I heard a humorous song on the radio that I wanted to share with you all. Of course the radio doesn’t lend itself to linkage in web pages, so I found a video (of sorts) of it on you tube. It seems that I am not the only one who found Jessica Rabbit just a little bit too hot. Check it out, but be warned it is certainly NSFW.
Author Archives: Shadowtwin
Turning you onto music I haven’t even heard yet!
A couple of bands that I have heard of recently, though I haven’t heard enough of them to really make claims about their greatness: Room 13 and The Showdown (those are links where you can actually hear some of the music, though neither appear to be “official websites).
The Showdown’s song Head Down has been getting some airplay on Sirius Satellite, and unlike most new music out, it hasn’t been getting beaten to death with a 4x an hour rotation. In fact I only hear the song once every few days, and when I hear it, it always leaves me wanting to hear another song. It is not nearly as heavy as most of the music that I like, but the guitar is awesome and the songs are short and to the point. They hit me sort of like Nickelback did; I never dreamed of buying their album, but when I found that I was turning up my radio for 5 different Nickelback songs (I didn’t know what songs Nickelback did at the time) I went ahead and got the album. This is the same way. I wouldn’t have imagined that I would actually be buying the album, but I have the available songs (from their website) on my mp3 player, and I find that I crank it up when they come on. Unfortunately, I have yet to see the album in stores, and my mp3 downloading service of choice doesn’t have either of their albums available yet. Definitely a release that I am looking forward to.
Also to note, The Showdown has a cover of the song Carry on Wayward Son on one of their albums. If you have been to my site when I was talking about music, you likely know that I generally despise remakes of classic songs. As it stands, I think only Disturbed’s song Land of Confusion has actually gotten a thumb’s up from me as far as remakes go. The Showdown’s is falling into that territory as well. It is impossible to quantify why I think this remake is alright while I think others are crap, it is totally subjective. If I can listen to it without thinking that someone, somewhere is crying about their song being destroyed OR if they take a song that I didn’t really like and make me listen to it, thumbs up. This one is a bit of both. They didn’t destroy the source material Evanescence style, they didn’t remake an 80’s synth hit Marilyn Manson style, they took a song that was great a couple of decades ago and made it sound current again. Which, when I think about it, is basically the same reason I liked Land of Confusion.
Room 13 is the latest band of Aliester Wytch. He was the lead guitarist for Eisenblakk when I got to know Dwight (the singer) back in the nineties. Aliester is the reason I really started playing guitar. Well, I played guitar before I met him, but he is the reason I started trying to learn how to play well. I started playing Jackson Charvel guitars because of him (I still do to this day, though I also play a Jackson Kelly for ease of fretting in the second octave), I started using guitar picks that were in excess of 1.2 millimeters because of him (most people call them bass picks when they see them, since not a lot of guitarists use picks so thick. You break a lot more strings with thicker picks, but the attack comes through a lot more with a thicker pick -it is like hitting a piano key harder; with a thin pick, it is only going to hit so hard before the pick bends, with a thick pick, it is like hitting the string with a brick. It never bends, so the harder you hit, the louder it gets. Not sure if this is why he used the picks, but that is why I continue to use them.), I idolized him as a musician. I always enjoyed his solo albums more than the Eisenblakk albums though, because I loved his voice, and he didn’t sing on Eisenblakk’s albums (except backing vocals). It is only fitting that he is the singer for the new band.
I haven’t heard enough of Room 13’s music yet to say whether it is something that will be in my mp3 rotation a year from now, but I figured I would throw out a link. Now if I could just convince Aliester to remake his songs Evil Speak and Vampire Lust, then it would surely be there (his solo albums were done in a home studio, and left a lot of room for improvement on recording and mixing -probably a limitation of the hardware at his disposal). I have to admit that nostalgia is probably playing at least a bit of a role in listening to the new work, but check it out anyway, for the voice if nothing else.
And speaking of voices…
Megadeth‘s new album, United Abominations is releasing on the 15th of May. I have heard a couple of tracks from the new album. Gears of War and Sleepwalker are exactly the kind of in-your-face shredding that the last two bands I talked about aren’t. A double-bassed, double-picking frenzy that makes you want to beat your dog. Of course as a rational adult, I don’t beat my dog; I pretend my car is a tank and take on all comers!
I was really stoked about Megadeth’s last album, but kind of soured to the preachy, Creed-like lyrics of a couple of the songs. This album has (at least the songs I have heard) gotten away from that. Of course I know that if you know anything about Metal, you already have this release date circled on your calendar. In fact I had no intention of mentioning it at all… Until my inner voice started calling me a pussy for posting about a couple of bands that do not actually “make my ears bleed”.
