Fixin' To Fight

Links to Stuff I Write

2012-01-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

Rather than update this blog with a new link every time I write something somewhere else, I'll just make this post be a collection of links and I'll bump it whenever there is something new. During the NBA season I spent most of my time writing at Negative Dunkalectics. Now it looks like I will spend most of my time contributing to McSweeney's.

Funny, Youre So Sad
Adventures in stand-up comedy and mental health therapy. For The New York Times.

Making Book In Jersey

What the mob can teach Chris Christie about gambling. For The Classical.

$100 Hand of Blackjack, Foxwoods Casino

I count cards at Foxwoods and talk to my sister about luck.

$5 Chess Match, Best of Three, Zuccotti Park
I play chess at Occupy Wall Street and ruminate on what it means to win.

$50 Under 11.5 Rounds Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Victor Ortiz

The second installment of my McSweeney's column has James Baldwin, a shotgun, a sucker punch, and much much more.

Fading the Vig: A Gambler's Guide to Life
I was selected by McSweeney's as one of their new columnists. In my first installment I spend a day at the races and learn that money doesn't equal class. These will appear sorta bi-weekly.

Taking Your Talents to South Beach: What LeBron Can Learn From Muhammad Ali

Looking at Ali's early career and how LeBron can learn from his mistakes.

The Final 7:14 of Game Two, In and Of the World
I recap the final 7 minutes of Game 2 of the NBA Finals.

Ron Artest: Citizen

Looking at Ron Artest through the lens of Dostoyevsky, Freud, Arendt, and Aristotle.

Two Horses, Two Races: The Civil Rights Movement Goes to the Kentucky Derby

I wrote this essay about the 1967 and 1968 Kentucky Derbies for The Awl.

Sweat in the Game: A Gambler's Grind in the NBA
I talk to Haralabos Voulgaris, one of the best gamblers in the world, about his trying to become an NBA GM.

NBA Playoffs Preview: Oklahoma City Thunder
As part of Negative Dunkalectic's playoff previews (where we compared each team to a 90's emo record), I talk about the Thunder and Refused's The Shape of Punk to Come.

NBA Playoffs Preview: Los Angeles Lakers
In that same series, I look at the Lakers and Fugazi's Red Medicine.

The NBA Will Expose You: Tom Scharpling and the Lessons of Basketball
I catch a Nets game with Tom Scharpling and discuss his career as a basketball writer.

Axiology and the Race for MVP
A look at how various philosophers and theorists might weigh in on the MVP race in the NBA.

A Popular Front: A Call to Arms for NBA Fans
I imagine the NBA Board of Governor's meeting as the 1974 OPEC minister's meeting, then sort them out, Carlos the Jackal style.

Melo-Madness and Ontology: A Knick Fan in Crisis
The Ship of Theseus as a guide for dealing with the Carmelo Anthony trade.

What's Better for the Union: Lebron's Presence or Kobe's Absence?
Analyzing the NBPA's tactics at the bargaining table.

Another New Year, Another Resolution

2012-01-02T06:42:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, friends. This one wasn't bad, all things considered. It was confusing most of the time, but at times it was also exciting.

My resolutions for this year were a mixed bag. I failed on unplugging from technology once a week. I failed on running the marathon. I signed up but didn't get picked. I kept up the running all year, though, which surprised me. I think I ran around 250 miles this year. So I've kept in ok shape from 2010. I succeeded on writing something every week, though. I've had a lot of success this year with writing (and only a couple of real failures) and I expect some big things in this department in 2012.

My only resolution for the coming year is to spend more time with my family. That's going to be a tough one to make happen given everything going on with my job. But if it wasn't difficult it wouldn't be worth making a resolution out of it, right? I'm resolved to find a way to spend more time at home and less time out on the road this year. I hope I can figure out how to do that without having to do something dramatic like find a new job or career, but it is the most important change I want to make in my life right now. So I need to figure it out.

Here's to another year in the books, and looking forward to an even better one.

Happy Halloween from The Charlies!

2011-10-25T06:35:00.000-07:00

Racist Zombies - watch more funny videos

I wrote this sketch for my group The Charlies. I also do a little acting in it. Please share it and remember to click "funny" (not die).

Upper West Side WSOP Through the Years

2011-06-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

A long long time ago I played in a weekly card game at Columbia University on the upper west side of Manhattan. That weekly game eventually spawned into a yearly trek to Las Vegas during the World Series of Poker where we would compete in our own tournament: The Upper West Side World Series of Poker (UWSWSOP).

Back then I and others used to chronicle our adventures on the usenet group rec.gambling.poker (RGP). Here are some archived links to the trip reports I and others have posted through the years.

2001 : The innagural year.

2002 : The first ever UWSWSOP

2003: "Ten Days In The Desert"
Day One
Day Two (with an argument with Daniel Negreanu)
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five: The Matrix Has You
Day Six: Good Hand White Boy
Day Seven: Where the Sun Shines
Day Eight
Days Nine and Ten: Vegas is a Manhandler

2004 "This Time It's Personal"
Day One
Day Two: Walking Around Lucky
Day Three
Day Four: Advanced Strategy
Day Five: Without Lamps, There'd Be No Light
Day Six: Fitting Ending

2004 "The Jury Is Out" (By Josh)
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five

2005 "Ante Up"
Pregame
Day One
Day Two
Day Three and Four

2006 : The "Lost" Year. (No TR)

2007
Day One: Coming of Age in Las Vegas
Day Two: It's All Over but the Crying
Day Three: Back on Top

There haven't been any trip reports since 2007, but the UWS gang still goes to Vegas every summer to meet up, eat, gamble, and compete for the coveted UWSWSOP trophy. The members of the group are getting older, fatter, bearing children and becoming responsible members of society now. So there is no telling how many more years this trip will last.

I post these links here to inspire myself and the other members of the group to take a stab at writing more trip reports this year and going forward.

This Is Happening

2011-04-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

At the start of LCD Soundsystem's last show (well, one of their last shows), James Murphy tells the crowd that its ok to film the performance if they want, to upload it to youtube, whatever. "But please consider," he adds, "to maybe not do it. To maybe just 'be here.' Be here in this moment." Everyone applauds and cheers but many still decide to hold their phones and flip cameras aloft to capture the show for posterity.

I take James Murphy's words to heart. I never had any intention of filming the performance. I'm not that kind of a fan. Sure, I like the band just fine. And I was glad to catch one of their final performances seeing as how I had never seen them live before. I also rarely get out to see live music anymore, so when a friend invited me along to this show I was probably more excited about getting to go out than about the prospect of seeing a potentially canonical band play for the final time. So here I was, right in the middle of the crowd on the floor (I rejected the option of watching from one of the higher floors because I wanted the full effect) preparing to dance myself clean with a bunch of young white strangers. I took his words to heart because despite not being a superfan like many of those standing around me, despite feeling no real overarching grief for the breakup of this band, I felt like there was something important about being here, being "in this moment" with this band and these people in this city on this night.

My son was born about 11 months ago here in New York City. I waited for him for nine months. During those nine months I waited my entire life changed in dramatic ways. For one thing, my wife and I moved to New York to have him here. We had been living a lonely life in Denver, Colorado for the past five years and saw this as just the right excuse to move back to the city where we met, where her family was from, and where most of our friends still lived. During those nine months I also lost my job under weird and dramatic circumstances. Most importantly my father died. Which was really intensely sad because we had rushed to conceive in order to try to have a child before my father's cancer got the better of him, and we thought we had a real shot at it, too.

Since Gus has been born my life has changed in even more dramatic ways. It sounds obvious, but life before and after kids really is completely different. And there is no going back. On one hand the changes you have to make to make room in your life for children are welcome changes. There is nothing too sad about giving up going out late at night or making plans on the fly. There is no reason to cry about having to give up going to the movies or sleeping in on the weekends. But on the other hand the changes you make hammer home the temporal quality of what is happening to you. You are getting old. You can never go back.

My friend who brought me to the LCD Soundsystem show shares with me the fact that when he last saw the band a year ago he was with a woman who he is no longer with. He says he's glad I came with him because the whole scene just feels lonely. We are sitting on these couches on the second floor of the venue and there are young hip white couples dancing all around us. It seems like the kind of thing better shared with a loved one than just a pal. The kind of thing that brings the lovey dovey out of everyone. The overly-sentimental and sappy mood of many of their songs doesn't help.

