Texas Hold 'Em

A New Lesson

Until this evening I had always believed that there was nothing worse in poker than being dealt bad cards all night long.

Now I know better.

In fact, there is one thing worse. It is being consistently dealt the 2nd best hand at the table.

Maybe it says something about how I would like to die... and I know I'm going to die. We all do. But I would prefer a long and slow death... some time when I'm in my 90s or 100s. I would be all the more excited if my obituary indicated that I died of "natural causes". Though I'm not quite sure what that means.

I know we all die technically because of a loss of blood to the brain. Or at least that's what I vaguely recall an answer to the Genus I edition (the original) of Trivial Pursuit saying. But what I think they are saying is that "he/she was just old." I'm fairly certain that natural causes is a heart attack or a stroke. But yet if you have a heart attack or a stroke when you are in your 40s or 50s or 60s... even your 70s... then it's a heart attack or stroke that killed you.

At what age exactly does your life become so meaningless that absent getting hit by a semi crossing the road or murdered that no matter what kills you, it's classified as "natural causes"?

I often think about that, oddly enough, when I strolling through the produce center of my local Giant Eagle and pass the "organic" food section.

Of course, I know they mean the use of "organic" chemicals and not that my "non-organic" grapes are inorganic.

But consider that for a moment... people are paying more $ for food that is cultivated not the way it is now, but the way people in the 60s grew vegetables and fruits... the 1760s! (I'm just waiting for the "organic" band-aids... which will just be a box of leeches.)

At some point you either have to start dashing out in front of tractor trailers on the Interstate or you are doomed to die of natural causes. But somehow it is seen to be more sophisticated, smarter even, to eat carrots that aren't grown with modern scientific advances but in a way that was used when your 105 year old grandmother was born.

So, in summary, my grandfather, who turns 90 in February, should take solace in the fact that while we think his life is meaningless, the way he grew tomatoes is critically important.

If my life in any way resembles my card playing tonight, however, none of this will matter. As I won't live to be my grandfather's ripe old age. I won't die of natural causes. I will die a quick and painless death... just short of a full house.

Banana Milkshakes

Mmmmmmmmmmm...

First you start with the ice cream. Good ice cream is key. If you error in the ice cream selection -- for example by buying something like this (which to my taste buds -- and maybe it's just me -- is made by pouring milk in an ice cube tray and freezing it) then you might as well have just gone to your local McDonald's and purchased one of their imitation shakes.

Then you thinly slice a whole banana into the blender. If your banana doesn't have banana freckles (brown ripe dots), then again please visit MickeyD's.

Finally, you pour just enough milk in so that it just reaches the top of your ice cream. Then hit shake. Count to 5 using Mississippis, then let it settle for a second, then shake again... 3 Mississippis. (If you want a thicker shake, count using Maines. If you would a thinner shake, then drink a class of milk you pansy.)

In a little under 2 minutes (or 120 Mississippis), you have a drink that is wickedly perfect.

Note -- if you can't make a banana milkshake, then the next best thing?

The second time I was in Calgary on business, in July 2001, coincided with the Stampede. I would leave the offices of my sister company (at the time) around 6 at night and make my way back to my hotel amidst a sea of drunken wannabe cowboys -- it was like a scene out of a bad rodeo movie. But apparently there were tons of exciting things to do (or so everyone in Calgary and back in Pittsburgh assured me). So when I returned home and was asked what the best thing about that part of my trip (I then rented a car and drove from Calgary to Kamloops through the Canadian Rockies and then on to Vancouver -- and then a day trip to Seattle to see the Mariners and Pike Place Market... THAT ENTIRE PART WAS AWESOME)... but the best part of my time in Calgary was the next best thing to a banana milkshake... banana pancakes for breakfast.

Thank God for Vices

a short shoutout to all that's morally repugnant...

If people didn't smoke, think how much more non-smokers would have to pay in taxes. Moreover, if people didn't smoke what would redneck farmers in North Carolina grow as crops? And kids would be forced to live in a world without Joe Camel and Joe Chemo.

Of course, it's equally good that smoking's siamese twin -- excessive drinking is permissible. Without it there would be a lot of ugly men and women who wouldn't have had sex otherwise.

I thank God for pornography. Sure, I was that 16 year-old kid who spent several weeks during the wee hours fruitlessly trying to tune in Channel 59, naively believing that persistence and prayer would dissolve the semi-psychedelic big black bar down the center of my tv that taunted, teased, frustrated, and ultimately shielded me from the beauty of copulation in celluloid. But that's not why I'm thankful for skin flicks. No, I give alms for adult films because exactly what else would dumb girls with implants do for a living? I mean, David Hasselhoff can only produce so many shows.

