This email bulletin crossed my email box, and it sounded so good, I
thought I would share it with my readers. That beer tasting sounds
mighty good.
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The Perfect Beginning to Summer by Art of the Table
May 23, 2012

Checkered blankets, a delicious bottle of wine and colorful bags
packed with scrumptious goodies...picnic season has arrived! Whether
your plans this holiday weekend include the beach, the market, the
cottage, park or your own backyard, don't miss out on the best of
summer essentials!sun

This combined edition gives you a little foray into

beer
wine (there's even an in store tasting tonight!)
delicious foods
table accessories

...and something to carry them all in!

First...find your perfect picnic/wine/beer carrying bag and holders!

Reisenthel Carry Bag
A favorite here since 2005, Reisenthel bags are perfect for any
occasion. A large, sturdy frame makes travel easy, and unique colorful
patterns make you the envy of the park, office & market, Reisenthel
bags are one of a kind. Ours are also $39 everyday, for that we are
happy.

Gerti Bags
These 100% certified organic cotton canvas bags (made in the USA!) are
perfect for a picnic on the lawn or beach! Gerti bags are designed for
upright stability to keep all your groceries upright & picnic goodies
clean and off the ground. Beautiful water-based ink patterns make
these bags just as cute as they are practical.

Bamboo Wine Table
Wine and picnics go together like peanut butter and jelly...it just
makes sense, right? Invest in our bamboo wine table and take away the
worry of spilling your favorite summer drink. Holding up to two wine
glasses with room for your other favorite snack, this eco-friendly
table folds up easily and is perfect for light travel!

Steady Sticks

Steady as you go! These brilliantly designed stakes hold your wine
bottle or wine glasses off the ground and away from dangerous spills.
Steady sticks come in two sizes,
one for your bottles and one for your glasses.

Wine Glasses
Our polycarbonate glasses are worry free and unbreakable. They're
wonderfully designed to look and feel like your finest drinkware, yet
capable of being tossed into the picnic basket and taken to the beach.

We also have a plethora of other picnic wares from baskets to
insulated bags & bamboo one time use plates & reusable ones too!

To kick off the weekend right, we start tonight with wine tasting!
We've got a Spanish wine tasting
in the store FREE from 5-7pm

We'll be tasting Deusa Nai Albarino, Las Valles Viura-Chardonnay & La
Vendemia, a Grenache/Tempranillo blend.

We love them all equally for weekend sipping!

Then there's tomorrow with a Stone Brewery beer tasting! in the store
FREE from 5-7pm

Are you on our Beer Talk email list? if so, you'll be getting more
info tomorrow morning on Stone Brewery
and other new summer brews!

If you're not on it, isn't it time?? Sign up on our website & at the
bottom under subscribe
check Beer Talk! Sublimely self-righteous. Thank you for shopping at
Art of the Table.

I am still allowed to follow my daughter's Facebook. All of her Aunts,
Uncles and Grandmothers follow her too. I saw she was going to the
Detroit Zoo, and I begged her to make use of her 5 Mexapixel Android
phone and unlimited data and post some pictures. She did. I enjoyed it
with deep relish. There's an clear tunnel through the swimming water
of polar bears, and she took some wonderful shots of swimming polar
bears, passing lightly overhead. I remember sitting in that tunnel,
not getting reception on my cell phone, and showing my daughter the
absence of bars on the primitive screen. It was ten years ago and she
was five. I also found myself remembering that my father had placed me
on the back of a Galapagos Turtle when I was barely old enough to
remember anything, but this isn't my story today. Despite wanting to
remember a day at the Detroit Zoo with my father in the middle 1960s,
it isn't my story today. It's my daughters. And I will not mention any
names nor will she read this story right away.

