Understanding spread betting

Understanding spread betting can be a little tricky at first. The basic point is that one isn't betting upon so much the outcome of an event but upon the precision of your forecast of an event. To think in horse racing terms, we're not trying to bet on which horse wins the race: but by how many lengths the horse wins the race.

Now it's true we tend not to do spread betting on horses in that manner: but there's an entire world out there of events upon which we can. Sports events, where we've got points being socred, are an obvious place for us to be doing that. If a soccer match could be won 1-0, 2-0, 2-1 and so on, there are a number of possibilities to be more accurate than simply Team X to win. Given that there are more possible outcomes of course odds tend to be larger. Thus the excitement is greater. As are all the variations in what can be done.

But as with anything else new it's necessary to understand the basics and spread betting is no different. Fortunately there's anice site, which you can get to simply by clicking through any of the links, that can guide you through this process. Perhaps most importantly, guide you as to which companies are offering inducements to you to try out their systems and platforms on which to do such betting. Especially the free bets they offer.

Good luck and have fun!

The story of Melissa Petro

I have to admit that I find all of this absolutely fascinating, the story of Melissa Petro. To give you a flavour.

Hooker-turned-teacher Melissa Petro yesterday admitted she knew her sex-for-hire past would land her in detention.

"Didn't you see this coming?" fellow Bronx teacher Ruben Brosbe asked Petro via Facebook after her sordid former sideline was revealed in The Post.

"We talked about it on the first day of training," Brosbe reminded his pal.

"Of course I saw it coming," the feisty Petro, a third-year art teacher at PS 70, wrote back.

Brosbe and Petro declined comment yesterday.

But Petro -- who has been reassigned amid an Education Department probe of her blogging about her exploits as a "former sex worker" -- joked on Facebook about how she hoped a car outside was a teachers-union escort and not "one of the 200 creepy dudes now trying to 'friend' me."

Now the thing is you see, what's supposed to happen in Nwe York once youn qualify as a teacher is that you spend three yeasr on a sort of probation. Only after you've passed that probation do you get tenure: effectively, it''s near impossible for you to get fired at that point.

The claimed aim of this three year period is to make sure that you are of sound character, of the sort of moral type, that peeps would like to have teaching their children. And there are supposed to be background checks and so on to make sure this is true.

While in this three year period Ms. Petro was not exactly quiet about her former trade as a hooker. She was in fact blogging about it under her own name. And yet those checks didn't manage to pick up on it.

Something of an embarrassment for those running the checks, don't you think?

On the subject of mens' clothes

Hmm, actually, should that be men's clothes or mens' clothes? Our approximation at solving the riddle of the Greengrocer's Apostrophe of the day perhaps (or is that Greengrocers'?). The clue to where the placement of that little piece of punctuation is is whether we are talking of clothes for a man or clothes for many men. And it could indeed still be both for while they might be clothes that would appeal to many men we usually expect that they'll be worn by just the one man. At any particular time at least.

Hmm, anyway, to get away from the pedantry, this is of course the time of year when wardrobes get cleared out, last year's warm winter woollies checked for signs of moth damage and then the necessary replacements found. Of course, the necessity of topping up the men's clothes selection foudn in said wardrobes does mean that one is also able to advance one's look to this season's fashions rather than being, like so many of our fellow Brits, stuck somewhere around 2002. Or, in particulalry sad cases, whatever year one's mother is stuck in when she buys your clothes for you.

Which leads us to a little recommendation if you are indeed on the hunt for expansions in the selection of men's clothes available to you. Just click through any of the links and you'll be taken to a site carrying the best of the best, up to date fashion for men. There's free delivery (if you're qquick) on orders over £50 and there's even a student discount. And if you don't like online shopping then there's a store locator so you can find out where to find the clothes in meatspace. What more could you possibly want?

How could Jessica Alba appear naked?

Quite, how could Jessica Alba appear naked in a movie when she'd told us all that she wasn't going to do something like that. She is an actress by gum and nudity to turn on the audience is something done purely by starlets, the young wannabees, not something done by those who can actually act.

And yet there she is, Jessica Alba in all her naked, nude, glory in her new movie Machete. So how can this come about? Actually, this Jessica Alba naked thing is quite simple. Here's how you do it:

Jessica Alba looks like she has broken her promise never to strip off for a movie role.

But her white undies in the shot were actually digitally removed in Machete.

Yes, that's right kiddies. You only think that you're seeing Jessica Alba nude. Jessica Alba knows that she filmed the scene in a bikini. What you're seeing is just the digital pixels that someone has painted for you.

