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

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."  :

2

 

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:

1

 

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".

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Worst... John Connor... Ever

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!

Scabbing for Cookies

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.)

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

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.

Meta-MiniPost 1.2

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)

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

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.