Without drugs there would not have been a Scooby Dooby Doo or a Puff the Magic Dragon or an H.R. Puff 'n Stuff.

Without murder, no one would know who Kato Kaelin is or have witnessed the wonder that is Fred Goldman's handle bar mustache.

Oh wait, maybe vices aren't all they are cracked up to be. Then again, if given the choice between having to engage in actual vice or being forced to sit and watch one hour of The Swan 1/2/3 or Who's Your Daddy on Fox, I'm thinkin' that my new catch phrase would be "you can't spell 'porn' without 'ron'"

Pretentious

Maintaining perspective...

J.Lo -- I mean "Jennifer" -- who asked recently that people quit calling her "J.Lo" (okay, I promise, that's the last time I will call her that. I do, however, reserve the right to call her "ho" and/or "serial spouse".) J.Ho -- AHHHHH... I mean, Jenny from the Block...ack.... Jennifer Lopez said, "I'm not J.Lo, she's not a real person."

Fascinating. But not as deliciously inane as "I was going to call [my] album 'Call Me Jennifer' because that would be my way of saying goodbye to the whole J.Lo [she said that, not me!] thing. But 'Rebirth' is perfect because it means so much more."

I was going to add her comments to the last piece as a way of indicating how they showed her lack of intelligence (i.e. her stupidity). But "Pretentious" is perfect because it means so much more.

People May Be Strange

but a whole lot more are just plain stupid...

I know it's a new year and I'm supposed to be optimistic and positive or some garbage like that, but stupid people ruin that for me. As hard as I try to avoid dumb people, they are too damn stupid to use condoms so they are all over the damn place -- like panhandlers on Forbes Avenue in Oakland. So instead of avoid them, every Tuesday I will be pointing them out and the dumb things they do. Do I think that this will make them any less idiotic? No, but if you can't beat them, try to humilate the daft bastr&ds.

Without further ado

So you haven't read "The Piece of String" by Guy de Maupassant or "The Bet" by Anton Chekhov because French and Russian existentialists aren't your thing, this does not make you stupid. Naming your auto body shop after a painter who gave the world this and this, marks you as a complete and utter moron.

When someone asks you what Carbon-14 dating is, you respond "some sort of kinky matchmaking website for science nerds" -- okay, that makes you a little dumb -- but still you are not half as stupid as the twenty or thirty people who I had to pass in the right lane on my way back from Reading on the turnpike over Christmas -- even though there wasn't another car in the right lane for at least a quarter of a mile. Are the signs that say "Keep Right. Pass Left. It's the Law" somehow too confusing? Of course, even they apparently are not 1/10 as dumb as the governor/Congressmen who have asked that these signs be posted on the turnpike at a tune of $675 each.

So when KDKA descended on Pitt's campus in the early 1990s and interviewed you and asked you when Columbus discovered America, and you said in your perfect Jersey girl accent "I ain't no history major" or your dumb-as-doornails Lennie voice "1944?"... well, you are unbelievably stupid. But if you didn't know that it was 1492 (the same year that Moors were driven out of Spain) -- that doesn't make you dumb. If you didn't know until just thirty seconds ago when you found the Moors link that the Jews were driven out of Spain in 1492, then you are the exact opposite of dumb... you are freaking brilliant despite the fact that you find it remarkable that none of your history teachers or professors ever mentioned the fact that Spain kicked the Jews out before the Muslims. Now that I think of it, perhaps the seed to Middle East peace is to pit the Jews and the Muslims (who seem to be waging a war over incidents that started before Jesus was born) against their old enemy -- the Spaniards.

If you memerized Pi in high school, that doesn't make you an imbecile but it does indicate that you are one seriously screwed up dude. Still, I'll take 10 of you -- actually 10 of you in a drunken stupor -- over the jacka$$ who came up with the public service announcement with Stevie Wonder in which Stevie says that he would rather drive than let someone who has had too much to drink drive. Now, you don't have to be a math wizard to figure these odds out... drunk guy with blurry vision sees 3 roads, only 1 is right... blind guy with NO VISION see 0 roads, and 0 are right... who would you rather let drive?

