A Good Christian Raisin’ and a Eighth Grade Education
Just when you thought we were stuck without any real choices this election year, I’ve come up with an option. I’m beginning a grass roots effort to convince Maryland State Senator Clay Davis to throw his hat into the ring. It will take a lot of convincing and imagination to make this dream a reality, but if we all band together by purchasing a bumper sticker we have a shot at getting Mr. Clay elected.
Hey, at least we know what we’ll get from him.
Last weekend I was up in Chicago for the finals of the Barclay’s Churchill Cup. Billymac covered most of the trip at his place, so you can get the full run down there–I’ll just concentrate on poker. On Friday, Billymac and I went over to Majestic Star Casino just across the Indiana border to play poker with our buddy Big Paul the Wrecking Ball. This was a very educational session of poker for me. I’ll get to the lessons later, after I give you the lowdown on playing poker at Majestic Star.
The Majestic Star has about 20 poker tables, and the room was surprisingly well populated for a Friday afternoon. It was a little run down–the felt on the tables was worn to almost nothing in some spots. That’s not a huge deal I guess, but everyone there was talking about the new poker room that was going to open up at Horseshoe (I think), so I’m surprised that they weren’t upgrading the room to try to make it as nice as possible while they still had the market cornered. The dealers were solid, and there was a good variety of games going on–1/2 no limit, 2/5 no limit, some higher stakes limit games, and even an Omaha game. I haven’t played any Omaha in a while, so I stuck with 1/2 NL.
I had a couple of beers and some coffee while I was there–pretty prompt service. The coffee was free, but the beer wasn’t. Not a big deal, just letting you know. We all played at different tables, and we were in agreement that there weren’t any bad players there, at least that we saw. My table had a few guys who were lose, but they were solid after the flop. There was one guy at my table who was really good and had everybody flustered at one time or another. I lost ~$60, but I can honestly say I’ve never had a run of cards as bad as I had during this session. I was dealt two pair the entire time–JJ and 55. I got K-8 off suit so many times I was considering going to the blackjack table instead. The session became an exercise in discipline, and that leads me to my lessons learned during this session.
Without good cards, it’s much tougher to win money at non-tourist poker rooms. Everybody there was local–local as in every day player local. They all knew the dealers by name, and several of them knew each other by name. The big topic of conversation was the new poker room that was going to open and which dealers were going to be working there. It sounds like Majestic Star is about to lose most of its good dealers and most of its regulars to this new room. It seems like local rooms are tough to crack because the level of play is pretty high and pretty steady. I’m sure a pro could have come in and jacked the place, but I’m no pro. Any local fish would get busted out of this room within a week or two and never come back, so you are stuck playing with guys who are essentially passing the same money around to each other all the time.
I was forced into playing tight by the cards that I was dealt, but being at a table with guys who were lose without being reckless post flop made it tough to pull off any moves, even with a tight image. I think this room is definitely beatable for me, but I’d be back to depending on luck, which I’d rather not have to do. The fact that the poker room at Majestic Star is open 24 hours puts you a little behind as well, because the max buy-in for 1/2 NL is $200. That means that you can’t sit down at a table with guys who’ve been playing for 15 hours with a $600 stack and stand up to them. I’m a firm believer that you are at a huge disadvantage at a NL table unless you can buy in to match the chip leader’s stack. A local room like the one I played at in Dania, Florida (which closes at midnight) is easier to beat because you can get there in the early afternoon and buy in at the max with everybody else. Then the guys who come in later are at a disadvantage to your larger stack.
As I said, it was an exercise in discipline, and I think I did pretty well to only drop $60 with the bad run of cards. It happens sometimes. I’d recommend Majestic Star just for the size and variety of the room, but it sounds like the new room opening up may be a little nicer once they get it going. Have fun!
$300,000,000,000.00 in funds for mortgage aid. I hope this doesn’t get passed for several reasons. First of all, it’s such an obvious attempt by both Democrats and Republicans to pander. This probably wouldn’t be happening were this not an election year.
