Muttroxia

I had the cards. I had the skill. I didn’t have the luck.

First hand of the night. Small blinds limps into my big blind, I call with Q-8. The flop is 8-6-5. With top pair I raise it, he calls. The turn is a 4. He had a 7, connecting his straight, taking 30% of my stack right there.

An hour later history repeats itself. I raise preflop with K-10. Flop is 8-9-10. Turns out he had 6-7 underneath (why did he call?). At least I got out of that cheap, I incorrectlyread him for A-10 and folded.

Me and one other player are shortstacked. The rebuy clock is almost up, I am sure he’s going all-in with any two cards. He goes all in with 800. I have K-Q suited. I go all in myself, 1300. Big blind mutters to himself and calls with A-10. He knocks us both out and I rebuy. Question: Should he have called the all-in bets? I don’t think it was a really bad play, but I wouldn’t have done it.

I go all in preflop with K-J. Short stack calls me. He had K-10. Guess what the river card was? If you guessed 10 you’re getting the theme of this post.

I go all-in with A-Q suited. A pair of 9s call me. The flop is A…, it’s A-9-x. Oh, c’mon! The Queen on the river is just insulting. I’m out.

Lots of good playable hands, right? I also had bullets twice, stole quite a few blinds, and basically failed to make any big mistakes. And yet… some nights the poker gods are against you.

Tonight: -$40
Running Total: I don’t know, I’m too tired to look it up. -$100?

I have some kind of ungodly throat problem. It’s been building for almost a week. Over the weekend it became serious. Swallowing burns. Saliva builds up until I have to make a disgusting dangling spit thread, or swallow and accept the pain as my own.

It helps if I don’t talk or use my voice. The last two days I have spent virtually silent. An odd phrase here or there, a few sentences when I’m feeling well, but mostly nothing. Gestures and facial expressions. It has been interesting to see how well I can make myself known without having to speak. After a bit of practice it gets easy to express most thoughts. I am seeing the world in a different way. I may try out Silence Day this year — not to be confused with The Day of Silence! Pete Townshend is a big supporter of Silence Day. Unfortunately, his song about it stinks. What a wasted opportunity!

I also found out that I yell at my kids a lot more than I thought I did.

Alien vs. Predator

Gif me your best smile

Facebook APB catches drunk thief.

Disney templates

Welcome to Romania

Deduping

Amazing basketball shot

Google Street View: Tall car, short bridge

AP issues itself a cease and desist letter

Atheist motivational posters

Meth-lab Feng Shui

Worst advertising slogan of the year

One way to explain cocaine test results

Life expectancy grows

Kris Kristofferson is my new hero

Ten Principles for a Black Swan-proof World

Understanding deflation (from mint.com)

Why lobbying continues: study shows 22,000% return on lobbying investments

I’m on hold with Comcast. In between the oddly un-soulful blues hold music, they play recordings to upsell me on various products.

..voice mail with web access and 12 popular calling features! Make Comcast for home phone service. Ask your Customer Account Executive about Comcast digital voice today!

Now I don’t know if I’ll ever be an executive. But I do know if I ever do become an executive, the last damnt thing I will be doing is answering phones for a living!

They have a lot of songs about waking up.

• “Good Day Sunshine”
• “Good Morning Good Morning”
• “Here Comes the Sun”

Then there’s also the obscure “I’ll Follow the Sun”.
And there’s two more songs about days passing, “Yesterday” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

C’mon!

Lost Cat: Reward

Reaganomics

Bill Gates on Facebook

Michael Bay eats cereal

Art from old cassette tapes

A good woman can bring balance to your life.

Nick Cage does Japanese Commercials

8 Awesome Cases of Internet Vigilantism

Where Are They Now: 6 “Stars” of Embarrassing Viral Videos

Clipart stop-motion movie

Use Your Illusion III

The complete history of The Joker

PETA the slaughterhouse: placing 7 out of 21,000 pets last year.

Australian Sex slave teen killed her tormentor with a shotgun, cut up his body into pieces, buried and hid the remains. She was set completely and utterly free.

More airport outrage: The unattended bag. And another one.

The less said about the first round the better. I was physically exhausted and played badly. I let myself get sucked into pissing away money on a draw, played overly aggressive with marginal hands, and was unlucky to boot. Blech.

After the rebuy I played much better. But the bad beats killed me. With J-10, the flop is J-10-5. Only one other player. He goes in. He goes in with lots of stuff so I easily call with my top two pair. He has K-9. The turn is a Q, giving him the straight.

I fight back and by the end of hour two I am right around average with ~2500 chips. The player to my right raise the 300 blinds to 600. I call with K-J suited, everyone else folds. The flop is K-Q-x. He checks, I instantly go all in (another 1900 or so). He calls with Q-9. The river is a 9, knocking me out.

It was discouraging. I had gotten myself together and was playing well but was killed by lady luck. That’s how it goes.

Two points of interest:
I spent a lot of time trying to get a read on my nemesis from last week. He was involved in several big hands. Each time he had something. It wasn’t always much but it was always something. He actually knocked me out in the first round. I limped in with 4-4, only three players. The flop was J-8-6. I was short-stacked. I gamble no one had a jack and raised it. He re-raised me and I had to call. He had 6-x. That’s quite aggressive on his part, but not a pure naked bluff either. In the end I still have no idea when he’s playing very loosely and when he has the goods though.

It’s been a long time since I was playing from ahead. It’s been a long time since I got a big hand in the first hour. I feel like I am always behind and struggling to catch up. I don’t know what that means, but it sucks.