I confess to him that I, too, feel lonely, and that before the birth of my son this is just the kind of thing my wife and I would do together. And I miss that. I miss her. I fear that by the time I get her back we will both be too old for nights like this. I think about the future, and it seems sad in that way. Soon my friend's favorite song comes on and his wants to go back downstairs to hear it from the floor. I follow him. The lights are pulsing on the crowd. The crowd is bouncing up and down in unison. Three hours in to this show people are now sweaty, tired, wasted, and giddy with delerium. I stare into the lights and feel young for a second. Feel like a totally different person. Or maybe the same person in a different time and space. I am here. In this moment. I tap my friend on the shoulder and apologize but let him know that I need to go home. He frowns but nods as if he understands.

The next day is Thursday and Thursday is my day at home with my son. Its the day I look foward to all week long. We hang out all day playing the usual battery of peek a boo and chase and stacking things and knocking them down. I feed him bottles. He naps on me. At the end of the long day I give him a bath. I'm playing LCD Soundsystem in the bathroom. "I Can Change" comes on and he starts splashing water all over the place. I take a washcloth and fill it with water, then hold it high above his head and squeeze it so that the water pours down right in front of him in a long cascade. His eyes grow big as saucers. He reaches out to grab the cascade and squeezes and opens his tiny little hands around the liquid rope over and over, trying to grab hold. When the stream runs out he kicks and throws his arms, splashing more water, and he squawks for it to return. I do it again and again and each time the same wonder sets in on his face. I start to well up. I am here. In this moment.

On days like Thursdays I often imagine what my son will be like when he's older. I wonder about our relationship, whether or not he's going to like me. What I'll think of what he becomes. I think about my own father and my relationship with him, and how much was left undone and unsaid when he passed away. I think of the moments we shared that meant a lot to me, but that I'll forever wonder whether or not he even remembers them. And I'll never again have the chance to ask him about the moments I may have provided him, whether as an infant in the bath or as an adult changing his clothes and feeding him on the last day that he was alive.

The trouble with touching moments like these, whether they are with my infant son or with total strangers, is that they won't remember them the way that I will. They exist only in my head. They have meaning and value to me that no one else involved can ever know or comprehend. And while that is sad in some sense, it also gives me strange comfort. These moments may not be shared, they may not be perfect, but most of the time they are all you get. And in total, these small moments make up an entire life. What's important is to not take them for granted. What's important is to not miss them. What's important is to keep having more of them. Memories are fine but moments never stop until the moment when we die. And after all, we can never go back.

I'm in this video 3 times...

2011-03-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

...see if you can spot me. the third one is tricky.

shoutout to the incredible tom scharpling for directing another solid W.

new post at negative dunks: nba, hip hop, dumbass teenagers

2011-03-01T12:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.negativedunkalectics.com/2011/02/tale-of-two-tylers-odd-future-nba-age.html

philosophical musings on the melo trade

2011-02-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

i'm up again this week at negative dunkalectics. this week i'm talking about the same thing everyone else in the universe is talking about, the carmelo anthony trade.

http://www.negativedunkalectics.com/2011/02/melo-madness-and-ontology-knick-fan-in.html

New post at Negative Dunkalectics

2011-02-16T08:28:00.000-08:00

I wrote something about NBA labor negotiations for Negative Dunkalectics. Go over there and subscribe to that blog's RSS.

http://www.negativedunkalectics.com/2011/02/whats-better-for-union-lebrons-presence.html

New Year's Resolutions for 2011

2011-01-01T17:02:00.000-08:00

2010 will go down as the greatest year of my life up to this point. I had my first child. It was a monumental experience for me. And it was all the more appreciated by the fact that in 2009 I lost my father to cancer, my sister to prison, and my job to politics. So I really needed 2010 to be good, and it more than surpassed my expectations.

In addition to Gus, I also managed to keep my two resolutions for the year. The first one was to give money to anyone who asked for it. I got the idea to do this after talking to my wife about how embarassed I was that I would automatically say no to every panhandler that ever asked for money, whether I had any money to give or not. After getting hit up for change so often in a city like NYC, it becomes easy to ignore and to refuse. I resolved to do the opposite. Instead of always saying no no matter what, I'd say yes. Obviously if I had no money I couldn't give any, but every time anyone asked me for money in 2010, I said yes.

There were a couple of situations that required me to come up with rules, like people holding signs (I decided to treat signs and cups as if they were verbally asking me, and therefore to always give them something) or musical performances (if they pass the hat, you put something in). Sometimes the smallest amount of money I had on me was $5 or $10 and I gave that. One time it was $20. The woman at the top of the stairs at my subway stop got me for probably over $100 by the end of the year. But all in all it was a good lesson in both generosity (we can all afford to be a LOT more generous) and need (people are hurting). It also really forced me to stop ignoring the people all around me that are so in need that they are begging for help. It is really stark how desperate so many people are, and how a little bit from all of us can make a big difference.

But this isn't what this post is about. I could go on and on about the virtues and vices of individual charity, symbolic action, and institutional vs individual change. But I wanted instead to pat myself on the back for doing something for an entire year that I said I wanted to do. Oh and I also lost the last 35 of 50 pounds that I took off starting in 2009. That was a pretty cool thing, too.

Now for 2011...

Write More - I started writing more in 2010 and really liked how it felt. I am going to write something every week this year, whether it is a sketch or a blog post or a letter or an obnoxious review of a restaurant. I'm going to get in the habit of always writing. Hopefully it will mean I update this blog a lot more.

Unplug More - I lost a bet to my cousin this year and as a consequence had to surrender my facebook account to her for one week. She still has it and I'm noticing the void in my internet routine. I'm probably filling it with even more twitter than I was already doing. I know that I spend way too much time plugged in to the grid, and I need to cut back. Rather than unfollow people on twitter I figure I'll dedicate one day a week to be offline completely. No twitter, no web, no email, nothing. This one will be harder, but doable with some effort and help from my family.

Volunteer - I'm going to sign up with NYCares and spend at least three hours a week volunteering. Hopefully I can combine this one and the last one to make them both easier to accomplish. Its a big city out there. I spend plenty of time dicking around. I don't think volunteerism or charity are the solutions to the problems that plague us. But I do think that it can be fun to volunteer, often more fun than the mindless shit I waste my free time doing. So why not have fun and do something valuable at the same time? Plus its not a bad way to get to know a city that is so big and intimidating.

Run the Marathon - OK this one is obvious and trite and boring but whatever. I know I'm going to do it so at least let me have one that I'm a lock to check off. I'll probably run NY since its so late in the year. But I'd like to run Chicago because they say its the easiest. At any rate, I'm ready for it.

Check back in 2012 and we'll see how I did. If this is still the top post on the blog then its a safe bet I blew the first one. But who knows it may mean I slam dunked the second!

A Right to Fantasy? Thoughts on Catfish [with spoilers]

2010-10-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

Sarah Zhang on Catfish at This Recording

I have a mixed reaction to Sarah Zhang's writeup of Catfish over at This Recording. Given that so much of the reaction the film has generated tends to see Angela as a victim and Niev and the filmmakers as big-city smartasses exploiting a salt of the earth small-town prole, I appreciated the nuance that Zhang shows in pointing out that Angela deserves criticsm as well.

In my opinion it is true, and also of no small consequence, that Angela lied and manipulated Niev. Even when confronted with her lies, as Zhang points out, Angela again lies about having cancer to manipulate Niev once again and to convert their anger at her deception into sympathy. That's a pretty dispicable moment for her, one she surely regrets, and one I'm not willing to forgive so quickly.

While I agree with Zhang that there has been too little criticism of Angela, I also think that there has been too much made of Niev's exploitation of her. Many critics have talked about Niev's "shit eating grin" as Angela does his portrait as evidence that he was patronizing her, making fun of her, having a laugh. However my takeaway was that Niev showed a remarkable amount of compassion, sincerity, forgiveness, and a willingness to connect with Angela emotionally right up to the end of the movie. His compassion outshines his compatriots who, when confronted with the truth of the situation, implore him to bail out with them, afraid to walk in to Angela's home and meet her family. This, in my opinion, is a particularly revealing moment given that earlier in the film it was Niev who wanted to quit and his brother and friend pushing him to continue. Niev remarks that if they came this far they should see where the situation will take them.

