Merriment in Malvern

Things I did this weekend:

1. Encouraged a Canadian (eh?) to make an illegal turn and then watched her sweet-talk her way out of being deported when she was pulled over by local law enforcement not 60 seconds later. The phrases "my husband's car", "over 10 hours on the road", "from Ontario" and "not familiar with your crazy laws down here" may have been uttered. The icing was when she innocently added that she was in town for a "charity event". Smooth!

2. Participated in the first-ever blogger limit HOST game. The rules were simple: everyone started with 30 chips and limits of 1 and 2. Four games were in the mix (holdem, omaha, stud and triple draw), with each game getting one full orbit. The first person to run out of chips had to buy the next round of drinks for the table, and then we would reset all stacks and start over. None of us thought to call this game SHOT, but that's probably because we were all drinking beer.

3. Went to my first "Cracker Barrel", located somewhere east of Philadelphia and just north of hell. This was after I was forced to leave a "Friendly's" restaurant in embarassment because one of my traveling companions could not refrain from dropping several loud, unfriendly F-bombs on the assemblage, who were all freshly scrubbed and just from church. If she tells you her mother doesn't love her, it's because she's GOING TO HELL, aka "just south of Cracker Barrel".

4. Gave Joe Speaker plastic mardi gras beads in exchange for a glimpse of his chest. Did you hear that ladies? I'm not sure who it puts Under Suspicion more, the ogler or the ogled, but since both of us were already Under Suspicion anyway, you can all kiss my ass.

5. Six words: high card out of the muck.

6. Oh, and there was this big charity party thing, where I consumed copious amounts of booze with over two dozen people, some of whom I've known for upwards of two years. It was only slightly embarassing to have each successive bartender at Flanigan's Boathouse say to me "F-Train! I remember you!", but thankfully I was eliminated from consideration for the Lewey Award for Public Intoxication early on after TripJax decided he would try to go shot for shot with The Man. Big. Mistake.

Big shout out to Al, Big Mike, Steve, Eva, and everyone else who put this thing together and made it so great.

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Bash 2006

I'm back. Liver is surprisingly intact. Write-up will follow after I've caught some shuteye. For now, feel free to check out the photos.

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Twin Towers

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Bring Out Your Dead

In order to keep our broadcasting licence, we devote Sunday night dead time to public service shows of limited appeal.
--KBBL Radio announcer, Springfield

This page is getting dusty because I haven't played much discussion-worthy poker since my last trip to the Air Conditioned City, and I prefer not to write about my personal life. Given that this is *my* blog, that may seem like an odd preference. G-Rob remarked recently that a whole year's worth of Joe Speaker's posts about Joe's personal travails would be far more entertaining than any old analysis of how to play AK out of position in a 3-way pot. Well, sure. That's because Joe Speaker is an excellent writer. An excellent writer can make anything an interesting read.

The vast majority of bloggers are not excellent writers. The writing ability of any blogger chosen at random will range from average to "how did you graduate the sixth grade?" awful. In order for me to care about reading the details of such an individual's personal life, they had better be either *very* interesting or a friend. Most random people, with their average to atrocious writing ability, fall into neither of those categories. Their blog posts are no better than a Christmas form letter you get from an aunt you see maybe once every five years, in which she updates everyone on her Christmas card list on everything that's been going on with her and her family (your cousins) over the course of the last year. You feel like you should care, because these people are blood relatives, but in the end the reason why you've received this Christmas letter, instead of a more personalized card or (God forbid) a phone call, is because your aunt and cousins are no better than strangers. All you're reading are the ordinary details of the ordinary lives of some ordinary people that you might not even recognize if they walked past you while crossing Fifth Avenue. Who cares?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, of course. I don't think of myself either as an excellent writer (a la Ryan, Joe or Wil) or as possessing a scintillating lifestyle (a la Flava Flav?). I don't even care to engage in wild hyperbole and/or poorly worded metaphors to make it seem as if I have a scintillating lifestyle. You will never find me subscribing to the Marilyn Manson theory of "Act like a rock star and people will eventually start treating you like a rock star". Add it all up, and the result is that I try not to be "that aunt" by keeping most details of my personal life off of this page.

If you've ever felt like you don't know much about me, that's probably why.

[N.B.: Poker blogs are dying.]

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