Like the Razzies to the Oscars, designer counterfeiters find fame for bad behavior.

It must be a tad insulting to the 2007 Oscars Awards that their nod to the best in films has to share February with the worst in movies of the 2007 Razzie Awards. Just imagine what the United States, hell-bent on its counterfeit crackdown, must feel about Asia, in heaven with its bestseller fakes.

Designer knockoffs of brands like Louis Vuitton, Prada, Chanel, Christian Dior, Hermes, Burberry sell hot and fast in cities across Asia. Luxury fakes abound in Seoul, Beijing, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur. Counterfeits are now a $500 billion business worldwide.

The vibe in the US is all glum and pointing fingers at counterfeiters as terrorists, but in China and South Korea, the mood is as festive as awards nights, fake merchandisers vying for their claims to fame.

Take South Korea, which vendors all over Asia agree make the best-quality fake designer bags. In the streets of Seoul, knockoff bags are peddled openly at dirt-cheap prices, bearing generic logos that are then replaced with designer logos once purchased.

At Namdaemoon, a veteran market in downtown Seoul, a merchant boasts: “We do not deal with Chinese products. For fake bags, South Korean products are the best. We export these products to…

A US gambling problem? Ask over 1 million pathological gamblers in California.

The Office of Problem Gambling (OPG) unleashed recently the most comprehensive prevalence study ever conducted on the United States gambling problem. The verdict: America is in big trouble.

Gambling in the US generated a revenue of $72.87 billion in 2003. Land-based casinos nationwide made $4.74 billion in state tax revenue in 2005. The OPG study on problem gambling was undertaken lengthily and meticulously — through a multi-lingual telephone survey between 2005 and 2006.

A critical inclusion amongst survey respondents were residents aged 18 and over of California, the most populous and one of the wealthiest states of the US. California gambling statistics collected provide a perturbing microcosmic picture of how gambling has taken hold of America.

A highlight of the OPG study, California has between 750,000 and 1.2 million adults considered to be pathological gamblers. Problem and pathological gambling are especially high among males, those with disabilities, and those who are unemployed.

The American Psychiatric Association defines pathological gambling as “an impulse control disorder that is a chronic and progressive mental illness”. Inaccurately referred to as compulsive gambling, it is problem gambling to the extent of a mental disorder, especially a psychiatric disorder, causing harm to the gambler and other people.

California has 296,500 to 490,000 adults classified as lifetime pathological gamblers, unveiled the OPG gambling study. There are 450,000 to 713,400 others with a considerable gambling problem although not enough to meet established criteria for pathological gambling.

Pathological gambling must meet at least…

Hollywood is still reeling from every celebrity who got knocked up in recent memory.

What with the recent bloated figures of hot babes turned hot moms, the belly of the beast known as showbusiness has new darlings.

A couple of new beauty-talent-personality searches are on to the latest demographic of unlikely stars.

As to which unlikely stars exactly, the girl fight is split in two camps, like always.

In this corner, soccer moms (i.e. Desperate Housewives’ Bree Van de Kamp).

In that corner, working moms (i.e. Desperate Housewives’ Lynette Scavo).

Even Bodog online betting props are keeping score — soccer wives, poker moms, and basketball girlfriends included.

Reality TV hot moms

Are You a Real Housewife? is the hot mom search by Bravo TV, possibly connected with its reality TV show, The Real Housewives of Orange County, which follows the lives of five true-to-life ‘desperatehousewives’ residing in Coto de Caza, California. [Go to http://www.bravotv.com/Real_Housewives_2/contest/index.shtml]

Hottest Mom In America is a…

Fact: The Oscars yearly breed more losers than winners.

The 2007 Oscar Awards are that predictable. We knew it as sure as Helen Mirren and Leonardo DiCaprio were nominated recurrently at the 2007 Golden Globe Awards. We knew it as sure as Sacha Baron Cohen, of all people, repeated himself.

“I want to thank everyone in America who decided not to sue us,” quipped the Oscar-nominated Sacha more than once. Thankfully, redundancy is to the favor of proposition betting. Never mind the losers, we know how to win by betting at the 79th Academy Awards, to be held on February 25th, hosted by Ellen Degeneres.

Best Motion Picture of the Year is arguably the least foreseeable of the lot, based on trends seen at the year’s Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards. At Bodog film betting, The Departed has 2/3 odds to win Oscar Best Picture while Letters from Iwo Jima has 7/2. Little Miss Sunshine has odds of 3/1, Babel has 4/1, The Queen has 10/1 odds.