And why does the gov’ment need to do this? Can’t financial institutions (who are in trouble if they don’t get paid) work this out with borrowers (who are in trouble if they can’t pay) on their own? They got on this boat together, both knowing its hull was full of holes. Why should everyone else have to come to their rescue now?
The mortgage aid plan would let the Federal Housing Administration back $300 billion in new, cheaper home loans for an estimated 400,000 distressed borrowers who otherwise would be considered too financially risky to qualify for government-insured, fixed-rate loans.
Does this mean I can look forward to being offered aid when I make a bad financial decision as well? What about the guy who started piling up cash years ago when people were getting interest only and adjustable rate loans because he knew there would be an opportunity to buy foreclosed property cheap in a few years for cash? Why isn’t that person, who made a good financial decision, being rewarded?
A lot of people are worried about these unstable financial times. A few years ago Dave Chappelle tried to help America, but I’m not sure how many people listened. I don’t think you have to be down with the Wu to understand how funny this is, but references to the Ol’ Dirty Bastard help if you know a little something about him (or Dirt McGirt). We can only speculate as to why he wasn’t able to be at the conference.
Green. Get the money. Dollar dollar bill ya’ll.
This isn’t much of a surprise…it was pretty obvious that the very reason Google bought Feedburner in the first place was so they could roll AdSense into it. And no complaints here either–to their credit, Google immediately made all of the “pro” features of Feedburner available for free as soon as they took ownership. These features are plenty valuable, and I’m happy to have them.
I’d expect the number of publishers enrolled in the AdSense program to go up (Go here to
). It’s still the easiest way (ok, maybe second easiest way) for small publishers to monetize. And including ads in a feed is even easier than displaying them on your site–no need to add code in the right place or worry about placement and layout, which is the “art” in displaying ads directly in the template. Feedburner is a great way to start playing with AdSense if you’ve never used it and were curious.
The downside? I don’t really see one. The ads are optional. It’s totally up to the feed owner as to whether or not to serve ads. It doesn’t cost anything to display the ads, and while you may not get rich, you may at least make enough change to pay for gas beer hosting. I am a little surprised it took Google so long to integrate AdSense. Then again, they still haven’t fixed the problem with reporting subscribers that shows up every month or so and makes everyone freak out.
So…why aren’t you seeing ads in this feed? I decided a while back that I was going to keep my feed ad free as sort of a “thanks” to the people who subscribe. In that vein, I’ve also made some changes on the actual site layout to make the site a little more friendly to returning visitors by eliminating one of the ad components in the sidebar and eliminating the ad at the end of each post.
That move isn’t entirely unselfish, as I’ve also added a “related posts” component that will hopefully make the site a little more sticky and get more traffic for older posts. Hopefully I’ll be paid off there, as each post older than 7 days now has an ad component at its beginning.
My other idea is to add a “donate” button. That way people who were just about to comment that I should eliminate all ads (you know who you are) could just give me money and feel like they really deserved ad free content.
That got your attention, huh?
As evidence I submit my venture to Sundown in the City on Thursday. Sundown in the City is a series of outdoor concerts put on each summer in Market Square. There’s no charge for admission, and they draw insane crowds. I haven’t been to Sundown in the City in a couple of years, but I went on Thursday to see Robert Earl Keen. Huge crowd, and an unbelievable amount of smokers.
Before I go any further…I don’t care if you smoke. You have every right to do so, and I think the ban on smoking inside is a bunch of crap. It’s your body-trash it if you want to. If I don’t want to be around it, I can (and do) choose not to be around it. That problem is easily solved.
But I didn’t realize that so many people still smoke. What is this, 1978? Maybe they were smoking so much because they aren’t allowed to do it inside anymore? Maybe they are all nervous about the fact that gas and food prices are so high? Maybe they spent the money they would have spent on fuel for this years family vacation on cigarettes since they wouldn’t be able to go anywhere this year?
I don’t know. But I started thinking that, while gases prices are high, they aren’t so high that people can’t afford the luxury of cooking themselves from the inside. I mean, this is literally just burning money, and a lot of it. To be fair, I didn’t hear anyone complaining about gas prices in between puffs, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that some of them had complained in the last 24 hours, probably the last time they filled up and bought a pack of smokes.