Now if my inner voice is done measuring his figurative penis, I am going to get back to listening to The Showdown -as my pc is the only place I can until such time as I find the album in stores.
The seldom used pedal that sits directly beside the brake pedal
One of the biggest differences between my new job and my old one -well aside from being treated as both a human and a peer- is the commute. My previous commute was about 2 blocks, and them is small town blocks where it actually only worked out to about a half a mile. The new job is 48 miles each way, but most of it on highways and the freeway during off peak hours, so it’s not really all that bad. Now that I have to spend two hours a day in the car though, I can tell you firsthand that the 12 bucks a month for commercial free radio is so worth it.
Having to make the drive everyday, I have been finding out that all the stereotypes about people and the way they drive are pretty accurate. Not to say that every guy that is driving a convertible is exactly 50 years old with a small dick, or that every SUV is being driven by a blonde woman on a cell phone, but enough of them are that I can tell that the stereotypes are at least grounded in fact (although I haven’t actually yanked the pants down on any of the guys in the sports cars to check penis size).
One thing that I have learned while driving around on the outskirts of a huge metropolitan area is that a lot of people tailgate. I’m not talking about the type of following close enough to put you a bit out of your comfort level either, I’m talking about cars following at a distance of less than 18 inches from the car in front of them. I’m sure that the people who are doing this assume that their superior driving skills will be able to keep them from getting into a collision (and a note to everyone out there: most wrecks are collisions not accidents. In order for it to be an accident, it must necessarily be unavoidable. Unavoidable means that driver error didn’t play a role. So say an axle snaps and your car rolls over, that is an accident. If you are following someone too close and smash into them when they lock up the breaks, that is a collision, it can’t be an accident since it was your action that directly caused it. Just because you didn’t do it on purpose doesn’t mean that it was an accident), but it just doesn’t wash. First off, if they indeed possessed superior driving skills they wouldn’t be following so close to begin with. Secondly, humans all have roughly the same reaction times in given circumstances, regardless of how good a driver you are, or how good your vision is, it takes the same amount of time to react to what you see. Give or take a couple thousandths of a second.
There are two simple ways to judge if you are following at a safe distance or not (well three I guess. Since if you can read the dash instruments on the car in front of you, you are following too close). These are the ones that they teach in driver’s ed. The first one was always pretty vague and subject to your ability to measure distance. It says that to follow someone safely, you should maintain a distance of one car length per 10mph. That method works pretty well for driving on surface streets, but that would mean that in order to fit that definition, you would have to be about 70 feet behind the car in front of you on the freeway, which I think we can all agree is just too much distance. The other method is the 2 second rule. Which is pretty self-explanatory. You should be passing any given landmark two seconds after the car in front of you. This one works pretty well since the distance will increase as speed increases. Two seconds is a good distance to be following at anyway, since human reaction time is about .8 seconds. If you are 2 seconds back and you see the car in front of you lock up the brakes, it will take you about .8 seconds to register it and hit your brakes as well. But since the car in front of you may have better brakes, you may need every bit of the 2 seconds to stop before you hit them.
Of course no one, myself included, ever really follows those rules. The only time I will actually maintain a full 2 seconds behind the car in front of me is if I am being seriously tailgated by the car behind me. You see, I don’t want to get into any collisions, even if they aren’t my fault, and I also know that it is going to take the guy behind me about .8 seconds to react if I hit the brakes. If he is following me at, say, waytoofuckingclose, he is going to hit me if I have to lock up the brakes. So I give the car in front of me a cushion that will allow me to to touch the brake pedal just enough to make my lights come on for a half a second or so before I start braking. That should give the guy behind me enough time to react to seeing the brake lights and hopefully avoid a collision. Probably also reinforcing the guy behind me’s belief that his superior driving skill can keep him from smashing into the car in front of him. But what do I care as long as that car isn’t the one I’m in?
But how to know if the guy behind you is following too close to stop safely? If you can see a bit of pavement between you and him in the rear-view, give that guy a fucking medal; he is at least 2 seconds behind you. If you can see his bumper in the rear-view, he is probably far enough behind you to react if necessary, this assuming that he is paying attention to what he is doing. If he is close enough that you can’t see his headlights, he is way too close and you will have to make an extra effort to keep him from hitting you if you do have to brake suddenly. If you can’t even see the hood of the car behind you, he is going to hit you, and it probably doesn’t matter what steps you take to try to avoid it.
