Mike May's Adventures In Probability Management

Thanks! (The Giving Of)

2011-11-24T21:00:00.001-05:00

I’ll keep this short. The other day I saw a warning sticker that helped me realize how good I haveit. We all bemoan whatever the annoyancedu jour may be. But it could always beworse and 'tis the season for remembering that. A shitty financial state, a crumbling relationship, family guilt,whatever it is that seems so painful right now, at the very least you should begrateful you’re not being anally raped by a truck.

If nothing else, know that it could always be worse.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Kid Genius Helps Me Understand Political Attack Ads

2011-11-01T15:41:00.003-04:00

So, for the first time in my life Apple fucked me over.

But that’s not the interesting part.

I updated the software on my iPhone last week. I had waited a little while before installing iOS5 to make sure that all the kinks had been worked out of the system. I didn’t want to be hit by any weird glitches that hadn’t been discovered yet. Turns out I didn’t wait long enough because after the update all my phone numbers and contact information disappeared. But that’s not the interesting part.

I’m deathly afraid of losing backup material so I figured the safest way to dig out my contact information would be to take my problem to an expert. I made an appointment at the Genius Bar of my local Apple store. Getting there at the crack of 10:45 the place was already packed. It’s about 15 minutes after my scheduled appointment before I get to see someone. In no way does this annoy me. I have a hand-me-down phone more than a year out of warranty and yet I’m still getting free tech support no questions asked. I’m always amazed at how well Apple handles customer care.

The kid assigned to my problem is way enthusiastic about helping me. When he interrupts or talks over me I don’t see it as rude. It’s just his enthusiasm. I explain what happened with my phone numbers and he says he’s heard about that. Online I’ve read about other people having the same problem and there were steps they had taken to varying degrees of success. But as I explain to the Genius assigned to me, I didn’t want to do anything that might possibly corrupt the back up on my computer.

When I first brought my current iPhone home I impregnated it with all my contacts and old iPhone information. So obviously at some point a usable full backup did exist on my computer. I drove out to the mall at that ungodly hour for one reason and one reason only, so that I wouldn’t make a mistake and corrupt the backup I had. The kid understands this and says not to worry. Apple stores the last 5 backups made by iTunes, so it’s not going to be a problem. If fact before we do anything we’re going to make another backup of the phone’s current state so that we have that in case anything weird should happen. Then we’ll restore the phone from the older backup. This scares me a little but clearly it is an irrational fear because this kid is leaking confidence from every orifice. Anyway Apple has certified him as an uncontested Genius which I imagine they wouldn’t do for just anyone.

He explains that a lot of people don’t back up properly. When you want to make a full backup you have to do this! And then he hits a bunch of tabs that I’m not really paying attention to. While my Apple authorized backup is occurring my Genius runs about to work on some other people. When the backup is finally done he comes back and starts the restoration process. It is at this point that his mood changes. I sense the overflowing confidence draining and a mild confusion filling the void.

Huh, well, uh, I can only find one backup on this computer.

My old backup?

No, the one we just made.

What?!

He then surmises that PCs must store the backups differently than Macs and suggests that maybe I should go to Best Buy. It’s possible the Geek Squad might know how to recover the backup that it looks like he just overwrote.

Now I won’t spend too much time going over it here, but for various reasons this enrages me.

The moment I met my Genius I was very clear on why I was there. It wasn’t some secret desire that I was afraid to tell anyone. It wasn’t I really like Peggy Sue and would love it if she were to hold my hand but I’m too shy to say it. No, I explained very clearly why I was there. I wanted to get my contacts back but above all I wanted to NOT corrupt whatever old backup I had on my computer. So in a way my real overarching request of Kid Genius wasn’t even an action. It was an inaction. It was for him to NOT do something, which generally is quite easier than actually doing something.

I suppose there are things that it would be difficult to not do. If I had asked him to not blink for the next hour then I can understand that that would be an obnoxious request. But that was not the kind of NOT request that I was making. What I asked was the equivalent of asking someone to not hit me in the face. “Hey, if it’s not too much trouble could you not punch me in the face? I just got a nose job and I’m still a little tender, could you do me this one solid and simply not hit me in the face?”

So of course what is the very first thing that Kid Genius does? He pops me in the nose. But that’s not the interesting part.

Long story short, Kid Genius, his manager, and I all have a little discussion with the final outcome being nothing more than a simply apology for my losses and an offer of a free iPhone case as compensation. Sensing my mood the manager is not surprised when I decline the blood money plastic phone protector and he quickly leaves.

Kid Genius apologizes once again and even after seeing me turn down the iPhone case he still tries to push a free screen protector on me. If I was a nicer person I would have accepted it, but I have my limits. And then, almost 3 hours after my appointment was supposed to start, he gives me his card. This I respect. I don’t know if this is a sign of great bravery or if it is actually possible that he somehow does not understand the level of my rage at this moment but whatever his motivation might have been I respect the gesture enough that I wait until I’m walking out of the store and out of his sight before balling his card up in an angry fist.

And it is shortly after this that the interesting thing finally happens.

I go home and the very first thing I do is I sit down and write for over an hour. And what do I write? Months later, am I finally replying to the email I got from one of my oldest high school friends? Or am I sitting down to acknowledge the handwritten letter I just got through the mail? Is it a personal diary entry? Am I actually writing the first blog entry I’ve done in a year? No. What actually snaps me out of my body-at-rest lack of inertia, what finally opens Microsoft Word on my laptop is an 1800 word pissy letter I’m going to send Apple.

Who am I sending this angry letter off to? I have no idea. I’m sure I can find someone later. Why am I writing this letter? I have no idea. There is nothing that the letter will fix. Apple assured me that my contacts were lost. The letter is just a rant about what happened. I don’t think I would even sign my name since the integrity of the letter might be compromised if I were sent a $20 iTunes gift card

Like one of the zombies in 28 days later the only thing I care about is infecting someone else with the rage I feel. In the hope of communicating the hatred inside I need to chase someone down and rip their cheek off with my teeth (in an epistolary manner).

Do you have any idea how little I’ve written in the last year? I have desire to write. But I never have the inertia busting motivation. And then a few days ago I finally found it, the spark I needed to rocket me off my ass and onto the keyboard. Turns out that the thing that was missing in my life, it was irrational hatred. Who knew?

I’m pretty certain that I have never been so moved by an act of generosity or laudable grace that I have actually written to a corporation about it. I’ve thought about it. I’ve made the decision to write such a letter. But I don’t remember following through on it.

Christi on the other hand, she does that sometimes. A while back I was at an airport with her. There was an out-of-line passenger berating an employee at the gate. The employee handled the problem passenger with such impressive calm that Christi actually wrote the airline to tell them how good their employee was. So I guess there are some people who can find actionable motivation in a positive encounter. I have seen Christi driven to write letters that congratulate the good people do.

But I think she might be the exception.

John Choi

2010-01-28T01:55:00.005-05:00

A man my age should probably have a better understanding of death than I do. Still the concept of someone I used to call a friend simply ceasing to exist is hard for me to wrap my head around.

Yesterday I got a TXT telling me that John Choi (tall John Choi) had succumbed to the cancer I didn’t know he was battling until a few days ago. Those of us who were blessed with a chance to play poker in the heyday of the Diamond Club know how insanely dense it was with larger than life characters. To stick out among that crowd was not an easy task by any means. But to be memorable for the right reasons, to stick out through the strength of your humor and the infectious nature of your smile, as was always the case with John, that was an honestly admirable accomplishment.

“Full of life” is one of the more abused clichés used to describe people in times like this. Nonetheless it is actually an apt description of how John will be remembered. The idea that he no longer exists does not make a lot of sense to me. When I got the TXT I didn’t know how to process the information. I didn’t know what to do. After the tears, Christi and I decided to go to the beach. It was early evening and the sun was setting soon. You can experience some incredible sunrises on the east coast beaches of Florida. However, looking out over the water, facing east, there’s not actually a setting sun to watch. But still Christi and I sat there in the sand at sundown. We sat there as the air got colder and the light faded. We sat there facing east and with no sun to watch it didn’t make a lot of sense. It still doesn’t.

John Choi

Wake: Thursday, Jan. 28, 8:00 p.m.

Funeral: Friday, Jan. 29, 10:00 a.m.

Central Funeral Home

809 Broad Ave.
Ridgefield, NJ

888-353-2424

Things I've Found After Spring Cleaning for the First Time in Over a Decade: a Mysterious Past

2009-05-28T13:12:00.012-04:00

I’m not quite sure what the most confusing part of this find is? First of all, I don’t understand this patch for the “magical stages of puppetry”. Maybe I’m reading this one wrong, but if you make a statement that some stages of puppetry are magical then it would seem to me you’re implying that there exist other stages of puppetry that aren’t magical. Obviously that’s bullshit since everyone knows that ALL the stages of puppetry are magical. So this patch makes no sense to me. And what the hell is an “OMSI Almost Overnight”? It just sounds a little ominous. Do a bunch of Girl Scouts have a slumber party where they get all comfy and doze off in their flannel pajamas only to have one of the parents burst in at 4 in the morning with a water hose? “SCRAM!!”

It was so close to being an overnight…

Or is the really confusing part of this spring cleaning find just why on Earth I might possibly have a couple dozen pins and patches from the Columbia River Girl Scout Council, Portland OR. 1987? I don’t recall doing things with girl scouts or ever being in Portland for that matter. I can only think of 3 really logical explanations for why such things might be in my possession:

1) It might not be actual real Girl Scout merchandise. They could instead be sardonic patches commemorating black op missions that I took part in but that were just so vile that I have simply blocked them out.

Or 2) Maybe I have the opposite of a Mr. Hyde-like alter ego. Maybe I black out and instead of becoming a Mr. Hyde I become a kind of Miss Heidi, someone who likes to hang out with other girls between the ages of 5 and 17 in an accepting and nurturing environment where they can learn to appreciate their own potential and self worth as well as develop skills for success in the real world.

Or 3) Maybe I just found a bunch of the things in another bag that no one wanted to claim after moving out of an old apartment. And maybe I just don’t throw things out no matter how utterly irrelevant to my life they might be. Maybe I’ve got problems. Maybe.

Things I've Found After Spring Cleaning for the First Time in Over a Decade: an Old Body Part

2009-05-06T02:23:00.012-04:00

There are a great many things that I have always assumed I wouldn't be good at: knitting, painting with watercolors, extreme interrogation of political prisoners, etc. And there are a great many things that I know from experience that I'm not good at: blogging frequently, cooking swiftly, writing a blog regularly, etc. However there are a few things that I know I am more than just "not good at." There are a few things that I am extremely, really, exceptionally not good at.

Throwing stuff out is one of these things. I don't know how to do it well. I don't like doing it. I am really very much not good at throwing stuff away. Spring cleaning, which by definition ought to be a yearly activity, doesn't happen a lot at my apartment. I would say that I haven't done spring cleaning in the almost nine years I've been at my latest NY apartment but that wouldn't be the whole truth.

One of the other things I'm monumentally not good at happens to be moving. On my last move I just stuffed a lot of things into vaguely labeled boxes and stored them in closets unopened. So if we drop those boxes into the mix we're pushing over ten years since I did a comprehensive, throwing-unnecessary-crap-out spring cleaning of the apartment that I have only been living in for nine years.

That has changed.

I am proud to say that my NY apartment has been officially sprung cleant. I’ve considered writing a long rambling and boring post about the existential ramifications of this spring cleaning and the reasons behind it. But for now you will be spared that post. Instead, I thought I would offer a pleasantly short picture post, the first of a possible series that I like to call: Things I've Found After Spring Cleaning for the First Time in Over a Decade.

I'm starting the series off with one of the happier discoveries; something that I thought was lost long ago, my tooth!

I've only had one cavity my adult life. It was in a wisdom tooth and on my dentist's advice I had it yanked rather than putting a filling in (hence the red circle on the side). I had always wanted to make this detatched body part into some sort of intimidating shark's tooth necklace but I hadn't seen it since moving. So you can imagine my joy at finding it. It happened to be hiding in a Ziploc bag packed away in a box marked "books and Misc" which I suppose makes sense since I imagine a disembodied tooth figures to be one of the more "Misc" things I might pack away.

The only interesting part of this discovery is just how ecstatic I was to find this tiny chunk of worn enamel. If I was in a Vegas pawn shop desperate for a stake in the $1-3 no ante, no bring in, stud game and all I had to hock was that gnarled tooth, I'd be in a lot of trouble. So on one hand it's utterly worthless.

But looking at it a little differently, you could say that in the entire entire world only 4 of these suckers exist, only 4. And the other 3 wisdom teeth are not only still attached to my jaw but they're also quite slobbery and gross. So, as a one of a kind piece, unattached and dry, it's hard to put a price on it. It's unique, literally irreplaceable, and from that standpoint utterly priceless.

It successfully straddles the line between totally worthless and completely priceless at the same time. I hadn't seen it in so long that I thought it had disappeared forever. And while finding it didn’t change my life in any actual way, for some reason it did make me extremely happy. I guess it's just comforting to know that this part of me will always be a part of me. As it turns out I am not big on throwing away priceless artifacts.

Better Science Through Cookies

2009-03-11T17:06:00.028-04:00

This year we decided to do something different. The Christmas cookie medium has often been about a look back on the year that was. Unfortunately though, 2008 was kind of a rough year. I wasn’t sure if Christi’s nephews really needed a Christmas cookie depicting Ayn Rand raging through Wall Street, with foam and scraps of credit default swaps frothing from her mouth, as she rips chunks of flesh from the necks of hapless bankers? I imagine that that’s the image you could drop in the time capsule if you really wanted to sum up 2008, but as a Christmas cookie?

Also, it should be noted that Christi and I spend our Christmases with her family in Texas, one of the few remaining places where people still hem and haw a little before begrudgingly acknowledging that, yeah, I guess George Bush did break the world. Since the Bushes would be moving to Dallas after their occupation of the White House was over I saw no need to be making fun of the neighbors with some political jab at the outgoing administration. So I thought it best this year to, for the most part, look forward instead of back, to focus on the positive and shy away from the political this year. And that’s how this holiday became the year of the Stem Cell Christmas Cookies.

Coming out of one of the more historic elections this country has seen, the end of 2008 was rife with optimism. Times were starting to get rough but there was hope that fresh ideas at the country’s helm might bring about positive change. Among the many changes possible was a hope that the next few years would see science treated a little differently.

I don’t want to go all buck wild politico in this blog but I do have to go on record as being pretty disappointed in our country’s stem cell stance over the last 8 years. For what it’s worth I originally wrote a couple hundred words outlining my views on the subject. But looking back I decided to chop it out of this post. Spending 400 words to say “science is actually a good thing” seemed like a questionable use of your reading time. Instead I will simply assume we are all in agreement on this one. If anyone can explain to me how the ban on embryonic stem cell research was anything other than a case of the firewall between church and state not being properly maintained, then please help yourself to my comments section. If I am missing something here I would be happy to understand the issue better.

In the meantime I will just say that I am grateful to find out that our Christmas cookie optimism was not misguided. The current administration this week overturned the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Beyond just unshackling this vital field of research, I feel the president’s action goes a long way towards making us all look a little less retarded as a nation. For that I thank the President and wish I had actually saved him a cookie.

Coincidentally this week also marks the release of the DVD for Rachel Getting Married which almost got it's own cookie. I had very much wanted the obscure-media-slot in this year’s Christmas cookies to be filled by one of the scenes from that movie. While I’m not a real connoisseur of the torture porn genre, I’m hard pressed to imagine anything disemboweled from one of the Saw movies that could be as excruciating as the wedding toast that Anne Hathaway gives in Rachel Getting Married. Unfortunately I didn’t quite know how to nail the essence of a scene like that in almond sugar icing. So instead, the obscure-media-slot this year is filled by page nine hundred twelve, the last page of Roberto Bolano’s brilliant behemoth 2666, one of the many pages I never saw in 2008.

2666 got such unanimous praise that I actually considered wrestling with its over 900 pages. In the end though it just seemed like a damn lot of words. I’m more than man enough to admit that I was not man enough to conquer 2666 in 2009. And this might have been for the best after all, considering that an unpublished 6th section of 2666 was recently rumored to have been found. Bolano the author may have died in 2003 but he's quickly becoming the Tupac of Latin American lit. If I could put up blog entries half as many times as this dead guy puts out new books, this blog might be worth bookmarking. Anyway, even before 2666 became the new never ending story I felt it wouldn't hurt to give his masterpiece some cookie props

Sitting to the left of page 912 in the picture above is this year’s 3^rd cookie, the memorial cookie. As I get older it seems like more and more important people die every year. I suppose that when I was 9 there simply weren’t so many people that I personally labeled as “important”. Just as many famous people must have been dropping like flies every day but I never noticed. In my late 30’s though, the names of those that have died are slowly becoming more recognizable. The obituaries are becoming home to people I’m bummed I will never get a chance to meet. One of those people is Gary Gygax. 2008 was the year that Mr. Gygax, as my good friend Dario so eloquently put it, “apparently couldn’t make his saving throw against abdominal aortic aneurysm.”

There were definitely people more famous than Gary Gygax who died in 2008 (Paul Neuman). There were also people who were funnier (George Carlin), more stylish (Yves Saint Laurent ), more conservative (William F. Buckley), more bigoted (Jesse Helms), more naughty (Betty Page), more literaryish (David Foster Wallace), and more Dolemitey (Rudy Ray Moore). But a case could be pretty well made for the fact that there was no one dorkier.

And that’s not to say we didn’t lose a lot of nerds in 2008. Robert Asprin, Majel Barrett, Arthur C. Clark, Bobby Fischer, Dave Stevens, Michael Turner, and Stan Winston are just a few of the new celebrity guests at that big convention in the sky. But still, I don’t know of anyone more identifiable as an icon of a certain type of Nerddom, than Gary Gygax the man most associated with the creation of the Dungeons and Dragons gaming system. So I felt quite justified in taking a yummy memorial moment to give remembrance to someone who added a decent amount of joy to my formative years.

And finally there was also a TV death that I felt deserved to be memorialized last year. It might seem insensitive to diminish the death of an actual person by placing it on a plate next to the death of a mere TV show. But I hope it is forgivable in this case.

Every so often a work of art is produced that transcends its medium. Like a person, it grows and matures and becomes something more than just an amusement that entertains us for some short break. It becomes a teacher of sorts. It helps us to see something in the world that we could never have experienced alone. In a way it becomes a friend that we are sad to see go.

