I’m in Romania, but I still made a weekly sexy. It’s about 5% about piñatas. Most of the things I write are, if you really look at them closely. Here’s a picture of grizzly bears.

I’ve never gambled before, unless you consider the claw machines at Kroger’s gambling. I suppose it is gambling in a very juvenile way. I’m challenging my own ability at subtly directing the feeble iron claw above some stuffed tiger or a St. Lewis Rams ball cap then testing my opinions that said tiger/hat has low enough mass and high enough friction for me to carry the object over the hole and drop it within hand’s reach, then give it to whoever I feel like impressing most at the time. Maybe it isn’t gambling.

I went to a place yesterday called the Zanvoort circus. It was simultaneously excited and disappointing as it had a large casino for adults upstairs and a massive arcade downstairs, yet it failed to have clowns, lions, women with beards, people with extra limbs, acrobats, fire, etc…Obviously, I went downstairs. Gambling seems to be a lot less interesting than kids’ arcade games. If I ran a casino in any part of the world, I would completely do away with backgammon and invest in massive Dance Dance Revolution machines and life action Mortal Kombat rings that actually required some skill and imagination to win.

The arcade was probably one of the better arcades I’ve seen in recent history, having most of the classics such as games like Time Crisis and that basketball game that kids always stole balls from, but also having such technological breakthroughs as this game where you were standing on a large LCD screen and you had to jump on aliens as they came towards you on the screen. It looked awesome, but probably cost far too many tokens for me to actually go out of my way to play. One game specifically, called Win a Bear, fascinated me, being that the prize seemed exclusive. Essentially, it was a giant slot machine, but the handle was a giant bear’s paw, and the goal was to get three buckets of honey, or three bear’s heads in a row. If, in which case, you do succeed, you get a bear. That’s the only description granted.

What could this mean? Obviously I would assume that you get a stuffed bear like the standard teddy bear type, but the game was tucked off into a corner, like the game wasn’t meant to be seen. Either it was a super unpopular game that isn’t worth playing, or the prize is too awesome and such a rarity that the owners of the arcade wanted to keep it hidden because of limited supply. I think this is not unlike the Tom Hank’s film Big, when he does something with some game and he suddenly becomes an adult. I actually don’t know how the plot goes at all, maybe I’m thinking of an Are You Afraid of the Dark episode instead.

If the bear is indeed stuffed, what is in it? Is it cotton filling? What if it’s candy, like it was actually a bear themed piñata? Kids love candy, but kids also get diabetes fairly easy, so this could also answer the reason for what the arcade’s incentives were for shoving such an important game into the corner of the room. What if the bear isn’t stuffed at all? Maybe you actually win a baby black bear that you can raise from its infancy into domestication. This is really how casinos should be set up. Instead of currency, the prizes should actually be things like Rolex watches, or new wheels for your monster truck, or maybe a private air-cropping plane with fertilizer included. This would make bachelor party weekend so much more interesting. Instead of men coming home to their wives saying that they lost 2,000 dollars gambling, they would come home with a year’s supply of Lavender-Vanilla scented decorative candles. Wives love that kind of thing; at least more than debt.