Brokelyn

Uh, do I hit?

Here’s how you know you’re truly down in the economic dumps: you start talking to your friends about the lucrative career you could, nay, will have as a professional gambler. “It’s all just numbers!” you scream into the winds of skepticism as you click click click away at a gambling web site in some language (maybe Dutch?) that’s taking up the browser window you’re supposed to be using to look for jobs.

Your friends will scoff, pick up their suitcases and head back to the office. Not Josh Axelrad. He will encourage you, and tell you that the game of blackjack is beatable using simple arithmetic. And he’ll tell you all this for free next week.

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Photo by M. Potter, University of Kentucky.

Earlier this week, when we wrote about couch surfing, a wary reader—the Flatbush Gardener, as it happens—commented with one word: ‘bedbugs.” And that’s one word that strikes fear into most sane people.

Bedbugs are freaking awful. Brooklyn is the bed-buggiest borough, according to BrickUnderground, a site about homeowning in New York City, which got its numbers from the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Bushwick appears to be the hardest hit, with Carroll Gardens the least bitten, an estimate loosely based on bit-up people’s complaints.

They’re also expensive—a typical afflicted family can spend up to $5,000 or more getting rid of the critters, according to The New York Times. Read the rest of this entry »