2007 saw the end of The Sopranos and 2008 saw the end of a show just as powerful, just as complex, just as worthy. After 6 dense years of life, The Wire finally completed its arc on HBO. It didn’t seem right to have done a Sopranos cookie in 2007 and then this year ignore what very well could have been the single greatest show to ever make it onto TV. So that’s why I knew I had to come up with a Wire cookie this year. There was only one problem, and that problem was this, at no time in my entire life have I ever seen so much as a single episode of The Wire.

Naturally, I've always been aware of the fact I was supposed to be watching The Wire. I even made Christi get me the box set of season 1 for my birthday. But truth be told, like proper dental care, it was something I have stubbornly ignored to my own detriment. Sorry. Until now this hadn’t hurt me too much. At Christmas though, I saw that having never watched so much as a single episode of the Wire would definitely complicate the act of turning it into a cookie.

However, I soon figured that I could wing it if I just played it safe and stuck to the obvious things. Based solely on the one or two publicity stills that I must have seen accompanying the rave reviews I have been ignoring all these years, I decided to go with the two things that would absolutely have to be in the final episode of The Wire.

1) I figured that there had to be a gun somewhere in the episode, possibly fired, possibly only referenced in flashback. I don’t know how you do a show like the wire and not have some sort of gun somewhere in the final episode.

And 2) I knew that at some point during the episode Yaphet Kotto had to have cried. It didn’t have to be a full force Keitel Cry, maybe just one solitary tear marching solemnly down his cheek, but at some point Yaphet Kotto would have to acknowledge what he had witnessed, and it would break him.

Of course I have no idea if Yaphet Kotto actual is, or ever was, in The Wire but that’s pretty much irrelevant as far I’m concerned. A final episode of The Wire in which Yaphet Kotto doesn’t cry makes no sense to me whatsoever. And if for some reason it turns out that Yaphet Kotto doesn’t end up crying in the final episode of The Wire, or has never actually acted in The Wire, then I do not even want to know about it. Clearly a mistake has been made. I will just hope that by the time I finally get around to catching up on The Wire it will all have been fixed with some sort of CGI special edition.

So that was 2008. While I have no idea what cookies 2009 will bring, I have to imagine that by the time this year's done with us there might be a lot that needs icing.

(And for what it’s worth I fully understand that Yaphet Kotto doesn’t have blue eyes. I simply felt the welled up sorrow Mr. Kotto was releasing in such a powerful scene was best represented by sky blue icing. Poetic license. )

20 Random Things You Didn’t Need to Know About 2008

2009-02-12T17:21:00.045-05:00

2008 was a big year in Mike May blogs for obvious reasons. Still for those among you who somehow didn’t get enough from this blog last year I thought I would put up a few of the less essential facts that I've kept track of during 2008.

1) Number of times in 2008 that I was able to bust out the phrase "Pardon me ma’am, but by any chance have you ever worked as a lion tamer before?" to a woman at a poker table and have her reply “Why yes I have”:

1 (at the Venetian in Las Vegas)

2) The 5^th most popular search keyword used to find this website:

"Vagina cookies" (It was actually the number 1 most common search keyword that did not contain some form of “Mike May” in it. I understand that the “vagina cookie” readership is probably a niche audience but I’ll take whatever I can get at this point. Other interesting ways to search for this blog in 2008 included search phrase #28 sexy odors, #56 “Steve Martin” legionnaires disease, #60 “What happened to Paco”, #165 Republican blonde fembots, and #202 young ripe melons – Brooklyn)

3) Amount of money I lost last year holding a starting hand that included the 4 and 7 of hearts in any poker game:

$195 ($5 in limit Stud hi/lo, $15 in limit Omaha hi/lo, $80 in pot limit Omaha, and $95 in no limit Hold’em.)

4) The picture from 2008 that most should have made it onto this blog:

The Genoa Club. All good things...

5) Number of African American presidential candidates that I did not vote for in 2008:

1 (Allen Keyes)

6) Total number of times that I've flossed in 2008:

52 (There is a long list of things I could do to make myself a better person. At the top of that list would be caring about and/or striving to become the best person I could possibly be. However I have conceded that that would probably take a buttload of effort. Much farther down on that betterment list is something I proudly thought myself capable of, flossing at least once a week on average (not actually weekly per se). So that was my one New Year’s resolution last year. And all I have to say is, mission accomplished! Aim high kids.

7) Number of Limo rides I've gotten because of this blog in 2008:

1 (which along with Jay Greenspan’s book Hunting Fish may be the only two things of actual quantifiable value that I ever have or ever will get from this blog. Yay writing!)

8) The picture from 2008 that most should not have made it onto this blog:

3 women, some real, some not.

9) Hand drier I was most excited to see being used in American public restrooms in 2008:

The Dyson Air Blade. How much does that thing rock? Copious amounts of rock, that’s how much.

10) Hands down the single coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life (in 2008):

FLCL.

This anime originally released a couple years ago, is not the coolest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. But while I was in the act of watching it I was able to think “THERE HAS NEVER EXISTED ANYTHING THIS COOL IN THE UNIVERSE EVER BEFORE, IN THE UNIVERSE EVER!” I miss being able to watch something and actually believe it to be the stone cold greatest thing that has ever existed. That’s one of the joys of being young that tends to fade as the world grays.

Ostensibly, FLCL is a coming of age story about a kid with a pan dimensional portal in his head, and there’s this hot older chick who has a bass guitar with an internal combustion engine in it, and when she whacks him with it a robot grows out of his forehead, and after seeing it it will make even less sense. All you really need to know is that Fooley Cooley, as it is known, somehow manages to congeal the frenetically illogical superbadassery of being young and packages it into six 22 minute slices.

(Honorary Mention in hardcore Nerd media from 2008 goes to The Venture Brothers. I watched a few episodes when the series first came out and wasn’t too impressed. But then I finally got around to watching some of the 3^rd season episodes that were clogging up my Tivo and I was pleasantly hooked. Go team Venture!)

11) Total number of words I've written since putting up my post, around 180 days ago, jokingly promising to write only 13 words a day on a long form project:

Maybe 78 or so.

12) Number of ex-girlfriends that started both blogs and Facebook pages in 2008, which much to my surprise took some of the fun out of stalking them online:

2 (though one of them changed her privacy settings effectively locking me out of her Facebook page.)

13) Number of new blogs written by ex-girlfriends that Christi scours vigorously for grammatical or stylistic mistakes that she can point out to me in casual manner, as in "Hmm, now that's a novel way to use a comma." :

14) Number of better-than-I-deserve girlfriends who didn’t dump me last year even though they’re not always fairly portrayed in this blog:

15) Toughest Sophie’s Choice scenario of 2008:

Trying to decide which is the greater sign of lyrical genius, Ne-Yo’s song lyric I won’t attend your pity party/ I’d rather go have calamari. (from “So You Can Cry”) Or Lil Wayne’s Swagger tighter than a yeast infection / Fly go hard like geese erection (from “Dr. Carter”) Am I more impressed with the ability to rhyme “party” with “calamari” or am I more awed by an artist unafraid to make poetry out of both yeast infections and geese erections in the very same song. I suppose I have to declare them both winners.

16) Board game genre that I most excelled at in 2008:

Medieval farming simulations. (I flat out destroyed in Agricola last year. Suck it, all you subpar, sucker-peasant agrigariasts!)

17) 2008 movie that had the most misleading ad campaign of 2008:

Wendy and Lucy (the dog movie). First of all, Jenifer Aniston looks way younger with short dark hair. Second of all, I don't remember even seeing Owen Wilson in it at all. Still, the commercials didn’t lie about one area, it was funny.

18) Single greatest album that came out in 2008 or any year for that matter:

Diamond Hoo Ha from Supergrass (To be honest with you I haven’t actually heard a single song from the album. I just so liked the title that I wished that I had started a band instead of becoming a degenerate poker player in the off chance that I would have come up with the idea of naming an album DIAMOND HOO HA.)

19) Painter who produced the empirically best oil works of 2008:

Nick Dileo. If you made a ton of dough in credit default swaps last year or have a wad of TARP money burning a hole in your pocket, drop him a line and pick up something nice for the office. Some of his older work can be found HERE.

20) And finally, this video, like most of my memories, looks somewhat washed out and faded but I think it very eloquently puts images to the subjective feelings I have of 2008. So I close with a little video I like to call "2008: a Fond Farewell to the Way You Made Me Feel".

Worst... John Connor... Ever

2008-08-03T15:32:00.005-04:00

I just wanted to take a second to address all the people who have been pestering me about why I haven’t been posting here recently. Of course, by “all the people” I am simply referring to Joel, who seems to be the only person who still doesn’t understand just what a lazy sack I am, and actually gets confused when I don’t post something here for more than two months. Setting aside for a moment the more general lazy-sack issue, the current dearth of posts here can be attributed to 3 things in my life right now. These are listed here in order of importance:

1) I have been very busy leading the human resistance against the totalitarian forces of the Combine. Often times I will wake up and think that I should do some blogging, but then I remember the giant tripod strider thingees that are running willy nilly through the streets, gunning down my friends like it’s going out of style. When I’m not around to be taking care of business, nothing seems to get done. Those tripods don’t just blow themselves up. So given a choice between giving Joel something to read about, and leading the human resistance against the transhuman forces of the Combine, Joel tends to lose out. Sorry Joel.

In all actuality I had planned on being done with this whole totalitarian alien invasion thing a long time ago but due to my pretty lame human uprising skills, it’s taking me a lot longer than I thought. As it turns out, one of the most important things that I've learned from playing Half Life 2 on my computer is that I am an amazingly slow and inefficient savior of mankind. To the Tome-of-Things-that-I-Always-Just-Assumed-That-I-Would-be-really-Good-at-even-Though-in-all-Actuallity-I-Turned-out-to-be-Really-Pretty-Crappy, I will now pencil in “leading a human uprising against totalitarian forces from another dimension.” Live and learn.

2) Also monopolizing time that would otherwise be spent putting things up here, is family business in Florida. I’ve learned that if I answer “family stuff” to most questions of why I have not done X, I can usually get off without going into details. So in the number 2 slot here I’m just going to cry family stuff.

3) And the final reason that I haven’t put anything up here on the blog is that I have been way too busy writing things to put up here on the blog. I know this might not make an amazing amount of sense to you, but it does to me. I have been working on a writing project that I hope to post here, but when I do put it up I want to be able to post regularly.

What that means is that I’m not going to put any of it up until I have it all pretty much finished. I still have about 50,000 or so words left to write, so it may be a while before it ever sees the light of day. I read that Michael Chabon tries to write 1,500 words a day. So if this was Michael Chabon’s blog you could hope to see new material in (50,000 words / 1,500 a day) less than 2 months. Personally, I tend to bang out somewhat fewer than 1,500 words a day. On average, without fail I try to get at least 7 to 13 words done every single day (excluding holidays, weekends, the first week of the month, and every other Thursday).

Luckily, what my words lack in quantity they more than make up in quality. I like to think that each of my words is roughly 147 times as good as each of the words a quantity whore like Chabon would write. Unfortunately though what this means is that it may take me a little more than the 2 months that it would take a hack like Chabon to finish this project. At my current writing rate, the math works out to something like 128.2 months before I get all the words I want. In the meantime though, I will try to get a short update post here or there just to let people know I still exist.

So to sum up, the bad news is that regular postings won’t come back for a little while. On the flip side though, the good news is that if you actually like reading the stuff here and wish that you could somehow read exciting new posts every single week, then 2018 is going to ROCK!

Greatest…Guidance Counselor…Ever

2008-05-05T10:40:00.008-04:00

The Jenna Jameson story is not a great success story. I mean, technically, it is a success story with the making of tons of money, and the rising to the apex of one’s field, and all the, well, “success” per se. But still it’s not a “great” success story. I mean, when a woman like Jenna Jameson or Tera Patrick comes from nowhere to create her own media empire you have to admire her determination, and business savvy, and all that stuff. But come on, “super hot chick does well in the porn biz,” I don’t know if that really screams achievement of epic grandeur.

Now Buck Angel on the other hand, that’s a story that impresses me. I came across Mr. Angel (no relation to Joanna Angel) in the pages of the Audacia Ray blog that I have been reading for a couple years now. I don’t know too much about who he is as a person, but based solely on his career path I can definitely tell you one thing. This is a man who has some pretty serious balls. And, of course, by that I mean he has no testicles.

Buck Angel, the burly bald man in the photo (who looks as though he could snap me like a twig if needed), is a female-to-male transsexual. As it happens, people without a Y chromosome who can kick my ass aren’t that uncommon. Somewhat less common though are people born genetically female who have found success in gay male porn.

I fully understand that some people might not be too hip on the very concept of porn. And there are even some people who might not be particularly pumped by transsexuals in general. But if you can momentarily put your own psycho-sexual-politico-moral leanings aside and look at what this man has achieved occupationally, you have to give him some props.

To say I’m a bald man and I’m going to make it in the porn world is one thing, but to say, oh by the way, I also don’t have a penis, well, that’s some moxie. And just how strong was the high school guidance counselor that got to work with this career choice?

"OK, you want to be a porn star, well, I don't know if that’s really the type of career I would recommend to a nice girl like you. But, I don’t know, I guess if you feel so strongly about it, I suppose we can work with that... Ohhhhh.. you say want to be a male porn star, hmmm, OK well...uh, that's going to be a little more difficult. Yep. I'm not sure about... Hmmm... Oh heck! If that's what you really want, and you can tell me that you want it hard enough, then what the hay! Sure, I would imagine there are going to be a lot of people who are going to tell you that you need a penis to be a male porn star, they’re going to try to bring you down. But I'm going to tell you that you have something far bigger than any penis I've ever seen. You have a dream! And no freak car accident can ever take that away from you."

As it happens, I’ve never actually seen Mr. Angel’s work. Nonetheless, I was always brought up to respect the dreamers among us so when I recognize him at the Adult Entertainment Expo I go to congratulate him on his success. For some reason though, I misremember his name. I address him as Mr. Adams, not Mr. Angel. If he is offended by this, or even notices it, he doesn’t let on.

I ask if he would mind if I grabbed a picture. With a hearty and infectious laugh, he lets me know “that’s what I’m here for.” We take the picture and I get a sense that this is a man who, at this very moment at least, is happy to be where he is, happy to be recognized for his work.

In what I would imagine was his ever so subtle way of correcting me for calling him Buck Adams, he simply says “let me give you one of my cards.” And with the business card also comes a broad smile, a smile that seems to say, honestly and unpretentiously, “it’s OK if you don’t get my name right, I appreciate the support anyway”.

Buck Angel, easily and without a doubt, one of the 7 nicest female-to-male transsexuals working in porn today.

Disgusting Philistines at this Year’s Adult Entertainment Expo

2008-04-08T15:57:00.023-04:00

So here I am at this year’s Adult Entertainment Expo, and let me tell you, I am learning quite a bit about the state of the American cultural landscape. The part of the Expo that I am exploring consists mainly of various booths for porn production companies. They come every year to show off their wares and they bring their Lucite heeled stars with them. Fans wait in lines that snake all the way up and down the convention floor. 10, 20 minutes they wait in line to get a fast autograph, to simply stand next to a woman they have lusted after from so far away. Hopefully she will smile at them for a couple seconds.

Unfortunately, what I see at the expo doesn’t leave me with a lot of pride for my gender. The problem really comes about when I make it to the far corner of the convention hall, specifically the booth for the Adam and Eve Production Company. When I get to Adam and Eve, the actress on display is a young woman by the name of Joanna Ange l. With her copious tattoos and multicolored hair she works in what has been dubbed as “alt porn.”

Now, by no means have I seen all of Ms. Angel’ works. Young Ripe Melons 8, Grand Theft Anal 10, Joanna Angel’s Guide 2 Humping, these are all films that I cannot pretend to know. Nonetheless, I do believe I have seen enough of what Ms. Angel does to be disgusted by what I find at her booth.

What I find at her booth, after having to wade through the trite mediocrity of the other booths, is an autograph line that consists of no more than four people. FOUR PEOPLE! This makes no sense whatsoever. As I’m sure you know, this woman of porn is clearly a national treasure and I cannot describe to you the disgust I feel when I only see 4 people in her autograph line.

Joanna’s Angels, the Charlies’ Angels themed porn that she did: Brilliant. Burning Angels, the Brooklyn based adult website she founded: Groundbreaking. This woman, raised orthodox within a Jewish household, has accomplished so much within this industry and yet the fans of AEE don’t seem to care. Everywhere I look I see these unbearably boring blonde bimbos, every one of them with staggeringly long lines and yet here, before an actual artist, there are no more than four people. Is this really what America has been reduced to, a country of tasteless philistines? For shame, porn fans of Vegas, for shame indeed.

I understand that possibly I should make some allowances for the subjective nature of such things. Maybe it’s even possible that I’m the one who is wrong here. Maybe it’s just a case of rooting for the home team since she’s Brooklyn based. Maybe I like to think that every night I’m not out successfully having copious amounts of random noncommittal sex can be offset by the work she is doing in New York. Somehow she’s working to balance the scales. Whatever the reason, she still seems so much cooler than the throngs of overly-siliconed fembots populating the other booths.

Initially I want to tell her what a disgusting shame it is that she has so few people in her line. I really am dismayed by the wretched taste everyone seems to have. I really want her to know that I feel for her, with the not being as popular as some of the lesser talents that I passed by. But eventually I wonder if this is really the kind of thing she wants to hear from a stranger.

Even if your intentions are in the right place maybe reminding someone about injustices they have no control over isn’t really the nicest thing to do. I mean if you’re a one armed Log Cabin Republican or something maybe you don’t really want some well meaning stranger coming by and rubbing it in with a “Hey sir, I just wanted to say how much it must suck to be a one armed, Log Cabin Republican, with the belonging to a political party that actively strives to prevent you from getting the same basic rights that other people have, and all that, and then when they do successfully pass a constitutional amendment preventing you from getting married you can’t even clap for it (being a one armed man and all), so I just figured you’d want me to tell you how much that all sucks. I feel for you bro!” So in the end I decide not to saddle her with my disappointment.

In all fairness I might just have caught her on a slow hour. And even so it isn’t like she is just sitting there by herself doing Sudoku. I just kind of feel like there is an unjust discrepancy in fan attention at the AEE. I decide that I’ll try to do my little part to make her feel properly fanned. Hers will be the only line I stand in to get a picture.