The month has taken a toll in my daughter's world. Two weeks ago, one
of her friends succumbed to Leukemia, a girl of sixteen. That was
incredibly sad. Just Monday night, this young man known for his
singing took his life. It really doesn't make sense as I browse his
Twitter and his Facebook. He had a pretty girlfriend and they talked
all the time on Skype when the two couldn't be together. The two had
dyed their hair fluorescent pink, two rebels together. There's
pictures of the attempts to reach him Monday night, all of them
unanswered. I'm upset because I never met him face to face and shook
his hand, but he was always a member of my daughter's theater pack.
You would see his name on the programs. I liked the spelling of his
name. I even found myself wracking my brains for the name of my
daughter's past boyfriend, and remembered it was different. I Googled
his name, and he shows up in programs for youth at the Detroit Opera
House. I have studied his cover photo in Facebook, and it shows a
school building under renovation, with a long hallway filled with
rubble and scaffolding. I understand he just got back from a trip to
Greece. There's a lot of YouTube videos of him singing in talent
shows, talent shows reaching all the way back to middle school.

I have an inclination to call the school and find out what is being
done for the survivors. Was the trip to the Zoo a response of the
school to the tragedy? In the end, I will begin by bringing up the
subject with her mother. Mom and daughter were featured in a special
article in last year's Yearbook. The two look really, really good
together. I have wrapped up a gift to send to her. I have a Herman's
Hermits Greatest Hits signed by Peter Noone. I have a copy of The
Cranes Wives first album. These will go in the mail tonight. It is a
pathetic something to do. My daughter transfers songs from the CDs I
send her to her iPod. Our projects have the power to keep us alive and
to indicate when we have lost the will to carry out projects and live.
Goodness, the young man even had an iPhone.

Don't ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Personally, I
hate having lost two of the children who were my daughter's friends. I
hate thinking that children who were babies when my child was a baby
have gone to the afterlife. Don't ask for the date of judgement day.
It is every day. There's a position one can take that all outcomes are
my responsibility. I have not been as involved with the lives of the
children in my daughter's circle. Could I have done something or
intuited the risk. Timor mortis conturbat me. The fear of death
disturbs me. My death is inevitable, and I have grown to accept this.
It drives me more today than ever that I will die. However, it is the
fear of death of those I love and those they love that disturbs me
more. Suicides tend to occur in clusters.

On Captiva Island, the residents are nutty about their sea turtles. The islanders keep outdoor lights to a minimum so turtles find way to the moonlit sea. In Michigan, we make political fodder about a turtle fence installed along US-31, eastern side, to keep those turtles from the Muskegon River flats from dying, flattened by a car any an one of three lanes. It's a bad game of frogger to allow a turtle on a roadway. By odd chance, I carried a painted turtle from west of Grand Haven Road to its east side, and the turtle peed in fear. My daughter on the east side of the state carried a turtle off her subdivision road and into a swamp. Where I hope the turtle stayed. I learned that the turtle gushed urine too. Hope she didn't allow urine to touch her hand.

Sunday, I saw the turtle smear, what was left of a painted turtle, pretty much where Saturday's turtle tried to cross. I wonder if it were that turtle returning to the western side. Or was it a turtle of similar size and age making the same crossing, finding an ugly fate?

(download)

Click here to download:

On_Saturday_May_20th_2012_turt.zip (1.54 MB)

In March, I was at Firekeepers Casino, east of Battle Creek, Michigan,
when I saw this phenomenon for the first time. A fellow was having a
nice game of Blackjack, playing at a five dollar minimum table. The
ten dollar minimum and twenty-five dollar minimum tables dealt cards
from a real shoe. One could actually cut the cards and maybe even
count them. That's what I call a sporting chance, and gambling is all
about sporting chances. The five dollar tables had a perpetual
shuffling machine, so each hand dealt was statistically the first hand
of a shoe that had been reshuffled and cut. Sitting and playing at
that table placed the young man at a lower chance of winning. He might
as well been playing on a Blackjack machine or at a parish fundraiser
where ties always go to the House. At his left shoulder, an attractive
young woman was standing and enjoying his choppy run on the baize. He
was winning one and losing one, then winning one and losing two in a
row. So his chip count was declining. He stacked up his four columns
of five chips each into a hundred dollar column of twenty red five
dollar chips and pushed his column into the round circle. "All In", he
declared. Why did the young man think he was playing Texas Hold'em? He
might not have known the game of Blackjack well enough to know if he
had a 11, an eight and a three, against a dealer with a six visible,
he would want to double down, adding a second column of twenty chips.
A suicide bet of fifty dollars would have prepared him for a stiff
hand on the dealer side and a hand requiring a ten card for twenty-one
on his side.