And that is Donnie’s guide to safe following distances in a nutshell. Also, and totally unrelated to actually driving, you can walk around a parking lot and pick out cars of people who habitually tailgate. Since that type of driving leads to braking hard, often, it tears the brakes up. Cars should have an even amount of brake dust accumulated on all four wheels, but if they habitually tailgate it will wear the front brakes out 10 times faster than the rear ones (since the front brakes do about 2/3 of the work in normal circumstances, but that amount goes up significantly when the full weight of the car is thrown onto them by locking them up at freeway speeds). So people who habitually tailgate will have a much thicker coating of brake dust on the front wheels than the rear ones. Which also generally leads to having to replace the front rotors with every brake job, thereby doubling or more the cost to maintain the brake system. That information is, of course, completely useless.
All of the judging of distance and increasing my following distance to accommodate the jack-ass behind me is done pretty subconsciously at this point. In fact it doesn’t really even bother me anymore. Well, most of time. Sometimes, though, a situation will develop that I just know is going to lead to a collision. I found myself in one of those situations a couple of days ago.
On a two lane road with a 65mph speed limit (one lane each way, undivided), a girl in a green Ford Taurus was following me so close that I couldn’t see the hood of her car in the mirror, just her face. She was talking on a cell phone. I was behind a Budweiser delivery truck that was going about 5mph less than the speed limit, but oncoming traffic made it impossible to pass. We were a few miles away from the Blackwater Trading Post (which is actually just a small store that specializes in beer sales. They sell a lot of beer, being that they are the first store you can buy beer at once you leave the reservation -beer sales are forbidden on the reservation). I want to pass the beer truck, so I am staying close enough to him that I can get around if a spot opens up in the oncoming traffic. I made an attempt to go around, but had to fall back when a car turned onto the road from a side street. The girl behind me came inches from hitting me and, well, that pissed me off.
She nearly hit me when I accelerated to go around the truck then just let off the gas. If I were to have to hit the brakes she, being so distracted on her cell phone, would surely hit me. Knowing that the beer truck was most likely going to be stopping at the trading post, which requires coming nearly to a stop on the 65mph road, I needed to get that girl behind me to fall back a bit. But since I was already a touch miffed (if you are going to tailgate, pay attention, damn it!), I decided to use the “scare the holy fuck out of her” technique. I fell back from the beer truck just a bit, and smashed the brakes with my left foot. I only hit them for a fraction of a second, and I accelerated hard with the right foot immediately to keep her from hitting me. In the mirror, I saw an expression of terror on her face as she locked up her brakes. She also dropped her cell phone. What I did was foolish, sure, but it usually makes them fall back a bit, since now they are worried about the maniac in front of them. Not this girl. She picked her phone back up and got right back on my ass.
At this point, we are maybe two minutes from getting to the trading post. I still think the beer truck is going to stop there, and the traffic still won’t allow me to pass. The girl behind me is going to hit me when we have to stop guaranteed. My only other option is to slow way down, which I did. I just let off the gas and coasted my way down to 40 or so. There still wasn’t a break in the oncoming traffic, but the girl passed me anyway, forcing me and two oncoming drivers to pull partially off of the shoulderless road. Dumb bitch. Anyway, since the beer truck was going under the speed limit, I caught back up to them just before they got to the trading post. The truck put on his brakes to stop to make the turn and…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
The girl smashed into the back of the beer truck.
I dialed the local police on my cell phone (yes I know the number, don’t ask), and pulled off the road. I grabbed a sheet of paper from my leather binder (still in the car from the job interviews in September and October), and started writing out a witness statement (which I am an old hand at at this point, again, don’t ask).
When I saw the guy get out of the beer truck, I went over to talk to him. His name is Lenny, he used to deliver to the store I worked at. We were looking at the back of his truck, which took only minor cosmetic damage, and talking about me, actually. He hadn’t seen me since I quit working at the store here in town, so there was some catching up to do. The Taurus was pretty fucked up though. The front end of it was smashed up accordion style (well the hood was), with the requisite smoke billowing from it. The girl was crying, begging us not to call the police -which Lenny had already done as well- screaming that if she got into another wreck she would lose her license.
The cop arrived only a few minutes later. I went to his car to give him my witness statement and let him check my ID. I let him know that I was on my way to work and all my contact info was already on the statement. I was back on the road within ten minutes, and made it to work on time (of course I am usually about 20 minutes early since I leave early enough to account for getting stuck in traffic).
The whole thing leaves me wondering though. How many wrecks has that girl caused? If you aren’t driving drunk, how many collisions do you have to get into before they actually take your license away? 3? 5? Hmm. What if it was like that for other things as well? Say you shoot 2 people and the judge says, “okay, that’s it. You shoot one more person and we take your gun away!”