As far as movie performance goes, note that Dreamgirls, while neither an Oscar Best Picture nor Best Director nominee, has garnered the most number of 2007 Oscar nominations, at eight. It is followed by Babel, with seven Oscar nominations, then Pan’s Labyrinth and The Queen, with six Oscar nominations each.

Best Achievement in Directing is also fobbing off the expected: After all, Marty has certainly never won an Oscar before. If he wins, we doubt he will be repeating any past impromptu speech, and we might even extend hopefulness the Oscar Best Supporting Actress curse will soon be broken.

Martin Scorsese for The Departed has 1/6 odds to win Oscar Best Director at Bodog online betting while Clint Eastwood for Letters from Iwo Jima has 4/1 odds, Alejandro González Iñárritu for Babel has 9/1 odds, Stephen Frears for The Queen has 13/1 odds, and…

And the Oscar goes to… All over again…

The road to the 2007 Oscar Awards is so straight and narrow it might as well lead to heaven. Which it likely will for at least four people everyone’s expecting to win: Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, Eddie Murphy, and Jennifer Hudson.

Not only do we suspect they’ll win, we can practically see how they’ll take it. But if Oscar predictability is bad news for film buffs, it is good news for proposition betting. There is almost no losing money on the dead foreseeable turn-out of the 79th Academy Awards, to be held on February 25th, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres.

Below, find some Oscar predictables, er, Oscar predictions on who and what we ought to be ready for.

If Forest Whitaker wins Oscar Best Actor, prepare for Jamie Foxx meets the Rainman. His thank-you’s will be 50% fanatical thanking in stutters and broken sentences, 50% gasping for air in disbelief. “Wow… wow…” How many wins does Forest need to start believing his luck?

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role has Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland with 2/13 odds to win at Bodog film betting online. Peter O’Toole for Venus has odds of 4/1, a record 44 years apart from the last time he earned any Oscar nomination.

Will Smith for The Pursuit of Happyness has 9/1 odds to win, and will simply have to try harder by cutting his romantic comedies down to half. Leonardo DiCaprio for Blood Diamond has 14/1 odds, but who knows how much harder he can try after multiple nominations at the 2007 Golden Globes? Ryan Gosling for Half Nelson has 20/1, which is okay as he had won MTV Movie Awards‘ Best Kiss already.

If Helen Mirren wins Oscar Best Actress, prepare to shout, ‘Long Live the Queen!’, regardless of which queen you mean. But you’d be ill-advised to refer to 2007 Razzie queen Sharon Stone, who can take the cue from Helen, Judi, Cate, and Jeremy Irons: If you want…

You won’t believe who is earning more money than you thought.

Oprah and Bill Gates, surely. Actors, too, once they’ve become stars; and ordinary people, often, once they’ve joined a reality TV show. But also, you’ll be surprised at high salaries attached to professions you mostly assume don’t pay all that well.

Job: Astronomer. Salary: $101,360 annual average. Just ask Britney Spears‘ manager and Lindsay Lohan’s publicist: as suspected, you can make a fortune by watching the stars. The job of an astronomer is that of a researcher-reporter, except his field of study is the celestial universe, plus the stars in his care hardly behave like primadonnas.

Job: School principal. Salary: $82,225 annual average (high school). Oprah was well-informed to have once given away her ‘favorite things’ to teachers, whose humble salaries are about $40,000 a year. It’s a different lesson, though, with school principals, whose job it is to be the school supervisor, encompassing the administrative, strategic, and psychosocial concerns of student life.

Job: Executive coach. Salary: $350 to $1,000+ hourly average; $70,000 to $100,000 base pay + bonuses if employed by company in-house. If life coaches offer life advice, executive coaches provide managers and CEOs with professional counsel like next career moves. More all-around than a shrink, they can even tip you on where’s a better gym to vent work anxieties out.

Job: Court reporter. Salary: $56,110 annual average; six figures when including freelance jobs. A court reporter functions as a documentor, recording legal proceedings into written transcripts. Given how one word in a hearing can send the accused to…

She can’t act decently, she can’t act her age, she can’t even really act at all.

She, in this case, pertains to four of six actresses nominated for the 2006 Razzie Award for Worst Actress. They are Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, Hilary and Haylie Duff. They always get in trouble for behaving badly offscreen but now it turns out they act just as badly onscreen.

At Bodog prop betting, Lindsay Lohan for Just My Luck has 2/1 odds of winning Worst Actress while Hilary and Haylie Duff for Material Girls share a nomination with 3/2 odds. Jessica Simpson for Employee of the Month has 30/1 odds whereas Kristanna Loken for BloodRayne has 13/2 odds.

