You know, you feel like a real dumbass agreeing to a chop, and then come in 2nd.

Great little tournament tonight, except that I came in 2nd* and not first. I got verrrry sloppy at the end, and I had an opponent who made the right moves to capitalize on that. All I can say is, goshdarnit, I was out of beer. Congratulations, and a hearty Great Game! to Wes the Gigantic Pirate, the winner of the 3rd WPBT seat in the WSOP $1,500 No Limit Hold ‘Em event. See ya in Vegas, matie!

* Read the rest of this entry »

This is a nice birthday present (or Mother’s Day present, since it’s from Sunday). Tim Hulsey, brilliant cultural dude, talks about the Western movie:

And here, as they say, is where I get off. Granted, if you’re a fan of repertory cinema, you’re not likely to see a classic Western in New York City, the very mention of which inspires a grizzled cowboy in a picante sauce commercial to cry, “Git a rope!” But ironically, you’re much more likely to see these movies in Manhattan than in Omaha, or Santa Fe, or any of the other places traditionally associated with the movie Western. Being a fan of movie westerns is much more lonely, when you have only a television and a DVD player to give you your cowboy fix.

You might not know this, or be able to guess, but I loooooove the Western. The age of the satellite teevee has ruined me, too, because I can get two or three channels devoted to the Western. Is there any possible way life could get better, short of free beer? And they come with all the schtick that surrounds the Western movie, like re-runs of Bonanza and Rawhide and The Virginian.

Well, anyway…Tim talks about the Western, how it relates to film noir (my other fave movie genre), and how audiences are still (still!) influenced by the Western. May it ever be thus, hombres…

One day I’ll bore you all to tears with my contention that the absolute top-dog best treatise on the duality of man is embodied in the characters of Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove.

Cobb on wacky GUI tools:

I take that back. What’s so absolutely perfect about this product is that it allows you to generate executable code that you can drop into obscure directories on your customer’s servers. Only you know what they do and only you can fix them. That’s evil genius.

I know a former mainframe systems programmer who worked like that…he’s in sales now, though.

Love this line: idiot proof visual drag and drop fecal-torium

Man, sometimes I really do miss coding…bare-metal assembler was my milieu, back when 16MB of core was a daily reality, and the dream gig was whipping the OS into shape for multiple partitions. I just stop sometimes and dream of what I could have done with a gigabyte of memory. I would have had tape drives dancing the jitterbug…

It’s my birthday (koff45koff), but that’s not important — it’s also

Like I needed an excuse…

My sensei (to whom I bow) Hog On Ice caught this. He has a superb cookbook called Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man - The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. I just love that…