Being A Couch Potato Isn't All That Unproductive

A couple Sundays ago I watched the opening weekend of NFL games from noon to nearly midnight. Between all the mindless marketing, disappointment of the performance of my fantasy players, and news that Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett sustained an injury that might leave him paralyzed, I was feeling fairly depressed towards the end of the night. That was, until, NBC shared a story of a former Dallas Cowboys player whose life was saved when one of his former teammates donated a kidney. The ailing man, Ron Springs, wasn't going to reach the top of the national kidney transplant list before a disease spawned from his diabetes condition would take his life. This prompted his friend, Everson Walls, to donate a kidney.

The two men were in Dallas to conduct the ceremonial coin flip before the Cowboys played the Giants. Ron Springs spends most of his time in a wheelchair since diabetes has rendered his legs very weak. Everson Walls, fully healed from the kidney donation, pushed Springs out onto mid-field for the coin flip. The two received a standing ovation and clearly were both very grateful to be alive.

In the spirit of cataloguing and sharing similar stories of heroism, philanthropy, kindness, whatever; I started a website where people can submit stories of their own, or simply enjoy others' content: GreatStories.org. I hope my friends and regular readers of this blog find that site enjoyable. Feel free to contact me with any constructive criticism.

Lisa Moment otD 09.25.07

Anyone who has met my fragile 33 year-old girlfriend might chuckle at this dialogue we had tonight:

Me: Did you start that Carl Sagan book?
Her: Yea, I read it for like an hour, but I don't think I'm going to read it anymore.
Me: Oh? Why's that?
Her: Well... it's kinda heavy.
Me: Oh, pretty sciencey huh?
Her: No... heavy like a textbook.
Me: So... sciency?!
Her: No, like physically heavy. It was hurting my back to keep it held up.

In the ten months Lisa and I have been dating, she's kept me thoroughly entertained.

Doug Stanhope (ZOMG!!)

A few months ago I hadn't even heard of this guy. Now he's, without a doubt, my favorite comedian. After watching his DVD "No Refunds" (highly recommended obv), I checked to see if he had Houston on his tour schedule. He did; the show is tonight at this dive/biker bar called Walter's. It's pretty small to be hosting a comedian of Stanhope's fame, so I can only assume he's using such a venue to test new material. Anyway, I've got a sixer of Lone Star Lite I plan on having disposed of before we head off to the show. I'm pretty pumped up. Here are a couple short YouTube videos to give you an idea of how hilarious this guy is in case you've never seen his stuff:

"Fuck The French"



"You're Taking The Wrong Drugs"



"Would You Believe?"



I'm super hammered, but real quick:

It was awesome. I tried to bribe him to give me his red suit coat for $100, he said no. I yelled in the middle of his set "rotate the wig!" and he said "rotate the wig?, okay" and did it. Furthermore, after he shot down my offer to buy his suit coat, I told him, "a lot of people out there really like you, don't forget that," and he said, "okay," and smiled. Overall it was a fun night. Wow I'm drunk.

Vote For The Fate Of Bonds' Home Run Ball

Marc Ecko, a successful fashion designer, bought Barry Bonds' 756th home-run ball for $750,000. In a brilliant self-marketing move, he's created a website to allow people to vote on whether the ball gets donated to Cooperstown, branded with an asterisk and then donated to Cooperstown, or shot out into space to orbit Earth. That annoying broadcaster, Tony Kornheiser, was just arguing that the ball belongs in Cooperstown, it's ridiculous that Ecko might let it go into space, blah blah blah. I can't stand stuff like that. It's like, the guy paid $750k for it, he can do wtf he wants with it! Personally this guy is my new hero for having the balls to do something like this. People are such babies. Guys like Mark Cuban and this Ecko guy are what the world needs more of. Rock on!

BTW, I voted space.

One of the Best Things to Happen to Poker In A While

For those of you who don't follow the poker world too closely, an 18 year old girl just won the first WSOP Europe Main Event. Anyone who does follow the poker world closely is well aware of which girl it is, Annette "Annette_15" Obrestad. She's basically been destroying online tournaments since before she even turned 18 (I believe). I've been trying to interview Annette for PokerTips for several months now, but my Pocket 5s PMs and chat-box requests have gone ignored. But alas, who has time to address such petty requests while assending to the spot of 4th best online tournament player in the world? Congrats, Annette!

Link To: Incredible Iraq Story

I realize making a blog entry just to link to an entry in someone else's blog makes this blog pretty suck-ass, but I wanted to pass along this story from Paul Phillips' blog about a relative of his who had quite the harrowing experience just before returning home.

The conclusion made the misogynist in me chuckle pretty hard: Oh, and when he was able to call his wife he let her go on about something unimportant for ten minutes before he said "oh, by the way... I got a purple heart yesterday."

Pale Blue Dot

The survival of our species might depend on if our minds can evolve quickly enough to be constantly aware of the lesson taught in this video. If we never develop to that point of consciousness, it will be because we destroyed ourselves too soon.

A Poker Confession

A lot of people (myself included, before now) like to live in a state of silence that borders on denial in the midst of a downswing. Sometimes there's nothing more refreshing than brute honesty, so here we go: Since writing the "Chop at the Venetian" article on July 6th, I'm down $36,000 from gambling! That's a typical swing for the more ballerish guys out there, but for this guy, that's a ton. Thankfully most of that was white meat from earlier in the year, but I'm still down a couple thousand from gambling in 2007.

Granted, a third of that downswing came solely from the Main Event, where I had $12,000 spread around in myself and others. But a lot of it is from two months of spewing in online poker tournaments. One stopgap I'm immediately implementing is limiting the number of tables I play simultaneously. One of the internet's top MTTers, BodogAri, won't even allow himself to play more than four tables at once. If someone that much better than me caps himself at four, I'm going to cap myself at three* until I start to show significant improvement in my game.

(*Save for the major stuff on Sunday 'cause it's giving up too much EV to sit out something like the FTP $750k, or what have you)

Last night, I played just two tournaments, the $100k and $55k on Stars. I did something in those tournaments I haven't done in a very long time, and it felt great: think.

It's so easy to fall into a rut of "going through the motions" when multi-tabling tournaments. I was amazed at how much better my decisions were last night. All it took was slowing down, thinking about the situation, and evaluating my options. This is hard to do with several tables beeping for action.

Of course, some of the sickest players out there, like Kevin Saul (aka: BeL0WaB0Ve), can play 10 tables at a time with exceptional profit. For now, I'll keep my expectations within the range of human capabilities. (Side note: Kevin, if you ever read this, I own kevinsaul.com and belowabove.com. They're yours for the right price.)

Anyway, one of the catalysts to getting me back on the road to actually thinking while I play has been reading MTT-based internet forums. I don't even want to go into this too much because there's so much value in certain forums out there that I'd just assume have no part in directing the competition to them.

But there you have it. I'm down a ton lately and am interested in a backer. I could liquidate the stock I have, but investing in the market this early in life is a great recipe to being loaded by the time you're 50. That's another topic for another day. I'm not quite enough of a risk-taker to toy around with that money.