I don't think Niev was being a voyeur. I think that he had an 8 month emotional investment in this woman that he couldn't just forget about and walk away from. He needed some closure. What followed was the story of two people's impossible dreams (Angela's to be Megan, Niev's to have Megan) come crashing down and how that crash connected them. Niev was unafraid to confront Angela, compassionate enough to forgive her, and then sincere enough to want to learn about her real life and get to know her as she really was. During the portrait he says to her "that was pretty intesene there for a minute, huh?" They both seemed to acknowledge that even though what they had was a fantasy, it was also very very real.

I disagree with Zhang that Niev and company were exploiting Angela to "further their own artistic careers." While she may be right in quoting Sherman Alexis that "all art is exploitation" she is, in my opinion, wrong to insinuate that in documenting Angela's lives both real and imaginary that they have lead her down some primrose path, preyed upon her feelings for Niev in order to accomplish their own ambitions. For one thing it is the entire post-meeting part of this film that makes it interesting and valuable. Getting to know the real Angela gives the film its humanity. And the filmmakers clearly didn't want (in the moment anyway) to even continue filming at this point. If the criticism that the mere fact of the film implicates the filmmaker in having selfish, exploitive motives is fair, then it surely incriminates the entire craft. Its paradoxical and is begging the question.

Zhang questions Angela's stake in the film, too. She says

The false identities created by Angela are a type of art and a type of exploitation too. In a reversal of roles, it is Angela who stands the most to gain from Catfish. Nev, Ari, and Henry were already fairly successful artists in New York, whereas Angela goes from a lonely woman in Michigan to a minor celebrity.

Its hard to believe that Angela would choose to be busted by Niev to accomplish fame. She is clearly embarassed and ashamed. She comes off pretty unflattering. And she says in the movie that she agrees to continue telling the truth to the cameras because she feels like she owes it to Niev. On this point I believe her.

For me one of the interesting questions Catfish poses is how much Angela has a right to live a fantasy life on the internet. On one hand she manipulates Niev's very real feelings, stringing him along believing he may one day meet Megan and have a relationship with her. But up until the two of them meet on her doorstep both of them experience joy and pleasure from their fantasy relationship. Both of them are fantasizing to be sure. Niev destroys the fantasy by dropping in on her. He is clearly within his rights to do so, but how much is Angela or anyone else allowed to live online as someone they are not? At what point did she cross the line into cruel manipulation? On this point I have a harder time figuring out how I feel.

One thing I think seems clear: Angela would far rather be Megan than the "minor celebrity" she has become. Whether or not she'd rather be the Angela that the world knows versus the Angela that lived in anonymity I have no idea. The sad thing is that on both fronts she has no choice. "Catfish" took away both of those lives from her.

Happy Labor Day!

2010-09-06T17:53:00.000-07:00

In honor of labor day, two videos about the comedians strike at the Comedy Store in 1979...

A Woman Is A Woman

2010-07-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

On May 14^th I went to MOMA to see Marina Abramovic’s retrospective, “The Artist Is Present.” The performances, images, and film were emotional and bewildering. I didn’t go as a fan or connoisseur of performance art. I went as a curious onlooker who had heard about the exhibit around town. I left feeling completely moved, incredibly introspective, and bothered down to the bone. That evening at home, as I shared my thoughts and experiences from the exhibit with my wife over dinner, she went in to labor.

Abramovic’s work spans over thirty years and traces the evolution of performance art worldwide. Her influence on the genre is unrivalled. Beginning in the late 60s and early 70s, Abramovic’s work was by her own admission “very radical, extremely focused both mentally and physically.” Her early work was very sado-masochistic. She either inflicted physical pain on herself or invited the audience to do so. However one of her early works, in fact the first work that patrons to the exhibit are confronted with as they enter, inflicts pain that seems both physical and psychological. “Freeing the Voice,” “Freeing the Body,” “Freeing the Memory” are shown on three different screens in a looped, grainy video. In the first video the camera is tight on a very young Marina’s face. She is lying on a mattress and she is screaming until her voice literally gives out. In the second video Marina is dancing on stage entirely nude until her body gives out and she collapses to the floor where she remains, staring out into the audience as if in a trance. In the third video Marina is repeating random words, mantra-like, over and over until they lose all meaning. These are early works. She is clearly exploring the limits of her own body and mind. Many of the works from this period are dangerous and shocking. These three are some of the more tame, but still some of the most mesmerizing. And while she isn’t making herself bleed or taking psychotropic drugs to give herself seizures or asking audience members to cut her like in other early works, the effect is still strangely violent.

The beginning of labor was actually peaceful. Our plan was to labor at home for as long as possible since the hospital was so far away. We even managed to finish dinner and carry on our conversation through much of the early labor. At this point the baby was two weeks overdue. It was Thursday night and we were scheduled to induce labor on Saturday morning. We had already been through plenty of false labor so we were in no hurry to let ourselves get excited, but this felt different.

In preparation for the birth we took child birthing classes where we learned things like positions and pressure points and massages to ease labor pains. We also learned about using breath as a technique for managing pain. In fact, that’s basically all we learned about were mechanisms to manage pain. In labor, there is no avoiding physical pain. It comes gradually but it comes without pause or mercy. Intense, all-encompassing pain that comes every few minutes and lasts a minute at a time. I remember watching the videos in our childbirth classes that showed transition contractions and thinking that they were like horror films, that they should be shown to teenagers to convince them to not have sex. Tonight as my wife lay in the bathtub having early labor contractions, the worst still well ahead of her, I thought not about these educational films but of Abramovic, lying there screaming into the air, writhing in pain. And again of her chanting, comparatively peaceful, the rational world of language dissolving all around her. It was going to be a long night.

One of Abramovic’s many themes in her work was the notion of self identity. This theme was most apparent in the work she did with her partner Ulay. For several years she collaborated with him and their art explored the notion of the self in radical ways. They worked hard to collapse their own egos and identities onto themselves and become one entity, one singular identity that encompassed two bodies. Their work during this period, like most of Abramovic’s earlier work, was also physically dangerous. One of the pieces that particularly haunted me was called “Breathing In, Breathing Out.” In this piece Marina and Ulay had plugged their nostrils with cigarette filters and locked their mouths together. They then exchanged breaths, each one inhaling the other’s exhale until both of their lungs had filled with carbon dioxide and they both passed out. Another disturbing piece from this era was called “Rest Energy.” In this piece Marina and Ulay each leaned their body weight back, balancing themselves on opposite ends of a large bow, the arrow pointed directly at Marina’s heart. Ulay’s hand held the string and arrow and Marina’s the bow. They held this position for nearly five straight minutes. Watching the video, it felt like an eternity. Abramovic agreed, stating that she felt very real fear and that the time ticked by extremely slowly. But for her, this was all part of what the piece was about. Physical vulnerability, the consummation of commitment through surrender, complete and total trust in another person. Again Abramovic and Ulay are examining identity and ego here. Ego is what gets in the way of this kind of surrender, this kind of trust. Ego is what disallows us from growing this close to another human being, so close you literally trust them with your life.

The hospital is a cold, uncomfortable, and inhospitable place for a woman to labor. For the new mother, labor is the most difficult and important thing she has likely ever done in her entire life. For the hospital staff, however, this mother is just another in a long line of screaming, dramatic, demanding patients. For my wife, the experience would push every boundary of modesty she ever had. There was no avoiding this. A hospital is a public place, filled with strangers whose job is to attend to you in the most intimate of ways. There was no getting through this experience until my wife first was able to drop her inhibitions and surrender herself to it. She had a quick initiation. From the first few hours we were in the hospital, the baby began moving down and wreaking havoc on her insides, expelling all manner of bodily fluids from every available orifice. I tried to tell her to let it go, that it would get far worse than this and that she needed to accept that now, early in the game. But she never fully got comfortable with how embarrassing it all was until the very end.

Much of what we did as partners was improvised. We had discussed some plans for how she would breathe, what positions she would use, how I could massage her, etc. None of them seemed to make any sense once we were into it. Most of our pain management rituals we just made up as we went. And if it seemed to work, we stuck with it. My main job was to make sure that during contractions she kept her eyes open, stayed focused on me, and that she counted out loud until the contraction was gone. I figured that these things kept her distracted, even in just a small way, from the pain. Keeping her eyes focused on mine was a way of both distracting her and reminding her that we were going through it together, that she wasn’t alone, that though we were surrounded by prodding and invasive strangers, she could count on me as her partner to hold my end of the bow and not let go.