So that's how you can have an actress both naked on film and not naked on film and thus is artistic integrity preserved.

Cool jeans online

Yes, it's time to stock up that winter wardrobe and get ready for the joys of the British winter. By now, the end of September, we've already had the traditional seasonal turning points of successive Daily Mail headlines telling us that we're in for a frozen winter, Indian summer is here and on the third day, why the Met Office is always wrong. Even though said Met is more consistent than Daily Mail headlines. And this season's essential wardrobe component is, as it has been for the past 30 years or so, a few pairs of cool jeans.

No, this isn't, of course, referring to jeans which will fail to do their job of keeping out that British winter. Far from it, we are not using the word cool in that sense. Cool jeans refers rather to fashion, to what is hip n' happenin', what is, with a bit of good luck and a following wind, going to raise the temperature not lower it as your display of current fashionability increases the number of people who want to get close to you. Hopefully, if all goes well, very close, inside your jeans type close.

And where better to get your cool jeans than online? As we all know the greatest concern facing us all at present is the climate (no, this is very different from the weather complained of above) and we'd all like to do our bit to make sure that that climate doesn't get any worse. And as that report in the papers yesterday said, as long as the delivery truck is delivering more than 25 items (and they all do, they all do) then there are fewer carbon emissions than if we went down to the shops ourselves individually. Save the planet and look good at the same time?

Bit of a bargain, surely?

Is Blanket Jackson really British?

Could it be true that Blanket Jackson, Michael Jackson's son, is really British? Or at least part British?

That's the claim being made by a former bodyguard to Michael Jackson at least. He says that he was offered $500,000 to make a donation, a fee which he turned down, but he did make the donation. And at about the right time for the conception to have been possible.

MICHAEL Jackson's former British bodyguard Matt Fiddes will this week claim he is the biological father of the dead star's youngest son Blanket.

Fiddes, of Barnstaple, Devon, will tell Australian TV he fathered the eight-year-old by sperm donation for nothing - turning down a £500,000 offer from the superstar. He has told pals he will fight for custody if anything happens to Jacko's mum Katherine.

He's obviously going to have a fight on his hands over that claiming custody though. For a start, Diana Ross is named in Jackson's will as being the next in line to take custody. But more than that, assuming that they completed the paperwork for a standard donation, he will have given up all his parental rights anyway.

Hey, the story might even be true as well but I doubt very much that anyone's going to let such a rich child potter off with a claimed but unproven sperm donor.

Where to play bingo: online of course!

The world of bingo has been rather turned on its head of late: the last decade has seen what will probably be the death knell of the industry, one that only really grew after WWII. Well, the death of the bingo industry in bingo halls that is, not the death of bingo games themselves: those atre just migrating online. There's a number of different things that have caused thisw death and it's worth running through them for some seem almost deliberate and others, well, that's just the way it is.

The most obvious problem that the bingo halls have had is the smoking ban. The people who were running them all make exactly the same point. Attendance dropped off right at the time of the ban and it simply hasn't risen again since. And this in itself causes further losses in attendance: bingo games, while being just as popular as ever, don't work all that well in large but empty halls. Something of a coordination problem there.

But the other major one, the one that's just happenstance, is the rise of the online bingo games. This is partly the availability of the technology, it simply wasn't possible to do this on any large scale only a decade ago. That the availability of this technology coincided with the smoking ban is just that: happenstance. But it does mean that those who like their game can do so from the comfort of their front rooms now, and simply don't need to brave the weather nor stop smoking while they play.

Bingo just isn't going to go back to the halls, whatever people try to do about it and with that ends one of the great post war leisure activities: beaten by a combination of technological revolution and government stupidity.

Is Lindsay Lohan on heroin?

Pictures of Lindsay Lohan posing with a syringe and torniquet have surfaced leading some to think that she was taking heroin.

About the only thing we can actually be certain of is that she's not been taking heroin recently: it would have shown up on the drug test which found the cocaine which sent her back to jail over the weekend.
However, the pictures are more than suggestive:

CROUCHING in a dark corner, Lindsay Lohan is poised to inject herself with what appears to be a syringe of heroin.

Our shocking picture shows the troubled Mean Girls star wrapping a tourniquet around her lower arm - the method addicts use to raise a vein.

Her right hand hovers the needle over the skin of her left arm.

Perhaps she was taking heroin: she wouldn't be the first and won't be the last person whio has tried it and doesn't carry on taking it.

Maybe it was just a pose for the cameras, a laugh with the girls?