The kind of strange thing is that I feel this weirdly shy, celebrity intimidation thing as I’m standing in line. This is something I don’t entirely understand. A week earlier when Leonardo Dicaprio jumped into my poker game at the Bellagio I wasn’t uncomfortable at all (in fact I was so comfortable that I took middle set about $2000 farther than I should have against him).

So maybe my uneasiness is not so much a proximity-to-celebrity thing. Maybe it just has something to do with this weird social inversion where I am only just meeting someone long after I have already seen her hoo-ha.

I understand that when you’re in a stage fright situation it’s sometimes helpful to picture the intimidating people as sitting there without their clothes. In this particular case though, I imagine that is probably somewhat unhelpful, unconstructively redundant in fact.

Still I find the courage to overcome my shyness and when I make it through Ms. Angel’s short line she gives me a comforting smile. I tell her what a huge fan I am and, as I am wont to do in such situations, I give her a hearty handshake of gratitude. Much later I wonder if this was presumptuous of me to unilaterally take her hand. I just mean some people might find it kind of gross to be obligated to touch the unwashed masses. I bring this up to Christi, and she tries to explain that if you did have some sort of Howie Mandel OCD thing about being touched, then maybe the porn industry wouldn’t be your primary occupational focus. This makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, neither my celebrity shyness nor my hand grabbiness seems to bother Ms. Angel. I ask if she would mind if I took a picture and she says that for such a big fan it would be a pleasure. She hops off of her autograph signing chair and I snap the pic. It is at this point that I discover something that I really feel like I should have realized about her but never did.

Joanna Angel, as it turns out, is a tiny, tiny woman. I mean she’s like a mini-person. Like 2 feet tall or something.

Of course that’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t have any bearing on how super hot she is. For some reason though I’m always a little disoriented when a celebrity turns out to be significantly taller or shorter in real life than they are in my head. And in Ms. Angel’s case this forces me to rethink a lot of her work.

I’m not sure if they still use it or not, but there used to be an ad for the Rosewood Grille in Vegas that I would always see. If you really understand this ad, what it means and what it represents, you will probably understand pretty much everything you will ever need to know about Vegas.

The ad consists of a picture of a man in a tuxedo, presumably the well dressed maître d’ of the rosewood Grille. This well dressed man is holding up a lobster that is almost as large as he is. If you had to guess you would assume that the lobster must be 4 feet long and weigh 300 pounds. You walk away from this ad thinking, wow, if I wants me some big ass lobster, the Rosewood Grille must be the place to go!

Old friend Dave Avrick, self professed fat Jew criminal and esteemed professor of all things Vegas, was the first person who told me to look a little more closely at the man in the ad. When I did, I noticed something a little off about his fingers. Staring at those stubby fingers I eventually realized what Dave was referring to. That’s no maître d’ in the tux, that’s a midget! (Technically I don’t know if he is a dwarf or little person or even what the contemporary inoffensive phrase would be (bald footed hobbit?), but whatever it is he is it.)

The Rosewood Grille hired the tiniest person they could find that would look normal in a tuxedo so that the lobster would look monstrous by comparison. Of course there’s no explicit lying involved in this ad. It’s not like it’s a computer generated lobster or latex rubber maître d’. No, it’s not a lie necessarily; it’s just that special sort of Vegas magic that allows a man’s pituitary defect to be artfully exploited to create the illusion of a lobster feast for four.

Since the gentleman in the tux looked like the proud maître-d’ of the restaurant, and since steak houses are obviously, by their very nature, viciously size-ist, it was natural to assume that this was an average sized person and a grotesquely oversized lobster. However, once you realize that the gentle man in the tux is so small you have to reevaluate how frighteningly large the lobster is.

In a similar vein, while it was a little strange to realize that Joanna Angel was so petite, it did allow me to reevaluate some of the more frightening objects that seemed so very intimidatingly large in her movies. With this new understanding of who Joanna Angel is I may have to do an extensive restudying of her oeuvre.

It may turn out that, much like Vegas, everything you see in porn might not be exactly as it seems. Live and learn.

50 bucks into The Future...

2008-02-21T17:52:00.015-05:00

Everyone loves the future. Not that dinged and blemishy future that gets so used up that we call it the present, but the future future, the one with the potential. That’s why I was so excited about the Consumer Electronics Show. CES is supposed to be the greatest gadget show of them all. All the major companies come to show off whatever future-tech they’re working on. It’s the show that shows you the Bluetooth enabled, HDMI compatible toaster ovens of tomorrow, today.

I had always read about CES from afar, but now I just happened to be in Vegas, and it just happened to be CES time, so I thought I would stop by and actually see it in person. Of course technically, it’s not open to the general public. To get a badge you’re supposed to work in the tech industry and have something called “credentials” to prove such. Unfortunately, years within the poker industry have left me far less credentialed than they want me to be.

Luckily though, technology comes to my rescue. The third day into CES I go online to fire up CraigsList Las Vegas, and with no trouble at all I’m able to secure a slightly used badge that someone doesn’t need any more. (Digging a little deeper into the Craigslist world I find out that they actually offer much more than just badges on their site. I also easily find a pre-op transsexual who would be happy to rub pantyhose with me. As it so happens this is not on my list of things to do while in Vegas, but of course it’s always good to have options.)

I end up paying $50 for the used badge which means that all I have to do to justify the cost of the show is to see 50 bucks into the future. I don’t imagine this should be so difficult, but to be completely honest I’m initially a little disappointed. I don’t see so much that really makes an impression on me.

I see some battery powered scooter shoes, I see an MP3 player that break-dances to the music it plays, and I see a 150 inch hi def TV. But for me, the difference between a 150 inch TV and a 120 inch TV doesn't feel all that important. If it doesn't make eggs benedicts or shave my back it's pretty much just a big TV as far as I'm concerned.

However I do eventually discover one item that lets me see plenty far enough into the future. Walking about the floor without any real plan, I come upon a vendor of security cameras. The company sells cameras that stream onto the internet, can see in the dark, and that are WIFI enabled.

Their booth has some show cameras that are set up to look down on you from the roof. As I walk by I can see myself in one of the monitors, or more specifically I can see that spot on the upper back of my head that is incredibly difficult to see under normal conditions. You can’t see it in a mirror because by the time you’ve turned your head enough that it shows up, you’re not looking at the mirror anymore. However, if you happen to position a night vision, internet streaming, WIFI camera on the roof, and use it to look down on you as you walk by, then it’s actually pretty easy. You can look at that spot all you want.

I had always assumed my hair was thinning somewhat back there. This was something I only know because of the “doth protesting” that Christi did the one time I asked her about it. "You? Going bald back there? Oh sweet zombie Odin! WHooSH! Why would you...?! That is so funny…, how could you think...I mean holy mother... That is so crazy!! Really. Ha Ha. Oh my... that you would think... Oh my…"

Still I had never actually seen for myself that thinning spot on the upper back of my head. That is I had never seen it until now, standing there on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show, peering into that security monitor and seeing far more than the $50 into the future that I had wanted to see. There it was for me to stare at for as long as I wanted: the minor deforestation on the back of my head that would only grow worse with time.

So that was the great awe inspiring discovery that I made at this year’s CES. I'm old. With the benefit of technology I leaned that my body is, year by year, ever so slowly rotting into oblivion. I just thought I should take a minute to thank everyone who made that discovery possible. Thank you CES! Godbless you... and all the wonders of tomorrow.

Not Vagina Cookies

2008-02-08T03:21:00.023-05:00

This is something of a first. I actually have had posts done but just haven't been able to get them up for technical reasons. I spent the weekend reinstalling Windows and whatnot and if you're seeing this I must have fixed whatever needed fixing. Hopefully this means I'll actually be able to put up more than a post a month for a little while. So feel free to check back more than monthly (this month at least)

Anyway, for those of you who've asked about this year’s Christmas cookies, in the end I decided I wanted to commemorate something that had made an impression on me, a cultural milestone or turning point from 2007. Obviously, like all years, this one had plenty of memorable moments: Military surges, stem cell breakthroughs, viable nontraditional presidential candidates, and the like.

However, there was one addition to the cultural landscape that stood out in my book. While it wasn’t the most politically or technologically relevant event, it was something that really made me say “Wow, the times they are a’ changing.” It was the almost mainstream acceptance of vagina paparazzi.

Now obviously both celebrities and vaginas are nothing new. But I don’t remember exactly when it become politely acceptable to stick a camera up a celebrity’s skirt as she’s coming out of a car, take a picture of her bare womany parts, and then publish it for worldwide consumption.

If a celebrity wants to wear a miniskirt without underwear, and fly out of the limo crotch first flapping that thing in everyone’s face, she definitely has that right. I’m just saying that I can’t pretend to be so hip that at least some part of me doesn’t say “Hmmm, that’s um, that’s, uh… am I really supposed to be seeing that?” Of course, with the rate we’re going I would imagine this will all make me look like quite the mayor of Squaresville in a decade or two. But I have to admit that I am still impressed by how much young Hollywood va-jay-jay that I can Google these days.

Of course, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me. I am neither anti-vagina nor anti-celebrity. I always have and always will find both celebrities and girl bits to be a source of bewildering fascination, individually and together. Nonetheless, I still want to say that I have always liked underwear as well. I would hate to see celebrities eventually force panties and boxers to one day go the way of the monocle and top hat.

So this year I decided to use the underutilized medium of Christmas dough in the hopes of reaching the kids of today and letting them know that, regardless of what Britney Spears might try to tell them, underwear is still cool! And that’s why I chose to celebrate underwear as my cookie theme this year (that and the realization that if I made actual vagina shaped cookies for Christmas I might not get invited back next year.)

As you can see, I mostly went with the cotton brief as the most easily recognizable underwear icon. But I also made a longer striped boxer for all the celebrities who seem to be spending so much time in the slammer these days.

Of course the one group of celebrities this year that chose to proudly wear undergarments, and then some, were the crazy love struck astronauts. Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak drove extra covered in her long haul adult incontinence wear. So the Astro-Pampers cookie is to commend astronauts in general for bucking the commando trend with such hell bent enthusiasm.

The red dotty square was just my attempt to shoehorn some Aqua Dots into this year’s batch of cookies. The idea of a children’s toy that put a date rape drug into shinny, candy colored dots, and that was shipped over here from China, had a lot going for it in my search for the most “Wow!” story of the year. But in the end it just got an honorary mention in the form of my failed attempt to make AquaDot based underwear.

In the end you might be asking, did the project on a whole work? Were the cookies well received? Well, as the photo of Christi’s nephew Cam clearly shows, I think underwear, or at the very least underwear based cookies are once again cool with the kids. While they might not have been Tamiflu cool, they were enjoyed nonetheless.

And to prove that you can like underwear and still be a complete badass I’m throwing in this picture of Cam from the Dallas World Aquarium. As his fist full of death clearly shows, Cam is not someone to be trifled with lightly. (I’m not quite sure what mid 90s, spare change massacre prompted this sign, but it did force me to look at the nickel in a whole new light.)

Bonus Cookie:
While I was relatively satisfied with the choice of pro-underwear cookies this year, I did have a back up cookie just in case. The other milestone of note that I felt deserved cookiezation came from TV. 2007 saw 13 seconds of TV that we had waited over 7 years for and that we were still talking about months after it aired. It might seem old hat now, like underwear, but still I have no problem giving cookie props to the final episode of the Sopranos. Personally I can't remember when a blank screen has sparked so much emotion and discussion. So here it is the official Last-13-Seconds-of-the-Last-Episode-of-the-Sopranos Commemorative Cookie (with onion ring cookies).

Jorge and I

2008-01-05T16:10:00.004-05:00

He’s got that raspy casino cough that is almost impossible to avoid if you’re unaccustomed to arid smoke filled Vegas. So he doesn’t sound exactly like Hurley. He looks like Jorge Garcia, but not exactly like the guy you see on TV. I don’t know whether that has to do with the makeup and lighting of TV, or if it has to do with the fact that I’m an idiot and can’t tell the difference between two entirely different people. When I first saw this gentleman walking around the poker room of the Bellagio I thought, wow he’s a dead ringer for Hurly, a character from TV favorite of mine, Lost. I imagine he must get that a lot.

I love Lost. It’s one of those great ensemble pieces where the entire cast is made up of fascinating people. It would be unpleasant to try and single out only one favorite character (that is if you pulled Ben, the empirically best character in the show, out of the equation). Still, if you had to pick the one character that you would feel most comfortable hanging out with, hands down it would be the burly and beloved everyman of the cast, Hurley, as created by the actor Jorge Garcia. So when this person who could be Jorge Garcia joins the table I am at, I can’t help but think it would be kind of neat to play poker with him.

However, since it is New Year’s Eve, I figure that he is not Jorge Garcia but rather someone who simply looks like Jorge Garcia. My logic comes from holding celebrities to a higher standard than I hold myself. While I might have nothing better to do than hang out and play cards on New Year’s Eve, a celebrity of Mr. Garcia’s stature would not enjoy anything so normal.

This makes perfect sense right up to the point that they fill the other two empty seats at my table. Three to my right is Lukas Haas, and directly beside me is a kid with scruffy stubble, a baseball cap, and a cigarette dangling from his mouth that I eventually recognize as Leonardo DiCaprio. I decide to reevaluate this New Year’s Eve logic.

I go to Matt the young floor person for the game I’m in and I ask him what initials the Jorge-Garciaesque player clocked into the game with. Matt says “JB,” which is not the “JG” of Jorge Garcia. Still, in a noisy casino, unless you see it written down, “JB” and “JG” are for all intents and purposes, the same things. Since this doesn’t help, I flat out ask Matt whether JB is Hurley.

Matt thinks this is funny because he wondered the same thing, but he thought it might be obnoxious to ask. In the end though he said it isn’t Jorge Garcia. He doesn’t explain how he came to that conclusion but he seems comfortable with it.

I go back to my table but I’m still up in the air. The simple, sane-person solution is to say “So, umm, are you Hurley?” But unfortunately that isn’t an option.

The day before, I was playing with someone that I remember from Vegas in July, a Ken or Kent someone or another. He was an ex-sports figure, basketball I believe, though with my vacuum of knowledge on all things sport I still have no idea who he is. Nonetheless, he was great fun to have at the table and we got along, so he remembered me when I saw him this time. As we were talking at the table, one of the players next to us jumped in with “You know, I’d really hate to be that guy, I mean I’m not really that guy, I don’t want to bother you, I’d hate to make you think I was that guy … but do you play basketball?”

I wouldn’t say this upset Kent, but he definitely wasn’t going to let this guy get off thinking he was not the type of guy who interrupts famous people to make sure they’re famous.

“Do I look like I play basketball? Look at me, I’m 44 years old! How many 44 year olds you know who can run a court an hour straight? And what are you trying to say anyway. You saying I’m not big enough to be a football player, is that it?! I’m going to tell you something about those football players, they ain’t so big in real, if you catch my drift.”

The “I-Don’t-Want-To-Be-That-Guy” guy meekly accepted this and didn’t pursue the issue.

This is the exchange that comes to my mind when I am sitting with JB. Now obviously, like you, I’m not “That Guy”. I’m way too cool let myself do anything that might make me look like “That Guy” (even though I know with every cell of my body that I’m so totally “That Guy”). So I decide to not actually ask JB who he is. I figure I am way smart enough to slap a read on him. I’ll just play junior detective and figure it out for myself.

Eventually DiCaprio and Haas take off to bang supermodels 4 deep or run covert Afghan missions or whatever the hell I imagine you do to ring in the New Year if you’re Leonardo DiCaprio. At this point someone asks JB if he knows DiCaprio. Now, if the guy asking the question also thinks JB is a TV star then this is a logical enough question to ask. Since I went to the University of Michigan (go blue), it is natural for people to assume that I should know every other person who has ever gone to U of M, ever, at any point in the history of the school. In the same way, every person who lives in Famous Land should know every other person who lives there.

What JB says is something like, oh those guys are way bigger than me. And I figured that settles it. This was the type of question that would be asked of a celebrity, and that was the type of answer a modest TV actor might give. So Matt the floor man was wrong. This is Jorge Garcia. I would feel perfectly comfortable with trying to get Christi to think I was cool for hanging with Hurly.

So there I am hanging with Jorge Garcia playing poker until the wee hours of the morning. And obviously I have a million Lost questions I would love to grill him with: how hot and/or bugshit crazy is Michele Rodriguez in real life, why didn’t Adebisi wear his little hat when he was on the Island, etc, etc. But I don’t want to bother him.

This is possibly strange since bothering people with excessive questions is not something I’m normally averse to. The only sport I ever really liked watching as a child was the gloriously surreal shuffle board on ice sport of Curling. Playing at the Mirage once, many years ago, I ran into the only professional curler I have ever met. I had no qualms whatsoever about grilling him ceaselessly on the minutia of his life as a curler, team rivalries, the groupies and whatnot. I would imagine being at the center of a major worldwide pop culture phenomenon, as Jorge is, would be as interesting to hear about as being a curler.

Still, for whatever reason, I think it would be unseemly to acknowledge Jorge’s fame and pester him with my questions on celebrity and acting. In the end I imagine he probably just wants to be one of the guys hanging out and playing poker. So I don’t bother him and we just play cards.

The next afternoon, after a couple hours of sleep, I’m back at the Bellagio. I see JB, and in the course of exchanging small talk he says something about Vegas not being like Florida or New York. It occurs to me he must actually have been listening to me the night before when I was talking about living in NY and Florida. And that’s when something weird and possibly annoying happens. I feel really flattered. For some reason I’m actually impressed that someone remembers me after sitting with me for hours and hours.

The obvious problem is that if JB was not a celebrity, I can’t say that I would be “flattered” to be remembered. And I have to imagine this makes me superficial. Even if I’m the only one to find out, I’ve just been outed as “That Guy.” And this is all really embarrassing.

In my defense I did enjoy having JB at the table. He was pleasant and well humored. He took his bad beats gracefully and while he’s obviously a competent player not giving anything up, he isn’t one of those guys that is going to jam a screwdriver into your neck every time you turn your head. So that’s good.

I’m comfortable in my belief that I would find him genuinely likable independent of any possible celebrity or lack thereof. So this allows me to feel a tiny bit less superficial.