Doggie goes bite
I watched a show on television yesterday about a dog attack in San Francisco 5 years ago that resulted in someone’s death. This particular incident was different than most attacks that end with death for two main reasons, the first being that the woman who was killed was a healthy, 30 year old woman (dog attacks that result in death are generally limited to attacks on children or the elderly), the second being that the dog(s) that did the attacking were not pit bulls. At least the breed was called something other than pit bull, although they look just like them, only considerably larger.
Whenever someone’s dog attacks someone, the owners are held to some level of responsibility for it. Their legal accountability for their pet’s action is (very generally speaking) criminal negligence and some form failure to control a vicious animal -whether the dog got out of a yard, off a leash, etc. It got to the person it killed somehow. Occasionally there will also be charges of involuntary manslaughter. In the case that I saw yesterday, though, the prosecution was seeking murder charges.
There have only been three cases in U.S. history where a dog’s owner has been convicted of murder in an attack. The burden of proof required to convict someone of murder in such cases requires that the owners know that their dog is capable of killing a human, and that they willfully allowed that dog to come in contact with someone while in an agitated state (it has been some time since I actually read about the cases and I don’t want to research them again, so that may not be the exact legal definition, but it is close enough for my purposes today). In order to be convicted of murder, your dog has to be specifically trained to attack humans and you have to basically command it to attack.
Being a dog owner myself, I was rather surprised by my reaction to this. It turns out that I think that the owners in this case should be convicted of murder (or the one who was in control of the dog when it actually happened). When you buy/adopt a dog -particualarly a large breed dog- you become responsible for the actions of that animal, and it should not be limited to negligence if it does kill. It doesn’t matter if your dog has never shown aggressive tendencies, it will snap at some point. It is your responsibility to excercise physical control over the dog when it does. That point is very important. No amount of training and voice command is ever going to be able to stop an animal when its base instincts take over, you have to be able to physically subdue it. Failure to do so could and should result in being held criminally responsible for its actions, up to and including murder.
The dogs that I currently have are not aggressive. One is a Labrador mix, the other some form of terrier mix, neither one has ever even snapped at a human. I know, though, that if I take them out into the public it is entirely possible that something will happen to them and they will attack. Being that they are dogs, if they do attack they will not stop short of killing unless I physically stop them (the larger of my dogs weighs about 60 lbs. I have had to physically subdue him when he has gotten into a fight with another dog and let me tell you that even though I outweigh him 3:1, it takes all my body strength to do so. Keep that in mind when buying a dog that weighs 100 lbs.). This may not be the first thing I think about when I leash them up for a walk, may not even be in the back of mind as we are out in the park, but it is something that, if that time should come, I know I will have to do. If I fail to physically subdue my dog if it attacks, I am responsible for the attack. Putting him on a leash and taking him into public is my implied acceptance of that.
There really should be laws in place that make taking ownership of a dog an expressed acceptance of the fact that your are assuming ownership of a potential killer. That way simply claiming ignorance will not be possible when sparky eats the neighbor’s newborn.
This week in poker
I haven’t been playing a lot of poker lately, mostly because I don’t really ever find the time to set aside a couple of hours (at least) where I can free myself from distraction. The worst thing that I can do when playing a tournament online is to not set aside enough time to do it, or to not sufficiently take away other distractions and leave myself not really paying attention. While not having enough time leads to having to bow out -usually right about when the tournament reaches the money-, playing distracted often leads to some bad plays late in an attempt to make up for not winning the small pots early.
When I jumped onto Pokerstars on Monday, I saw that the weekly MATH tournament was just about to start. At the time I decided to sign up for it, there were only 15 people already entered. I figured that with the aggressive play in these blogger tournaments, it would probably only take an hour or an hour and a half for this one to end. I was wrong. So with other obligations later which could force me to exit early, I decided to give it a shot anyway (Monday is one of only two nights that I am at home with my wife, which is the biggest reason that I don’t enter this one more regularly.).
I managed to play pretty well for the first hour, with the exception of making a pretty questionable call with an A-9o that went on to 4-flush a win. In that instance I really thought he wasn’t holding an ace, but since we both checked it on the river, I think it is fair to assume that neither of us was all that sure of our hands. I got a big double up early when I was holding an A-Q and smooth called a 3x raise pf. When the flop hit AQx, the other guy bet the pot, I min-raised it and he pushed with AK. Hard to put me on AQ there since I had limped, but (IIRC) I was UTG and not too happy with AQo at a full table. When I called the pf raise, I did so knowing that unless I flopped two pair, trips, or a straight I was going to fold it. My stack got padded a bit more when someone pushed UTG (who wasn’t really a short stack) and I happened to have pocket aces, and they actually held up!
