Poker players like to say they're "running bad" when they hit a spell of bad luck. I ran pretty bad Saturday -- and I didn't even lose a dollar at the tables. First there was the van that ran into my rental car in the Rio parking lot. Thankfully, nobody was hurt -- but the result involved waiting in the 106-degree sun more than an hour for a tow truck to bring me another car.

Then, when I got to my room at Bellagio to write my latest World Series dispatch, the phones and Internet connection didn't work. An hour later, an engineer came to my room and noticed that the cords had been put in the wrong jacks by somebody when my room's carpet was professionally cleaned earlier today before I checked in (what happened in the room to warrant a professional cleaning I do not wish to know).