And then, we get to talking a little more. It comes up that he was actually a prop player (a house player at a poker club) all through law school, which I find really interesting. He acknowledges that propping was pretty tough work, but of course that’s all behind him now that he’s “living the Dream” as he describes it.

Since I don’t know anything about his life outside of his acting I find it fascinating that he was both a prop player and went to law school. So, the next morning I get up and do a little Google-stalking to read more about it. I look at his Wikipedia entry but for some reason it doesn’t say anything about going to law school or ever playing as a prop. Could there really be that large a hole in his online biography. Is this not an age of zero privacy for celebrities.

Wikipedia does talk of Jorge Garcia playing poker on a celebrity show, so he does play poker, but there isn’t anything about law school. I check a couple other sites and read about Jorge Garcia once working in a book store, and how it was a small part in Curb Your Enthusiasm that got him an audition for Lost, and how he had to miss his sister’s wedding due to filming, but nothing about law school.

This freaks me out more than a little bit. I really start to second guess myself. It was a natural assumption to think that when he mentioned that he was “living the Dream” he was describing what it’s like for an actor to land a show like Lost. However, I would imagine that after playing 4-8 limit as a San Diego prop, a lot of people might consider it “living the Dream” to be playing $10-20 No Limit at the Bellagio with Leonardo DiCaprio (and obviously Mike May). It occurs to me that maybe JB isn’t Jorge Garcia after all. Maybe I’ve just been enjoying time with some regular old normal person. For some reason I feel a slightly cheated.

So now I’m really confused and have to reanalyze everything I remember him saying. I remember him saying something about how humid Florida was before I said anything about my living there. If it is Jorge then why would he use Florida as an example of stifling humidity instead of Hawaii where he lives and works? I mean I assume it has to be humid in the rain forests that they film in. Maybe it’s not humid in Hawaii after all. What the hell do I know about Hawaii?

I check out Jorge’s blog and find a picture that he posted a week or two ago. It looks like JB, but he’s got sideburns in the picture that he doesn’t have at the Bellagio. Did he just clean himself up a little bit knowing that he would be in a swanky casino? I have no idea.

I’m becoming honestly concerned about whom it is that I actually like, JB or Jorge Garcia? I thought Jorge’s blog was fun and attributed it to JB. But if JB is not Jorge, isn’t that kind of a bonejob for Jorge? Grand theft literary respect?

And the more I obsess about it the more I keep coming back to a different Jorge: Jorge Luis Borges or more specifically his classic micro story of identity, Borges and I. It’s a little autobiographical one pager about being Borges, an actual guy who likes hourglasses and maps and the taste of coffee, but also having this other Borges who likes the same things but is not him. The other Borges is the one who everyone knows from Borges’ works. I, Mike May, can never know the first Borges. He died in the 80’s. However, I can find out anything I could possibly want about the second Borges, the one that is filtered through his writings and the interactions he’s left upon the world, the one whose stories I have read.

In a loosely similar way, there’s JB and then there’s Jorge Garcia. JB is an actual guy I met playing poker on New Year’s Eve, while Jorge Garcia is the actor who plays a beloved character on TV and who occasionally writes a blog and who, as I learned on his Wikipedia page, used to do stand up. Even if JB actually is Jorge Garcia, they are not the same person.

And the fact that JB could be some random John Bowden, an entirely third person, illustrates this idea as well as anything from my Intro to Philosophical Literature class. With no disrespect meant to him, I actually wouldn’t be flattered that John Bowden remembered me from the day before. I’m not in any way saying I didn’t have fun and enjoy hanging out with him at the table, because I did. I’m just saying that the irrational superficial part, where I was honestly flattered that an actor whose work I have enjoyed so much actually knew that I existed, that part came from the nebulous, public Jorge Garcia that I had draped over JB like a cape, whether it was justified or not.

Eventually this all leads to a fairly annoying realization. It occurs to me that I have to avoid JB if I go back to the Bellagio. I really don’t want to find out whether he is Jorge Garcia or not. To think I sat at the same table with someone as distinctive as Jorge Garcia for two days and still wasn’t 100% sure that it was him would make me feel amazingly stupid. And to find out that I had spent two days with John Bowden and actually thought he was Jorge Garcia is going to make me feel even stupider. It’s Kobayashi Maru. The only chance I have to win this is to never find out who he is, to let him always stay as he is now, existing simultaneously as both a particle and a wave.

Needing to bounce all this off someone who can give me a little outside perspective, I give Christi a ring. I ask her if she thinks this whole obsession makes me “That Guy” and whether this would be an interesting post even if JB turned out not to be Jorge Garcia. Her response is wonderfully Christi, in that it is concise and puts it all perfectly into context. After I explain everything and ask what she thinks, she pauses for a second and then simply says “Uhmm… you’re really creeping me out.”

OFFICIAL UPDATE:

So I originally posted this story on Saturday, January 5^th, 2008. On Monday, January 7^th, 2 days later, I see my first reply in the comments section:

“Yup. You're right it wasn't me. However I did spend the New Year playing cards. It was in Kauai with my uncle and cousins.” Signed Jorge Garcia and coming from the account of Jorges’ blog.

Hmmm.

O.K., in relation to this new information I would just like to make 3 comments.

1) I fully understand that celebrities are much more powerful and well informed than regular people, but still… On a good day, it would take my own father maybe a month or two to find out that I have a new post up. And even if someone held a gun to my head, I don’t know that my mother would be able to Google her way to this blog. So the fact that Mr. Garcia found this post in less than 3 days impressed me more than a little.

While this is not necessarily scary, it is illuminating. So much for being able to slander a celebrity in the privacy of my own blog without them finding out. I assume that I can still write nasty text messages about celebrities (granted they aren’t scientologists), but who knows.

Shortly after receiving Mr. Garcia’s comment, I went to his blog and apologized profusely for my daftness in misrecognizing him. I’m assuming that there shouldn’t be any lawsuits pending.

2) Naturally I would love if people thought that I was not actually stupid, and that instead I simply realized that misrecognizing this poor slob would give me the chance to cram money, celebrity, and existential philosophy into what should have been a boring holiday post, but unfortunately that isn’t actually the case. I actually am just dumb.

and 3) Regardless of who JB actually is, I would like to point out that Borges still comes out of all this as relevant as ever. So, for all of the quantitative types out there who like to keep count of such things, the current score is Borges: 1, Mike May: 0

Scabbing for Cookies

2007-11-14T01:02:00.001-05:00

I have always believed that if you are one of the truly lucky ones, there will come a time in your life where you discover that which you were meant to do, that which you do so much better than all others. There occasionally comes that sublimely rare moment when a Tiger Woods picks up a golf club, a Michael Jordan picks up a basketball, or a Brian Lamb picks up a Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. So you can imagine my happy excitement when I felt that I too had discovered that which I was meant to do.

As the lag between posts on this blog clearly proves, if there is any task that I feel that I can truly throw my back into, and do as well as almost anyone on this planet, it is the act of not writing. So when I first heard of a so called “writers strike” I honestly thought that my time had come. It suddenly occurred to me that there are few things for which I have so much innate flair for as I do for “not-writing.” And now I was being told that my secret talents could be put to the greater good. My not-writing would become a devastating tactical Strike upon our corporate overlords. I figured I would not-write my ass off, nonstop, day and night, until corporate America could no longer stand the weight of my boot upon its throat.

And there I was this week, quite satisfied with how aggressively I’ve been tea-bagging "The Man" these past few months, when Christi unfortunately broke the bad news to me. What she tells me is that I don’t actually belong to the WGA.

Hmmm. Apparently, as she explains it, there is actually a guild of some sort that writers join. For whatever reason, I imagine perhaps a screw-up with the postal service or a problem with my cell phone, I never actually got an invitation to this clique. Christi also goes on to point out that, in my case, a doubling of my DVD residuals will not actually come out to all that much. So much for “being of use.”

On the bright side, what that means is that I am free to write again and just in time since I’ve decided to try using this space for something I usually abhor, two way communications.

I read somewhere that one of the strategies for growing a blog’s readership is to actively court and respond to reader’s comments. Now, I realize that this might make sense for a less narcissistic writer. However, what originally attracted me to this whole idea of keeping a blog in the first place wasn’t the new media ability to have actual interaction with a readership. Rather it was just the idea of being able to blah, blah, blah about myself in a public forum, for free, and without necessarily having to be interesting.

Why then did I enable the anonymous comments feature on this blog? Well, in all honesty I actually enjoy reading and erasing spam comments. It’s been interesting to watch them evolve in sophistication. Just yesterday I got a spam comment that actually found the phrase “Take me to the river” from an earlier post of mine and cut out a Wikipedia entry on Al Green that had the same phrase, and then posted the entry into my comments section, with their web address at the bottom and a link to "sportsbook" thrown in randomly. I was so impressed I actually left it up for the time being if you want to see the latest in spam-tech.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am exaggerating somewhat. I do enjoy getting nonspam comments as well. I’m just not a big fan of interacting with other people when I can avoid it. Getting comments is kind of like getting phone messages and emails, in that people sometimes expect you to return the interaction. While this is by no means unreasonable, it is annoying nonetheless.

And also, more often than not, what happens when people make a comment is that for some reason it suddenly becomes about them. It’s all: “I think that you’re brilliant Mike” and “I can sense the powerful virility of your loins” the stuff that they think and that they feel. By no means did I start this blog so that other people could talk about themselves.

(Now obviously I know that you have interesting things to say and if it was just you, I would have plenty of time to respond to and consider anything you might have to say. But you and I know very well that not everyone has as many well thought out things to say as you do. Once again, as it has so often been the case in your life, other people are ruining it for you.)

Nonetheless, putting my aversion to social interaction aside for a moment, I am actually requesting help in the form of your comments and suggestions if you have any. I am hopeful that one of the more creative amongst the half dozens of people who read this blog might be able to help me come up with ideas for Christmas cookies.

For quite a few years Christi’s family in Dallas has invited Christi and I to share Christmas with them. Traditionally, Traci, Christi’s Uber-Mom sister in law, bakes up Christmas cookies that we all get to decorate. Naturally there are only so many times you can decorate a tiny fir tree or a rotund old guy in a red suit and still have it be interesting. So over the years we have tried to expand the design possibilities at least a tiny bit.

The first year was really primitive. Maybe an occasionally angry snowman or some peapods (Christi loves English peas).

The second year was still sloppy but at least I tried to work more within a theme, counterfeiting holiday money.

Two years ago at the height of bird flu mania I figured the best thing I could get for Christi’s nephews and niece would be some fine Tamiflu antiviral cookies.

And then last year I decided to honor various members of the Bush administration who are no longer with us. (Due to my almost photo realistic craftsmanship, who the cookies represent should be obvious. Nonetheless, I’ll label them at the end of this post just in case you have trouble figuring out who is who.)

And then this year I figured I’d try something different. I decided I would open up the floor to see if anyone out there had any thoughts. So, if you’ve always had a remarkable concept for a holiday cookie that you desperately want someone else to steal and pass off as their own, now’s your chance.

Of course, there are a number of things that I’m looking for in a design. Naturally we’re looking for topical originality. But I also need simplicity in execution. If you have a brilliant idea but it would involve me having to recreate Picasso’s Guernica, in icing, on a dozen cookies, that is probably going to be more annoying than it’s worth.

While it doesn’t have to be directly holiday related, at the very least it has to be age appropriate. If appreciation of your idea is going to involve me having to try and explain to a nine year old what exactly balloon fetishes are, or Picasso’s Guernica for that matter, I’m going to have to pass.

And finally, you will get bonus points if you can work within the confines of standard cookie cutter shapes, triangular trees, stars, reindeer and whatnot. This is not a prerequisite, but if it saves me the trouble of carving custom shapes in the dough and therefore plays to my laziness it will be appreciated.

So far, I think the Tamiflu cookies were the best received. It was a simple design that didn’t take much explaining and seemed like fun to eat. (I understand that the color of the capsule is wrong but I had supply problems. I think Camille hogged up all the yellow to make stars or something like that. Through the pain of experience I’ve learned that sometimes fighting an 8 year old over frosting is more trouble than it’s worth.)

The Bush cabinet cookies were not shunned, but they weren't gobbled up with the same enthusiasm as the Tamiflu cookies. As it turned out no one seemed quite as excited to eat an almond iced John Bolton cookie as I had hoped, except for Bella of course, their angelic if somewhat slobbery 900 pound Mastiff, who jumped up on the table and ate the entire administration when no one was looking.

And now, this year, I'm putting it in your hands. So if anyone has any topical and easily reproduced design ideas, I would love to hear them. Of course, if your design is chosen you will not be mailed any finished cookies, and in fact you won’t really get much of anything out of it except the satisfaction that I feel when my life is made easier. However, if the dog doesn’t get to them first I’ll post a picture up here and the kids will of course thank you. And by thanking you I actually mean me, since they don’t really know you very well.

(In case you needed help with the Bush cabinet cookies, moving counter clockwise from the upper right hand corner you quite obviously have cookies to commemorate ex-US Representative to the U.N. John Bolton, ex-White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, ex-Secretary of Defense Donald “Rummy” Rumsfield, ex-director of FEMA Michael “Brownie” Brown, and of course ex –Secretary of State Colin "The Colon" Powell.)

Pride and Product Placement

2007-10-12T02:12:00.001-04:00

All right, I do feel bad about not putting more up in this space. But the bottom line is that the stuff I’m doing down in Florida is just too powerfully exciting to post about here. I suppose I could make frequent updates on my day to day life in SoFlo, but if I did I would have to make this a pay site. There’s no way around it, my life has become just that exciting.

So to keep this a free site, Christi has suggested that I pull material from the vault and write about some of the things I do when I’m able to sneak away from Florida, things like showing her some of the gayer parts of NYC.

Now, contrary to anything Christi might tell you, I’m not actually gay. Nonetheless, I’m not above occasionally indulging in intrinsically gay activities, such as going to parades, or even uber-gay activities such as the New York Pride Parade.

I remember what it was like when I first moved to NY. From my loft in Chelsea I could hear the commotion marching down 5^th Ave. Being somewhat parade-curious, I checked it out and wow, let me tell you, that was some Gay. Growing up in southern Michigan you don’t see so many floats dedicated to post-op transsexual Asian volleyball teams.

Since moving out of Chelsea a number of years ago I haven’t had an excuse to catch the parade. So when I just happened to be back in NY with Christi a few months ago, and she expressed an interest in experiencing the gayness herself, I was happy to oblige. And wow, let me tell you, the times they are a changin’.

Don’t get me wrong, there was still plenty of gay. You still had your Gay Lawyers for Buddha and whatnot. But what you also had this year, which I don’t remember 10 years ago, were the corporate floats. Verizon, Delta, Macy’s, among others, all had gay floats. I guess I always had my suspicions that Starbucks was at the very least "bi," but who knew that there was something intrinsically gay about Gotham Lasik or JP Morgan Chase.

I’m not quite sure when this corporate influx came about, but I have to admire the balls of the first Macy’s suit who had to make this presentation:

“All right, hear me out on this on. There is this group of really large and excessively hairy men who refer to themselves as 'bears.' Now what makes these guys interesting is that they love to have sex with other large and excessively hirsute men. I imagine it’s predominately sodomy, but probably not exclusively so. You’d also have your oral pleasures, your manual stimulations, nonpenetration assplay and whatnot. Anyway, the thing is that once a year they get almost naked, maybe they’ll have on some leather chaps, denim short-shorts (I don’t know, it’s summer and it’s hot out) and what they do is they drive a float covered in frilly crepe paper down fifth avenue in celebration of their sweaty man-love. Now, as the head of corporate branding for Macy’s, I don’t imagine I have to tell you where I’m going with this one: We NEED to be behind that float! If that’s not what Macy’s is all about, then I don’t know Macy’s.”

Naturally, on the one hand I’m proud to think that our country has come this far. Less than twenty years ago, most any image of one boy liking another boy (in that way) would have sent corporate America running for the hills, shrieking like a little school girl. So, obviously I applaud the courage of the companies willing to show their support for the gay community.

However, it is a little strange to see. And I can’t help but wonder if this changes the focus of the Pride March. It’s just that when something becomes so commercialized there is always the fear of it losing its original vision. In a year where even the Republicans are embracing their wide stances, I would hate to imagine people forgetting the true meaning of Gay Pride Day: the hot, anonymous gay sex.

I would think there was copious man on man, and lesbian, sex happening somewhere in the city that weekend. But what I saw at that parade, more than anything, were people shilling. On both sides of the parade barrier there were legions of day temps who handed out free samples of the newest gums or moisturizers, or whatever needed to be marketed to New Yorkers that weekend.

There was a very young family next to Christi and me that seemed to be making out like bandits. I’m not sure their exact heritage but they cheered quite enthusiastically when the “Venezuela Gay United” float went by, so I’m going to make them South American. Anyway, they were happily collecting parade swag by the fistful. They had a shopping bag filled with free samples of breath mints, beauty products, and the like. Every so often their two year old would reach into the bag and pull something out. And being two, he couldn’t really tell the difference between the Trident White Cinnamon Tingle and the only slightly differently packaged Astroglide Personal Warming Lubricant. It’s amazing the things you’ll chew on when you can’t read.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to watch the foreign tourists who were obviously just walking by and didn’t know quite what to make of all this. Two older Japanese women politely “ooh”ed and “aaww”ed with wide eyed delight whenever one of the more ornately adorned drag queens would sashay by. I watched them as one of the sample distributers handed them a wooden paint stirrer from the Pleasure Chest. It had “SPANK SOMEONE HAPPY” printed on it and it could be used as a 20% off coupon for “any single impact implement” from the store.

The exact meaning of all this was a little confusing to the women at first. With puzzled looks, they conferred in Japanese, until one of them finally figured it out. She bent over, ever so slightly, and used the small wooden paddle to tap herself on the behind. “Ohhhhh! Hai,” the other one said, and nodded enthusiastically. To signify that she understood, she herself bent over and let her friend tap her behind, softly the first time but with an audible CRACK the second time. This took then both by surprise, and they almost fell to the ground giggling.

So, come to think of it, I suppose my fears about the integrity of the Pride March might have been a little unfounded. If, as it turns out, a little push from the commercial sector is what it takes to get two Japanese women to share their first lesbian SM experience, so be it.

And once again, from the largess of corporate generosity comes cultural understanding. God bless America.