After the first hour, there were still ten people left. One of them was gone on the first hand after the break. I made another bad decision preflop shortly after that. I was holding an A-Jo and raised into an open pot from position. When the big blind re-raised it, I was putting him on a re-steal so I called it. Had I been paying a bit more attention, I would have noticed that calling it there was the wrong thing to do. His raise was enough that it pot commited me, I should have either raised or folded. So when the flop came out with three rags I had to push, and he, in turn, had too many chips in the pot not to call. He had AQ but lost to a rivered (I think) jack. While I don’t normally like to play AJo in big pots, the only thing that I don’t like about my play on that hand was smooth calling the re-raise; I had read his raise as a re-steal, I needed to re-raise him there to try to push him out. He probably had enough invested in it that he would have called it anyway, and knowing that he was holding AQ, I don’t think he would have layed it down anyway, but I didn’t give him the option of laying it down pf if he was holding a garbage hand. I’m probably lucky that he wasn’t in it on a re-steal, I could just see my call of the pf raise giving his 37o a chance to hit two pair on the flop.
When it was down to five of us, the play got tight. There were entire orbits without seeing a flop, as everyone folded to whoever raised the pot first. At some point, the chips were nearly evenly distributed, with everyone seemingly waiting for someone else to make a mistake rather than to risk their chips to make a move. It took a tptk vs. flopped set to get us down to 4. Now officially on the bubble, I certainly didn’t want to be the one to make a mistake. I stole the blinds a bunch of times (as did everyone left), and even got to show the hammer on a steal. The next time I looked at the lobby, it was nearly two hours since the start of it. Dinner had long since grown cold, and the wife just stopped by to tell me that she was going to bed. I was pushing with any two cards until I busted now, which wouldn’t take long. The first hand after that, I pushed a qjo into a pot that had already been raised and found myself against aces. Making it the second consecutive time that I have bubbled the MATH (that being the last two times I have played, not the last two calendar weeks). Which is a bit frustrating. I played well, and I really think that if I didn’t have to leave so abruptly I could probably have held on for another dozen hands, and I was only a double up from second place… Yeah, I need to quit playing this one unless I can set aside a bit more time for it.
As for any other poker over the last week or so, well, I just happen to have screenshots of the other three games that I played:
And I forgot to take a screenshot of the leaderboard at the end of this last one, which was another two table sng, so I only have this one:
I’m not playing in huge stakes tournamnets here, but any time I can play in three sngs and win two, finishing second in the third, I’ll take it. Also, if you looked at the pictures, they date from February 1st through last night. These are not selective pictures of only my wins, I have only entered four events (including the MATH) over that span of time. Isn’t it the way of things that now that I can actually put myself in position to actually take down events when I enter, I simply can’t set aside the time to do so…
Oh, and that $1.36 that I started playing stud with a couple of months ago, that is a little over $185 now.
My last post was when?
My recent schedule at the new job has kept me from sitting down to post anything here for the better part of two months now. When one of the co-managers quit, I was sort of thrust into the role. That would all be well and good if not for the fact that when combined with an unreliable work force, I was on schedule for 56 hours a weed, but working more like 60. Tack onto that an hour commute -each way- and I was at work, or on my way to or from it, for about 75% of my waking hours. Hell, I have hardly even had any time to look at porn!
I’m not entirely sure if I have had anything worth posting during that time anyway. I bought a car back in October, I had been meaning to make mention of it here, as cars are not exactly the type of thing that I just buy every day. The car I bought is a 2001 Saturn Sl1. I chose it after spending quite a bit of time on the internet comparing all the key features in used automobiles: reliability. This car is defenitely not the prettiest car out there -it isn’t damaged in any way, in fact it looks almost like new, it just wasn’t very pretty when they made it. It had 70,000 miles on it when I bought it and I have already added 8,000 miles onto that with my new commute. I paid $3200 for it, which was $2200 less than what Kelly blue book priced it at in good condition. It has performed admirably thus far, and even manages to average 34mpg, though it was closer to 38mpg before I started ignoring the speed limit.
I also had a personal anniversary to celebrate earlier this month. January 5th was the one year anniversary of my quitting drinking. While I am not normally the type of person to get too excited about anniversaries, nor to even acknowledge my own personal achievments, this one meant something to me. Consider that I hadn’t been sober for an entire week for about 17 years prior to this and you will understand why I am proud of this one. I still don’t really talk about it (aside from a few family memebers very few people know that I ever drank at all. Which just goes to show that I was good at hiding it.), but it was the most difficult thing that I have ever done, and the accomplishment that I am most proud of in my entire adult life. I truly can understand why so many people try and fail, or succeed but relapse. I still don’t know if I am on board with calling alcoholism a disease, but I am certainly a lot more sympathetic to what alcoholics are going through, especially those who are trying to sober up.