So as high as prices are, I think we’ll survive–at least long enough to demand in our old age that someone give us free health care to take care of all those problems caused by smoking.
Maria Bartiromo was my big crush at the turn of the century. My daily schedule was to get up really early to work out, take a nap, and then get up to watch her for the opening bell at the NYSE on Squawk Box. She’s super smart, and not too tough to look at either, so I didn’t have much trouble staying awake to hear what she had to say. A couple of naps later and I could check her out again in the afternoons on Street Signs.
Then the .com bubble burst and I had to get a real job. Oh well.
Last night Maria Bartiromo hosted a special on CNBC on America’s Oil Crisis. There were a few really interesting points and ideas on why we are in the situation we’re in right now and what’s going to happen in the future with oil and other energy sources. For instance, I was surprised to learn that George Bush doesn’t get up early every morning to set the prices at the pump of each and every gas station in the United States.
So who is to blame?
Speculators, for one, are getting a big part of the blame for creating something of an oil bubble. I didn’t realize that you only have to come up with 5% of the purchase price on oil, and a lot of folks are saying that margin should be raised. I’m good with letting some speculators get stuck when the bubble (if there really is one) bursts myself, just so long as they aren’t going to get bailed out for borrowing money to purchase over priced oil.
Where does the government’s share of the blame come in? No real energy policy, disallowing drilling in the US, continuing to devalue the currency and weaken the dollar. I guess those could have some effect, huh?  Now there are pending threats of taxes on windfall profits on oil companies to boot. Talk about some incentive to increase production–just tell the producer that you’ll charge them more to allow them to do the work. Makes total sense.
It was interesting that 15% of the viewers polled put the blame on the consumer for not changing consumption habits. It makes me wonder–what is the price per gallon of gasoline that would make you carpool? Downsize in car? For me that was the $2 mark in 2002.
Bartiromo, the naughty capitalist that she is, slants a lot of her questions in favor of letting markets work these things out, but there were plenty of people interviewed on the show who are in favor of heavy government intervention, hinting at times that gas should be subsidized. I guess we have a right to state provided gas now too?
I’m talking about the broader sense of “rights”, not rights that are specifically listed by some document written by a bunch of 18th century lawyers. I’m talking about the concept of rights. How do you define that concept?
Do rights encompass all of the things you’d simply like to have? Are they the things that are necessary to sustain life? Are they the things necessary to live comfortably? Maybe everyone has a different answer. For me, the easiest way to answer the question is to consider the things to which I’m entitled. And for me, the things I have a right to end where the rights of others begin. I’m able to determine which rights I have by defining the rights, or entitlements, I don’t have.
I’m not entitled to anything that requires a sacrifice on the part of anyone else.
I may covet these things. I may try to trade for these things. I may wait for others to decide to give me these things. I may even try to convince someone to give me these things now. But I can’t take these things, at least not morally. Sounds reasonable enough, right? We can agree is true? If so, then we must also (by logic) agree that the contra positive is true. More specifically, I am entitled to anything that does not require a sacrifice on the part of someone else.
If that made sense, keep reading. If your brain is already scrambled by the terms “entitled”, “contra positive”, and “logic”, that’s cool. Just come back in a few hours…I’ll be posting another edition of “The Roost” later tonight. I pride myself on providing a little something for everybody.
According to Gawker’s Nick Denton, yes.
Gawker head honcho Nick Denton explained to Silicon Alley Insider that the decision to sell the sites was based on the economy, lack of advertising, and his desire to get lean before the blogosphere implodes.
Wait. Don’t panic. One prognostication does not a bubble burst. Don’t rush out to the nearest convenience store to trade in your shares of www.itfrom.us for beef jerkey and (used) scratch of lottery tickets just yet.
Any reasonable person knows that the blogosphere is not going to implode, at least not until someone invents a cheaper and more efficient way than blogging to waste time and money.
I’ll tell you why. Or I’ll let MonsterNoodle explain it:
Keep on loaning to people that can’t afford it, for things that are not worth it. Enough said.
Read the whole post.