Tonight: -$40
Running Total: -$60

From the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge newlsetter, here is how the executive summary of “Why Sweatshops Flourish”:

Everyone agrees it is wrong to buy things made with sweatshop labor. Yet many of us are willing to justify our decision when a product—a pair of jeans, for example—is something we really want.

Bolding is mine. No. Not everyone agrees it is wrong to buy things with sweatshop labor. In fact, most of the field of economics regards sweatshops as a good thing. The authors are clearly blind to this.

Next, participants responded to four statements, each of which draws on some of the common moral rationalizations used to justify sweatshop labor such as: “The use of sweatshop labor is OK because otherwise those workers would not have jobs”; “Without sweatshops, poorer countries couldn’t develop”;

These aren’t moral rationalizations. The first one is very factual. It is telling that they don’t bother to define what sweatshop labor is. The vast majority of what we consider “sweatshops” are not slave labor. They are mutually agreed upon contracts between extremely poor people and companies. Sweatshops offend us because we in America are incredibly prosperous. It blinds us to conditions in most of the world. The sad fact is that sweatshops prosper because the options for the employees are even worse. Their other options in life are even more hopeless and desperate. Moral outrage should be saved for the basic living conditions in these countries, not for the capitalistic engine that helps get them out.

And Harvard professors shouldn’t make such blatant ideological assumptions in academic research.

Obama is planning to increase foreign aid to Pakistan to somewhere around 1.5 Billion per year. And we are stepping up our demands for them to root out extreme Islam and increase counter-terrorism on the Afghan border.

At first glance, there’s something a little sick about increasing aid to Pakistan. They’ve let Osama Bin Laden (remember him) hide out there for almost a decade, they’ve sold nuclear technology to anyone who will buy it, they haven’t done much to fight Islamic terrorists. And their popular candidate was assasinated, their Supreme Court was summarily dismissed – why are we rewarding that?

But paying someone else to do the dirty work is a good strategy. How much would it cost us to keep going into Pakistan and root out terrorists? For comparison, the supplemental budgets for Iraq were 661 Billion dollars. If we can remove Pakistan as a haven for the terrorists for less than 10 Billion, we have made a great deal.

(Of course the kicker is that Pakistan has to follow through on it’s end of the deal. Understandably, they just want a blank check. “For years, the United States has simply paid bills submitted by the Pakistani government for counterterrorism operations, even during truces when its military was not involved in counterterrorism. Pakistan has resisted linking its aid to specific performance criteria and officials acknowledged that developing those criteria could be problematic.”)

David Lee Roth soundboard. Fantastic!

Google classic, pre-internet

Swim practice just got a lot more intense.

You’re a bad man, Chris Brown

Fmylife

Sturgeon faces

Then hilarity ensued

An honest criminal

Getting the best of tech support

Seth McFarlane, for Hulu

German police have been tracking a nefarious serial killer for decades. The DNA has turned up at 39 murders. Oops, turns out it’s a worker in the plant that made the DNA cotton swabs.

Fireman dresses as Spiderman to save autistic boy on ledge

What kind of crazy unit of measurement is CNN using?

A fascinating account/explanation of hypothermia.

Doctor has heart attack during surgery. He keeps going, knowing his patient won’t recover if he stops. Wow.

Press corps: “But Mr. President, why did it take you days to come out about the AIG bonus mess when Cuomo was on it immediately???” Obama: “Because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak. Next?” Press Room: “Oooooooooh..”

Did I play this right? Let’s just skip to the key hand. We’re two hours in. I have exactly 2,500 and blinds are at 100-200. I’m on the dealers right. I have been quiet for a long time. Players have been respecting my raises.

I have Qd-Jd. Instead of calling, or putting the standard 600 in as a raise, I put in 800. I want to pick up the blinds. I figure no one will call unless they have premium cards. Unfortunately, the small blind raises it up to 2,000.

Question 1: Was my initial bet okay? Was it overly aggressive, or did I just get unlucky?

So.. should I call? It’s 1,200 for a pot of 4,200. I’m obviously going to go all-in, so it’s really 1,700 for a pot of 4,700. More importantly, what does he have? He’s a good player. He has been known to bet big with very little. I try putting myself in his shoes. Muttrox has been known to bluff, but it’s usually a semi-bluff at worst, he must suspect I have something. The bet of 800 has to get some respect. If he goes over the top the odds are good I’m going to call. He must want me to call. I think there is no way he’s putting that much in unless he has A-A, K-K, or A-K. If it’s A-K, I might call given the pot odds. But I think it’s K-K or A-A. After a lot of thought I fold.

Question 2: Was that the right fold?

It didn’t take long after that. A few hands later I raised it up to 600 with A-9, again hoping to get some blinds. I had two callers and the flop was A-x-x. With only 1,100 more to play with I had to go all-in and hope no one had an Ace with a higher kicker, even though I suspected someone did. Yep, I was called with A-J and knocked out.

I still can’t decide if I played it wrong. I think I was just unlucky enough to run into premium cards at the exact wrong time. Either way iIt was not an auspicious start to the new year of poker! I have decide to reset the running total.

Tonight: -$20
Running Total: -$20

Here’s one of my favorite weird moments from Futurama. The aliens have announced they are coming to Earth and are going to eat all the humans.

We will begin with the firemen, then the math teachers, and so on in that fashion until everyone is eaten!

The joke is figuring out what “in that fashion” means. What possible ordering could start with firemen and then proceed to math teachers?

In a business meeting yesterday everyone in the room introduced themselves and listed their hobbies. This was one co-workers answer:

I’m into cycling. I’m learning guitar and into music. Fine arts, stock-trading, all that stuff.

All that stuff? What’s the next thing on that list?