” and I could throw a hundred ten dollar bills out the window and make a hundred people happy!”

Up front in the cockpit the pilot leaned over to the co-pilot and stated, “those three blowhards back there, I could toss all three of them out the plane and make 156 million people happy!”