One of the best things about looking up sites to link to are the things you learn. How about this site again. "Cliff Notes -- The Fastest Way to Learn". The makers of this site aren't clods but they do have the biggest set of balls on the planet. The fastest way to LEARN? Yes, all of the students who used Cliff Notes in high school were always looking for the quickest way to LEARN something. If the audacious creators of this site were honest, the moniker would read "Cliff Notes -- When You Are Looking For Shortcuts and Learning Gives You Headaches" or perhaps most accurately "Cliff Notes -- For People Who Hate to Read".

Worse than a dumba$$ is a lazy dumba$$. The number of companies on the web offering college term papers is staggering. My personal favorite though is Paper Experts, Inc. who claim "At The Paper Experts Inc. we only sell superior quality non-plagiarized papers." Yes, because if I'm looking to you to do my work for me, I demand that you not be as lazy as I and insist that you not plagarize from someone else and produce top quality work. Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that you can purchase 175 papers on Ethics. The clear winner of the group being "6. 874 The Importance of Ethics". Maybe our good friends at the Paper Experts can team up with Cliff Notes and rebrand their site -- "Paper Experts -- The Fastest Way to Write".

Shakespeare said in Henry VI "kill all the lawyers"... I think only because "stupid people" are just too much fun to not have around.

Related/Unrelated closing note....

For a wonderful look at additional idiots in this world, please check out the various articles on Shaun Alexander, hot swim suitmodels, and Stone Phillips (okay, there is no article on Stone Phillips yet there... but I'm sure one of these days that waste of humanity will be cleverly profiled there. I can only hope).... at a Madman's website.

And an interesting blog that I came across today in the op-ed section of the WSJ of all places...

The Children's Blizzard

Booknotes

When I was a boy 0f 5, dinosaurs, sharks, snakes, and anything featured on In Search Of, especially killer bees and Bigfoot, fascinated me. This fascination together with the allure of the hypnotic hum of a nostalgic love cemented an affinity for the written word. And while I lived nowhere near the desert southwest, nor had any plans to ever visit, I found it useful to remember that red touching yellow meant trouble. And I found myself captivated by the shark that looked like an anvil had lodged itself in its misshapened head.

As a boy of 34, my tastes have changed. Instead of T-Rexes and makos, biographies of Hamilton, Truman, Adams, Churchill, Lincoln, and Edna St. Vincent Millay (to name but a few) crowd several bookcases throughout my house. Unfortunately, with rare exception, the authors of these tomes all seem to have graduated from Tolstoy University, in which aspiring historians are instructed to write no fewer than 900 pages of text about their subjects. And while Hamilton deserves all 731 pages of his 10 font treatment by Chernow, I'm not sure W.E.B. Dubois' life -- as intriguing and controversial as it may have been -- is worth 751. Needless to say, my eyes have seen the last pages of very few of these books.

In fairness, as I cannot lay the blame entirely at the feet of these writers, I have a habit of reading multiple books at once. It's not uncommon to find four books patiently waiting their turn in the nightly rotation on my nightstand. And this lends itself further to an "incomplete" reading. This may explain why I'm 293 pages into 9/11 Commission Report, 117 into Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton", 7 into "The Writings of Alexander Hamilton", and 147 into Stefan Fatsis' entertaining "Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players". If that weren't bad enough, "E=MC^2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation" claims top honors as "bathroom reading", having taken over for Sedaris' "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim", which I managed to read over about 120 "morning readings".

It is a rare book of non-fiction that captures my attention to completion... except if it is a book about an ill-fated Everest climb, or an ill-fated whitewater expedition in Tibet by a former high school classmate of Bill Gates, or anything by Erik Larson.

I have just found and finished another in this line of enchanting, beautifully-written tragic tales -- "The Children's Blizzard" by David Laskin.

Imagine yourself as a 12 year-old on the Great Plains in the waning years of the 19th century enduring a month of snow and temperatures below 20F. Then on the morning of January 12th, 1888 a wonderful reprieve... a day of sun, clear skies, and temperatures in the 40s. Like many, you may have gambolled off to your one room schoolhouse a half of a mile from your family's sod house... maybe without mittens or thick wool socks -- the protections of winter's clothing.

What would you be thinking when during the lunchtime recess, a black line appeared on the horizon and an eery calm enveloped you?

For most, there wasn't time to think as the storm like no other struck, bringing with it plummeting temperatures, gale force winds, and a blizzard that made it difficult for you to see your hand in front of your face.

This is a tale of immigrants fighting to farm an inhospitable and unforgiving land. It is a story of the fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and teachers who found a way to survive that 12th day of January 1888. But it is also the story of over 100 children and 150-350 adults who did not.