Sadly if not surprisingly, Sharon Stone for Basic Instinct 2 has 2/5 odds of being named Worst Actress.

From the Duff sisters, we move to the Wayans brothers. Shawn and Marlon Wayans share 1/2 odds of winning the 2006 Razzie Award for Worst Actor. Rob Schneider, for Benchwarmers and Little Man both, has 1/1 odds, and Larry the Cable Guy for Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector has 7/1 odds.

The Santa Clause 3, The Shaggy Dog, and Zoom all conspired to get Tim Allen odds of 11/5. Oscar regular Nicholas Cage for Wicker Man, though, has 30/1 odds at Bodog betting to win Worst Actor. …Sure, but where the heck is Tom Hanks?

If the above are any indication, here are the…

Remember Wynn Las Vegas as the one hotel Steve built after he became a billionaire.

Steve Wynn has built more than a few Las Vegas casino hotels, all but one while he was still working on his first billion. His net worth jumped up to $1.3 billion in 2004, and a year later, on his wife’s birthday, the hotel named after him was opened.

Proudly bronze and golden, Wynn Las Vegas was built at $2.7 billion, the largest private funding of any construction project in the US at the time.

If indeed a man’s self-assurance is proportionate to his riches, then Wynn is just a wee bit different than Steve’s other casino hotels. For one, it has most of Steve Wynn’s art collection on display: Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso’s Le Rêve, which Steve famously elbowed and so failed to sell for what would have been the highest price ever paid for art.

Le Rêve is also the name of one of two Wynn Las Vegas shows, created by Cirque du Soleil’s Franco Dragone; the other is Monty Python’s Spamalot. More Wynn entertainment are offered at Tryst and Lure nightclubs, some of the hottest Las Vegas nightlife. Alex, Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare, Daniel Boulud Brasserie, Okada, SW Steakhouse, and Tableau lead the choices in…

My money’s safe with me until I get to the casino. By taking a free trip to Macau.

AirAsia is giving away 1 million free seats to flights around Asia — including free travel to Macau, hailed as the new Las Vegas and hottest casino gambling mecca today. All the better to have more moolah for this China region’s leading tourist attraction: Macau casinos.

1 million free seats from AirAsia! Click here to score your free trip to Macau and around Asia.

On the Cotai Strip, Macau’s answer to the Las Vegas Strip, casino resorts are a neat package of gaming spaces (slots, baccarat, blackjack, roulette, poker, etc.) plus fine dining, retail shopping, entertainment shows, and eyecandy like Sin City. There’s Wynn Macau, Sands Macau, MGM Grand Macau, as well as the Mandarin Oriental and Hyatt Regency Macau hotel casinos.

For local-flavored casino games — like sic bo, dai siu, and fan tan — I’ve got Casino Lisboa and the rest of the Stanley Ho clan’s casinos for hardcore gamblers, or those of Hong Kong’s Galaxy Entertainment, like the new StarWorld and Emperor Grand casino hotel co-owned by Asian superstar Jackie Chan.

You can beat me to the Macau free trip, but I’m not running out of options. AirAsia’s 1 million free seats are flying to a host of destinations: in Malaysia alone, free trips to places like…

If you OWN the lottery, what would you do with the money?

That was not a typo. While we’re busy asking what we’ll do with the money if we won the Lotto, here was a lottery vendor stepping out to declare how he wants to spend all the moolah he has made. He is northeastern Spain’s most famous lottery man, and he is saving up to travel in space.

Xavier Gabriel owns a lottery shop nicknamed Bruixa d’Or, or Golden Witch. It is arguably Spain’s luckiest Lotto store — for starters, it is located in Sort, a word that means ‘luck‘ in his native language of Catalan.

More than that, the shop has sold lottery tickets that have won over $1.14 billion since 1992.

Many know about the luck with which Golden Witch seems to have been blessed. Busloads of lottery players regularly come from all over Spain to join the long queue of lottery jackpot hopefuls outside the store. Gabriel himself has become a sort of celebrity who gets stopped on the street by people to ask him for a lucky number, or rub their Lotto tickets on his sleeve.

Thanks to Golden Witch’s fame, it has sold an estimated $114 million worth of lottery tickets in 2006 alone. Over 80% of the sales transpired online, possibly making Golden Witch Spain’s largest Internet business. Gabriel makes a 3% commission for every lottery ticket sold, and since his…