The other theme of Abramovic’s work that stayed with me was her examination of the body’s limits (or lack thereof) and its connections to the natural world. In much of her later work she uses bones, skeletons, skulls, sometimes animal and sometimes human. She draws on religious and spiritual traditions, paganism, Tibetan Buddhism, Christianity. Her work gets less violent, less directly masochistic, but more physically challenging. Her more ambitious pieces are tests of her own endurance, like “Room With An Ocean View,” where she lives in a makeshift apartment on display in a gallery, totally nude, with no way of escaping, for 12 days. Or “The Great Wall Walk,” where she and Ulay traverse the entire length of the Great Wall of China on foot, each one starting at one end and meeting in the middle. Marina claims she was spurred on by mystical forces, minerals in the ground, spirits of those who built the wall, etc. The shoes she wore for the 90 day, 2000 km walk were on display. I stared at them for a long time. I knew I could never do anything like that. I wondered how anyone ever could.

And then there was her newest piece on display, also titled “The Artist Is Present.” It consists simply of two chairs on the second floor of the museum. One chair is available for anyone who wants to sit for as long as they care to sit for. In the other chair sits Abramovic, silently, practically motionless, for as long as the museum is open, and for every day of the exhibits three month run. Knowing nothing of Abramovic’s life and work, the whole thing just sounds like something David Blaine would do. However after having walked through the exhibit, already feeling overwhelmed and consumed, seeing this piece is indescribably powerful. For one thing it is a display of this woman’s power and self control, but in a far more elegant and dignified way than any of her previous work. Many of the restagings of her older pieces in the exhibit are done by other artists, and all of them rotate in and out on two or three hour shifts. Here sits the artist herself, now in her sixties, and she does not take a break, does not compromise her vision. She sits in this chair all day, every day, and never breaks her stare. And the viewers who sit across from her? Well that’s the other thing. The effect on them is profound. Some fidget, they try to distract her, they mimic her, they put on their own show. Most however just sit and stare. And almost all of them cry. Sometimes, Marina will cry, too.

Around the 18 hour mark a doctor told us that we were in arrested labor and had been at five centimeters for over two hours, which was bad. They told us that in order to jumpstart the process and avoid a c-section, we would need to give my wife a drug called pitosin that would intensify her contractions. They also said they would give her an epidural so that she wouldn’t be forced to endure the increased pain of the contractions, which they assured us would be considerable.

My wife was adamant about having a drug-free childbirth. She especially wanted to avoid the epidural, claiming that it would rob her of the experience of feeling the baby coming out. She wanted a “natural” birth. We discussed what we would do in a situation where the pain was more than she anticipated and she was asking for the epidural. She told me that she wanted me to talk her out of it, to remind her that she didn’t want it and encourage her that she could handle it. I felt pretty ambivalent about this assignment. I had no objection to the epidural and felt like if she needed it she should take it. I felt like her insistence on refusing it was just macho bullshit, a way to prove she was tougher than “those other women.” I didn’t like being put in the position to stand in the way if she changed her mind and needed some relief from the pain. However I also knew that this was an incredibly important experience for her, and that she had a right to have the kind of experience that she wanted. It was her body. What better way to demonstrate agency over it than to volunteer to experience pain? We refused the epidural but agreed to the pitosin. The doctors looked at us like we were nuts.

The pitosin was administered through an IV and every 20 minutes a machine would beep and increase the dosage. At this point the contractions were coming very fast, every three minutes or so. We were already operating on no sleep. It was all we could do to not fall asleep during the three minute break in between contractions. Once the pitosin kicked in, the contractions got very intense, and my wife’s demeanor changed entirely. She became incommunicative, completely subsumed by the pain of the contraction. She didn’t do any of our breathing techniques or respond to anything I said to her. All she could do was lie on her side, grip the side of the bed and my arm, and scream in pain. And after every 20 minutes when the machine would beep, we knew the next round would be worse than the last. And we gripped each other and held on tight. We suffered like this for over two hours without a doctor ever coming in to check to see how things were going. Well into the second hour my wife said that when the doctor returned she wanted an epidural. I did not argue with her. I couldn’t take it anymore.

Marina Abramovic has consistently pointed out that she is not a feminist artist. She says that in Communist Yugoslavia, where she grew up, there was no concept of feminism. Her mother was in the army, the women in her life were strong, equal to men, and this view was confirmed by the men and by the social structure. She says she was not raised to believe herself a victim. What the artist here doesn’t seem to acknowledge is that her strength, her ability to withstand emotional, physical, psychological pain, her ability to know and to redefine her own body and her own self the way that she does, that this is all a very feminist, very liberating demonstration. An act so universal, giving birth, may not be a feminist exercise but is still empowering in the way it pushes one past their boundaries, creating new ones, creating a new sense of one’s self in the process.

The doctor finally returned and told us that she had dilated enough to start pushing. Fortunately we didn’t need an epidural. The worst was now behind us. Eventually, after three and a half hours of no-anesthesia pushing, our son was finally born. My wife: squeamish, modest, inhibited, and reserved lay on the bed naked, covered in several different biological fluids, and around 48 hours without sleep. Her body had been put through incredible physical trauma, her mind and emotions even more so, and here she lay, beaming, the happiest I’ve ever seen her. I looked at my wife’s body sprawled out on the bed, the remnants of the past 22 hours spread out around the room like a crime scene. I knew I could never do anything like that. I wondered how anyone ever could.

The image from “The Artist Is Present” that stayed with me the longest was called “Holding Milk.” In it, Abramovic is standing in an abandoned Spanish orphanage, dressed in a colonial-looking black dress, and in her hands she is clutching a simple bowl of milk. The image is a video shown on a life-size lcd screen. It is so still that at first glance it looks like a photo. But after a minute or two I noticed her hands shaking. Eventually her arms and hands are shaking enough that some of the milk begins to spill on her dress and onto the floor. The illusion of the photo now broken, the video becomes disconcerting. Here, a woman stands in an almost submissive pose, clearly struggling and in pain. Milk is certainly a powerful symbol in my life now. As new parents, we are consumed by milk. And my wife’s efforts to breastfeed have been a real struggle so far. Hooking up to machines to pump, storing the milk, measuring the milk, counting the milk, the routine of our everyday life is so much about milk, perhaps this is why “Holding Milk” has lingered. This, too, is a simple, universal symbol. Perhaps not at all feminist in intention, what we get is a feminist image of a woman struggling to provide, to feed, to simply give life to others. Yet such a simple act exacts such a physical and emotional sacrifice.

In the early days of life, the parents’ job is to simply keep the child alive. Feed them, clothe them, comfort them; rinse, lather, repeat. It requires very little expertise; in fact it may only require a natural instinct. However it is among the hardest things one will ever do. It is simple and easy yet sublimely difficult. Marina Abramovic has made it a point to say that performance art is not really performance and not really art. It is real life. It is happening in the moment, inseparable from the activity of life. The actions and consequences are real. Yet in these acts, these “performances” are so incredible, so arresting, that we have no choice but to meditate on what they mean. We see something that moves us, that changes us. This transformation makes it art. Marina’s instructions to the audience on the final night of her show “Seven Easy Pieces” were simple:

Please, just for the moment, all of you, just listen

I am here now, and you are here and now with me

There is no time

Please Give review on This Recording

2010-05-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote a review of the film "Please Give" for the blog This Recording. If you don't read it, maybe you should, starting with this.

Matt Taibbi - The Great American Bubble Machine

2009-06-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

why buy the jonas brothers issue of rolling stone when all you really want is to read the new matt taibbi piece about goldman sachs?

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From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again

By MATT TAIBBI

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the rear end in a top hat chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention ...

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went - and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long - including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.

IF AMERICA IS NOW CIRCLING THE DRAIN, GOLDMAN SACHS HAS FOUND A WAY TO BE THAT DRAIN.

BUBBLE #1 - THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids - just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small-time vendors in downtown Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman's disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.

This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment-trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hog-wild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund - which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah - which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.

The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line; The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leverage-based investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."

BUBBLE #2 - TECH STOCKS
Fast-Forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor's assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street.