PS Of course the one product that Christi and I were both surprised to find absent at the parade was this:

PPS I don't ever do this but, powerful poker personality Barry said I had to put a picture of him in my next post “Listen here, my man, I don't care what the subject is! You sneak me in there.” And my friend Terence said that if Barry got in then he had to be with him. So, by request, that's Barry and Terence up there (the non-bear looking guys). Happy pride to both of you.

Days of Shame and Disappointment: Michael Bay’s Existential Relevance to This Year’s World Series of Poker

2007-07-10T20:09:00.001-04:00

In a very general sense I’m somewhat happy with myself. I could definitely be doing much better in many different ways, but overall I’m able to sleep at night. Nonetheless, I’m not a man of great “accomplishments.” I have never swam the English Channel or founded a culture changing website.

However, there are two small things I have done. I do not talk about them much, but I have taken personal pride in them over the years. What I'm proud of is that I have never once been knocked out of the World Series of Poker on the first day, nor have I ever seen a Michael Bay film. At least that’s how it used to be.

This year, for the first time in the 7 years that I have been playing the world championship, I did not make it to day two. I won’t bore you with the specifics of the hand I went out on. I will just say that it was one hour before the end of the first day. I had 15 outs twice and if I were a better tournament player I would have hit one of them. I would have won the hand and ended the day with well over two times the average stack. But that didn’t happen. I could use one of those “I was trying to win the tournament and not just survive it” rationalizations, but I think that’s a cop out. I had just been moved to a new table and I didn’t have nearly enough information on my opponent to make the play I did. It wasn’t a horrible tournament play but it was a little sloppy and unnecessarily risky. To win an event of this size there’s not much room for sloppy play. You have to be, as I once heard it described, shit-house lucky (a term, the origin of which I do not know but that I understand nonetheless) or you have to be flawless in your play. I was neither.

As I’ve described before, getting knocked out of the WSOP is a particularly unpleasant moment for a poker player. And this year for me, going out on the first day, was the worst in a while.

And on top of that, I found out that sometimes when you’re not happy with yourself you’re not so concerned about taking care of yourself. “Screw it!” you think. Who cares. Sure, you promised your son you wouldn’t drink this weekend, but since you already had one beer (it would have been rude not to) another one isn’t going to change anything. And yeah, now you’re drunk. You hate yourself so much for lying to your son, the only person who’s ever believed you, that you’re just plain numb by the time you use that stolen Unicef money to pay for the tranny hooker. Naturally, one thing leads to another, and before too long you think “yeah I always did want to kill a hobo” and that’s when bad things start to happen.

So that’s the state of mind I was in waking up this morning. That’s the place I was at that allowed me to say “Ehh, maybe I’ll catch a matinee of Transformers.”

Now, just for the record, I have nothing against the film director Michael Bay. There’s no logical justification for taking pride in never having seen one of his movies. It’s just that, in the most insignificant of ways, it made me feel like I was beating the system. The Michael Bay film represents something fairly powerful. It isn’t even the movies themselves so much as the brute force marketing of them. When a new Michael Bay film is about to come out, I want to see it. Saturated by the trailers, and posters, and the articles that show up in the Sunday Times, I start to feel the illicit pull of the siren’s call.

I just naturally assumed I would have to see Pearl Harbor, one of the most expensive movies ever made, or something or another to that effect. It was supposed to be Titanic but with even more things blowing up. The Island: Ewen McGregor, high concept sci-fi, how wrong could that be. But with each movie I resisted those first weekend screenings. I was able to put off seeing it just long enough for the reviews to come out. The reviews offered an immunization of sorts. And after that opening weekend the TV commercials died down a little, and room was made for the next weekend’s premier, and for some reason seeing Pearl Harbor no longer seemed so utterly imperative. For whatever reason, this made me feel as though I had accomplished something.

Transformers though, I knew Transformers was going to be tough to beat. The Transformers cartoon was not an integral part of my childhood, but it is something I remember. I’m in no way ashamed to say that, as a young boy, I enjoyed seeing giant robots beating each other up. Obviously, the giant robot stuff coming out of Japan, Macross/Robotech and the like, was far more advanced than the half hour toy commercials we got here in America. But I remember watching the Transformers cartoons nonetheless. And, sure, it was cool to see cartoons of robots slamming into each other, but there was always that nagging fantasy of what it would be like in real life. At nine you realized that that would be the ultimate in cool, actual 30 foot robots, actually punching each other in the face, and blowing things up with laser cannons. And of course that is just what Michael Bay spent over a hundred million dollars to taunt me with.

Naturally, it was a silly point of pride, never having seen a Michael Bay film. But nonetheless it did make me feel good that I wasn’t going to let the studio’s marketeers tell me what movies to watch. As I said though, I was not in a very good place this morning. Hence the matinee.

Walking over to the Palms’ theater, I feel dirty. Through the trailers, through the opening credits, I sit alone in the theater saddled with a sense of personal failure. But then the movie starts, and I watch an unidentified army helicopter being escorted by jet fighters to a Middle Eastern military base. Once there, the copter starts to whirl and shift and transform itself into an evil robot, and it starts to rain down unholy robot vengeance upon the puny humans and their primitive military technology. It is a short sequence, but it is about as cool I would have imagined unholy robot vengeance would be. I start to think that I’ve unfairly misjudged this Michael Bay guy.

But then we cut away from the giant robot blowing things up. We cut away to people talking; and that’s where things start to fall apart. Within a couple minutes of this I begin to wonder why we can’t just have the robots blowing things up without all the jibber-jabber cluttering it up. For almost two hours people keep talking to each other. Some kid buys a car and bags a girlfriend far hotter than he should, and the African American kid cracks an alien super code with about 15 keystrokes on his home computer, and because he’s overweight he eats a whole plate of doughnuts, and other stuff happens, and hopefully John Turturro gets a really big paycheck.

Eventually however, as though Mr. Bay had read my mind, the entire last half hour happily tosses all the jibber-jabber aside. The evil robots attack the good robots and mere anarchy ensues.

There is a sequence where the evil jet-robot flies through a squadron of human jets and tears them apart, jumping from one to the next, transforming between robot and jet as it does. But besides that, there unfortunately isn’t very much carnage of a really creatively holy gee-whiz sort. And sometimes it’s a little tough to tell one giant robot from the next. The hard to follow blur of “real life” robot action occasionally makes me long for the more stylized Japanese cartoon action.

I think one of the good robots got killed but I’m not entirely sure. It just got ripped in two and being a robot I would think that might be more or less fixable. Of course, if I was following the action correctly I think that the robot who died was the “urban” robot that liked to breakdance and talk in that rapping grandma sort of way that white people sometimes write black dialog. So I may not actually be too upset if that robot doesn’t show up for the inevitable sequel.

And then a bunch more things get blown up, and a plane flies through an office building, and eventually the kid from the first Project Greenlight movie shoves a box into one robot’s chest, and I guess that’s as good a reason as any to end the movie.

In all honesty, I have obviously seen worse movies (Silent Rage still exists). Taken as a popcorn blockbuster for the kids, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Transformers. If this was some little Korean film that I had discovered at the video store, I would have thought, wow, it’s a little flawed but it definitely has it’s fun moments.

So part of me is perfectly happy to ignore the stupid and say “Ehh, it could have been worse.” And when I first went to bed after getting knocked out of this year’s WSOP, that’s pretty much how I felt about the last hand I played. Ehh, it could have been worse.

But when I woke up the next morning and really did the analysis, I was struck with a far more burdensome realization. Obviously, the painful part is not that it could have been worse, it’s that it could have been better, it should have been better.

And I suppose that’s the fundamental existential question that seeing Transformers throws in my face. If you make a hundred and fifty million dollar action film, are you trying to make something as good as James Cameron’s Aliens or are you just trying to make something that is not as bad Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla.

If I had never seen James Cameron’s Aliens, then sure, I might not know how good an action movie can be. But I have, and to pretend that Transformers is the best you could hope for is deceitful. Transformers is not evil by any means. But to not acknowledge and criticize its lowest common denominator aspirations is a sad surrender of sorts.

As it happens, I have some idea of what my poker capabilities are. I know I could have played that last hand better. Was the play I made Roland-Emmerich’s-Godzilla-horrible? No. But, was it the best possible play I could have made? Not really.

There’s nothing wrong with coming close. Being almost good is obviously better than being bad. But being almost good is by no means the same as being actually good. Sometimes it is important for me to be reminded of this. For that I thank you Mr. Michael Bay. Please keep trying.

The People Prevail! Brodie Boycott is a Success.

2007-07-02T16:16:00.002-04:00

Just in case you hadn’t heard, since my boycott was a success I am now ending it and have gone to Vegas. As you may or may not know, I boycotted this year’s World Series of Poker in protest of Richard Brodie being barred from Harrah’s. Unfortunately, I was a little busy and never quite got around to telling Harrah’s about this. Nonetheless, when Harrah’s ran their first $1,500 no-limit event and the turnout was a paltry 2,998 as opposed to the 2,999 that it would have been had I been there, it was obvious that they felt the sting. I am proud to say that thanks to my actions, Richard is once again allowed at Harrah’s.

Now I know what some of you have said. “Didn’t they lift that ban weeks ago?” Yes, they did. But I personally felt that I had a duty to carry on the boycott just in case Richard happened to get banned again. Certain hardened cynics have said that I had ulterior motives in waiting to come to the series, that the only reason I kept pushing back my Vegas plans was because Christi and I were so enjoying our summer in the city. Obviously that’s meanspirited speculation that devalues the sacrifices I will make for a disenfranchised working-class everyman like Richard Brodie. I suppose that for every one man that chooses the path of altruism there will always be 50 others who seek to question his motives. Such is the world we live in.

Furthermore, I normally find it to be in bad taste to talk about my charitable works, but since you brought it up, I guess I should probably let it be known that it wasn’t just Harrah’s that I boycotted in support of Richard. For the past month or so I also boycotted making blog entries, eating brussel sprouts, putting money away for retirement, and flossing. That’s just how I roll.

Still Here

2007-01-30T03:51:00.000-05:00

Christi often wonders what will happen when I pull a Stu Unger and overdose alone in a porno motel. If no one finds my body, she wants to know long it will be before people start to wonder whether I’m still alive. Well, if the past 5 and a half months are any indication, I might put the over/under at around 5 and a half months. The calls and emails have started to trickle in.

For the people interested in such things, I would like to go on the record as saying that I do still exist. If you happen to be wondering why you haven’t seen me around the northeast much or at any of the usual tournaments it’s because I’ve been with family in Florida. And unrelated to that, if you’re wondering why I haven’t updated this site much, there is a reason for that as well. It’s because I’m a lazy sack.

But in my defense it is also partially due to the fact that I haven’t done much worthy of your reading time. My normal year end activities, the east coast poker tournaments, the Central American Krumping circuit, the pro bono bounty hunter work I do for tax reasons, so on and so forth, have all been indefinitely put off. I will make an effort to do exciting things that I can write about at some point in the future but I have no idea exactly when that might be.

Right now I’m just in something of a holding pattern, taking some time off from the danger and excitement of my normal duties in order to hang out with my father. For the past couple years I was always hoping that he was just faking this whole Parkinson’s thing. He does love attention. And as Rush Limbaugh clearly showed, anyone can fake that whole shaky-ass crap. Unfortunately though, it’s finally gotten to the point where even if he is faking it he’s doing such a damned thorough job it’s probably best to just humor him.

So Christi and I have been hanging down south for a while to keep him company. On the bright side, even though he may be a little older, and whole lot wobblier, his attitude, as always, is good. And, above everything else, he’s still here, which all things considered, is probably not the worst way to start the year out.

Take Me to the River (or Mike May: “neurotic and slightly balding”)

2006-08-22T22:51:00.000-04:00

If you could take both the wisdom of Solomon and the strength of Hercules and somehow turn them into a bubble gum, that bubble gum would probably have the powerfully satisfying taste of Take Me to the River, the single greatest piece of literaturousity ever put to page.

All right, I might be exaggerating. In fact I'm not sure how objective I could really be in reviewing this book. The problem is that the subject of the book is something that I find myself eternally fascinated with day in and day out: myself.

I always knew I was vain but it never occurred to me how much more I would enjoy the reading experience when one of the little people running around inside a book was actually me. In fact, I so enjoyed this book, I may never again read books that are not specifically about me. I understand this will radically limit my reading choices but I'm a pretty slow reader anyway.

Of course technically the book is about my friend Peter Alson, but if you can read between the lines it's pretty easy to see what it's really about.

The focus of the memoir is on a writer of questionable maturity taking tentative steps towards responsibility. With a marriage coming up, as well as a child, he realizes that changes have to be made. The willy nilly finances of a freelance writer just aren't going to cut it anymore. He understands that he needs money, reliable money. So, accepting that he is now an adult, he does the adult thing. He goes to Vegas.

Ostensibly, it's about Peter going to the 2005 World Series of Poker to make money for his upcoming wedding/new life, the wacky characters, the ups, the downs, etc, etc. Ostensibly.

But if you can read between the lines it is pretty clear what Peter is trying to get at. There's a character that pops up occasionally, a friend of his by the name of Mike May. Now this friend of his is barely a minor character, and he doesn’t really do or say anything all that interesting, but personally I thought he was a powerful presence within the book. I felt a crackling jolt of electricity whenever I read about him.

Again, this may be a fairly personal reaction but I think that a sophisticated reading of Take Me to the River will show that, in essence, it's a book about the powerful sexual prowess of Mike May. You have to read between the lines, pretty, uh, pretty far between the lines but that was my initial reading.

As I mentioned, your reading may be different than mine but I like mine better. The problem is that my life is not so fascinating that I get to see it in print so often. So when it does happens, and I don’t come out looking like an ass-monkey, it’s exciting for me. Of course, I suppose not everyone is such a whore for attention.

A friend of mine read Peter’s book and gave him a wonderful if backhanded compliment. He told me how incredibly happy he was that he’s never ended up in one of Peter’s books. Knowing most of the people in Peter’s book rather well, my friend felt that Peter did an eerily accurate job of describing who they really were. He wasn’t sure how he would feel about having a similar portrait of himself flapping about in the domain of the public.

I thought about this for a little while and once the initial excitement subsided, of seeing that there are no slanderous untruths (or more humiliating actual truths) in Take Me To The River, I did have a secondary reaction, a weird anxiety that I may have just dodged a bullet.

Personally, my narcism usually trumps my fears of public embarrassment. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a little scared about this book coming out. I gave Peter the key to my room last year, so that he could store a couple things while he jetted back to NY for a week, meaning that he had unsupervised access to my life at the Gold Coast. He could easily have written about the rancid smell of legionnaires disease wafting about my old laundry, the NakkidNerds.com bookmarks on my computer, or any of the many more inditing things that he might have found, and that I won’t incriminate myself by mentioning here.

Luckily though, if you take out the stuff about S and M clubs (which Christi was none too thrilled with), the portrait Peter painted of me was thoroughly benign. Nonetheless, it did remind me how dangerous it can be for someone with control issues to have friends who are writers. In fact my obsessive need for control was one of the vast many reasons I started this whole blog thing in the first place. So even though it predates Peter’s book, the very existence of this blog can, in a way, be blamed on Take Me to the River.

A while ago I was interviewed for a book on Jon Finkel, a different friend of mine. When this book came out I rushed out to pick it up and tore through it. It was reminiscent of the moment in The Jerk when the Steve Martin character sees his name in the phone book. He starts to jump around flailing his arms frantically, yelling "Look! I've made it, my name's in print!!! I'm somebody!"

Of course, later, I looked back at what was actually written about me in the Finkel book and I saw that I was introduced as Mike May "neurotic" and "slightly balding". I realized that while "neurotic and slightly balding" will probably turn out to be the most concisely comprehensive description, ever put to print, of who I actually am, it nonetheless may not be what I would have written myself.

This turned out to be one of the fulcrum point moments that allowed me to understand how much my industry was changing. By most poker metrics I'm really something of a nobody. While I am quite content with the career I've had, my TV resume is less than inspiring. And yet here I was being interviewed and finding myself in print. When nobodies like myself were subjected to a spotlight (no matter how faint it might be) it became apparent a new facet of poker had entered the industry.

Reading about myself in the Finkel book was a strange experience. While it was exciting to have someone care about my story enough to write it down, it was disorienting to realize that someone besides myself would have final edit on it. I thought about how many more people would get to know Mike May through this book than would actually meet me in person. How very strange.

So to stave off any possible lawsuits it seemed as though it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to premptively put my side of the story, whatever that story might be, into print. Hence, Mike May: The Blog. And that’s why I blame Peter, and the various other writers who have tried to bring the poker subculture to the masses, for this blog’s creation (in a rather roundabout way).

So if you at all enjoy this blog you may want to thank Peter for it's creation by picking up a couple copies of Take Me to the River. Even if you hate this blog with a passion that will not die you might want to give Peter a try. And especially if you can't make it to the World Series of Poker yourself, you should definitely read it and make a vicarious trip via Peter. Of course, come to think of it, the 7 or so friends of mine who make up the readership of this blog were all at the Series last year, so I guess that might not be the best sales pitch.

Instead, lets just work with simple economics. It’s actually very expensive to play in the final event of the World Series, and I’m not just talking about the $10,000 buy in. Consider for a moment all the expenses:
-10,000 dollar buy in,
-travel to Vegas,
-food,
-hotel,
-back waxing to look good at the pool,
-hookers and blow,
-lawyers fees once you realize that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" doesn't actually apply to federal statutes,
-bail,
-hastily purchased ticket to undisclosed south and/or central America country,
-rental of beach front bungalow,
-monthly retainer for Paco to keep "them" off your trail,
-hush money to cover that local incident that was simply a misunderstanding, and it wasn't your fault what happened to Paco since he totally should have expected you to run, considering how it came down,
-the Viking funeral for Paco (really it was all he ever asked for, and clearly something he deserved),
-dry cleaning,
-and of course tooth paste, you always forget to pack tooth paste for some reason.

You add up all these expenses, and I have no idea what it comes out to, but it's probably a heck of a lot more than the $16.32 it costs to buy Peter's book from Amazon with this link. So next year bag the trip yourself and just lounge by the pool with a relaxing copy of Take Me to the River. Let Peter do all the work for you.

And if that isn't reason enough for you to buy the book I should mention that if you use this link and buy Peter's book, I think (if I set the link up correctly) I'll make something like 60 cents in Amazon kickback payola which will be the first penny I’ve ever made off of this blog.

