What a busy week!

On Monday we played poker at my house. Kim won $200 playing .25-.50 NL Holdem, which is hard to do. In all the .25-.50 games we have played, only a couple, maybe three times has somebody won that much. While $200 may not sound like much, that is 400 BB’s, which would translate to winning $2,000 in my old $2-$5 game, something I never did. Yours trule broke even (with a high-water mark of +$85), but drank about a gallon of Kim’s tequilla, so I feel like a winner (and I felt like a winner on Tuesday a.m.!) Mr. KTL took about $50 from me on a hand where most people would have won little to nothing off of me. He flopped a set and between his body language and his betting (or shall I say calling) patterns, I was convinced he was drawing at a flush. Consequently, I bet the top pair pretty hard on the flop and turn, and he doubled up through me.

We went to Houston for the holiday and I didn’t do much other than see family. I did grab a beer (or two) with Boyd, winner of the 2nd ever Dr Fro Poker tournament circa 1999, and we caught up on life. All other fun with friends will have to wait until Christmas.

Of course, I watched the UT-A&M game. Some losses are hard to take (say, OU when they got hosed by Oregon) and others are not. This one went down ok. If you had told me we would give up 250 yards on the ground and turn the ball over 4 times, I would have guessed that we would lose by 500, so losing by only 5 seems not so bad. You have to hand it to A&M’s game plan. We had the best rushing defense and (one of) the worst passing defenses in the country. So, what do they do? Run it at us all game long. Suprising, but effective. What was not suprising was the defensive strategy: make life hell for a hobbled quarterback. They had him rattled all game, and it worked well.

I have heard some chatter on the last two hits on Colt McCoy. I don’t have much to add. One was illegal, and the player was properly penalized. The other was legal. Football is a very violent sport, and sometimes (actually, quite often) that means that guys get hurt. That’s football.

On the subject of the game, a wise man recently wrote:

Who would have thought a freshman QB would have the same impact on the team as VY did.

I would respond, but I have no idea what that means, so I can’t.

A genius at a gas station was so excited to talk smack to me (I was wearing UT gear today), and he decided to ask me why, if we were such great fans, were our fans booing Colt McCoy late in the fourth quarter? I don’t think the idiot understood that the booing was in response to an instant replay at the stadium that showed what appeared to be an un-called facemask against A&M. Even a retarded sports fan knows that when, on TV, you hear the entire crowd boo in unison about 30 seconds after a play, it is probably in response to the replay. Oh well, he had obviously been waiting a while to find someone to ask that question. I smiled and walked away.

On the subject of football, this is just amazing.

On to poker, did you see that Iggy moved? Same quality material, new home.

Ready to Christmas shop? Try ebay.

ARH is buying this for Knox.

And while the idiots in Washington are making poker more and more illegal, more progessive societies are headed the other direction.

And now that Christmas season is officially upon us, I will close with a little Christmas-ish humor:

Jesus and Satan were having an ongoing argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

Finally fed up, God said, “THAT’S IT! I have had enough. I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job.”

So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away.

They moused.

They faxed.

They e-mailed.

They e-mailed with attachments.

They downloaded.

They did spreadsheets!

They wrote reports.

They created labels and cards.

They created charts and graphs.

They did some genealogy reports

They did every job known to man.

Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency, and Satan was faster than hell.

Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off.

Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.

Jesus just sighed.

Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers.

Satan started searching frantically, screaming: “It’s gone! It’s all GONE! “I lost everything when the power went out!”

Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work.

Satan observed this and became irate. “Wait!” he screamed. “That’s not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don’t have any?”

God just shrugged and said,

JESUS SAVES

So long, Jackie.

I quit going to Dallas card rooms a while back when the first raid happened. I had previously gone to these places under the legal advice that “while it may* be illegal to run these places, it is not legal to play at them.” That advice became suspect when they gave tickets to the players several months back. Since then, however, I have learned that everybody who fought their ticket won in court. Very interesting. Maybe it isn’t illegal? Problem is that everybody got off on technicalities (you can read about it on the ‘net, I am too tired to find the links again). Hmm, so maybe it could be illegal. Legal or illegal, the tickets are Class C misdemeanors, like getting a speeding ticket. Given that, it would seem hard to justify speeding every day but not playing cards once a week. Until you remember that the SWAT team does not bust into your car holding machine guns when you speed. Big difference.