It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm's mantra, "long-term greedy." One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. "We gave back money to 'grownup' corporate clients who had made bad deals with us," he says. "Everything we did was legal and fair - but 'long-term greedy' said we didn't want to make such a profit at the clients' collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace."

But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliche that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy - a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE THE WORLD. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy - beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system - one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

"Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share."

The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. "Everyone on the inside knew," the manager says. "Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They'd been intact since the 1930s."

Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future."

Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era. Of the 24 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent.

How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called "laddering," which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here's how it works: Say you're Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You'll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a "road show" to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of
the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price - let's say Bullshit.com's starting share price is $15 - in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO's future, knowledge that wasn't disclosed to the day-trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company's price, which of course was to the bank's benefit - a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money.

Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nichol as Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television rear end in a top hat Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman.

"Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator," Maier said. "They totally fueled the bubble. And it's specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation - manipulated up - and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in." In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations - a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.)

Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was "spinning," better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price - ensuring that those "hot" opening price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business - effectively robbing all of Bullshit's new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company's bottom line into the private bank account of the company's CEO.

In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman's board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age - Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as "an egregious distortion of the facts" - shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. "The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk," then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. "Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business."

Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn't the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.

GOLDMAN SCAMMED HOUSING INVESTORS BY BETTING AGAINST ITS OWN CRAPPY MORTGAGES.

Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits - an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman's mantra of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else's Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America's recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that "I've never even heard the term 'laddering' before.")

For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent - they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.

BUBBLE #3 - THE HOUSING CRAZE
Goldman's role in the sweeping disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that poo poo out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those lovely mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-con's mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can't write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn't know what they are.

Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the lovely ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance - known as credit-default swaps - on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won't.

There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994. A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated - and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.

More regulation wasn't exactly what Goldman had in mind. "The banks go crazy - they want it stopped," says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. "Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped."

Clinton's reigning economic foursome - "especially Rubin," according to Greenberger - called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 1l,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.

But the story didn't end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities - a third of which were subprime - much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.

Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006-S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation - no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody's projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months.

Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners - old people, for God's sake - pretending the whole time that it wasn't grade-D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. "The mortgage sector continues to be challenged," David Viniar, the bank's chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. "As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions .... However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable." In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.

"That's how audacious these assholes are," says one hedge-fund manager. "At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb - they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing." I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against - particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer - doesn't amount to securities fraud.

"It's exactly securities fraud," he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud."

Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck ho1ding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million - about what the bank's CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.

The effects of the housing bubble are well known - it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It hosed the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and hosed the taxpayer by making him payoff those same bets.

And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion - an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here."

But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down - and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.

BUBBLE #4 - $4 A GALLON
By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn't leave much to sell that wasn't tainted. The terms junk bond, IPO, subprime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public's mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDOs were about to join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years - the notion that housing prices never go down - was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling.

Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market - stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a "flight to commodities." Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.

That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

GOLDMAN TURNED A SLEEPY OIL MARKET INTO A GIANT BETTING PARLOR - SPIKING PRICES AT THE PUMP.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling - which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help - there were other players in the physical-commodities market - but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures - agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator," who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.

In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission - the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps - to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.

All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops - Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.

This was complete and utter crap - the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.

Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market - driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash - finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers - and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.

What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. "I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC," says Greenberger, "and neither of us knew this letter was out there." In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions.

"1 had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy," the staffer recounts. "And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, 'Yeah, we've been issuing these letters for years now.' I raised my hand and said, 'Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?' And they were like, 'Duh, duh.' So we went back and forth, and finally they said, 'We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.' I'm like, 'What do you mean, you
have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?'"

The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company's current position in the market. But the staffer's request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman's current position. What's more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman's capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over.

Armed with the semi-secret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index - which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil - became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly "long only" bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions - meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it's terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. "If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you'd see them pushing prices both up and down," says Michael Masters, a hedge-fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. "But they only push prices in one direction: up."

Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an "oracle of oil" by The New York Times, predicted a "super spike" in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities-trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn't know when oil prices would fall until we knew "when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives."

But it wasn't the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices - it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country's commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices.

In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn't just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World.

Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. "The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now," says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. "Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up."

Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it."

BUBBLE #5 - RIGGING THE BAILOUT
After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming - this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers - one of Goldman's last real competitors - collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bankholding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding - most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs - and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman - New York Fed president William Dudley - is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all this - the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds - is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 - with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses - off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 - which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. "They cooked those first-quarter results six ways from Sunday," says one hedge-fund manager. "They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit."

Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first-quarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using half-baked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout.

Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new "stress test" for banks seeking to repay TARP money - suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn't pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. "They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after," says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. "The government came out and said, 'To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC - which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before."

And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?

Fourteen million dollars.

That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion - yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.

How is this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely hosed corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.

This should be a pitchfork-level outrage - but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money," he said, "the left is hiding it offshore."

BUBBLE #6 - GLOBAL WARMING
Fast-Forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs - its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign - sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

AS ENVISIONED BY GOLDMAN, THE FIGHT TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING WILL BECOME A "CARBON MARKET" WORTH $1 TRILLION A YEAR.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits - a booming trillion-dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.

The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here's how it works: If the bill passes; there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billions worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of an electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that 'Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech ... the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees - while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.

HST at the Derby

2009-04-16T21:02:00.000-07:00

"That whole thing," I said, "will be jammed with people; fifty thousand or so, and most of them staggering drunk. It's a fantastic scene--thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey bottles. We'll have to spend some time out there, but it's hard to move around, too many bodies."
"Is it safe out there?" Will we ever come back?"
"Sure," I said. "We'll just have to be careful not to step on anybody's stomach and start a fight." I shrugged. "Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they'll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomitting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It's hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up"

As I prepare to meet up with my friends in the Churchill infield on the first Saturday this May, I've collected a few of Hunter S. Thompson's writings on this most hallowed of sporting events, starting with his seminal work on the subject.

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved (from Scanlan's Monthly)

http://www.kentuckyderby.info/kentuckyderby-party.php

The Derby and Other Gambling Disasters (from Page 2)

http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1192515

The Villain of Triple Crown (from Page 2)

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=thompson/030610

Return of the Christmas Mixtape

2008-12-14T17:30:00.000-08:00

The last year I did my annual Christmas Mixtape was 2005. I'm not sure why I fell off for two years but I'm bringing it back for the 2k8.

In the past I would have mostly songs I dug from the year interspersed with a few Christmas songs and the mixtape served as a kind of "songs of the year" collection for me.

This year is the opposite. I put almost all Christmas music on this year's mixtape with just a couple (3) songs that I was feeling this year. I could have done more but what I found was that most of the music I was listening to on repeat this year just didn't fit the holiday mood and made for an akward mixtape (although this one is akward enough).

Download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/sharekey=5de61321bd9d595ad2db6fb9a8902bda

Here's your tracklist for 2008:

1. Silent Night by Meg White

This is a cute and short intro to the mixtape. Basically Meg White singing acapella.

2. This Time of Year by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

The seminal ska band of the 1990s, the Bosstones were a standard in my high school soundtrack. On this track they growl about the holidays over two tone guitar and horns.

3. Bizzare Christmas Incident by Ben Folds Five

I'm probably showing my age with so much music from the 90s on here but hiding the fact that I've entered my thirties is less important than including a christmas song this cool.

4. I Choose You by Outkast featuring UGK

This isn't really Christmas music but I listened to this song a lot this year. Plus I'm getting married in a few months so it has a particular relevance to this season.

5. Christmas Blues by Willie Nelson

Since Willie loves dirty jokes I'll tell a dirty Christmas joke. What do the female reindeer do when Santa takes the males out on Christmas Eve? They go in to town and blow a few bucks.

6. Christmas in Washington by Steve Earle

Like Steve says at the beginning of this track, this song isn't about Christmas or about Washington. In this track Steve praises some unlikely heroes of his like Republican Governor George Ryan of Illinois. And some likely ones like Joan Baez and Abbie Hoffman.

7. Fuck Christmas, I Got the Blues by The Legendary Tiger Man

This might be a downer for those of you looking for merriment and cheer but you have to give this Portugese blues singer a listen because he's a lot of fun and he can lay it down.

