sixth sense

walk around atlantic city this week and there sure are a lot of people who have it. at least if you ask them.

in fact, every time i sit at a poker table there seem to be nine people who have it. it's like morgan freeman said in the shawshank redemption; he's the only guilty man at shawshank. well at the poker table, i'm the only one without esp.

i've always thought it's hilarious that people try to elevate what they do to some transcendant level in order to eleveat their self-value. you take the average card player and what you get is someone who gives his money away during 12-hour sessions where the only movements he makes are lifting the corners of two cards to see what he's been dealt. their hygeine is generally subpar, their social skills limited to ogling at cocktail waitresses, and their families generally undercared for.

yet they seem to gloss over these details. if their english were better, they'd describe their compulsion as a way of life; an unflinching battle of wits where strategy is neither finite nor constant, but rather an evolution of style which combines mathematical analysis, pattern analysis and comprehension of human nature at the highest orders. yes, it is warfare, humanized; the physical bruatality of battle removed, distilled into a matching of social intelligence.

to illustrate, here's a scent that transpired at my table. note: poker jargon has been translated into standard english.

"That's a helluva bet." (translation: you're really smart) He pauses to cotemplate the correct course of action, activating his extra-sensory power to deconstruct the meaning of his opponent staring at the table. He shakes his head in disbelief of his challenger's adroitness.

"Wow, that is a great play." (translation: this borders on genius on your part. I am truly impressed by your abilities.)

"I'm going to lay this down." (translation: I have determined that you hold the winning hand. Despite losing the hand, the fact that i'm able to unravel your brillant stratagem demonstrates that i am operating on a higher plane than mere mortals.)

yes, this is what passes for social interaction among poker players. next time, you're at the cardroom, try it for yourself. acknolwedge the complex web of thinking that your opponent used in deciding on how to play his hand, and by showing that you are able to decipher it, you will indirectly showed your superiority.

and best of all, the people will see you as a really nice guy!

you really do learn something everyday

in case any of you aren't aware, poker is really popular right now. if you own a television for any other reason than deference to societal norm, you've come across it on the tube. by my count, there's three weekly programs dedicated to the "sport". and trust me, i'm not searching the tv guide looking for more.

i'm typing this from the desk of my atlantic city hotel room because i've made the cross country journey to the world poker tour borgata event. for a while, i supplemented my income playing texas holdem, but that was mostly online, and this is my first major ($10k) event. so despite logging hundreds of hours playing cards, i've spent relatively little time in the company of actual poker players. thank god.

but it hasn't taken me long to figure out something about a large number of the people and how they think. i also think it explains part of what is behind the poker boom.

in reality, any person with half a brain and the patience to sit in a chair for hours at a time can be a winning player. one of the big skills of the game is pattern recognition and doing quick computations in your head -- otherwise known as nerdiness. not nerdiness in the sense of getting stuffed in your locker before homeroom every morning, but real nerdiness of the ab (and bc) calculus variety. these are the people who pick the game up the fastest, and they are flocking to it.

why do you ask? it's because they're thrilled to have something they like to do that would be considered "cool" by girls. now on a friday night, they can play online poker instead of starcraft, earn money and not have to make up something to impress the receptionist at work they have a crush when she asks (rhetorically) how their weekend was.

if you need more convincing, just take a look at the poker groupies running around the borgata this weekend. they approach the various television pros requesting autographs, as obsequious as a trekkie asking spock for one of his ear tips. poker groupies even have their own uniform: cargo shorts and a swag white polo with a stretched out collar.

don't get the pesce

This was my second journey to this Italian tapas eatery. And if there's one hallmark of this Russian Hill restaurant, it's inconsistency. The service was spotty, lacking both the professionalism of a formal dining experience, but also the easy familarity of the place around the corner. It continued with the food. Some dishes, like the steamed clams, spicy corn and bread pudding were delectable. On the other hand, the oysters and swordfish rolls were just mediocre and the drunken tuna was terrible, tasting like microwaved Chicken on the Sea slathered in Bullseye BBQ sauce.

The wine list was suprisingly inexpensive, but I found out why when the first two bottles we ordered had all the complexity and body of a grape-flavored Capri-Sun. Then we asked the waiter to recommend a full-bodied bottle and he brought one twice as expensive as anything else on the list. That was annoying.

yes sir.

i'm really down on intelligence right now. what i mean is that i'm beginning to think that being smart doesn't count for shit. in fact, i'm not so sure being above average is really better than being average when it comes to brain power. after all when you're smarter than the people around you, all you think about is how everything that people are doing sucks.

take my job for example. a couple months ago, we designed ads on a pretty tight budget using stock photography that really did set us apart from most of our competition in the backward world of online gaming (think dot coms at their heyday).

now, one month into launch, the financier decides that everything is wrong with the ad.

his reasoning: don't re-invent the wheel.

yes, instead of trying to be different than all your competitors, why not just be the same? just imitate what all your competitors are doing and grab some market share.

if that isn't the pearl of wisdom that has advanced human civilization over the last 2000 years, i don't know what is.

the shocking thing is that all the other people in the room simply nodded their head as if the ceiling had opened up and light from heaven was shining down upon them.

two months ago, everyone in this room loved this ad (i myself thought it was decent but not great). here are the two main excuses that people put forth as to why we were unable to foretell the problems with our campaign.

