I’m not a betting man. If I was I’d be a poor betting man.
I know betting’s all the rage now, especially with how easy it is, using your phone and, hell, even being able to place in-game bets. Even Wayne Gretzky is all over it, a guy who is right up there with Tim Hortons and their Roll-Up-The-Rim contest in terms of Canadian identity and popularity.
Money lines, point spreads, over-under, parlay bets, teasers and props, middle, future, and live bets, there’s no shortage of ways to get fabulously rich, or if you’re me, fabulously poor.
Luckily for me, I don’t have the kind of money to engage in this activity. Losing a single $5 bet would have me in apocalyptic circumstances, so I stay away. I don’t even buy Lotto 649 anymore because I feel it’s too risky.
That said, I know others absolutely love the action, and are willing to place money on the most trivial of things, mostly in the world of sports. But sports betting has it’s drawbacks, especially if players, coaches, officials, etc go to the dark side to influence how a game goes, or how much court-time a player gets, or ice-time, or at-bats, or carries, etc.
I remember Gordy Morland back in the Hood, taking bets from all the boys prior to the big game, mostly football, but a lot of golf, hockey, and baseball, too. Even horse-racing for Pete’s sake, and we were just in our early twenties, although I think the Morlands might have had some horses in a stable somewhere. Gordy would be there with his pen and note-pad, busily calculating odds, offering odds, taking the bets, taking the cash, making his math teachers proud.
It was all in-house, not some television mob betting scheme. That stuff was for our dads.
No, it was small stakes stuff, where a winning bet would probably snag you $100 and about seven rabbit punches to the upper arm for your trouble. I don’t know about bettors generally, but my bettors were sore losers who wanted to make sure you were a sore winner for your good fortune. Another reason why I stood around and watched.
But it did have the effect of making the game more exciting, not just because of the drama on the field, but also for the drama in Brian Casey’s living room. Watching fortunes rise and fall, outside of simple team allegiance, did have some entertainment value. When the whole afternoon, hell, the whole everything came down to a last-second field goal attempt, in the snow, from 52 yards out by a kicker with a cracked pelvis anbd a borrowed helmet, against the wind, and held by a forty year-old concussed quarterback squinting to see the snap? You can’t find that shit anywhere else. Especially if he makes it.
It’s why I think we should incorporate betting into Town Council meetings. Let’s face it folks, these affairs aren’t going to compete with your favourite crime thriller on your streaming service, so as a public service at the very least, can’t we at least build a little excitement into the mix, just to keep ourselves fully engaged and adrenaline pumping? My goodness, I entered my very first council meeting a young man. I left looking like Abraham Lincoln.
How about an over/under of the meeting going 2 hours and forty minutes? That sounds pretty simple. How about a straight-up yes or no if the council goes into closed session. An over/under on the number of reasons cited for going to a closed session? Will any two items of Mayor Sidney’s clothing belong in the same colour family? Or at least be distant relatives of that colour? How many people will Councillor Andrew Dick piss off? (that might require an exit poll, so it might be unworkable). Will Reeve Emon show up? How many will recognize him if he does? Will Councillor Kyle Cybulski make somebody cry just by looking at them?
There’s just too many possibilities to list, and no Gordy Morland to make it all work.
But my favourite would be this: How many times will Clerk Carolynn Errett — that’s two n’s, two r’s and two t’s for those keeping score — check her phone throughout the meeting? Or even better, how many times will she get “caught” checking her phone and not be able to answer a question because she wasn’t listening to it in the first place?
That’s the kind of in-meeting drama I’m proposing here. You see, at the last meeting on November 12th, she got caught by Councillor Dick, and didn’t realize that he was speaking to her, in fact asking her a procedural question, one of the main reasons why she sits at the big table with the mayor and the CAO. But she couldn’t answer it because she didn’t hear it, because she wasn’t paying attention to it, because another staffer on the other side of the room had just texted her something, probably something to do with Councillor Dick. So she had to ask the councillor to repeat his question.
This is why you attend the live meetings. You don’t get this stuff on the Youtube stream. It’s to the point where the Acting CAO is running counter-surveillance, watching me watch them, a cat and mouse affair worthy of a Robert Ludlum thriller. But the CAO doesn’t read my stuff either, so probably has no idea about any of this. She’s probably just wondering who the clown with bad shave is.
I’m not sure which secondary characters will be present at Tuesday’s meeting, with administrative staff only present if they have to be, so maybe the line-up card will look different. So maybe that fellow staffer won’t be texting the Clerk mid-meeting, giving her the old “you go girl” text. But there are quite a few people that the meeting agenda suggests will need to be there, all sitting in the outer ring, and every one of them probably having their phone right there. So it could happen again, especially if the Clerk is called upon to explain some arcane procedural necessity that apparently only she knows about. Or so she believes.
I feel bad somewhat for the mayor, who sits there having all this wireless communication bouncing off his head as the texts travel back and forth with him in the middle. Might even equate to a health and safety thing.
What protects the integrity of this potential bet is the fact that Clerk Errett has no idea that she actually got busted. She doesn’t read my stuff, so likely missed my scouting report on the last meeting where I brought it up for my eleven readers. In fact, I’m not even sure Councillor Dick is aware of it, because I don’t think he’s one of those eleven either. If he was, I’d bet (sorry) that he’d actually lay an ambush for the Clerk to catch her for real this time, and then call her on it in front of all the salivating fans at the meeting, at home, or aboard our ships at sea. Now that would be the price of the ticket right there.
But as I said, he’s likely not going to read this, although I’m pretty sure there will be others inside the room, other than myself, watching for this to happen again. Just for the entertainment value.
After only two meetings, I’ve actually found a way to make this exciting. And it’s a good thing nobody else knows.
If they did, the custodians would have to put out more chairs.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 