At least I can sit at home and play poker online perfectly legally. Oh wait a second…

Well, I don’t play poker online, but I know someone who does. We will call him Greg. Look at Greg’s performance today.

Keep in mind, this was a 6-seat table that played 4- and 5-handed for an hour. I’d rather have a machine gun pulled on me than have that kind of luck! Sucks to be Greg!

Kyle says, “dammit, Chris, I can’t believe you called with that crap!”

We shall not rest until George W. Bush drinks the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq!

I saw Borat last night. My opinion falls somewhere between Junell’s and John’s. That isn’t right. My observations are spot-on with John’s, but even though I agreed with him, I still enjoyed the movie. John is right that the humor of Borat lies in the unsuspecting victim he is interviewing, not in the character Borat himself. The movie would have been better if there was less “plot” with Borat and just more interviews. The naked scene was, in my opinion, a cheap laugh that was well beneath the genius that is Sacha Baron Cohen.

Maybe it is just me, but I have been laughing at the line, “I am the son of Asimbala Sagdiyev and Boltok the Rapist and the (former) husband of Oksana Sagdiyev, who was the daughter of Mariam Tuyakbay and Boltok the Rapist. ” since he was on Channel 4 in the UK. (That was the 4th of the 4 channels we received in our flat. Ordinarily, getting only 4 channels would suck, but when you are watching Ali G., The Office, Friday Night Poker and The Royle Family, you can’t complain!)

Johnny G is also right that the joke is, of course, on us. While the movie is popular here, it is also very popular overseas, particularly in Europe. Borat showed Americans as naive, paranoid, racist, homophobic simpletons. Since this reinforces the stereotypes of Americans held by Europeans, this movie is very popular in Europe. The sad thing is (and this is when everybody gets mad at me), I don’t think he had to try very hard to find these people. While the highly sophisticated and high-brow readers of this blog do not fall into this stereotype, I think that there are tens (?) of millions of people living in this country that actually do fit the stereotype well. And that makes me a bit sad.

I was wondering how hard it was for him to keep an interview going when even the most naive should be on to his schtick. Then it occurred to me that several of his interviewees were, in fact, paid: a driving instructor, a humor coach, a manners coach and, who could forget…a prostitute. And it did seem that all the above were on to him. So maybe it is harder to find unsuspecting dufuses than I thought. But the pentacostal church and the rodeo scenes were harsh reminders that not only do we have a lot of unsuspecting dufuses in our country, they tend to travel in herds.

Corby has a merkin

I need to take a shot at DFW sports radio. It, frankly, sucks. I love the Ticket. I listen every day on the way to work and most days on the way home from work. But the Ticket is humor radio, not sports radio. It is very hard to find a couple guys on the air talking sports here. If you do find sports talk, 95% of the talk is about one subject: the Dallas Cowboys. Even during baseball season, you couldn’t find people talking about the Rangers. Over the course of the year, there is about 15 minutes of cumulative conversation about college football, all of which is a lovefest for the Oklahoma Sooners. I was driving around town this morning and on one station is two rednecks talking about what type of bait to use to catch yellow bellied snout nosed bass and on the other big station is some yahoo talking about vitamins. Seriously. And once the action kicks off at 11, they go straight to pre-game coverage of local teams that are terrible (TCU, SMU, UNT). Will somebody please tell me where I can find two guys giving continous updates, saying things like “Whoa, there is an upset in the making in Champagne, Illinois!” or “Brady Quinn: Heisman contender or pretender?” because I am sick of hearing about T.O., Vitamin C, lake levels and Conference USA. And just once in the moring, I would like to hear something that isn’t a fart joke. I’d even listen to people promote a college football playoff if it meant I could hear sports talk!

We beat down kids from Memorial, Stratford, St. Thomas, Lamar, and Episcopal

And for Beau Ryan, living proof that you can take the dog out of Naughty Dawgs, but you can’t take the naughty out of the dog.

Carnac the Magnificent knows all

Although my preseason college football predictions have looked solid thus far, they will come crubling down if A&M beats UT and Notre Dame beats USC. If that happens, I will go from college football guru to just another John Greene Mark May know-nothing hack.