Casino tycoon out-scrooges Scrooge

Steve Wynn is the cheapest trillionaire in the world. He makes Scrooge seem benevolent and charitable before his reformation.
CityLife of Las Vegas rightly skewered Wynn in its recent “Get Out of Town Issue.” Editor Steve Sebelius wrote of the casino mogul: he steals tips “from dealers to redistribute them to supervisors!”
“Wynn’s company complained it couldn’t induce dealers to move up because tips were so good. Instead of raising supervisor’s salaries to compensate, Wynn insisted that dealers pool tips, which are then distributed among dealers and their bosses. The upshot? Hardworking dealers take a cut in pay and Wynn doesn’t have to pay more in salaries.”
The pay of the 500 dealers at Wynn Las Vegas has been slashed 20 percent. Unfortunately, dealers are not unionized. A union might not defeat the nefarious Wynn policy but it would fight for worker rights and provide the marvelous disinfectant of publicity.
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News item: Ramsey Clark assails death penalty. Clark, former attorney general, says the United States will shame itself even more and be responsible for still more bloodshed if it allows Saddam Hussein to be executed. He’s right.
Few will mourn the death of Hussein, convicted of crimes against humanity. But capital punishment is murder by the state. It is the barbaric biblical notion of an “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (Exodus: 21:24) The death penalty is thoroughly discredited throughout the civilized world.
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The Associated Press filed a story recently that more than 9 out of 10 Americans have premarital sex. No kidding.
No survey is needed to support that happy fact. But it does show the stupidity of the sex-abstinence preachings of President Bush. Speaking of stupid, now Bush wants to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq. Stubbornness and stupidity are a frightful combination.
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Another AP dispatch from Tehran, Iran, recently began: “Hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad….” Have you ever seen an AP story begin: “Hardline President Bush….”?
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A statistic in a recent issue of Playboy is stunning: 39 percent of Americans reject the fact of Darwinian evolution. But at least America is not last in the world. Michigan State University researchers ranked 34 major nations by their citizens’ acceptance of evolution. The United States beat out Turkey for last place dishonor.
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Fads often flourish in America. In the Roaring Twenties goldfish swallowing was popular. Then we had fads like hula hoops, pet rocks, mood rings and Rubik’s Cube. But one of the ugliest fads today is tongue piercing.
For nearly a decade attractive young women have been disfiguring themselves with metal studs embedded in their tongues. (On dit that the studs enhance fellatio.) Now this fad has been pronounced by medical science as fraught with problems: tetanus, heart infections, brain abscess, chipped teeth, receding gums--and even possible death.
Tongue piercing can cause excruciating facial pain. This nerve disorder is called trigeminal neuralgia--colloquially, the suicide disease.
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Robert Messenger, deputy managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, recently wrote that “no critic in history has ever wielded as much influence as Robert Parker. His ratings send customers scurrying to wineshops and drive prices skyward. Wines are made on five continents to suit his preferences.”
Bogus claim? No. Parker is the American Bacchus, a one-man supreme court of wine.
But wine drinking itself is filled with snobbish and phony rituals like cork-sniffing, wine-swirling and test-tasting in restaurants.
Winemakers love to describe their products in fanciful terms. A Kendall-Jackson label on a bottle of its chardonnay: “Bursting with tropical flavors--pineapple, mango and papaya.” And here’s an Aussie brand, [Yellow Tail], on its cabernet sauvignon: “Leaps from the glass with a touch of mint over aromas of blackberries.”
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Harper Lee, whose 1960 novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” sold 2.5 million copies in its first year and won a Pulitzer Prize, has written: “in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.”