One of our dogs died in October, I made mention of that here. Our other dog, Warlock, has seemed a bit depressed since then, as I imagine I would be if the only friend I had of my own species was taken from me. My wife and I had been talking about getting another dog since sometime in November. We decided to wait until a couple of weeks into January to get one. The reasoning was simple: those Christmas puppies turn out to be a lot more work than the children who got them ever imagined. As a result, animal shelters begin getting in far more animals than they can find homes for in January. Better to spring them from the joint when they are on death row than to get one of them when they are so cute and fuzzy before Christmas. After a couple of trips to our local animal shelter, I found Warlock a new little brother.
The new puppy is 7 months old. They told me it is a mix of Catahoula Leopard Dog and Doxie -whatever the hell that is. He is considerably smaller than Warlock, and will remain so. Warlock is in the 60 pound range, and the new puppy, whom we named “Scruffers” (well, I named him Lord Scruffenheimer III, but the wife says we have to call him Scruffers for short) will only be about half that. Warlock has been doing a pretty good job of keeping up with the puppy’s energy, but now when he lays down he is like a stone for the next six or eight hours -minimum. But they seem to be getting along pretty well. Scruffers has a very unique color pattern to him that I am not sure what to make of; It’s almost brindle, but then it’s almost dirty mop water too. In fact I would have believed them more if they had told me that he was a cross between a wire-haired terrier and a dirty mop.
You can see a bit more of his coloring in this shot:
And one last shot. This was the most adorable picture ever, right until Scruffers saw the camera. Then he jumped up such that when the camera clicked he was about .2 inches from it: edit 11/18/09. The following photo is the most hit file on my site by about 400%. Someone has this linked somewhere, but I don’t know where)
Well that’s all for now, I will try to throw something up here from time to time, as I am sure you are all dying to see more pictures of my adorable dogs (can you sense the sarcasm?).
Happy Wintersday!
I was at work late last night when Ed, who is a manager at the connected Arby’s, along with another man walked up to me. I didn’t know who the other man was, just an older guy, I would have guessed in his sixties. He was wearing work boots, heavy, black jeans, a sweater, a green jacket, and a beanie cap. Ed said, “Hey, Donnie, Phillip is looking for a place to stay tonight.” I was midway through my hotels on Chandler Boulevard monologue before I even knew it. As I ended with the “There is also a Sheraton at the casino across the freeway, but it is a bit expensive.” part, the look of abject horror on Ed’s face, as well as the smile on Phillip’s face told me that I was going the wrong direction with it. “Oh,” I said, “You are just looking for a warm bed for the night?”
“Yeah,” Phillip said as he handed me his I.D. (which I didn’t ask for or require, but he insisted I take), “I just got a ride in from Houston. I’m on my way back to Washington, but there aren’t many trucks running on account of the holiday.”
“Let me see what I can find.” I said to him as I offered him a seat near the payphones.
I don’t live anywhere near where I work, and in I don’t know the first thing about local homeless shelters, but I wanted to find the guy a place to stay. I called the local police department, assuming they would probably know since they are frequently called to escort vagrants from local businesses. Unfortunately, the local police department was for the Gila River Reservation, and they could only give me the number of the Chandler Police Department, who also couldn’t help, but were able to give me the number of the Phoenix police department. After a half a dozen phone calls, I was able to get the numbers of three area shelters. Since it was Christmas, though, each of the shelters informed me that they were already full. The last man I spoke with told me that a local church had opened its doors to shelter the “overflow” from the other shelters and gave me their number. The church was willing to take him in. Great. Except that the church was a good twenty miles away, through the heart of Phoenix. They also gave me the number of an emergency shuttle service to try, but said that it was unlikely they would give him a ride, since it wasn’t an emergency. I called their number but was only able to leave a message, and wasn’t too sure I was even going to get called back so late on Christmas Eve.
After I hung up the phone, I made my way to where Phillip was sitting. I told him that I had found him a place to stay, but that I was still in the process of finding him a way to get there. I offered him a cup of coffee and something to eat. He declined the food, but did get a cup of coffee. I told him he could sit in the restaurant while I found out about his ride, and went back to the phone. I called back the church, but this time I asked for driving directions. If I couldn’t find someone else to take him there, I was going to take him myself after I got off of work. He began to give me directions, then stopped and asked for my phone number. He said he would call me right back.