Maybe he was trying to impress the woman who spazzed. She couldn't
bear to look and she performed a bit of a dance, maybe for luck. The
dealer dealt the young man a ten and a three, a stiff hand. The dealer
dealt himself an ace up, with nobody home. The young man signaled for
a hit, took a Jack and busted. The dealer hauled his twenty chip
column to the bank. The young man pulled out two twenties and bought
another round of chips.

Perhaps I'll find a YouTube video of Tosh's skit. Tosh and his
production staff sold a ton of production souvenirs and raised
$24,000. Tosh flew to Vegas and put that 24 grand into the circle and
took a hit on a stiff card. He left with a grin as the dealer
collected his stack of chips, Tosh none the worst for wear. It reminds
me of the guy who sold all of his earthly belongings and put the sum
raised on red for roulette. Fortunately, red comes up almost fifty
percent of the time in roulette, so he doubled his money when red won.
There's a line quipped by a John LeCarre novel, not said so much as
thought, "Put it all on Red". I'll have to look that one up.

I though nothing of it again until playing Blackjack at Little River
Casino in Manistee, Michigan, where I had a good run at the five
dollar minimum table, I ultimately left the table fifty dollars up.
The dealer had a pleasant affability and he dealt from a real shoe of
six to eight decks. Before I played on, I saw the shoe was
three-quarters full, so I promised to wait for the next shoe. A woman
pushed in all her chips into the circle, about fifty dollars, and
declared, "All In". She hit a fourteen against a dealer's sixteen and
busted. She walked away with her head hung down a bit. A second fellow
pushed his chips into the ring, about forty dollars. He stood at
sixteen and the dealer pulled a five on a six and ten, making a
perfect twenty-one. He slouched away, facing a week on Mac and Cheese
after payday at the casino. Then one guy remained to finish the shoe.
He actually followed basic strategy and make about twenty dollars by
the time dealer threw the red cut card onto the green baize.

It is usually considered bad manners to interrupt a gambler while he's
making his bet and telling him or her what to do. If you want to try a
risky strategy when down, try playing two hands. Even riskier, but
theoretically workable, try a martingale. In other words, if one hand
loses one five dollar chip, bet two five dollar chips. If you win the
ten dollar bet, you're even. If you lose the ten dollar bet, bet
twenty. If you win, you're even. If you lose, bet forty. Keep
following this sequence until a win restores your chip balance or the
table limit is reached. On a five dollar table, this is usually 500
dollars. One would have to lose many times before that table limit was
hit. That's so much better than an "All In" suicide strategy, possibly
made popular by Daniel Tosh's "All In" with a bet of twenty four
thousand dollars.

Lose 5
Lose 10
Lose 20
Lose 40
Lose 80
Lose 160
Lose 320
Lose 640 ---- which wouldn't be allowed by the table limit, locking in the loss.

Personally, I wouldn't mind if people who were to play table games
were required to take a course and a test before being allowed on the
table. Yes, it's a free country, but it's bad sportsmanship to let
calfs go unwittingly to slaughter on a blackjack table. Of course, I
laugh at Tosh's stunt. However, I wish I didn't see so many young
bucks and dames following it towards disastrous results.

A day's wages lost at the Tosh of the cards? http://tosh.comedycentral.com/blog/