"The House Always Wins."

Sometimes in your day, in your life, in your soul's reeling arc betwixt the vault and the precipice, you have to simply listen to some good old kkkountry gold on the stereo of your shitkicker flatbed truck. And when you stop, as stop ye must, you have to stroll over to your foeman's front porch, where your foeman lounges in a hammock, and you got to spit a plug of tobacco in your foeman's face and smile as the juice drips down your foeman's chin.

Other times you have to watch an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter that you know that you have seen before, even with the knowing that thy term of natural life on this firmament is perishing by the second.

Why because it's good and it's righteous and it's right and it's goodly and it's kindly and it's not ungood.

This lunchtime I watched an episode where Dog was going after an inveterate gambler, one Kristine Lau, and this provided the premise and the impetus for round after round of gambling metaphors from Dog.

"She's a gambler. So are we. We're gamblers. It's gonna be like chasing ourselves. Because bounty-hunters are gamblers. Every time we take on a bond we make a gamble. Right?"

The camera then shows Leland with his lips parted. You can almost read his mind:

"...? Whaddid he just say? We're gamblers now?"

Nothing daunted, Dog kept the thematic zingers coming. "We're The House. She's the gambler. She's bet she can outrun me. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha."

Now Dog had narrowed his focus. He wasn't going to keep making broad gambling metaphors. He was going to refer to himself and the team henceforth as "The House".

This is not to say he didn't experiment with other, equally confusing figures of speech. At one point, to punctuate a lull in the narrative, he growled "We're here. We're live. This isn't Memorex."

Bad metaphor for the digital age, Duane. You're making yourself look old - obsolete.

Then he resorted to that classic trope of American folk rhetoric, willful exaggeration. Speaking of his quarry's dwindling options, he asked facetiously, "Where they gonna go, the ocean? They gonna rent a submarine to get away from us?"

He was on rare form in this episode. It was, I should note, from maybe six or seven years ago, when the world looked young and hopeful and a bard was inspired to heights inconceivable today.

Dog's methodology had been typically bewildering. In pursuit of Kristine Lau they had decided to be as blatant and cumbersome as possible, effected by blundering raucously into all the illegal gambling dens and asking the staff bluntly "Ya seen her?" while brandishing her mugshot. Amazingly, when this didn't turn up any results, Dog seemed genuinely surprised. He was at a loss as to how it could've not've worked.

As time ran out the bounty-hunting team would go to the car parks of these strip malls where the gambling dens were and saunter around like Union Square protesters, ostensibly scaring off custom. I think the quaint idea was to embarrass her into submission. This didn't seem to be working either, especially because come about ten o'clock at night, when most gamblers are still eating breakfast, the Chapmans got tired and went home.

They were knocking on a gambling den door one evening when they received a call from their own office that Kristine Lau was there and had given herself up. Not one to underplay the moment, Dog still got right flustered and acted like they were in a race against death itself to get back to the office before Kristine Lau changed her mind. He was all animated in the SUV, bouncing up and down on the back seat, one second chiding Beth for her driving then chuckling with glee "The House is gonna win!"

As usual when they got to the office the arrest was totally mundane and everybody calmed down immediately.

Nevertheless, Dog had room for one more gambling metaphor in his summing-up segment: "In a gambling perspective you win, lose or draw. This was a draw."

Here he paused, and I thought he had finally laid his flirtation with the device of The House to rest. No such thing. He grinned his pure kkkountry gold smile and resumed:

"A draw in favour of The House."