Yay Peter!

Peter Alson hard at work experiencing things
and then writing about them, so you don’t
have to go through the trouble of experiencing
them yourself.

Thanks Ralph!

2006-08-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

I realize that I've been spending too many post with boring thank you’s and well wishes. Very soon I hope to go back to rambling, overly wordy stories that better serve the true purpose of this blog. However, overcome with the moment, sitting here in Central Park, I want to give a fast shout out and thanks to Ralph Lauren. If you ever happen to find yourself on the upper east side of Manhattan and need to drop a deuce, do treat yourself and drop it at the Ralph Lauren shop on 72nd and Madison.

A half an hour ago I had to take the dump of the ages and easily amortized the cost of my new cell phone by using the "find bathroom" feature on Vindigo. It listed the Ralph Lauren store as being the closest 5 star bathroom, and let me tell you Mr. Laren did not disappoint. I doff my chapeau to you, sir. A doorman at the front of the store wearing a pink shirt and sports coat, three urinals downstairs all with different sections of the New York Times, clean sinks and even toothpaste. I'm not quite sure what degree of homeless I would have to be to scrub the inside of my mouth with something I found in a Manhattan bathroom, but it was reassuring nonetheless to know that if it ever comes to that Ralph's there for me. I love this city.

Good Luck

2006-08-10T17:12:00.000-04:00

Being on a plane for multiple hours, I had planned to work on a couple posts. Instead I watched the in-flight movie Failure to Launch, and then I slept. So this post is going to be a little shorter than I had hoped.

On the poker front I want to wish Allen the success he deserves today. And on a more personal/important level I would request prayers and/or wishes of a speedy recovery for Kareem Fahim and Chancellor Hanley who both happen to be undergoing vital operations today. Get well soon.

The Dream is Dead

2006-08-05T02:01:00.000-04:00

All right, don't spend too much time scanning today's results for my name. The dream is dead. Perhaps I'll post about getting knocked out at some time but it's not really that exciting. I was a 75 or so percent favorite when the money went in so it was an honorable death, and I did cash, but still the details are probably not worth your time.

Right now I'm a little on the tired side, but I do want to give a fast thanks to everyone who wished me well and a special thanks to Andy, of Dealt Out fame, for letting me pimp this site on the MSNBC blog. Take care everyone.

Also, if for some reason you would like to actively shun the blog of the person that knocked me out then definitely don’t go here.

Above Average!

2006-08-03T12:18:00.000-04:00

As I left the World series tournament area last night I checked to see what the listed average chip stack was.

The listed average: 72,376
My stack: 73,200

Awww yeah! That’s right, above average.

Of course there were fewer players in day 2A than my day 2B so once they combine the two fields and crunch the new numbers I should come out right where I generally belong, slightly below average. But for a couple hours at least I will bask in the glow of my above averageosity. In your face, Average! I am so 1.138 percent above you it’s not even funny. Suck it!

Harrah's, Heck Yeah!

2006-07-19T14:03:00.000-04:00

Considering that I’m trying to write more while out at the World Series of Poker, I feel a little guilty about not actually writing about the WSOP itself. Unfortunately I don't do very well with real time in this blog. I didn't finish putting up my coverage of last year's WSOP until some time in the middle of January. So to keep you informed about this year's series, or more specifically what Harrah's is screwing up this year, I will simply direct you to 2 posts that other people have written. The problems covered run the gamut from simple "I remember going to class at the old school, it was so much cooler than this new school" issues, to the confusing level of incompetence and lack of consideration that Harrah's has shown to those people dumb enough to be in the middle of Nevada in July.

I guess I always understood the concept of an efficient corporation being a ruthlessly self serving entity. But the life I live tends not to put me in the corporate world very often. Watching the WSOP evolve over the last 3 years has been rather educational. Harrah’s leaves no stone unturned in the hopes that there might possibly be a penny under it. I am impressed.

The posts I'm linking come from Dr. Pauly (here) and Shane (here). I link them because they are both informative and well written but much more importantly because they save me from witting about this crap myself.

I also want to take this opportunity to give Shane temporary favorite person status. Shane has given me what is easily the best link I’ve gotten yet in describing me as "like the Terrence Malick of bloggers." Of course, I am going to make the assumption that this is a reference to the lush and awe inspiring vistas that my cinematographer and I create and not a reference to my being a lazy load that only produces something once every decade or so. Either way it made me smile.

The only thing I’ll add to the WSOP discussion is how amused I was by the double-plus-ungood rights that Harrah’s has granted us this year. Last year there were draconian cell phone rules and if you wanted to play an event you lost the right to use the F word (which I will not sully your eyes with here). This year however those loses of freedoms have been replaced with rights.

The second event I played opened with a rambling speech over the loudspeaker that told us about all these new rights. Apparently we now have the right not to have anyone at our table use offensive language and by offensive language I mean the word "fuck" and only the word "fuck." I checked and luckily this new right does not cover the words "ass-monkey," "cock-munch," or any racial slurs whatsoever.

And we have also been granted the right to not have someone at our table carry on a 20 minute conversation with a stock broker over his cell phone. Of course with this also comes the right to have your hand declared dead if you look at the screen on your phone to see what time it is (which I first thought was an urban legend until I actually saw it happen.)

This later proved a source of amusement for me as I watched a new dealer in a live 100-200 game tell the big blind, with an impressive level of indignation, that since he answered his cell phone his hand was dead. The other players tried to explain that this new right of ours only applied to tournament games. He was having none of it though and refused to continue the hand until the floor came over.

And after that I watched a security guard go to a 10-25 pot limit Omaha game and tell some European players with cell phones sitting on the table that they couldn’t have them out in plain sight. The amusing part was that the Europeans complied and just laughed it off with an I’ll-never ever-ever-ever-play-in-this-silly-place-again look on their faces. Apparently they’re not afforded the same rights in Europe that we have here.

In My Entire Life This Will Likely Be The Most Memorable Hand I Will Ever Play

2006-07-14T15:30:00.000-04:00

I tend not to talk too much about specific poker hands in this blog. However, I recently played what I’m pretty sure will be the most memorable hand I will ever play in my life. Since it is going to take me at least 3 posts and a couple of weeks to even scratch the surface of this hand, I’m just going post a picture of it now. (And yes I am counting this minipost towards my at-least-one-post-a-week-while-at-the-WSOP pledge)

Almost Cool

2006-07-07T12:59:00.003-04:00

I’m at a wedding a while back (Jean-louis and Katie) and during dinner I’m talking to a stranger about blogs. He asks me what mine is about and my knee jerk reaction is to say "poker". However, it occurs to me that this guy is a stranger that I just met, and as a stranger I have nothing emotionally invested in him. For that reason I don’t see any reason to lie to him. So when he asks me what my blog is about I tell him the truth. "It’s about trying to make me look more interesting than I am."

As it so happens there are a lot of reasons that I started this blog. Above most though is the desire to tell self aggrandizing stories in the hope of creating someone interesting. Truth be told, the bulk of my life is spent lying in bed, eating cookie dough and staring at the ceiling, both figuratively and literally. However, occasionally something nonboring might happen and it is my hope that if I put enough of those nonboring moments here I might be able to skew perception of who I am, perhaps help people get the wrong idea about me. At least that’s my hope.

Of course for some people I imagine that interesting things happen quite often. Unfortunately I’ve never really been one of those people. So to supplement this blog sometimes I have to settle for interesting things almost happening to me. As it so happens I recently had a week filled with interesting things that almost happened. So now I’m forced to write not about being cool but being almost cool. I take what I can get.

I’m having dinner with a friend who will remain nameless. This friend happens to be closely related to dork director extraordinaire Sam Raimi. Sam Raimi, whose brilliant Evil Dead 2 ranks among the top five greatest slapstick movies of all time and who also directed a little indie franchise by the name of Spiderman.

As it happens, Sam is in New York to shoot Spiderman 3. With the Raimi’s being a fairly tight family, my friend, Sam’s cousin, is expected to stop by the set to say hi, maybe grab a bite. As I’m having dinner with my friend he gets a number of calls from this assistant or that to coordinate a set visit.
"You’ll be filming where tomorrow?... I suppose that would work... What time is Sam’s meeting?... No, the afternoon would be better for me...Yes, I’d prefer to stay in Manhattan." Etc, etc.

Welllll... my friend has a good sense of what a big comic book dork I am, as well as my reverence for Mr. Raimi’s work. And besides, Toby Mcguire and I go way back (insomuch as I played at his table once a couple years ago when he was just learning to play poker). So it seems like my joining him on the set visit is a no-brainer. Still considering what a coup a visit would be for my blog I figure I can’t afford to be subtle.

"So... you’re going to stop by the set tomorrow?" I inquire.
"I think so."
"That should be fun."
"It’ll be nice. I haven’t seen Sam for some time."
"Yeah, I just mean it would be fun to be on set like that. I mean, especially if you were a big comic nerd. "
"I suppose."
"I mean for someone a little familiar with the source material it’d be even cooler. You know like someone who was really curious how they’re going to present Venom, the villain of this sequel. I mean like someone who wondered how Sam might present the alien symbiote which Peter Parker initially dons as a costume but that later melds with fellow photographer Eddie Brock and transforms him into a psychopathic black mirror image of Spiderman that calls itself Venom, I mean, considering that in the comics the symbiote was originally found by Spiderman out in another galaxy when he was whisked away by the Beyonder in order to fight in the Secret Wars miniseries (not the recent Brian Bendis series but rather the original Jim Shooter one from the 80's). I mean for a comic nerd like that a visit to the set would probably be something that would really raise his street creds in the dork world. A real once in a lifetime kind of thing."
"I would imagine" was his reply, followed by "so, when are you leaving for the World Series?" And that was pretty much that.

Considering that subtlety has never been my strong point I always figured that I would be better at being unsubtle. So much for that theory. And so much for being cool.

But as it turns out that was nothing compared to the almost coolness that came a couple days later.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase "It’s good work if you can get it" and wondered exactly who it was that was getting said work, his name is Peter Alson. Peter will probably come up here quite a bit in the coming weeks due to the publication of Take Me to the River, his latest masterpiece about my time at the WSOP (technically, it's actually about Peter's time at last year's WSOP, but as much as I loved it I tended to ignore everything but the paragraph or two where he mentioned me). For now all I’ll say is that Peter is running pretty well.

It turns out that Chinese uber-auteur Wong Kar-Wai happens to be making a movie by the name of "My Blueberry Nights". In it, Natalie Portman happens to play a poker player, and it happens to be that someone needs to help Ms. Portman understand what it’s like to play poker. As it happens this person turns out to be Peter.

I ask him just what such a job entails.

"You know, we just covered general stuff and watched some video of Jennifer Harmon."
"You were paid to be alone with Natalie Portman in a dark screening room."
"It wasn’t anything so formal. We just went back to the hotel."
"Her hotel?"
"Yeah, there was a VCR in Natalie’s bedroom."
"In her bedroom?"
"Yeah."
"You’re sitting in a chair with Ms. Portman in her hotel bedroom."
"Well, there weren’t really any chairs. I mean, it’s a hotel bedroom"
"So you’re on the bed with her."
"Well, yeah, I guess."
"And you’re being paid. Movie production money... to sit on a bed with Natalie Portman."
"More or less."
"Oh..."

I’m not sure, but at a time like this, when a peer tells you that he’s getting paid movie production money to watch TV sitting on a bed with Natalie Portman, I think the only response that really makes any sense is "Oh..."

I try to think of all the reasons, given his lack of juice in the film world, that Peter might get such a job. And try as I can, I can think of no better reason than it’s the kind of thing that, by association, will make me feel worse about my own life. I know this doesn’t make too much sense, but that’s the way my mind works.

My new found loathing of Peter thaws quite rapidly though when he calls me up a few days later to ask for a favor. He explains that he needs to leave for his summer vacation a little early. He doesn’t think that Natalie will need him for anything but he wants to have a backup for the slim possibility that she needs something poker related while he’s gone. He wants to know if I’d be able to look after her in the off chance she needs something.

Uh-huh. Working in the poker industry I get a fair number of calls from people asking for help. Really not so many like this though. Oh, and I’d also get movie production money for my time spent hanging out with Natalie Portman, talking about myself.

Now I did try to consider the downside here. I did want to consider the possibility that I might be a little intimidated and I might in some manner grotesquely embarrass myself in front of one of the more attractive woman I’d be likely to meet this year. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that she’s far enough out of my league that it’d be hard for me to be intimidated. To feel nervous that you would blow a chance with a young starlet you would first have to be able to believe you had a chance with said starlet. I didn’t think that would be a problem in this case.

Of course I did make the mistake of watching the movie Closer the other day which might have complicated things. Every so often a movie produces an image visceral enough that it stays with you for quite some time. Hannibal Lecter behind glass talking about Fava Beans, Tony Montana and his little friend being gunned down, etc. Closer had a moment that stuck with me as well.

As it so happens, I’d like to believe that I could see Ms Portman as I should, as a three dimensional individual not completely unlike myself, and interact with her accordingly. However, face to face with her, I’m not quite sure I could muster up enough focus to not continually think of absolutely nothing other than the scene in Closer in which Natalie Portman is in a strip club bent over on all fours showing her hoo-ha to Clive Owen. And I imagine that might possibly prove a little distracting. If I was working with her I would definitely make a concerted effort to try not to think about such a thing, but I couldn’t make any promises.

Of course as Peter is telling me all this I know that the true possibility of anything ever happening is probably well under 1.3 percent, tops. Still, if there’s anything poker players understand it’s the value of a free-roll. And for a little while it makes me happy to think about that 1.3 percent. It’s not unlike buying a lottery ticket. You know you’re not going to win but for 1 dollar you get to sit around for a little while and think "yeah, but what if...?"

Not surprisingly, I never get my call from Ms. Portman, which is too bad because it might have made a decent blog entry. As it is I’ll just have to settle for writing about my underthings or jiggly woman parts. But of course if I can’t be cool myself it is a blessing to have friends who are occasionally cool themselves (and from whom I can leech second hand cool off of). I take what I can get.

In regards to complaints about my blog (or rather the disheartening lack thereof)

2006-07-03T14:24:00.000-04:00

I’m not sure how I should feel about this, but no one seems to complain about my blog. I’m reading some of my friends’ blogs and they all have posts about people being upset that they don’t write more often. Chris Fargis and Matt Maroon write apologies to all the people who say they should post more often. Here at the world series I’m talking to Richard Brodie for maybe 6 minutes tops and someone comes up to him desperate to know when his next post will be. For whatever reason, that doesn’t seem to happen to me. No one, uh, no one seems quite similarly concerned about my prolificness.

I am of course sincerely thankful for the couple of people who have come up to me and said kind things about my content. But when they do this I usually apologize for my dismally infrequent output and invariably their response is almost identical, some variation on "oh my, don’t trouble yourself with such thoughts."

Of course I want to read this response as "my lord, who could be expected to produce such brilliance more than once every 3 months." However, I don’t know if that’s a correct translation.

More accurately I picture a five year old finger painting a father’s day card, and then apologizing for the lack of semiotic unity with some of the themes he’s explored in his earlier works. "Oh my, don’t trouble yourself with such thoughts."

As it so happens, I’ve usually been rather comfortable with aiming low. However, the problem I realized is that it’s one thing to have low expectations for yourself, but it’s something entirely different when you realize those expectations may be contagious.

So I’ve unilaterally decided to try and raise the bar a little. I make this promise to you, while I’m out here at the World Series I’ll be trying to get a post of one sort or another out at least every week or so.

Regardless of whether you care or not.

So screw you.

The Service Industry

2006-05-09T14:36:00.000-04:00

I like the Borgata, the hotel casino in Atlantic City. It’s very nice as far as casinos go. Just take my word for it. However, don’t try to get a tuna melt there. Apparently they had a meeting. (The following is the actual conversation I had with the nice woman at the poker room snack bar.)

Her: What can I get you?
Me: Could I get a tuna melt?
Her: No.
Me: I can’t?
Her: Nope.
Me: I was here two weeks ago and I had a tuna melt then.
Her: Since then we’ve had a meeting.
Me: You had a tuna melt meeting?
Her: It was a general meeting. Tuna melts came up.
Me: Oh. (I walk away dejected.)

And when you’re done not getting your tuna melt don’t try to buy 5 black chips from the cage. They have a 5-10 no limit game with a $1,500 cap on the initial buy in, so I went to the cage to buy some chips.

Me: (handing $1,500 to the cashier at the cage) Could I have $1,000 in $25 chips and $500 in $100 chips?
Him: I can’t give you 5 black chips.
Me: I can’t buy 5 black chips?
Him: You can buy $2,000 in black chips.
Me: The maximum buy in is $1,500. I just want 5 black chips.
Him: I can’t give you 5 black chips.
Me: Oh. (I walk away with $1,500 in green chips.)

Apparently there is a new Borgata and/or New Jersey Casino Control Commission rule that says you have to buy a full stack of chips. For reasons that I’m sure are apparent to someone besides me you can only buy in increments of 20, not 5. Apparently the customer isn’t always right.

However I did meet one person in Atlantic City looking to satisfy the customer. I had a terse but interesting encounter on the way back to my hotel room. I step into the elevator late Friday night along with a group of 4 young men and 2 surgically enhanced young women that I don't know. Out of the blue, one of the young men says to one of the women “Yeah, but he’s not with us,” in reference to me. To which another asks, “but how much for him too?” The woman runs her gaze up and down my body and finally comes up with a figure she’s satisfied with. “A hundred bucks,” she answers.

Now, I don’t remember the interaction word for word but I think the phrase “party” was used and she inquired as to whether I would like to join them. I thanked her for the offer but explained that I was actually very tired. She explained that she could wake me up quite effectively and I replied “that’s what I’m afraid of.” I really don’t know quite what I meant by that but it was the first response that came to mind and she accepted it. If she felt unduly shunned she did not show it.

They exited a floor below me and I said something fairly inane. “You kids have fun,” or something to that effect. And that was the end of it.

The next day I talked with a friend who has knowledge in such areas and inquired what specifically I could have expected to get for $100. “At the Borgata or the Taj Mahal?” he asked. I explained the situation and he gave me a couple broad possibilities but thought that $100 was fairly cheap for the Borgata, unless there was some sort of group discount being offered. I mentioned that there were two women and it might have simply been a performance piece of some sort. I don’t know.