When he called back, he said that “since it was Christmas Eve” he had called the shuttle service himself and arranged for them to drive Phillip to the church. He then said, “You certainly seem to understand the spirit of Christmas.” I laughed. All I did was make a few phone calls to help a guy find a warm place sleep, and I would have done that regardless of the date on the calendar.
No Limit cash: A tale of two hands
Having enjoyed some success playing stud cash games in all forms (doing exceptionally well in Razz of late), I decided to take another crack at NLHE cash. Because stud games are all played in some form of limit, the amount that you can win or lose on any single hand is minimized. So it was my thinking that if I played a solid NLHE game, I would be able to double my money a lot faster. Well that is true, but I can also stack myself a lot faster.
My cash game got off to a fast start with what is far and away my largest single hand win to date:
And how bad must that have sucked for the other guy?
Unfortunately, that was followed almost immediately by my largest single hand loss to date. I was in the big blind on this hand, and there were two limpers prior to the button. The button put in a raise that made it $1.50 to go (.25/.50 blinds), and was immediately called by the small blind. That put the pot at $4.50, and with a suited 78, I was willing to call a buck to see the flop. The flop gave me every draw known to man, as well as top pair. I bet the pot, which got all but the pf raiser to fold, he went all in. I had him covered (the bet was about $40), but barely, and the huge overbet was just what I would expect from someone with an overpair who knew that there were too many draws on the board. I made the call as a pretty significant favorite, although he did have a better hand when the chips went in. As often happens in these situations on PokerStars, I was staring at the screen mouth agape and forgot to screenshot it. This pic from a calculator though does nicely since it shows the odds:
A call that I really have to make with an OESFD. Any 4, 7, 8, 9, or heart and I win the hand. A quick look at the math shows that I had two shots at roughly 20 outs, and I managed to miss every one of them.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… It’s… Little green men?
Let me just start off by saying that I don’t fit the profile. I have a full compliment of teeth, I don’t currently sport a mullet (the flashback of school photos from the 80s is making me cringe), I don’t regularly wear faded overalls or plaid shirts, my house, while it does have a tin roof, does not have wheels, and it never did! So no one was more surprised than me when I saw a UFO this morning.
The stereotype seems to be that only hicks see UFO’s, which I don’t think is actually true; hicks are the only ones that talk about seeing UFO’s. With everyone virtually disregarding the actual meaning of the term as an object that is unidentified, and instead thinking of the little green men in a saucer connotation, I can understand why others would remain silent. I, however, have to write about it, because the whole thing fascinated me.
I am generally a very skeptical person. I like to think that I don’t believe anything that there isn’t pretty solid evidence to support. I think the very same thing about UFO’s: there is no conclusive evidence to support the beings from another world theory, so I have always assumed that the objects were either actual aircraft whose reflections/lights were altered by natural phenomena. But that is so not what I saw today. And my logical self was arguing with my UFO seeing self the entire time I was witnessing it.
I am still not ready to claim that I saw a craft from another planet, but what I saw today did have characteristics that are not seen in any aircraft that I have ever seen (which is not to say that we don’t possess them, and being relatively close to the testing site in Nevada, I think that is the most realistic explanation). I am going to detail what I actually saw as well as my logical mind trying to rationalize it -because honestly I was having fun arguing with myself while tooling down the freeway at 75.
I came up over a hill and had just started down the other side. Ahead and to my right (3 o’clock or so) I saw a bright light, distance was impossible to judge as there were no buildings or other landmarks on the horizon to gauge depth, the same things kept me from being able to make any guess at the scale. It was hovering (I say hover only to mean that it wasn’t moving up or down) and moving slowly from my right to my left. The sun was coming up behind me, so my logical brain assumed that it was most likely a small airplane, probably in a banking turn, reflecting the rising sun. Easy and logical.
The next time I looked to where the light was there was no longer a light shining towards me, instead there were two lights, both as bright as the one I had seen previously, only now one was shining up and one was shining down. This shot my reflection of the sun theory straight to hell -unless this happened to be one of those new geometric planes with the prismatic cabins. Now my logical brain was guessing that it was actually a helicopter. This helicopter, so my logical brain was saying, was using a searchlight on the ground. That would all be well and good, except for the other light shining straight up. Now I was intrigued.
As I continued to watch it move, it switched direction a couple of times. The direction changes were such that it could not have been done by an airplane: it stopped then went the other way. This could have been done by a helicopter, so my logical brain was still telling me that that is what it was. Even so, I started paying a lot more attention to it at this point, mostly hoping that I would be able to conclusively say that it was a helicopter. I simply couldn’t.
