If you’ve been on top of a glacier, the pools of meltwater on pure blue. The water is sitting in a white bowl, basically, so there’s nothing to diminish the intrinsic blueness of H2O as the light streams through it. Alaska has a couple of drive-up glaciers: Mendenhall in Juneau, Worthington just north of Valdez, and Matanuska about a hour’s drive from Anchorage. The entrance to Mat Glacier is on private property, but if you pay the fee it’s probably the easiest way to hike on a glacier.

You mean THAT kind of bangs?

BA says he saw layers of sediment in the ice… How many layers? Were there more than 6000? How did the Flood manage to freeze in layers with dirt in between, and not in one solid mass? (That must be where glaciers came from, freezing flood waters, and not from thousands of years of snowfall, right?)

(Let’s see if all the responders to the Colbert takedown thread take this seriously…)

Also, http://waltzking.org/photos/AmSafari/AKInsidePassage/
which includes pictures of Juneau. I hope Phil is having better weather than we did a year ago, because it rained every day we were there (but the sun also came out every day we were there).

I have to say Phil is right about the blue color of the glaciers; if you’ve never seen it it’s hard to describe and hard to capture properly in a photo. It’s one of the most intense blues I’ve ever seen, and is even more impressive if you get to see it up close.

They pay 6 to 5 when you get a 21 on the first two cards instead of 3 to 2.

Whether you play a system or basic strategy, one of the primary foundation stones of the players statistical advantage is the solid return base of the 3-2 payoff.

Removing that is an extra 1.4% advantage to the house. If you know much about gambling, you know that’s a BIG number.

http://www.blackjack-primer.com/singledeck.php

They’ve also ruined the video poker payouts. I liked VP to relax a bit between table gaming sessions. You could put in a $20 bill and play for quite a while and enjoy the free drinks and cocktail waitress costumes- and sometimes even walk away with >$20.

Instead of 2-1 for two pair and 3-1 for three of a kind, it’s 1-1 and 2-1 respectively. These seem like little things, but most of the payoffs in VP are those sorts of low end hands.

I’m a huge free market supporter, but when an industry as endlessly profitable as gambling feels the need to squeeze its customers for every last penny, it’s just depressing.

Vegas used to treat Joe Average like a champ. Casinos would comp you meals and rooms if you so much as peeked in the door. Prime cuts of beef could be had for $1.99 as late as the 1990s. All you can eat buffets were gifts.

Now he’s just a chump. Now it’s just a place for the idle semi-rich to be seen at the Wynn’s Ferrari dealer.