YouTube is a Cultural Treasure

...where you can find stuff like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERaBECJY2u0

It's an (in)famous episode of the fantastic 1980's game show Press Your Luck where an unemployed ice cream truck driver spent weeks using his newfangled VCR to rigorously study the electronic patterns used to allocate money on the show. After surmising that the wandering lights followed a pattern, and that two of about thirty squares never contained a fatal Whammy, he managed to get on the show and win over $100K. It's hilarious that everyone on the show is astounded by his "luck" when he manages to not hit a Whammy for over forty rolls (especially because the chances of him hitting a Whammy on any given turn were 1/6). While he did mis-click on a couple of occasions, he was fortunate enough to not hit a Whammy, although with his stockpile of spins, in theory, he could have kept the show going for weeks. Anyhow, it's great that youtube helped unearth this important historical relic, because for a long time CBS was embarrassed by it, and would not air the episode.

Anyhow, the story of the ingenious unemployed man ends sadly on a couple of notes. After he mercifully let the show end, he revealed that he bought his collared shirt for 65 cents at a thrift shop, had to borrow money to make it to L.A. for a chance to play on the show, and didn't have any money to buy his daughter a birthday present (which fortunately changed that day!). It made me incredibly sad to realize that there's people all over who face these emasculating and demoralizing experiences of unemployment and indigence, and that they're supposed to cover up their plight by buying collared shirts. Of course, I guess he put all of his idle time to good use. However, he ended up blowing the money on a real estate swindle and other much less successful get-rich-quick schemes and died running from the Securities Commission, according to Wikipedia. However, if dead people can be comforted by consolation, his 15 minutes of fame have now been immortalized...