As I mentioned, there was a bright light shining up from it and another shining down, but as I watched it further, I saw more lights. There appeared to be dim lights around the edges of it, the shape was elliptical, and brighter lights at either end of it. The lights at each end of it were not continuous, but I can’t say with any certainty whether there were two lights that were each flashing, a series of lights strobing around it, or a single light and the craft itself spinning (although my logical brain discounted this possibility right off the bat). I continued to watch it for several minutes as I drove (I did look at the road occasionally) assuming that at some point I would see … something … that convinced me that it was actually an airplane or helicopter. That didn’t happen.
After having watched it move slowly from right to left, then right, then left, whatever it was made an ascent. That is to say that it shot straight up into the air, with a speed so fast it could have been a bullet. And just like that it was gone.
I certainly don’t know what that thing was. What I do know is that it was not a conventional airplane or helicopter. It absolutely could not have been a balloon either. It was simply an Unidentified Flying Object. And enough to make me think that maybe not everyone who sees one is a crackpot.
NLHE: The woman who beats me, but I always come crawling back
Several weeks ago I made mention of my quest to turn my $1.36 on pokerstars into some serious cash. Admittedly, I thought the odds of doing it were pretty grim, but with the future of online gambling (money transfers specifically) currently up in the air, I wasn’t about to transfer any more funds into it (in fact I had transferred my money out of all sites but pokerstars and full tilt prior to this).
When I started trying to build up my buck, it was exclusively in stud hi-lo, simply because winning there (at micro levels) was fairly simple. It took a couple of weeks, but I was able to build the initial $1.36 to over $50 in low limit stud. At that point I started risking portions of it on NLHE tournaments. There is just something about the atmosphere of the NLHE tournament that just isn’t there in a cash stud game. Of course I was still playing those at low levels as well, with just enough success to keep the bankroll slowly going up.
Last week I also bought into the MATH and WWDN tournaments, which have a combined buy-in of just over half of my total bankroll. I managed to donk out of the MATH early after making simply a horrible call that I don’t want to discuss (the short story is just because someone is playing like a maniac and raising every hand doesn’t mean that they don’t have the cards to back it up -at least some of the time). The WWDN went notably better. I was playing well and getting some cards when I needed to. I managed to also donk out of that one after min-raising from UTG with AKo. It got a call from the big blind, who also happened to have a King, but when the flop was a King and two rags I never put him on an 8 to make two pair. Should have raised it more to push him out preflop. Noted. That cash (sixth place I think) put me right back at 50 bucks.
I am still playing the stud for a while each day, and I am still winning overall, but I am having more losing sessions than I used to, and after an entire week of nothing but stud I am only up about 4 bucks. So I needed to switch gears. Too much of anything can be detremental to my game (as evidenced by my play in NLHE when I was playing it daily). So I decided it was time to try out some HORSE.
I am pretty good at Hold ‘Em (hey, it’s my story), I can hold my own at Omaha, and Stud Hi-Lo has always been my best game. That leaves only Razz and Stud Hi to try to fake my way through, right? Well it turns out that I am not nearly as good as I thought at Hold ‘Em (see, it’s limit Hold ‘Em, a completely different game), and Razz likes to deal me an A23 every hand only to deal four consecutive kings afterwards. Omaha has quickly become my strongest game, and I just try to avoid getting into the hands at all in Stud hi. I have done pretty well so far. In four HORSE games (single table sng), I have finished on the bubble twice, second once, and third once -noting that the bubbles were back to back, followed by third, then second.
So I am having success -at least in the form of not losing any money- at every form of poker except NLHE. So all of the meager winnings from the other forms of poker end up going back to buy ins in NLHE. I do this even knowing that I will need at least a few premium hands, I will need to play solid poker for a couple of hours, and I will have to get lucky at least three times (luck in the form of winning coinflips, though suckouts help too) to have a cash finish. It takes a lot more work, a lot more time, and certainly a lot more money to play in them, but it is so much more gratifying to do well in a NLHE tournament than to stack someone in a stud cash game. Why? You got me.
But all the stud play over the last few weeks has afforded me the ability to play in the MATH yet again. This time I was able to make some plays when I needed to, pick up some cards in good position a couple of times, and, yes, even get lucky a few times. It took two hours to finish the game (I think there were 16 entrants), and I only came in second, but the $84 payday puts my current bankroll at just over $112.
$1.36 to $112 in just over a month. Now if I can just keep increasing it 80x every month I should be golden with a year…