8. Christmastime in the Mountains by Palace

I love everything by Will Oldham. This song is no exception and it happens to be about Christmas so its a wonder it hasn't made it on a mixtape before now.

9. Merry Christmas, I Don't Want to Fight by The Ramones

This song has double duty because while it is a Christmas song, The Ramones would definetly make it on to any 2008 retrospective for me. Not because of anything that came out this year, just because for some reason I found myself listening to a lot of Ramones on my headphones this year.

10. You by Atmosphere

When Life Hands You Lemons, Turn That Shit Gold has my vote for best record of 2008. I wore this record out listening to it over and over. It was like my soundtrack for 2008 and this song is the most upbeat and happy song on the album. Imagine how excited I was after this record came out and I heard they would be performing at the SEIU march against the Republican Convention.

11. Oh Come All Ye Faithful by Twisted Sister

Did you know that TS did a Christmas Album? Well they did.

12. Soulful Christmas by James Brown

I know you knew James Brown did a Christmas album. I seem to put a James Brown Christmas track on these mixtapes every year. Many of them are unlistenable but this one is pretty funky.

13. Whatever You Like by T.I.

This was the jam of the year. It has a bit of a Christmas vibe to it, too. I mean it's the season of giving and all of that.

14. If Anybody Asks You by Odetta

I had to put some Odetta on here in tribute and I was pleased to learn that she actually recorded a Christmas album of old holiday spirituals. I downloaded it from Soulseek and this was my favorite track. Rest in peace, sister.

15. New Year's Eve by Matthew Bradley

No need to explain why this track wraps it all up. Matt Bradley is a good friend of mine from back home and he recorded this song back in 2004.

Hope you enjoy this. Download it, put it on repeat, drink some egg nog and have a nice holiday.

xoxo

Dave

The Madness continues...

2008-10-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

The pregame has started for midnight madness 2008 and to celebrate I uploaded all of the videos I had from games past to youtube.

Travers Weekend 2008

2008-09-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

I'm posting my notes from my journal during Travers weekend this year...

8/22/08
Playwright's Tavern
Midtown Manhattan, New York City

It's the middle of hte day and I'm sharing the bar with a cast of characters that include a Kerouac-quoting guy with a neck tattoo, a pathetically lonely bald man hopelessly flirting with the bartender, and another 31 year old horseplayer - the only other bettor in the bar.

Playwright's is one of the last few OTBs left in Manhattan. Far less crowded than the Winner's Circle and with a far more tolerable crowd, I've often wondered why this place doesn't get more traffic.

The other punter doesn't have my vibe, really. He's all east coast. Fast talking and slick, he's a bit intense. He starts in on me immediately with his bad beat stories as soon as he notices my race form.

I was sure I'd win this last race. When the Stones got inexplicably louder on the jukebox as the horses came around the far turn, I thought maybe it was meant to be. But it didn't happen. Another handfull of tickets flutter to the floor.

Last night I was all alone and decided to walk from midtown to union square to play some chess. It was a gorgeous night. The street musicians made the air that much more comfortable. A saxaphone on 16th street, a plastic bucket drum down on University, it wafted on the summer breeze over the park almost as if they were in harmony.

None of the hustlers in the park would play me for free but a bus driver let me let him destroy me a few games before his friend showed up. His friend was a teenage black kid in an argyle sweater vest and slacks - overdressed for this crowd but came with some serious game. I didn't see him lose in 5 or 6 games. Eventually I gave up on them and made th elong trek back, buying a race form on the way and falling asleep later in the bathtub of my tiny, dank room.

Today I ate with an old friend that I hadn't seen in three years but our conversation felt like it was picking up right where it once left off. That felt right and good.

New York feels right and good and in much the same way. I can come back here all alone and pick up right where I left off the last time. I've often said that this is a great city for being alone and this week has been no exception.

The kid is talking to me again. It appears that he had the 50-1 shot that just bombed the last race is inexplicably on one of his pick 4 tickets. It isn't his biggest ticket, but it's a live ticket nonetheless. This ought to be fun.

Unfortunately the next race he doesn't have the favorite. He's got a couple horses, one of which is over 10-1. So no reason to get too excited.

He tells me about how he has to bail on the Travers tomorrow because his friends are all dropping out of the trip. He even had his parent's summer house all lined up. I'm burning with envy. A live pick four ticket and a free place to stay in Saratoga. Alls I got is a voucher for $10 and my racetrack hat. I'm planning to go to the Travers tomorrow no matter what I tell him. I'm all alone, too. My friends all dropped out, too. I plan to drive up for the day and drive back. I don't even have seats yet. He smiles. I can tell he's thinking about the prospect of going anyway. I'm wondering if I could take hanging out with this intense stranger for a whole day. Then the 10-1 shot wins the race and suddenly we are in this.

He's got the chalk in the next two races. He's got Ginger Punch in the Ensign and the favorite in the last leg, too. Ginger Punch is a lock and wins the race true to form. In the next one he's got the 3-2 favorite and a ticket worth $15,000 plus another pick 3 worth $5,000 more. He starts rocking back and forth in his chair. He starts frantically dialing everyone he can to tell them what's going on. The rest of the bar is oblivious to the sweat we have before us. A real live $20,000 sweat on the chalk. It's unbelievable. I'm nervous as hell for the kid. But I believe he's going to win. Why? And I tell him this part - because it isn't me holding the ticket. I'm positive that this wonderful thing will happen to him today because I am there to witness it and to not partake in it.

"If you win this you're going to Saratoga tomorrow no question."
"If I win this I'm buying this bar a round and I'm buying you two!"

Why build the suspense for nothing? The poor schmuck lost. It wasn't even close. He leaves the bar with his cell phone on his face making plans for that evening. I leave the bar to head back to the hotel and rest up for my drive tomorrow.

Tomorrow I find out if the spa feels right and good.

8/23/08
Saratoga Race Course
Saratoga Springs, NY

What a place! What a place indeed! The stand-up bass and banjo would make the mood all on its own but the guy dancing a jig certainly adds a nice touch. The crowd is huge. It touches all walks of New Yorkerdom or Horse Racingdom.

I'm wearing my seersucker suit, my race form rolled up under my arm, my clubhouse seat in hand. I don't know why I do this, get dressed up all by myself. But it feels good to be dressed for the occasion. It feels more celebratory. And this is truly a day to celebrate. It is Travers Day. It is a holy day.

The morning was spent at Spiro's of course. But not drinking ginger ale, instead packed in the back like an animal waiting for the scraps that Steve Crist throws off the table for us to fight over. He walks us through the day's card giving us his thoughts and picks and we mark our forms dutifully. The whole operation takes a mere 45 minutes and the herd pushes forward towards the track.

I take my seat in the clubhouse stands next to another lonely party, an old woman who isn't even betting just cheering on the horses and telling anyone within earshot her history of working with horses and horsemen. Behind me is a large party of men in their 40s and 50s who are loud and boisterous and smoking cigars. They aren't strangers to the track, but clearly don't do this very often. They are having fun and intend to make the most out of the day. In front of me is a father and his son, the father teaching the son how to decipher the numbers on the program. My past present and future surround me.

7th race

It's the 7th race and it is revenge of the palooka day so far. The longshots are murdering the chalk and the apron-dwellers are losing their collective shit. They leap for joy with their $2 exacta tickets clutched tightly in their raised hands. Ordinarily I'd love a day like today, but I can't hit a barn with a brick. I have $100 left and 3 more races to go.

8th race

Things aren't going so well. I told myself to be more confident but the scary thing is that I interpreted that to mean "bet more." Its 5 minutes to race and I feel like I'm all-in. If I hit this one I'm looking good. If I miss I'm treading water to get out of the track with money for tolls. The lump is growing. The tension builds.

9th race

There is no more confidence only desperation. The hole has grown so deep it seems insurmountable. How often I find myself in this predicament, right before the feature.

Shakis is strutting on the track. He knows where he is. He owns this track. It is as if all his prior losses were his stubborn way to get his trainer to bring him back to the spa.

I wish I had as good an excuse for my recent form. At least I know I'll have a long price when I finally make my comeback. 6-1 on the reigning champ of this race? What was I thinking?

10th race - The Travers

Officially all-in on the Travers. I've staked my hopes, my dreams, and my gas money on an untested up and comer named Mambo in Seattle. I think my main rival is Macho Again. Neither name inspires anything poetic for me, nor do they seem intimidating.

