Sex, Lies and Jamarkus MacFarland

It all started with this article in the New York Times. I read it when it came out and said to myself, “Self, this can’t be true. Why would a school give free illegal drugs to athletes? And why does this crazy mom contradict herself?”

Then it comes out that at least part of the story is a lie. In fact, Jamarkus made up a lot of the stuff for an English paper. He implies that the writer, Thayer Evans read the paper and lifted the story without so much as asking Jamarkus if it was a piece of fiction. So, either the kid is a liar or the reporter is a hack. Or maybe both.

Then it comes out that Thayer is the same guy that wrote the article on Darrell Scott that was later questioned for its accuracy.

Evidently the guy is from Oklahoma. (See bios down and to the right). He used to write for Sooner Illustrated. Hmmmmm. I wonder why he was so interested in printing articles damaging to UT.

So, Evans is a hack. The mom is a bitch. The kid is a momma’s boy with bad judgment. He can rot in hell with the others that got away (Bomar, Perilloux…) What are those guys up to now?

Uh… No witty comment available here as I’m still trying to figure out what I just watched.

John -

I finally found that polling data you requested.

While I don’t usually find the business side of sports all that interesting, I thought this was worth posting since it covers an area that people tend to not understand.

It’s been a looooong December…

It looks like the last 6 weeks of 2008 will drive my net win/loss on the year more than the other 46 weeks combined.

After Mexico, we spent 2 nights in Houston. One night (last night) we played $2/$5 NL in the locker room of one of the guy’s country clubs. Lots of action, lots of action…

I bought in $200 and cashed out $1,396. We played for about 5 hours, so there were several hands that contributed to the winning, but one stood out.

I got JJ on the button and made it $30 to go. Six of us saw the flop.

Flop came 7,8,T. I had an overpair and a gut shot.

Check, check, check to Wildog who bet $20. Hank called and I made it $300 “all day”. Wildog went all-in for my $280 raise plus $216 more. Hank went all-in for his remaining $20. I called $216 into a pot of $1,026 thinking I was beat. Hell, for Wildog to bet like that, he must have had KK, AA or a set. So I am probably needing 6 outs (2 jacks, 4 nines) or a bit less than 4:1 odds, but the pot was paying me 5:1(ish). I had to call, but I *knew* I was behind.

Wildog shows 77 for the set. Hank shows K9 for the straight draw. I now have 5 outs to win the side pot (9,9,9,J,J) and I must get runner runner to win the main pot (because my Jack would also give Hank the straight). Fortunately, the main pot was $270 and the side pot was $972, so I was almost kinda sorta getting the pot odds I needed. I was certainly worse off than I thought when I called.

Turn came Jack. Holy shit. Only one card – a 7 to give Wildog quads – could rob me of the side pot. At the same time, Hank hit the straight for the main pot…. until the river came….which paired the board and gave me boat over a boat over a straight. I pulled in $1,242 for a profit of $696 on that hand. F yeah.

The rest of my $500ish of profit came from hand after hand of me having the best of it, betting it, and my hand holding up. No bad beats that I can recall.

I dumped $300 on one stupid call.

I accepted insurance once (getting better odds than my had dictated, I might add) which gave me $200 I would not have today if I had declined the insurance.

Just one of those candy ass luck nights.

Junell played. He brought a thick bankroll and left with about $12, his dignity and his heterosexuality. McAndrew was giving long odds on him leaving with any of those three. If you had parlayed all three, you could turn $200 into something like $1,396.

Unless I blow north of $4k in the last week of the year, I’ll book a winner this year. I’d rather be lucky than good any day.

I thought this was well said:

The administration’s belief that saving GM from the bankruptcy it so richly deserves is essential to saving the rest of the economy symbolizes how it misunderstood the crisis from the start.

When credit markets seized in mid-September, the government acted as if the problem were the collapsing market price of non-performing loans held by money-center banks. Nonsense. The real problem was the collapsing market price of performing loans held by everyone else.

That is, the true crisis was not that companies that richly deserved to go under couldn’t raise cash at favorable rates, but that otherwise good companies were (and still are) imperiled because they can’t raise money at reasonable rates. The problem today is not that a sensible market doesn’t want GM bonds, but that a panicked market doesn’t want anyone’s bonds.

As long as the government continues to conceive its job as saving bad companies from their just deserts – rather than getting the trillions of dollars of credit destroyed by the panic back out to the productive economy – the bailout will continue to expand and continue to fail.

Really what’s happening is that Bush doesn’t want this to happen at the tail end of his presidency so he’s trying to push it down the road to someone else, same thing for the Republicans in congress. Politicians engage in this kind of thinking all the time, but nonetheless, from an economic perspective this piece hits the nail on the head: the reaction of many of the other politicians with their bailouts and whatnot is exactly opposite of what actually needs to be done.