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                                                           WELCOME  TO  MY  AUTHOR  PORTFOLIO

 

In case you haven’t heard, June 1 is National Flip a Coin Day  If you missed it, you’ll just have to wait till next year and plan better.  According to one website, “the origins of the holiday are inconsistent” whatever that means.

 

Maybe you think a coin flip is entirely random and the odds are exactly fifty-fifty that the result will be heads or tails. After all, the coin flip is the poster child for teaching probability and the idea of randomness. Toss a coin a thousand times and you should get very nearly 500 heads and 500 tails. Or if not, keep tossing till you get to ten thousand. The number of heads and tails should trend closer and closer to even the higher the number of tosses. 

 

A researcher at Harvard found, however, that if the coin you are about to toss begins its journey as a heads, it is ever so slightly more likely to be a heads when it is flipped. And same for tails. So, the odds are really more like fifty-one to forty-nine instead of fifty fifty. So there’s another thing you learned in school that isn’t totally true.

The play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opens with a coin toss contest, Rosencrantz winning 92 times in a row betting on heads each time. Guildenstern suggests there may be un- sub- or super-natural forces at work. Or, perhaps, cheating?

Which brings us to American football, which begins each game with a coin toss, a tradition that dates back to 1892. If a team wins the coin toss, are they more likely to win the game? Or more likely to lose the game?

 

We’ll focus on the Super Bowl. In the 2023 contest (Super Bowl LVII) the two teams that made it to the championship game are also the teams that had the highest number of coin toss wins during the regular season—the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles (tied at 14 apiece). In the Super Bowl, Kansas City won the toss and the game. Sounds like we’re on to something, doesn’t it?

 

In the previous 56 contests, though, things weren’t so clear. In those games, teams that won the coin toss went on to win the title 24 times but lost in 32. Before this year, teams that won the coin toss were on a nine year losing streak. The last time a team won both the coin toss and the game was the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII (two years later, they won the toss but lost—to the Patriots).

 

PUBLISHED  STORIES  AND  ESSAYS

construction, protection, life safety fundamentals, brainstorming and creativity concept.

HARD  KNOCKS
(CLICK ON LINK AND SCROLL DOWN TO PAGE 31)

UFO, an alien plate hovering over the field, hovering motionless in the air. Unidentified

PLACES TO GO, THINGS TO SEE

Missing piece of the puzzle, white puzzle pieces on blue background.jpg

MISSING

Antique Shop

JUNK, READY TO BUY

OTHER PUBLISHED STORIES... AND ESSAYS

How To Eat Right
How To Manage Your Money
How To Stay Healthy
The Fall Of Squirrel
Cake Walk
Do-gooders Gotta Eat Too
Of Peas and Queues
Three O'clock in the Garden of Good and Evil
News Item
The Visitor
Mr. Blinkie To The Rescue
The Point System
Elements Of Success 
She Spits to Conquer
The Tree Remembers
Christmas Time Is Here 
The Sodfather
What MLK Day Means To Me 
Thanks, Mussolini 
The Cure 
Tarzan In Decline 
Side Effects 
Greatest Of All Time 
The Last Hundred Days

Plight Of the Humble Bee

Books

AWARDS AND HONORS

               

 2017     Pushcart Prize nomination from Hawaii Pacific Review for The Last Hundred Days

    2018     First Honorable Mention Short Story Division AWC contest

                2018     Second Place Chattahoochee Valley Contest Short Story category

2019     First Place Flash Fiction Division AWC contest

2020    First Place Essay Streetlight Magazine 

2020  Top ten finalist for The Opossum Prize

2020  Honorable Mention Stories That Need To Be Told Anthology

2020  First place  Flash Fiction category  in Seven Hills contest

2021   Second place Streetlight Magazine's Flash fiction contest

2021   Second place Seven Hills contest for flash fiction

2021    Second place Seven Hills contest for essay/memoir

2021     Third place Seven Hills contest for non-fiction

 2022     First Place Seven Hills contest for flash fiction

Writing on Computer

"Life is a moderately good play with a poorly written third act."

Truman Capote



"Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Old Book

CURRENTLY READING

...or just finished

God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

Pile Of Books

Acknowledgments: Photos of Stonehenge courtesy of Trevor S. Key from our trip to England in 2015. Photos of ball pit courtesy of Amelia C. Key from our trip to NYC in 2019.

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