The natives are in full force for the feature now. I just saw a drunk man with a small boy who was wearing jockey goggles and crying up a storm while his drunk old man laughed hysterically. Behind me in the gallows the possee of east coast punters are having a heated argument about why the winner of the last race should never have won. The goon who had him is smartly just smiling and nodding his head.

They are loading the gate now. The crowd roars. I'm beyond being nervous. This is it...

Everyone needs to see this graphic

2008-09-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

r u serious

2008-08-05T14:16:00.001-07:00

Dark Knight Dilemma

2008-07-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

My favorite part of The Dark Knight was recognizing the prisoner's dilemma during the scene with the ferry boats. Here is the scenario:

The Joker has rigged two boats filled with people with explosives. One boat has ordinary law-abiding citizens. The other is filled with prisoners. He has given each boat the detonator to the other boat's bomb. He tells them that he will blow both boats up in one hour unless one boat blows the other boat up first.

Not really that tough of a prisoner's dilemma on the surface. Let's look at how it breaks down.

I'll assign the following values...

Life Spared: 1
Life Taken: 0

There is no third value as there would be in other dilemmas or even games of chicken.

Cooperate: Don't detonate
Defect: Detonate the other boat

So the matrix looks like this...
B
C | D
A C|0,0 | 0,1
D|1,0 | 0,0

There is no 1,1 outcome in this dilemma, and there's only one round (one shot dilemma). Naturally, defection is the rational choice, and defection quickly before the other side could defect first.

This leads to an interesting problem not presented in the film. If both boats are rational actors, then both boats would recognize immediately that a single minute wasted leaves you vulnerable to the other boat's defection, so the rational action is to push the button right away. But if both boats reached this conclusion simultaneously, then that leads to the 0,0 outcome above. Of course neither party can control the other's actions in any way so this is a moot point and you would push the button immediately anyway.

Of course in the film they both cooperate, and only after a ridiculous scene where the members of the law-abiding boat decide to put the whole thing to a vote (an incredibly irrational thing to do given the circumstances, and for me anyway an illustration of the limits of majority-rule democracy). But they vote to defect yet nobody on the boat has the balls to push the button so they end up cooperating against their own collective will, another totally irrational outcome, but one that serves the plot. Batman of course prevents the Joker from blowing both boats so all are saved and rewarded with a 1,1 outcome.

I'd have like to have seen some discussion amongst the prisoners of "Batman will save us" or at the very least "let's hope the police can stop him! We don't want this on our hands!" That would have changed the matrix somehow for me and would have made the people on the boat's actions seem more rational to me.

There was an interesting line where one guy looks at a clock and remarks that the other boat hasn't blown them up yet. The assumption being that the other boat intends to cooperate. In a matrix where mutual cooperation rewards the parties, this would change everything, because every minute that passes by, rather than leaving you vulnerable to the other side's defection, confirms the other side's cooperation and would inspire mutual cooperation.

I'm not really sure what this matrix would look like. Anyone care to comment on this "Batman clause"?

The Spoiler

2008-05-10T15:32:00.000-07:00

Here he is, Casino Drive, the Ralph Nader of this year's triple crown...

That beautiful handridden 11 length victory was in his maiden race. His second start? Today's Peter Pan at Belmont, where he won by 5 3/4 lengths in similar fashion.

So what you may ask. How can a horse with two starts and only one stakes victory stop Big Brown from winning the triple crown?

Consider if you will this horse's big brother and sister. His older brother's name is Jazil and his older sister's name is Rags to Riches.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Pyro might not be the real deal

2008-04-05T08:32:00.001-07:00

His efforts in the Risen Star and La Derby looked impressive, but he only earned a 90 and a 95 beyer for the races respectively.

I have to trust the geniuses at the DRF on this one. Plus I'm always looking for value. I got a future bet on Denis of Cork so let's see how high he scores on today's Illinois Derby.

Big Brown has also shown up as the favorite in the third pool. A battle of undefeateds?

I'll post more after todays races, assuming Katie lets me get to the OTB. In addition to the Wood, SA Derby, and Illinois Derby, Oaklawn is running the Handicap today.

Pyro might be the real deal.

2008-03-08T17:46:00.000-08:00

First off, please feast your eyes on Pyro's amazing Risen Star...

Today's Louisiana Derby was as amazing, but for different reasons. Yes he came on late, although he didn't give us another 1/4 in .22 like in that amazing race. What he did that was so impressive was battle his way out of traffic in the stretch. As the field bunched together around the final turn, I couldn't even see where Pyro was. (admittedly I was watching Majestic Star, who I had bet on, and who took the the turn and stretch as wide as he could) But he made his move a furlong into the stretch, which showed amazing tactical speed.

I don't know what's next for this guy, but I hope it's Kentucky and I can't wait to see what he does.

Run, Ralph, Run

2008-03-01T00:24:00.000-08:00

Quite a bit is being made of Ralph Nader's decision to run for president for the fourth time. Most of the noise is the same tired rehashing of the "spoiler" argument that has been made since 2000 when Gore blew the election and Nader was accused of "taking votes" from him. And as if being blamed for not only Gore's loss in 2000, but every bad thing that Bush has done in the 8 years since, he also is being chastised for daring to run again.

I should point out at the top here that I am most likely not going to vote for Ralph Nader in the election. And to be honest, I feel some guilt about that, because I don't disagree with a single thing Ralph Nader says about this country and his vision for where it should go. I have nothing but respect for this man and his life's work and feel his life has been an inspirational and heroic story. Even though I agree with Ralph more than any other presidential candidate, I still will vote for Obama if he gets the nomination. And that's really hard for me to rationalize to myself, but Barack Obama in 2008 is no Al Gore in 2000. Politics have changed quite a bit since I enthusiastically campaigned and voted for Ralph 8 years ago. And there is less a need for the message and purpose of Ralph Nader's candidacy than there was then. In fact, I feel Ralph Nader's run in 2000 really helped move the Democratic party leftward, showing them how taking the progressives for granted could cost them dearly in the general election. But I digress.

The purpose of writing this is to say that even though I won't vote for Nader, I am totally disgusted with the reaction to his running. The mere suggestion that votes can be "stolen" from another candidate is ridiculous. The idea that Nader's votes "belong" to another candidate is totally divorced from logic and reason.

People who vote for Ralph Nader are well aware of the other candidates in the race. And if their votes are so important to the Democrats, then I say the Democrats should work harder to earn them and win them away from Ralph. They should work as hard or harder to win votes away from Ralph as they do at winning votes from the godawful independents. These proudly apathetic voters are the same people who demand that taxes be cut while insisting that spending be increased. The same people who voted for Bush because he was for good and against evil and now will vote for Obama because he is for hope and against fear. The voters who hate Hillary Clinton because she is "shrill" or a "bitch." Democrats work very hard for these votes, yet instead of campaigning to win Nader's voters back, they try to prevent him from even getting on the ballot. And they demand Nader explain why he has the gall to even consider running against the two party's candidates.

I think that Nader has every right to run. And if he disagrees with both parties on substantive issues, then he not only has the right to, he ought to.

I think that most Democrats really don't want a Ralph Nader in the race because they don't want to be reminded of their compromises, their triangulations, and their sellouts. They want to posture as progressives by saying things like "universal health care" while offering us corporate-run subsidized private health insurance. They say they want to "bring the troops home" while refusing to go on record and say they will withdraw us from Iraq completely. They get it both ways, and Nader in the race pulls back the curtain.

I for one understand their fear. I'm already struggling with my own guilt and frustration of knowing that I won't support Nader if Obama gets the nomination despite the fact that he is the candidate I most agree with. That is a hard thing to accept about yourself, but I'm glad that I'm forced to. It means I have to strengthen my argument for my candidate of choice. I have to really think hard about why I support Obama and be prepared to debate not only those people around me who don't support him, but debate myself - the inner me that knows that Nader is a good and intelligent man who was right about the direction our country was headed in the 1980s, in the 1990s, and now today. He's trying to tell us something. We may not end up voting for him, but we goddamn better listen to him.

Ron Paul

2008-01-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

“[O]ur country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists—and they can be identified by the color of their skin.”

“I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city [Washington, D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”

“We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational.”

“The riots, burning, looting, and murders are only a continuation of 30 years of racial politics.”

