Not ashamed of being stupid

The other day as I was leaving a casino I noticed a familiar face, though he didn't appear to see me. It wasn't until after we had passed that I was able to pull from the ol' memory banks who he was. His name is Josh, and he used to play at the Hilton on a fairly regular basis. He was extremely friendly and generally pleasant, though a lot more talkative (and loud) than is to my personal liking. He was pretty easy to win money from, because he bluffed incessantly.

But the most memorable thing about him was an incident from what was, I think, the first time I played with him. It's a story I recorded during the first month I lived in Vegas, as it was published in the "Bulletin Board" section of my home-town newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, to which I used to be a frequent contributor.

Last week, a young man next to me at a poker game ordered a Corona. When it
arrived, he noticed that the lip of the bottle was cracked. He commented on it,
and I could easily see the broken glass, too. He then shrugged his shoulders and
took a swig of it anyway. Then he got a strange look on his face, and spat the
beer back into the bottle. He complained that he had glass in his mouth. Soon
after, he left the table, saying that his mouth was bleeding. (It was -- but
only a little, as far as I could tell.) He spent the next hour wandering around,
complaining to anyone who would listen how the casino gave him a beer in a
broken bottle. None of us at the table were very sympathetic, since he had made
a big deal of the bottle being broken before he put it in his mouth.

Mind you -- the beer is free to the poker players (it keeps them at the
table longer), and even if he had paid for it, he obviously could have asked for
a replacement bottle if he had been willing to wait five minutes for it.

Finally, he filed a formal complaint, and I was asked by the hotel security people to
fill out a description of what I had observed. I did. The security guy shared my
feeling that if I had been that stupid, I wouldn't tell anybody -- let alone try
to blame the establishment, or try to weasel a few nuisance bucks out of them.
The noive of some people!