- sometimes, you need to see it on paper. hmm. well let's see; each of you was sent the proof and could've printed it out. we also got a match print done so that we could see exactly what it would look like.
- we had to see how it would look next to other company's ads. oh, this one is my favorite. wow, is this because it would've been so difficult to actually open one of the magazines and see how other ads compared to ours? or is it because the idea of evaluating the competition prior to developing a campaign was just too abstruse?

did i mention the man behind this project is probably worth $100 million and has a business that he nets close to $2 million a month?

obviously smarts don't help you get rich.

fuck yahoo personals

for a moment, let us return to our dear missy.

our poor watertown bloke has pulled himself up by his bootstraps and risen off the bed and forced himself to his computer two steps away. he has pledged to move on, see who else is available in his little town. so he opens his 56k modem and dials in to his ISP. five minutes later, he's connected.

isn't the internet remarkable, he mutters to himself.

full of resolve, he returns to the yahoo personals page. but 45 seconds later when the page finishes loading, his mouth drops open and he unknowingly slumps into his folding chair. the muscles in his neck give out and his chin drops to his chest.

this is what he sees.












his beloved missy in the arms of another man.

tears begin to streak down his face, more quickly than he can wipe them away. his breathing stops and starts in fits as his chest heaves.

he does the only thing he can and hits the continue button, but alas the modem can only process information so quickly. he curses the town, wondering when they too will have access to this technology rumored to be out there known as dsl.

little does our naive young boy know of the horror that awaits him though.
















he can no longer help himself. words begin to pour out of his mouth. harlot, slut, skank, slag. she has given herself up to not one but two different guys, this after he had waited a quarter of a century to give himself to her.

the horrid thoughts begin to creep into his head. why is she clad in the same shirt in both pictures? and then he realizes what it must be; she must have been with them at the same time. he covers his eyes trying to block out the image of missy spinning around like a merry-go round as each of the guys take one side each in filling her up from both ends.

but nothing stops. he screams and begins to pull on his hair. he wants everything to stop. he needs it to. he just can't go on like this.

so he makes things stop in the only way he knows how and he sprints down the stairs and out the front door, stripping off his clothes while in full motion, until he is, moments later, naked and standing in the knee-deep snow. he then dives into the white powder clawing his way to the bottom until the whole body goes numb and finally everything stops.

look what you've done yahoo. all because you've lied!

missy from watertown

with pretty good frequency when i open my yahoo mail, i find the pleasant countenance of a late-20's blonde with unblemished, pearly-white skin staring back at me. perhaps you've seen missy too -- she's the cover girl for yahoo's personals service.

pretty faces are so abundant on the internet -- although this one stands out because it leaves out the ample bosom that normally accompanies a woman's smile -- that i usually just gloss over them. but this one caught my eye for another reason: she's from watertown, ny.

for those unfamilar with this place, consider yourself lucky. during the winter, it quite regularly boasts being the coldest city in the continental us, and during a particularly desolate winter of 2003, the temperature didn't break zero (fahrenheit!) for more than 30 days consecutively.

i only know this, because my brother happens to make this arctic village his home. after finishing his residency at a harvard hospital, he had the choice of a faculty position at johns hopkins and a lucrative private practice in watertown. inexplicably, he took the money and a long-term residence in the frozen tundra.

as the good brother that i am, i decided to see if missy were available for my brother to date. after all, in a town where fixing a pothole warrants a front page headline in the town paper, a doctor is a small celebrity. and in fact, he made appearances on the local network twice within the first three months of moving there.

but after looking through several pages of personals, i was disappointed to find missy absent. intentionally, i filtered out characteristics that it was obvious missy did not possess. from her face, i knew she had blond hair, i knew she wasn't fat (no double chin) and i knew she was under 40.

still no missy (as a consolation, however, i did find a somewhat goth looking female in search of a nsa tryst).

think of that poor bloke in watertown who shoveled a dozen driveways of 2-inch thick ice to save up the $200 to buy that yearly description (as a gentlemen, he would need time to woo missy) only to find his cherubic girl has deserted him.

and now our pimple-faced 25 year old just sits in the bedroom he's called his own for the last nine years, curtains pulled, staring at the cream-colored paint peel off his walls, as his mom berates him for wasting so much money on a girl he should have known he'd never have.

giving for katrina

i made a small donation to the relief efforts for katrina victims, but i made a serious mistake in doing so. of course, i'm not saying i shouldn't have given money, but what i should've done is found a friend whose company had a matching donor program, and had the friend give the money on my behalf. you could make an argument that's unethical, and takes advantage of the generosity of certain corporations, but the argument's bullshit.

on a similar note, walmart, mcdonalds and ups have stopped paying regular wages to employees who can't get to work because they don't have scuba gear that would be necessary to get to their offices. apparently, they've decided that since they won't be making money in the new orleans area, no one should.

let me be the first to say how weak that is.

on walmart's page describing their relief efforts, they cite that they are delivering two trailers of water daily for the new orleans police force. WOW! maybe they're using the lost wages to fund the program.

i've never been one to extol the virtues of starbucks, but at least they've decided to keep cutting paychecks for disaster victims. of course, starbucks has nothing on their site saying they've done anything else. i'm guessing that's because they don't have anything else to say.