It is a snapshot of America -- (then and now) -- the heroism of its citizens and the hubris of government bureaucrats and officials.

Sunday Sports Emporium

A perfect marriage of sport and community

My former co-worker, still-friend, and past/present/future rah-rah coach (Beth) and I have (I was going to say "debated", but that would imply that there is a credible argument on the other side... so I instead will say...) "playfully mused about" the status of cheerleading -- activity or sport.

As the wise financial genius behind minor league baseball (Eric) has commented, "if cheerleading is a sport, then what was their win-loss record last year?" Consider that archery... which certainly is no more than an activity... is included in the Olympics as a "sport", but only the deluded believe that cheerleading should be a medal event.

Come on, the only reason that cheerleading exists is to give men hot women to look at when the football game becomes boring. If cheerleading is a sport, then there are sports venue all over this city. I prefer to think of them (though I do not frequent them... as Bill, Mike, and Jr. can attest to) as strip clubs. Some prefer to think of them as "gentlemen's clubs", though few gentlement can be found in them. But if cheerleading is a sport, then millions of husbands can take a fistful of dollars and tell their wives that they are going to a sporting event -- where the only equipment required is a pastie.

But I'm not here to continue this discussion because, quite frankly, CHEERLEADING IS A FREAKIN' ACTIVITY! No, I'm here to talk about something (I'm not even sure it's an activity) more interesting.... platform tennis in Sewickley.

The activity?/game?/sport?

Every day that I jog, I pass Sewickley Academy, which sits expensively (Tuition is $16,750/yr. for a high schooler, but only a mere $10,525 for pre-kindergarten -- morning only) on my left as I make my way down Beaver Street. But as tempting as it is to look at a building that is just sucking money out of people's trust funds, I find myself mesmerized by the venue on the other side of Beaver, where individuals who yearn to be part of the Polar Bear Club but who either have a fear of water or are not completely insane, partake in that unique October through March outdoor (activity?/game?/sport?) known as plaftorm tennis.

And what exactly is platform tennis, you may wonder. The best description that I can come up with is... it's the wallyball version of tennis, except played with raquetball paddles by people without a lot of range.

The first time I ran past the court and saw people playing, I thought it was an activity that only Vince McMahon could have created. The XFL for tennis. It was as if several tennis players had become incredibly angry at each other and challenged one another to a "steel cage match" but instead of wrestling, they decided to play each other in tennis.

Once I looked past the unique venue, it occurred to me on that "lovely" December 2003 day that there were snow flurries floating down around me like confetti and as hard as it tried, the mercury in the thermometer couldn't get past 20F.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the only activities/games/sports (skiing, hockey, luge) purposely played outdoors on the winter solstice involve either snow or ice... or some combination thereof. I mean, you don't see people forming outdoor variations of shuffleboard or horseshoes in the Northeast to play in December, do you? Of course not because that would be fairly insane (note: I reserve the use of the phrase "completely insane" for people who jump into 45 degree water on a 20 degree day or who voted for Al Sharpton).

So inevitably one asks, "what sort of community would create a venue for this activity/game/sport?"

A place I call home

As those who know me know, I love Sewickley. I love the fact that in most communities I would be considered a middle to upper-middle class member. In Sewickley, I often feel as if I have Section 8 housing. In most communities, I think people would say that my home is a Red Monopoly property. In Sewickley, I live on Oriental Ave. Mind you, this is a community where I watch parents pull up in their BMW SUVs across the street from my house and drop off their middle schoolers. And their precious 12 year-olds aren't carrying baseball mitts or backpacks filled with books as people in my middle school did. No, these kids are toting laptops (no lie!) and lacrosse sticks.

There is a Land Rover dealership in town (or as Sewickley residents refer to it... "the village"). Residents ostracized the "lower-class" Audi/BMW/Porsche dealer to "the river side" of Rt. 65 in Sewickley.

The two gas stations located in town do not advertise their prices. As the saying goes "if you have to ask how much, it's too expensive for you."

Don't misunderstand. There are many things to love about Sewickley... the property values (if you are a homeowner), the schools (if you have kids), and the village (if you want to be a minute's walk from a morning bagel at Bruegger's -- though I much prefer Einstein's -- or a cup of joe -- aka a "no foam, soy latte" -- at Starbucks)... to name just a few. But while I love Sewickley, there can be no more perfect a location for the activity?... the game?... the sport?.... known as platform tennis.