All I really do know for sure is that all of a sudden I really do want to know exactly what I was offered. I really doubt it was anything I would have bought (and the chance of Christi authorizing such a purchase would be rather slim) but still I am curious. At this point I wish I had offered that woman $20 just to explain exactly what the $100 was for. I’m not saying it was necessarily anything really good, like a “tuna melt,” but the fact that I’ll never know does vex me. Oh well.

My Underwear as it Relates to the Inevitable Destruction of the Poker Industry

2006-03-31T15:01:00.000-05:00

As if I didn’t have enough to irrationally fear: the bird flu, religio-fascism of various brands, Vice-Presidential buck shot. It’s a scary world out there. And apparently to add to all this I now have to worry that my sole source of income will be completely eradicated. Lately it seems that every other month there’s a new rash of mainstream headlines assuring me that the poker industry is going the way of $0.99 gas and Lawn Jarts.

This doesn’t make me all that happy. Among the many things that the poker industry has done for me over the years there are two that are paramount. It has allowed me to live in Manhattan without government assistance, and it has made me even more unemployable than I might otherwise have been. Now, I’m not saying I haven’t learned anything from poker. I’m just saying that I don’t know how the lessons I’ve learned would look translated into black and white words on a resume. I mean, I’m sorry, but I don’t know how many HR people are going to be so blown away by my ability to not overplay Ace-Queen under the gun.

So naturally all these Casandraesque headlines were a little disturbing. Luckily though I took the time to read one of the actual articles the other day and I feel a little better. Apparently, these "Dismal Outlook for Poker Industry" articles were talking not about poker players but rather the people who rushed in to exploit poker players. It turns out that, surprisingly enough, there is not quite the market for Hold ‘Em branded car seats that some people thought there would be.

As it is with many issues, I think my underwear might help to elucidate things. A while back Christi, as she is wont to do, bought me some underwear. In particular "Texas Hold ‘Em" boxers. I’ll try to keep this rant to a minimum because I’ve posted similar sentiments before, but it’s just that I still find this mainstreaming of poker fascinating.

I remember the first time I found Doyle’s original Super System in a Barnes and Noble. Since you used to have to call up the Gambler’s Book Shop in Vegas to find it I was pretty surprised. And the first time I saw an entire 11 book Poker display prominently placed near the checkout line I was blown away. Then it just started to get strange.

I walked into a local grocery store a Christmas or two ago. Standing among the various tomatoes and Twinkies there was a large display with exactly two items. These two items had nothing to do with groceries at all. If you’ve ever been to a local Manhattan grocery then you know how tiny and cramped they tend to be and what a premium there is on space. Yet the owner of the store had figured that if there were any non-food items in the world that he might be able to hawk it would be these two: the new Harry Potter novel and of course a set of Texas Hold ‘em poker chips.

Unfortunately, due to technical issues I can’t post the picture I took of that display. Also currently undisplayable is the picture of the poker cologne set I took at J.C. Penny. I guess nothing says sexy odors quite like poker players do. But of course nothing says inappropriate over-branding quite like the one photo that I can display, the Hold ‘em gum ball machine. Not since the creation of the candy cigarette has there been as clear a statement on responsible marketing.

What does this have to do with my poker branded underthings? Well, in this case it’s not so much how responsible it is as just how sloppy. Whoever designed these boxers either has a wonderfully dry sense of humor or is an idiot. If you look closely at my undershorts you’ll notice that it’s populated entirely with power hands like the King Fiver, and the Jack Seven off. Not quite the iconic celebrity hands, the Ace-Ace or even the Jack-Ten suited, that one tends to link with Hold ‘em.

Now, as it happens I would love to live in a world were I could believe that the designer of this garment wanted to show the actual type of poker hands that you will most often see and by extension was making a deft statement about the less compelling negative space that lies between the rarer moments of excitement that make up our lives, a reflection on the sheer volume and therefore the existential importance of the mundane. However, this may be a bad read.

Possibly more likely, I would imagine a designer who has no concept of poker at all and asks his boss to explain what the eff Texas hold-them is. "I don’t know, it’s some game where you get two cards. And I think the two cards sometimes burst into flames and/or sprout wings. Just run with it."

And I like to hope that it is this type of gratuitous over-branding that is getting people into trouble. Poker as a fad more than poker as an industry, the idea that if I include the word "poker" on my cologne I can sell more. Reaching a saturation point in mainstream penetration is not actually the same as a complete industry wide collapse.

There was a period in the late 90's when CNBC became like ESPN, with throngs of unfinancial-type people following and betting on their favorite stocks like they were sports teams. At the time this may not have done much for the stability of the stock market. But while there were a few post millennial corrections there actually is still a stock market and some of the smart people still do make money.

For better or for worse I think we are stuck with poker for a while. I mean people still haven’t gotten bored with golf and I don’t believe that that’s a bad analogy to draw.

Now don’t get me wrong I am still quite confident that a harsh rain’s a-gonna fall. The poker correction is coming. I’m already hearing anecdotal stories of parents getting calls from Vegas requesting a plane ticket home. Hindsight might show dropping out of college and moving into the Orleans as possibly not the single most farsighted career plan ever.

I don’t think that anyone in the know believes the current environment is completely sustainable. Obviously the majority of truly bad players have to either become better or become broke. But the total apocalypse may still be a while off. And one way or another I still can’t wait to see what the Poker Lifestyles Expo will bring to us this year.

Timely Valentines Day Post

2006-03-22T15:37:00.000-05:00

So I run into Dollie, of Jane and Dollie fame, and she tells me that she has been reading my blog. My particular type of narcism being driven by insecurity, I ask her what she thought of it.

Dollie- "Oh, I loved it!"
Me- "Oh yeah."
Dollie- "Yep. No it was good. I mean, you know, I liked it. I mean I didn’t read the whole thing."
Me- "No?"
Dollie- "No. It was just kind of like, you know, it was kind of like a lot of... long."
Me- "Oh"
Dollie- "Yeah, I mean I guess it makes sense. You’re always, you know with the stories, and they kind of...you know they kind of... Oh yeah, I liked it. It was just... you know, a lot."

All right, all right. In an attempt to keep the Blah, Blah, Jibber-Jabber down a little I’ve decided to run this year’s Valentines’ Photos with only minimal commentary. Instead of going to a swanky restaurant this year, we went to a fancy pants hotel for Valentines Day. A special thanks to Jor for getting us a decent rate at the Standard in downtown Los Angeles. I told Nick Dileo we were staying at the Standard and he told me how much he despised it. It’s one of the new breed of "hip" hotels and I can imagine it being a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place. I don’t remember whether Nicky hated it because it was too pretentious or because it was too silly. But the more I think about it, that’s probably exactly why Christi and I liked it. Somehow it was able to be both pretentious and silly at the same time, which isn’t so easy. Anyway, with far less commentary than the Japanese photos, here are a couple shots from Valentines day at the Standard.

Scenic rooftop pool:

The cabanas were these funky molded red plastic things that for some reason all had actual waterbeds in them:
From here we could wave at Jor across the street in his oversized window office:

Luckily since this is minimal commentary I will not have to explain why there might be a giant black foam foot in our bathroom:

And of course, in case there was any confusion, this is the paper you use when you take a poo:

Bada Butt

2006-03-12T12:08:00.000-05:00

A couple months back I’m having dinner with Gene, a friend of the family, and obviously I get peppered with some poker questions. Gene is not really a player but he does ask an astute question. With these new tournament fields being as large as they are, he says, you probably are not going to sit down with many people you know at all. So if that’s the case then how can you cater your game to someone’s style of play if you know absolutely nothing about them or how they play?

I allowed that he had a point. It is very different than even a couple years ago when the band of nomads traveling from tournament to tournament wasn’t quite so large. I remember TJ writing about what an advantage he had because he could remember every player he’s ever played with and how they played. Still though, I explained to Gene, you never know absolutely nothing about the people you see. The second someone sits down at your table they are generally drenched with information of some sort or another. What they’re wearing, who they’re talking to, how they hold themself, it all helps to give some sense of how they might play.

For instance, if you are sitting down to the first day of the 2006 World Series of Poker and the guy next to you is wearing a souvenir 2006 World Series of Poker shirt, 2006 WSOP jacket, 2006 WSOP baseball cap and has a plastic WSOP card protector, there’s a decent possibility that he may not be a stone cold 20 year veteran of the series. (Of course if you sit down to a similarly attired player 6 or more weeks into the series it may have less to do with the fact that he’s a star struck 1st year player and more to do with the possibility that this guy just hasn’t left the casino in 40 days and is too lazy to do laundry.) Likewise, if you sit down and the guy to your left spends 5 minutes dissecting a hand he played last night in a home game with Lee Watkinson this is also going to give you some insight about what level of game he plays. Obviously these are not things that will tell you the full story of how someone plays, but they do give you a starting point to think of their game.

This conversation that I had a few months ago, on the information that players wear, was at the forefront of my mind last night. You see I missed something about an opponent at my table that may have been more informative than any tell I’ve ever run across before, and more obvious than any tell I’ll ever run across again. Having played the poker circuit off and on for a couple years I pride myself on being able to size up an opponent fairly quickly. The more subtle cues may occasionally elude me but I have no trouble catching the obvious stuff. Or so I thought.

So I’m playing a single table satellite last night and across the table from me is a young woman, cute, short hair, spaghetti string top revealing a somewhat tattooed left shoulder. I play with her for about 35 minutes or so until she calls all-in on the river with no pair/jack high and, not surprisingly, gets knocked out. Well, at this point she gets up from the table and being the Clouseauesque master of observation that I am I just then notice the one thing about her that probably would have told me everything I might ever need to know about her game. As she walks away from the table and towards the bathroom, what I so keenly observe is that the woman just happens to not be wearing pants. Yep, no jopke, staring right back at me, nothing but bare ass. When I see this, the all in call with jack high starts to make a little more sense.

I had a friend who once used the phrase "it was like playing in a dealer’s game" i.e. that it was a game where all the players were professional poker dealers, i.e. that it was supposed to be a soft game. See, the general belief is that if a poker dealer were a good enough player then they wouldn’t have to deal to make a living. Therefore poker dealers are lousy players. Beyond just being condescending this is a characterization that just isn’t true. Michael "The Grinder" Mizrazi, Mike Matasow, Robert Hanley, Scotty Nguyen, a number of the best players in the world were all once dealers. In fact to make such a broad generalization about any diverse group of players is obviously dangerous. With all that in mind though I will still give you one piece of infallible advice. If anyone ever offers you the opportunity to play in a high stakes strippers’ game then by all means run, don’t walk, to the nearest pawn shop and hock whatever you have to to buy in, strippers not generally being know for their keen understanding of implied pot odds.

Now, why am I playing poker with a stripper? Well, that has to do with something called (the oddly apostrophied) Bar Poker Pro’s.

Having slogged from sterile hotel to hotel, grinding out this "easy living" for so long I sometimes forget that a lot of people actually like to play poker. They actually do it not for the rent but rather for some kind of fun. And that’s the idea behind http://www.barpokerpros.com/ a business that offers poker as entertainment. Instead of hiring a band or a DJ to get people into a bar or restaurant you hire a poker game. The Bar Poker people bring a table and a dealer and they advertise for a game. People who might not have frequented your establishment come by to play poker and while they’re there they of course might buy a few beers, order a burger, whatever. Playing is free. You get league points for how high you finish and at the end of the season there is a championship for the people with the highest point totals. Then the winner of the end of the season tournament gets a WSOP seat.

They run these little games throughout South Florida, in various bars and restaurants. Next week the game closest to my father is at a fancy steak house. This week however the closest game happened to be at a rustic little pub by the name of Bada Bing. Now I was not familiar with the Bada Bing chain before this and I’m not even sure if it is a chain. For all I know it may just be an unrelated group of bars that haven’t gotten around to suing each other for having the same name. I didn’t ask.

Anyway, I pull up to the Bada Bing with my father and the first thing that I notice about the decor is what looks to be a homeless man sleeping in front of the building. Upon closer inspection though I see that said man is not moving and the police tape cordoning him off would seem to imply that the gentleman is not sleeping so much as dead. Finally though under closer closer inspection I realize that said man is not only not alive but is actually not even a man. It’s actually just a mannequin dressed up to look like a dead guy.

See the Bada Bing is not only a nudie bar but a nudie theme bar, the theme being gangsters chic. You walk in and all the TVs are playing old gangster movies, the VIP room is called the Godfather Suite, etc, etc. Of course my favorite decorative touch was not gangster specific. It was in the bathroom where someone had taken the time to take a red cloth napkin and place it on top of the toilet. For some reason this just really impressed me. I mean I’m lazy. I know lazy when I see it. Sometimes though I find myself impressed by a sheer artistry of sloth and it sticks with me. It was obvious that someone cared enough to think "what might make this space more inviting?" They might have thought about maybe putting plants in there or repainting it or even just occasionally mopping it, but no. Out of all the things that could improve the aesthetics of a dank and dingy space someone said "yep, red napkin, that’s definitively the way to go. Problem solved," and walked away.

Of course I don’t imagine that environmental aesthetics are really what draw most people into strip clubs. It’s all about the ladies, which Bada Bing had plenty of. In fact when we arrived at around 8 o’clock there had to be more performers than patrons. And to make matters worse the six or so patrons that were there were poker players. As the evening went on the place filled up a little more but at first it was just six patrons and two off duty strippers sitting at a poker table.

This of course didn’t turn out to be too profitable for the working strippers since poker players can be a little single minded during a game. When you’re in a hand, once the flop comes out, everything outside of the game temporarily goes blank and ceases to exist. I’ve long believed that a monkey and a one armed midget could be having a knife fight and once that flop comes out not an eye would be on them. While I haven’t had the chance to test this particular hypothesis yet, I can give you one piece of empirically proven truth, cards do seem to trump boobs. Two feet in front of our table: nubile young womany parts; Two feet to the side of our table: another stage with another woman jiggling her junk. Yet not once did I see a player even look up from the game much less miss a hand due to the nudeness around them. Poker players are strange people.

And the really weird thing was that everyone seemed to be having fun, even without playing for cash. I mean no one was losing grotesque amounts of money and yet everyone was still smiling. Strange people indeed.

Meta-MiniPost 1.2

2006-03-11T11:34:00.000-05:00

All right hopefully this will be my last meta-post for a little bit. However I think it’s important to mention that I’ve actually started to read a few of the blogs I spam and I think I may have found 3 that I am perfectly comfortable with giving the Mike May Seal of Blogpproval (by which I mean 3 more blogs that linked to me with only a moderate amount of groveling on my part.) The three lucky recipients of these kudos (of a verbal kind as opposed to the more desirably chocolate coated kind, sorry) are the too cute to be playing poker Jodi, the too wealthy to still be blogging Chris, and the very much way too cool to be linking me Jane. I hope the sudden tsunami of readers that will come from this high profile publicity doesn’t collapse their respective servers.

Mission Accomplished!! (Metapost 1.1)

2006-03-02T14:41:00.000-05:00

Unfurl the banners. I’m proclaiming Operation Back Door Thunder (as outlined in the last post) to be a resounding success. The hard work of putting random comments on random other blogs has paid off generously, to the tune of one pity link from Ross on a Rush. The chemist/poker player market is not an easy one to penetrate but with this new link I now consider it conquered and will move on to other markets. Of course the fact that I was originally linked as http://http://mikemay.blogspot.com/ instead of the correct http://mikemay.blogspot.com/ makes the utility of this new link a little suspect but I will take my victories where I can. Break out the champagne, the battle is joined.

Meta post #1

2006-02-25T02:14:00.000-05:00

Before I do anything else I think I should take a moment to thank all the people who have used space on their own blogs to link to this blog and recommended it to their readers. So a big shout out to this growing group of helpful folks that so far consists of nobody. That’s right in the half a year or so that this blog has been up nobody has seen fit to recommend it to someone else. Thank you nobody. It’s good to know that as always nobody is there for me. I couldn’t have done it without you. (Actually I just double checked and found out that my friend Jor has actually put up the first link to this blog. However I still think "nobody" is funnier than "Jor" so I’m leaving that first paragraph as is.)

However, nobody linking me didn’t really bother me until I read this New York Magazine article on blogging. In short it said that you can have two different blogs both specifically dealing with the political economy of media as it relates to East Timor, one of which is written by MIT’s Noam Chomsky and one by Different Strokes’ Todd Bridges, and in short if Todd has more incoming links he’ll have more readers. End of argument.

So apparently these link things are important to getting readers and nobody wants to give me any. What exactly does that mean? Well, two things actually.

First in a vindictive retaliatory action, for the time being, I will be actively not linking to other blogs. Screw you all. You guys have no idea just how hard I'm not linking your asses.

And secondly I will be bypassing the blog writers who so brazenly snub me and instead will be courting their readers directly (in a roundabout manner). My plan is to attack through the comments section of their blogs. It is my hope that if I put comments on other people’s blogs some of their readers might see my name and say "Hey, I loved Shut Up And Deal," and click on my name.

Now of course I’m a little too lazy and/or self absorbed to actually read other people’s blogs much less write stuff on them so to simplify this operation my comments will consist of 3 phrases which I can cut and paste randomly to other blogs. Until someone comes up with a better idea these 3 phrases will be:

1) "Personally, I think I would have just moved all-in." As it turns out this is generally my response to 93% of the poker questions I get asked, but don’t actually listen to. So I figure it should apply to a majority of the posts dealing with specific poker hands.
2) "Awwww, yeah! You put the B in blog, beeyotch." This was actually Christi’s suggestion and I think it is rather sufficiently generic enough to cover a wide range of posts.
3) And of course anything that isn’t covered by the first 2 comments will be handled by the ever reliable standard: "Zoinks!!!"

Wish me luck.

Shorties at the Big Dance

2006-01-14T15:54:00.000-05:00

This isn’t necessarily my favorite photo from the World Series of Poker, but it’s up there. Of course, the first thing you might notice about it is that it does not involve degenerate gamblers, badly dressed old men, or crushed dreams. Therefore you might ask: what the hell does it have to do with the World Series of Poker? Well, that’s exactly what I asked as I walked to the Rio Tournament area one day. I showed up and everywhere I looked it was Jon Benet Ramsey-day. It was all sequined shirts and strained smiles as far as the eye could see. I’m still not entirely sure what was going on but it had something to do with small children dressed as figure skaters and possibly a dancing competition going on in one of the sections of the convention center the WSOP wasn’t using.

