Sunday, July 02, 2006

How a Simple Fart ruined a Million-Dollar Scam! You Gotta Love This!

THE POWER OF A FART

Can a fart spoil a million-dollar scam? Just ask Mumbles and Wheels, two elderly casino grifters who’d been grinding it out for fifty years in Vegas’s dingy downtown gambling joints before discovering the power of a fart. Mumbles had lost his voice to throat cancer and Wheels his legs to shrapnel in the Great War supposed to end all wars. But this did not hinder their old-age ingenuity. They came up with the greatest dice-switching scam in the history of craps, a perfect plan with each minutia examined the way the allies must have studied coordinates for Operation Overlord before their D-Day landing on Omaha Beach. At the precise moment, with all the diversions and distractions in place, the legitimate dice were switched out of play and replaced by their “tumblers.” But one distraction they didn’t count on during Mumbles’ first fateful throw of their crooked dice, on which they’d bet their entire bankroll, was that Wheels would blow a silent but deadly fart from his wheelchair at the crucial moment of release. Mumbles, overcome by the smell, threw the crooked dice too hard and they skidded over the table’s wall and out of play on the floor beyond. Amazingly enough, the dice retrieved by a craps shooter at the opposite end of the table from the two old-timers were not the ones Mumbles had tossed but his own crooked dice that worked on an entirely different principle from those of Mumbles and Wheels. He, too, was a professional dice-switcher and had capitalized on Mumbles’ errant throw to sneak his own crooked cubes into the game. Unfortunately for Mumbles and Wheels they did not notice this, and when Mumbles rolled the other guy’s crooked dice, expecting a seven, they came up “snake-eyes,” causing them to crap out and lose their entire bankroll on that very first roll of their scam. All because of a fart. Had Wheels been able to restrain himself they probably would have become millionaires instead of going to the grave broke.