Word: dices
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...rootless, helpless, 56-year-old accountant named J. Henry Waugh. Alone in his apartment, he spends all his nights and weekends playing an intricate baseball game of his own invention. Eight imaginary teams of the Universal Baseball Association battle for the pennant; individual players spring to life as three dice and a collection of elaborately detailed charts decide their fate. They reach glory, enjoy fame, grow old, lose their skills, retire to sell insurance and finally die as the dice decree. Waugh records the statistics. He is God's scorekeeper, or perhaps God himself-the name J. Henry Waugh...
...trauma is too much for Waugh. He becomes irresponsible, cheats with the dice, finagles the charts, juggles the schedule. He throws his cosmos into chaos. In the real world, he gets fired by his employer. As he drinks his troubles away, the people of the association comfort him. In the end, the players celebrate the death of Damon Rutherford with a passion-play re-enactment of the game. The cosmos no longer has any direction; the players are on their own. And there is the doomed Damon Rutherford, holding the baseball aloft, "hard and white and . . . beautiful." He says...
...Greek tragedies, proud men and women roll their lives like dice against the gods and lose. Man proposes but fate disposes. Euripides, the most skeptical and psychologically minded of the classic tragedians, recognized that man is sometimes his own worst fate. Iphigenia in Aulis, presented last week at Manhattan's Circle in the Square in a translation by Minos Volanakis, shows men and women undoing themselves through ambition, power, lust, fear, guile and egocentric arrogance. At its heart, however, the play is a Grecian urn of tears, an incomparably moving lament for all who die young in war. Directed...
...item on gambling [Oct. 27] invites my observation: in throwing dice, the faces with more than three points come up, on the average, a bit more often than can be expected statistically. The physics of this: where the "holes" are more in number the faces are lighter. Accordingly, the center of gravity favors the 1-2-3 faces, and the faces 6-5-4, which are just opposite, come up. The potential energy of a system tends toward least. Physics or no physics, the theorem holds for your wallet...
...game Stickman Gatterdam was running was a setup for suckers. Each set of dice was mis-spotted differently-the gull being to let the roller establish his point with straight dice, then slip in the mis-spotted pair that would make the point unattainable. Thus, by using "even splitters"-numbers 1, 3 and 5 on one die and 2, 4 and 6 on the other-Gatterdam made certain that points 4, 6, 8 and 10 could never be made. Crapping out became inevitable. Since Nevada law holds that a casino is responsible for its employees and is liable to lose...