At first, it somehow just didn’t seem right. Of all the things I think of when I think of the WSOP, unbridled youthful enthusiasm usually isn’t at the top of the list. Looking back though it starts to make a little bit of sense. More so than others, I guess 2005 actually was a year of youthful enthusiasm. And I’m not just talking about the throngs of 17 year old internet players sitting behind towers of black chips at the triple draw lowball tables. This year the final event had over ten times as many players as it did the first year I got to go, over 2500 as many players as last year’s event. That makes for a lot of first time players, a lot of people untainted by the taste of soul snapping defeat that comes from busting out of the final event.

Don’t get me wrong, I like to think I’m still far from being jaded about the final event. I consider myself fortunate every time I get to play it. Come summer people are always asking me if I’m playing the final event and I’m always amused by the number of people who think I’m joking when I say I don’t know. The money to monkey ratio is insane and traditionally it’s one of my luckier events. Nonetheless, I’m not ashamed to say that $10,000 still seems like a lot of money.

I was watching Desperate Housewives last year and I remember a scene with a private eye who said that for $5,000 he could have someone hurt and for $10,000 he could make them disappear. Now, I really flipped out when I heard this. What this meant was that for the same $10,000 it cost to play the World Series every year I could have been having people bumped off. (At first I wasn’t sure about the veracity on that price quote and I decided to ask around the New York poker clubs. This didn’t really work out though as the few people who actually would have had privy to such information all gave me exactly the same answer: "I, uh, wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, and we, uh, never had this conversation.")

Even if $10,000 isn’t the exact cost of a hit though, it still helps to put things in perspective. Money in itself tends to lose some of it’s meaning for poker players. Occasionally I find it helpful to instead convert the raw numbers into more concrete things as in "this weekend I lost 3 new laptops, a Tivo, and 2 weeks in Tokyo with my girlfriend." I mean, if on the first day of the tournament someone asked for a show of hands on who would be willing to give up their seat in exchange for the chance to have a cap popped in someone’s ass you might find yourself at a somewhat smaller event.

All I’m trying to say is that I still understand what a privilege it is to be able to participate in the final event. And while I’m still excited every year, I would be lying if I said it is ever like it was my first year. The abject terror at the thought of making a million dollar mistake, the awe inspiring possibility that I could become a champion of the world, these were still virginal experiences. I did feel like a lucky child swept away by the fantasy of it all, so very excited to have a chance at playing the big game.

I look back and think about what it felt like for me that first time, and what it must have felt like for the thousands of people in Vegas for the first time this year, and all of a sudden those wide eyed kids in their shiny little costumes that were skipping around the Rio don’t seem so out of place.

Twirl on tiny dancers. Twirl on...

Alternative Lifestyles

2005-12-05T21:35:00.000-05:00

Imagine sneaking up behind Jules Verne, clocking him with a lead pipe, and stuffing him into a freezer. Then thaw him out almost two hundred years in the future and show him videos explaining the fax machine, the atom bomb, and Paris Hilton. Now look at that expression of slack jawed, bewildered disbelief on his face. That was the expression that I wore for about 43 minutes the day before the final event of the World Series started. That was when I first laid eyes on the 1st annual Poker Lifestyles Exhibition, a convention hall full of vendors that you had to walk through to get to the tournament area in the Rio.

Now it may come to pass that in the far future my reaction will seem very confusing. Not so many people find it bizarrely jarring to walk into a Foot Locker store and see Michael Jordan sports jerseys and other NBA merchandise. Perhaps my initial reaction to all this poker marketing will seem very dated very shortly but for me the Poker Lifestyles gig is still a little disorienting.

Sure there has always been a "poker lifestyle" but it just wasn’t really something that you wanted decent folk to even see, much less ask them to buy. Not very long ago the poker lifestyle was somehow being able to scrounge up enough money to play Twister with hookers in your hotel even though you were living out of the back seat of a ‘92 Lincoln. Now, believe me, I’m not saying there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that. I’m just saying I didn’t think it was something for which you would get your own bobblehead doll.

Anyway, here’s a couple quick snapshots from the inaugural Lifestyle exhibition:

In case you were wondering what you would get if you applied the acute aesthetic sense of a poker player with the stylish world of high fashion I imagine it might look something like this.

As promised: bobbleheads! I just checked the website and the Mel Judah bobblehead has officially sold out. The funny part being that I’m not kidding. Way to go Mel.

Here I am actually standing next to Mr. fancy pants acclaimed author PETER ALSON. Or as we used to call him at the club in New York: Peter.

Here’s Peter researching his upcoming book on this year’s WSOP, a book about trying to win the money he needed for his pending wedding and the life he’s starting with his new wife. What does that have to do with playing poker with trade show hussies? I haven’t quite figured that out myself but since I think the readership of this blog consists solely of my parents and you I don’t imagine Peter’s wife will see this.

Now having this at the poker show actually made a lot of sense. When you think of poker lifestyle what do you think of? Exactly, you think of filthy tax cheats. Sure you could put stacks of hundred dollar bills in a safe deposit box at a bank but who wants "The Man" knowing you’ve got a box somewhere that could possibly have something in it. That’s where the Sovereign Solution comes in. The only I.D.ing that they do is through biometrics. Instead of giving them an address and driver’s licence you just go through a retina scan. No paperwork to link you to whatever you want to lock away in the Sovereign vaults. Of course if you’re ever in a horrible Lawn Jarts accident and lose your scanned eye I’m not quite sure what happens to your vault.

Ans speaking of taxes, this is an actual picture of my actual accountant at the Bodog booth. I can smell the audits from here.

Hand for Hand

2005-10-15T19:42:00.000-04:00

This is one of my favorite moments that I wasn’t personally involved in from the final event. We’re starting the 3rd day. I think we have about 569 players left at this point. 560 players are being paid so the decision is made to start the day out going hand for hand. If you don’t know what going hand for hand means then go ahead and skip to the next photo. If you have played in tournaments though and have had to go hand for hand with one player before the money, everyone clinging desperately to their last chips, and maybe 3 tables left, you know that it can take some time. Now imagine that there are over 60 tables left and you have to wait for every one of those tables to play their hand out before you can deal the next hand at your table. In 2001, the first year I played the final event, there were a total of 613 players. Going hand for hand with 560 plus players would almost be like starting the first day of the 2001 final event and having to wait for every single table to finish every single hand before moving to the next. We knew it would take a while.

What they decided to do was to have every dealer in the room to stand up once they finished the hand they were dealing. Already exhausted from working double and triple shifts they now had to deal a hand sitting down and then stand up for minutes at a time as they waited for everyone else to finish. At first I really felt for the dealers who had put up with so much over the last 6 weeks. However, after looking over to the table next to mine I realized who the real victims of this hand for hand tedium were: the degenerate gamblers.

I looked behind me and my heart went out as I thought of poor Sammy Farha sitting there and not being in action for minutes at a time. I’ve had some brief experience with the man and, my lord, I don’t even want to know what that eternity between hands must have been like for him. As it turns out though my fears were somewhat unfounded as Farha is plenty resourceful.

After his table’s hand was over he told the dealer to spread the deck. He then randomly drew a card, the 4 of clubs. Sean Sheikhan, who was also at his table, drew a 10 of hearts. Sammy peeled $1,000 off his wad of hundreds and said "double or nothing." As we waited for the next hand to start $1,000 became $2,000 and then $2,000 became $4,000. Eventually the floor came over and was simply aghast at the idea of bets being made without the house getting some kind of cut. The floorman explained that if they make the dealer do this again he’ll lose his job. No problem. Sammy reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a quarter. Sheikhan calls tails and it comes up tails. This goes on for a little while. By the time the next hand is about to start though Sammy has finally had enough and he nonchalantly pulls one casino chip out of his front pocket and flips it over to the young man who had been taking his action.

Now the thing to remember is that we’re still on the bubble in the largest poker tournament in the history of the world. I’m sitting there in excruciating desperation clawing my hair out at the thought of making the mistake that will cost me the $12,500 bottom money.

Of course at the table behind me, after a few high cards and coin flips, the young man goofing around with Farha proudly displays the $25,000 Bellagio chip he just won; and then we all sit down to play our next hand.

The Single Most Important Picture of this Year's World Series of Poker

2005-08-19T05:27:00.000-04:00

All right, I know the photo above doesn’t look like much. On a personal level though, this may be the single most important picture from this year’s World Series. I’m going to make an attempt at explaining why. It might not work but bear with me.

For context, this is from the 3rd day of play in the final event. The people looking into the camera are all friends from New York. The person they are looking at is the person taking the picture, me. Also helpful is the following photo which gives a geographic context:

The important part of this second picture is that empty space in the middle. The people in the 1st photo are on the left of this empty space. I am on the right. Now at first glance the empty space in the middle may not seem that large, a space of maybe 3 feet. But if you look a little closer you’ll see that the distance between the two groups is over 56 million dollars.

At the instant that the top photo was taken I’m in the money in the largest poker tournament that has ever existed. Everyone sitting at a table to the right is guaranteed some portion of the 56 million dollar prize pool, anywhere from $20,000 to $7,500,000. Guaranteed. The people on the left get jack. Granted some of the people in that 1st photo are smarter than I am, and some of them are far wealthier, and one in specific has significantly more anonymous gay sex than I do. But right now they are left side people and I am a right side person. For this brief shining moment I am special and I have friends who are happy for me and it’s actually kind of cool. (As the top photo empirically proves.)

Of course at the time I took it all for granted. I was a little busy and didn’t really have time to wax philosophic. The day after I got knocked out though it hit me. Before catching my plane, I went back to the Rio to cash out a couple chips I had stashed in my room. As a left side spectator I watched the tournament for a minute or two. That’s when I actually noticed that empty space in the middle, that one-way membrane that separates us common folk from the people who could still become this year’s world champion.

I try to explain what it’s like to get knocked out of the WSOP final event. It’s been said that the worst day of every poker player’s year starts the moment they get knocked out of the final event. There’s a little truth in this but I don’t know if it translates. I mean, I imagine it’s got to blow to get shanked in the kidney with a sharpened screwdriver but until I lose a prison fight I don’t know if I’ll fully understand the actual pain.

Try to imagine the best Christmas you’ve ever had. You’ve got the friends, and the family, and someone actually put some thought into a present that you actually love, and you’re all ‘nogged up, and you’re thinking "this really rocks." Then you hear a buzzer go off. A referee steps in and escorts you outside. All of a sudden you’re standing on the lawn in the cold. Now the worst part of it is that everyone else is still having Christmas. You look in through the window and everyone is still laughing and getting presents and everyone is having way too much fun to care that Christmas just ended for you. That kind of describes how it felt to go back and be there on the left side and watch everyone else play.

Of course, this year, to console my delicate sensibilities I did receive something:
This blurry sealed bag that happens to contain a couple years worth of rent, all in casino chips. Naturally they can’t just give you cash or a check which you would put in your pocket. No, the Harrah’s Corporation has to take one last shot at you as you’re walking out. They give you chips and make you walk through the casino in the off chance you might decide to let it all ride on red 5 before making it to the cage.

I succeeded in keeping Harrah’s hand out of my wallet but you know you can never get away completely clean. I couldn’t dodge the post game dinner shakedown at the Wynn with some friends. And of course I want a special thanks to go out to Richie "the Dwarf" Bell for telling the waitress "ehh, just bring me whatever you recommend," when she asked him what kind of sake he wanted. There’s nothing like picking up the tab on a $50 glass of sake.

So then finally, you’re in Vegas with a few friends and you’ve just outlasted over 5,400 people in the largest poker tournament ever, what could you possibly do to top it? You bowl the crap out of that town, that’s what you do! The roll of film with all the photos of the, uh, hookers and the blow and whatever else it is that cool people do when they win money got misplaced. Here’s an exciting bowling pose though.

Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 1 (The Why)

2005-08-09T13:51:00.000-04:00

A while back American Airlines ran this incredible promotion. In hopes of building loyalty and combating JetBlue on a couple of their most popular routes AA offered a free ticket to anyone who made two trips from New York to California or Florida within one year. Between the number of decent LA tournaments I could go to and the fact that both my parents and Christi lived in Florida it was the perfect promotion for me. I easily completed the two required trips and was mailed my free ticket. Now the thing that made this offer so impressive was that the ticket was good for anywhere in the world that American Airlines flew to. I looked up the world map on the AA website and found that every continent short of Antarctica was positively littered with tiny red dots representing cities you could get to using AA. All I had to do was take two flights to places I was going to anyway and I would get a free ticket to anywhere in the world, it seemed too good to be true.

Now, as it so happens I’m not all that well traveled. I’ve seen a fair cross section of the large and lushly diverse country that I call home. I’ve lived in Michigan, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York. I’ve taken various road trips out west, along the Eastern seaboard, from Florida to Chicago, and so on. If it’s a state with a major legal casino I’ve probably made a business trip to it. However, I’m not so much a world traveler. I've never even made it over to Europe. I did spend about a month in Ethiopia in ‘99 but beyond that I'm not so much a member of the international community.

Luckily I’ve a fair number of friends who are far better traveled than I am and I spent almost a year interviewing them on what I should do if I had the chance to fly anywhere in the world for free. I received a decent range of suggestions but with the parameters I set one country came up more than most of the others, Thailand. So I called up American and told them "I’m going to Bangkok!" to which they replied "No you’re not."

What I quickly discovered was that American Airlines defines "anywhere in the world" fairly differently than I do. While the world map on the AA website was littered with tiny red dots that represented AA cities, the subtle difference between a Codeshare City, a Oneworld City, and an AA/Codeshare had eluded me. While you could get to Bangkok through AA it was not the specific Bozo type of city required for my ticket.

Well, I had backup and I told AA that I’d go to New Zealand instead. Now, the woman on the phone didn’t actually laugh out loud at me but there was a moment as she tried to figure out the best way to convey not only that I was not going to New Zealand but that it was a pretty dumb question in the first place and to convey all of that without insulting me too much. She got the first two ideas across but failed slightly with the third.

From there the conversation went: Australia? No. China? No. Singapore? No. And eventually I just gave up and asked "what’s the farthest point I can get to with this ticket?" She thought a second or two and said "Tokyo. I guess," to which I replied "Lock it up!"

And that more or less is the short explanation of why I ended up in Tokyo. Now just in case the idea of me trying to wade through Tokyo alone not knowing a single person or a word of Japanese wasn't silly enough I actually convinced Christi to put aside her debilitating fears of earthquakes, Asian bird flues, and having the only person she knows on an entire continent be me, and I dragged her to Japan as well. This all resulted in the following photos: Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 2 (The Photos)

Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 2 (The Photos)

2005-08-05T15:37:00.000-04:00

Part 1 (The Why): here

This was the Japanese Inn we stayed at our first night.

The room was small but we liked the room service.

The view rocked as well.

This is Christi riding the subway. As you can tell all she had to do was throw on a black coat and she was indistinguishable from everyone else on the train.

This is Christi so hopped up on unfiltered Sake that she pretended to be a painted fiberglass bear...

...and then a sumo, where she yelled "FIGHT ME!!" and challenged the confused locals. Luckily, after about 20 minutes she eventually got bored.

This is Christi either at a Buddhist temple or in 1940's Germany.

Here's Christi at Shinjuku Train Station which made Grand Central look like an Amish buggy junction.

I didn't get any decent pictures of the neon of Shibuya so here's a stock picture of Time Square that's blurry enough that you can pretend it's Tokyo.

Here's me in front of a building with a giant bug crawling up the front of it. I'm still not entirely sure why there was a giant Japanese cockroach on the terrace but somehow in Tokyo it didn't seem too out of place.

As it turns out the whole city is pretty much laid out like the West Village, which makes it great for cruising around and randomly exploring little neighborhoods but not so good for actually finding anything specific. The fact that they choose to not even name most of their streets, much less list them in English, doesn't help either.

This impressed me though. It's not enough that you can buy a can of sake in any 7-Eleven. Their cans of sake actually have a button on the bottom of them that you can push and within a minute you have steaming hot sake no matter where you are. Those little bastards are crafty!

And speaking of crafty bastards, I stepped out of the shower and I couldn't understand why the area over the sink hadn't fogged up. Then I touched it and realized, heated mirrors. These fricking guys and their high tech mirrors. As you can clearly tell though, we westerners still have them soundly dominated on the hirsute front.

Completely by accident, we ended up in Japan at pretty much the exactly perfect time for all the touristy spring time activities. The weather was perfect for seeing cherry blossoms...

...and shrines...
...and gardens...

...and of course giant radioactive spiders.

This was where we ate the first morning.

And this was what we ate (after putting some wasabi on it). The restaurant was about 50 feet from the fish market that supplies all of Japan. It seemed pretty fresh.

This was one of our favorite restaurants.

It was almost like being in the Japanese pavilion at Epcot Center but it felt even more real.

Here's another of our favorite restaurants. All pampkin, all the time. We tried the pamkin pizza and pamkin curry. Actually very good.

This is a gratuitous shot of me on our picnic in order to show off my new haircut.

I'm not sure why, but for some reason I thought pachinko would be somewhat less dumb than slot machines. I was wrong.

This was of course great for my allergies.

I still have no idea what this thing is but the picture fits very well into the "Things Growing Out of Our Heads" series of shots, which also includes...

this...

...and this.

And speaking of things sticking out of heads, the only thing cuter than a giant robot shaped like a panda is of course a giant panda shaped robot with a little panda pilot sitting in it's head. These people do love their cute.
For Culture we hit the Kubuki theater. As you can tell, the Gaijin seats were pretty far back. Those little tiny colors in the distance are a bunch of Samurai's and Geishas and crap like that. We had headphones that were supposed to translate the play into English. However, what happened was that someone on stage would go into a 15 minute Shakespearean monologue and then at the end, through the headphones, all we would hear was "Let's go boss!" I imagine some of the nuance fell to the wayside.
This was an instillation piece at the Mori Museum. What was great was that the white things on the floor were hundreds of plastic cups arranged aesthetically. Two different times during the 20 minutes I was there I actually heard a shattering crash as some older Japanese lady would accidentally barrel through the cups. A very crafty people, the Japanese, but perhaps not so coordinated.

And finally, this was the view as we sadly journeyed back to our empirically inferior Caucasian country.

Here's Christi miserable to be back wallowing among the muddied, miscegenated, masses of New York.