Running log
Journal: notes and corrections
This page is the ledger. When a passage elsewhere on this site is wrong, the fix is recorded here with a date and the original wording. When something is watched, re-watched, read or checked, the note lands here first. Four entries follow, newest first, from the last three months.
Three rules cover it. Fixes happen in the text itself, with a public note. Unverifiable statements are deleted before publication. And admitting a dead end is allowed: the phrase 'this resisted confirmation' occurs on this page more than once.
The ledger
- 11 AUG 2026
Correction — faro mislabelled as a cousin of baccarat
History page amended; original wording preserved below.
- 19 JUL 2026
Rewatch — the 1995 casino picture, second pass
Set dressing and the direction of extras, confined to the frame.
- 28 JUN 2026
Source — digitised newspaper runs, 1905 to 1930
Gambling and cinema panics, read side by side.
- 31 MAY 2026
Vocabulary — pokies, slots and the subtitle track
Six tracks checked; the count is in the note.
11 August 2026 — Correction
Faro was not a cousin of baccarat
On 3 July the history page carried this sentence: 'By the 1720s the fashionable rooms had turned to faro, the faster French cousin of baccarat.' Two readers wrote within the week to say it was wrong. It was — on both counts.
Faro banks. Cards leave the deck in pairs against a printed board of thirteen ranks; money rides on whether a rank falls to the bank or the punter. Baccarat compares. Banker's hand against player's hand, totals reckoned modulo ten, and no rank board exists. Common ground between them: furniture, longevity, losses. Ancestry: none shared. Ownership: not French, whatever the films imply — Italy and France both played them long before a licence existed anywhere. The measuring stick is Venice, where the state's first sanctioned room dates to 1638; both games predate it.
The sentence now reads: 'By the 1720s the fashionable rooms had turned to faro; baccarat travelled on its own line.' While fixing it I also went looking for a documented ancestor of baccarat — several popular accounts name a fifteenth-century parent game. I could not confirm the descent in anything I would print, so the history page now says nothing about ancestry at all.
Policy, restated: corrections are made in place, dated, and logged here with the original wording. The history page carries a one-line note pointing to this entry. Nothing is deleted silently.
19 July 2026 — Rewatch
Second pass at the 1995 picture
A second viewing of the 1995 Las Vegas casino picture — the three-hour one, 178 minutes on the timer — watched this time for the background instead of the leads. On a first viewing you follow the principals. On a second the frame opens up, and most of what it shows is labour.
What is visible: the pit is dressed deep. Tables behind the principals are fully staffed and fully stocked — chip racks filled rather than sparsely propped, drinks on the rails, ashtrays in use. There are no clocks in any frame I checked and no windows; the light comes from above, warm and even, so no hour of day can be read off the image. The background palette stays in golds and muted greens, which leaves the foreground costumes to carry the colour. That is set dressing doing its work: the room reads as continuous even when the cut is not.
The extras are directed away from the camera in a specific sense: nobody in the deep background watches the principals. Every table visible behind the actors runs its own game — cards moving, chips crossing the baize — and the hands are correct at speed. Whether those hands belong to working dealers hired for the shoot, the frame does not say; correct movement is either hiring or drilling, and I could not confirm which from the film alone. I checked perhaps forty minutes of pit footage this way, not all 178, so read 'every table' as 'every table I looked at'.
One more thing the frame shows: money handled with procedure — bills banded, counted in motion, moved in trays. Procedure photographs well because it repeats, and repetition is what an audience reads as authenticity. That is a note for this site as much as for the picture.
28 June 2026 — Source
An evening in the digitised newspapers
A recommendation without a citation, on purpose. The digitised runs of early Australian newspapers — free to search, scanned from the originals — carry decades of coverage in which gambling and the cinema are treated as the same civic problem. Read 1905 to 1930 and the two panics run side by side, often on the same page.
Both panics ran on a single template. The ingredients of an editorial against cinemas matched those of one against two-up schools — youth, darkness, a wager — and with the nouns swapped most would read unchanged. Outrage arrived after the game, not before it. The standard genealogy points to 'cross and pile', an English and Irish pastime of the eighteenth century, and an outfit of a pair of coins and open ground meant the game crossed the armies of 1914-18 carrying nothing. Newspaper coverage climbs in step with that military spread.
- 'picture palace' — theatre openings, and objections to them
- 'two-up school' — raid reports, most of them brief and procedural
- 'gaming raid' — the wider net: cards, coins and premises
- 'moral welfare' — the editorial register both panics share
No dateline appears here from memory, and no reference is manufactured; the newspaper runs are indexed, and the search terms are listed above. A warning applies. Some later writers state that returning diggers won the game a spell of public tolerance. Court reporting tells a different story — prosecutions run steadily into the 1920s — so the tolerance claim stays unverified on this site.
31 May 2026 — Vocabulary
Pokies, slots and the subtitle track
Local betting speech was built at home: punt, pokies, the TAB, swy. Words shipped in from elsewhere sit visibly on top of it. On screen the two vocabularies collide in exactly one place — the subtitle line — and in May a fortnight went into logging what imported casino pictures call the machines there.
The count: six subtitle and caption tracks checked across DVD and streaming copies. Five keep 'slots' or 'slot machines' wherever the dialogue says so — the standard subtitling position, fidelity to the spoken word, and the right call, since an American character who says 'pokies' has been relocated to the wrong country. The sixth, an Australian-captioned television broadcast, went local: 'pokies' once and 'poker machines' twice for the same object in the same scene, which suggests either two hands on the file or one hand changing its mind.
Translated films are where the choice gets real. A French or Italian machine name owes no loyalty to either English word, so the subtitler must pick a country for the room. The international English tracks I checked pick 'slot machines' every time; I found none that ventured 'pokies' for a European room, and the zero is correct — the word carries a jurisdiction with it.
Machines are not the deepest layer. Below them sits 'swy', two-up's other name, borrowed from German zwei on the goldfields and never once required by a subtitle track. It earns its place in this entry as a unit of measurement: the distance from home-made vocabulary to imported is one game, two coins, and a word assembled from a second language.
Money goes on double heads, double tails, or the split known as 'odds'; the longer treatment lives on the history page.