Aces Casino Blog: Closing Out March With Another Edition Of "Where Did They Get That CRAZY Name?"

We all know that Aces Casino Entertainment has long prided itself in being the top Orange County casino party company in southern California, but here's something else that the public at large might not know (unless you've visited the Aces Complex in person) -- That wacky, eclectic, "professionally irreverent" bunch of Aces Casino staff members also takes pride in what they call their need to be "asking the questions that need to be answered."  That's a good thing for us parakeet-paper scribes, especially when you need copy for an upcoming Aces Casino blog article. 

Yes sir, just one quick trip around the Aces Casino offices, and you can get enough "blog-worthy" material for a month of Mondays and Thursdays," not to mention still another GREAT idea for a recurring blog theme to dredge up when the moment arises.  We thought to ourselves, "hey, why NOT ask the questions that need to be answered?"  We were SURE that. when we installed that ominous "suggestion box" in the main hallway and asked for our crew to tell us what trivial situation was gnawing at them, something that they just needed to know the answer to, that they'd come through for the home team.

They did.

So, without further fanfare, let's reach into the Aces Casino suggestion box and find out what's on the minds of the best orange county casino night team in the business (Ed. Note: Fasten your seat belts, this is NOT going to be pretty...) -- Let's check out the first three submissions to Aces Casino Blog Issue #1 of "Where did they get that Crazy name?"

#1 -- "Why did they name it 'Spam?'"

See?  I knew things were going to go downhill in a hurry, but we asked.  SPAM, that long-time staple of Geo. A. Hormel & Co., was originally registered as a trademark in 1937, being a conflation of “spiced ham”, which was the original name.  The name “SPAM” was chosen from entries in a naming contest at Hormel.  Specifically, the name was suggested by Kenneth Daigneau, who was the brother of a then Hormel Vice president.  He was given a $100 prize for winning the naming contest.   He probably had his choice of taking the money, or getting a lifetime supply of SPAM.  We're guessing he took the money.  I like the name that finished last in the contest - "Something Posing As Meat."

You think you're in a jam NOW?  Wait until the lawsuit hits.

#2 -- "What does ZZ Top Mean??"

OK, I have to admit it -- When I saw this pop out of the suggestion box, I thought to myself, "Yeah, how DID that name originate?  Well, for this, we had to go to the source himself -- The name ZZ Top, according to band member Billy Gibbons, came from a tribute to B.B. King.  The band originally were going to call themselves “Z.Z. King” in King’s honor, but then decided it was too similar to B.B. King.  Because B.B. King was at the “top” of the blues world, they changed it to ZZ Top.  You heard it here first, my friends.

Cool Band.

#3 -- "Whose Idea was it to come up with that stupid Daylight Savings Time' Idea?

Well, if you go all the way back to the late 1700's, you can point the finger at the man who "invented electricity" -- None other than Ben Franklin.  That's the good news.... Here's the BAD news; Franklin’s proposal of something like daylight saving time was written as a joke. 

In a comedic letter he wrote, An Economical Project (published in 1784), ”to the authors of the journal of Paris”, Franklin mentions something like daylight saving time. Although, instead of changing clocks, he suggested ringing church bells and firing cannons, among other things, as the sun rises to maximize the amount of time people would be awake during times when the sun is providing free light.  The letter was meant to be a satire, rather than actually suggesting these changes be made.

 The modern day version of daylight saving time was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson in 1895. The credit for the first to suggest the modern day DST system is often incorrectly given to William Willett (Ed. Note: Yeah, I make that mistake all the time.  Not.), who independently thought up and lobbied for DST in 1905.  He was riding through London one day in the early morning and noticed that a good portion of London’s population slept through several hours of the sunlit summer days.  If only he’d read Franklin’s letter, inspiration might have struck sooner.  Willett lobbied for DST until his death in 1915.  It was one year later in 1916 that certain European countries began adopting DST.  Just a tad too late to help ol' William out; he could have lived an extra hour.

"I hope they know I was just kidding... It IS funny, though..."

 

We were guessing that whomever put this question in the ol' Aces suggestion box  must have had a genuine hatred for the suggestion of implementing DST, so, to that end, we thought we'd include some of the better anecdotes that came to be as a result of the ol' DST...

 

Daylight saving time once single-handedly thwarted a terrorist attack, causing the would-be terrorists to blow themselves up instead of other people.  What happened was, in September 1999, the West Bank was on daylight saving time while Israel was on standard time.  West Bank terrorists prepared bombs set on timers and smuggled them to their associates in Israel.  As a result, the bombs exploded one hour sooner than the terrorists in Israel thought they would, resulting in three terrorists dying instead of the two busloads of people who were the intended targets.

In March 2007, an honor student in Pennsylvania was accused of threatening his school with a bomb.  It was later found that he had actually called an automated school phone line to get information about class schedules;  someone else made the bomb threat exactly an hour later, but, due to DST, the time seemed to match up to when the honor student called.

Daylight saving time once got a man out of being drafted for the Vietnam War.  When drafted, he argued that standard time, not daylight saving time, was the official time for recording births in his state of Delaware at the time of his birth.  Thus, he was actually born the previous day using standard time, so he should have had a higher draft lottery number.  This defense worked and he didn’t have to go to war.

Well, that'll do it for another month of irreverent blogging, my friends.  We'll be back in April with another great idea that we've plagiarized from the employees of Aces Casino, the Orange County casino party leaders, and placed right here free of charge in the infamous Aces parakeet paper.  Have a good weekend, and watch your back on April Fools' Day!