“The criminals who terrorize our cities—in riots and on every non-riot day—are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are. As children, they are trained to hate whites, to believe that white oppression is responsible for all black ills, to “fight the power,” and to steal and loot as much money from the white enemy as possible. Anything is justified against ‘The Man.’ And ‘The Woman.’’”

“My friend waved to the tiny [African-American] child, who scowled, stuck out her tongue, and said (somewhat tautologically): “I hate you, white honkey.” And the parents were indulgent. Is any white child taught to hate in this way?” [As a matter of fact, Paul has appeared on a radio program called “The Political Cesspool,” which has featured the neo-Nazi twin pop stars Prussian Blue. –ed.]

“But this is normal, and in fact benign, compared to much of the anti-white ideology in the thoroughly racist black community. The black leadership indoctrinates its followers with phony history and phony theory to bolster its claims of victimology.”

“Korean-Americans, hated by blacks, never riot, and in fact are some of the most productive people in America (the reason for black hatred).”

“The cause of the riots is plain: barbarism. If the barbarians cannot loot sufficiently through legal channels (i.e., the riots being the welfare-state minus the middleman), they resort to illegal ones, to terrorism.”

“We must not kowtow to the street hoodlums and their sanctimonious leaders.”

“Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots.”

“Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country.”

“Blacks have ‘civil rights,’ preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black beauty contests, black TV shows, black TV anchors, black scholarships and colleges, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.”

Source: The Ron Paul Report, “Los Angeles Racial Terrorism”

“Black males age 13 that have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary, and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.”

Source: The Ron Paul Political/Survival report, 1990-1994, excerpted by the Austin Chronicle

Conspiracist Pull Quotes:

“We now know that we are under assault from thugs and revolutionaries who hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for: private property, material success for those who earn it, and Christian morality.”

“In San Francisco and perhaps other cities, says expert Burt Blumert, the rioting was led by red-flag carrying members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Workers World Party, both Trotskyite-Maoist.”

“Many people tried to buy guns to protect themselves. But, whoops, California has a 14-day waiting period. And then, just to make sure honest Californians could not get ammunition for the firearms they already owned (poor ragefilled youth might be shot), Mayor Tom Bradley ordered all gun and ammo shops closed, a great help to criminals who had stocked up earlier, or who could simply break in and loot.”

“Several days after the violence ended, we learned that there would have been blacks on the King jury—if the NAACP hadn’t engaged in jury tampering by telling potential black jurors that it was their racial duty to convict the cops. The blacks admitted this to defense lawyers, and were rightly excluded from jury. This is a serious crime, but the NAACP will not be prosecuted.”

“Two years ago, in a series of predictions for the 1990s, I said that race riots would erupt in our large cities. I’m now predicting this will be the major problem of the 1990s.” [Helter Skelter, anybody?—ed.]

Source: The Ron Paul Report, “Los Angeles Racial Terrorism”

“Last month I reported on massive, illegal spying by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith against its perceived opponents, as revealed in California. The ADL keeps track of people and groups from left to right, and purchases illegally obtained information on Americans from its agents in police departments in order to prepare and maintain hundreds of thousands of dossiers.”

“The [Los Angeles] Times also brought to light the ADL’s work against ‘cults,’ especially interesting given the BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms]-ADL connection.”

“It was such a seminar [i.e. a cult awareness training seminar], arranged by the ADL, that targeted the Branch Davidians in the first place.”

Source: The Ron Paul Survival Report, June 15, 1993

“The intensity with which Israel lobbies in the U.S. Congress is surpassed only by its media campaigns to drown all criticism of Israel. Prominent U.S. Editors and media owners don’t even pretend to objectivity on the issue. They all follow the advice of Norman Podhoretz, editor of the influential neo-conservative magazine Commentary….” [Our emphasis –ed.]

“This bias [Martin Peretz’s] informs every opinion expressed in The New Republic. For example, it opposed Contra aid until the Sandinista government showed sympathy for the PLO.”

Source: The Ron Paul Political Report, date uncertain

“If this walking bomb had gone off, it would have demolished the House Chamber and most of the congressmen in it. Yet this attempted terrorist attack was buried by the media. Why? Because the perpetrator was an undoubtedly mad Israeli, furious over alleged slights to his country… [T]he Israeli lobby deep-sixed the story, and no one outside of Congress ever head about it.”

Source: The Ron Paul Political Report, date uncertain

“The Earth Summit is the creepiest meeting of politicos since the first gathering of Bolsheviks. Officially known as the UN Conference for Environment and Development, it will be held in Brazil in June; bad guys from all over the globe will attend.”

“[Hillary Clinton] is one of the most dangerous women in public life. Not only is she a fanatical abortion advocate, she wants parents to register with the government as a condition for having children to be able to sue and `divorce’ themselves from their parents. Maybe her daughter ought to sue her parents for attempting to raise her as a leftist. That sure qualifies as abuse to me.”

“Disgruntled taxpayer Dean Hicks fired bombs through mortars at night at buildings of the Internal Revenue Service in California. Hicks did damage federal property, but no individuals were injured… Hicks was sentenced to 20 years in prison, given a $45,000 fine, and ordered to pay $335,000 in restitution to the IRS. If he had been a serial murderer, he would not have gotten this sort of sentence.”

“There is good news after the L.A. riots. Statewide, gun sales are up 45% over the same period last year. People have been purchasing a record number. If the cops are not going to take care of the problem, the people will.”

Source: The Ron Paul Political/Survival report, 1990-1994, excerpted by the Austin Chronicle

Midnight Madness 2007 Wrapup

2008-01-03T06:36:00.001-08:00

It has taken me this long to recuperate from the game and to make the time to write a detailed wrapup. I've been waiting to get more photos from other teams but nobody has sent me any. The ones you see here are mostly from Lindsey Gathier and Greg Kennedy's flickr pages. I'm still holding out hope that someone will send in more photos, particularly of the maze. That thing took a long time to build and I never got a chance to see it at dark or see it in action. I'm also hoping that people took photos of the starting lines or any video of the game. If you have any of this stuff I can host it on flickr for you if you email it to me at the address on the meatmachine.org page.

Before I begin I want everyone to know a little about our planning process. Our discussions about this game began literally the day after we won last year. As I posted on this blog in my wrapup from last year, we passed around a sheet at our victory dinner to solicit ideas from people. That exercise bore no fruit, but we had discussion about the game on the meatmachine listserv all year long. And throughout the year I played in three other games which gave me some ideas to toss around with the team. And two of our teammates played the NYC Midnight Madness as well. We also were inspired by all the posts that went up on Rob's old blog right after last year's game where he posted conversations between him and Matt Rowe about game ideas and his original script for MM2K6 that showed which clues made it and which ones got scrapped. I think those posts probably jump started my own thinking more than anything else, and particularly inspired the dual game control idea.

My original direction for the game was to have multiple Game Controls that had different rules but were basically balanced. Then teams would choose a GC based on whatever strategy they intended to employ during the game. I wanted teams to think about the game as a strategy game, and to have more variables to work with than just puzzles in a line. I also was interested in the idea that the "game board" could change based on decisions the teams made throughout the night, so that the game they played would be totally unique.

These conversations and ideas got out of hand initially, and I kept dreaming up structures that had more and more rules and elements. I suggested things like Mob teams leave false puzzles behind to slow other teams down but that FBI teams could infiltrate the Mob by being undercover and could warn everyone about which puzzles were false. I had an idea that each group would have several hideouts throughout town and if you found the hideout and raided it you'd get money. I thought teams should be able to "arrest" or "whack" each other for money. But in the end the team thought it would be better to whittle it down to a simpler structure. I think we achieved a happy medium.

We also had to scrap several clue ideas because a member of WMD managed to get access to our listserv back in the summer. He graciously told us of his achievement so we could fix the hole but we couldn't chance that he saw our eariler puzzles. This killed off a few pretty good ideas, including the live chrome genz performance puzzle we had thought up. So anyone hoping to see a live Chrome Genz show, you can thank Dave Tortorella for blowing it for you.

So here is the game we came up with...

PREGAME

The trailhead was a letter posted on this blog from an "OM." Somewhere along the line last year I suggested making the theme of this year's game deal with Hot Springs's old mobster/gambling history. I wanted the pregame to force teams to research this history on their own so they'd get a flavor for it before the game. The pregame would both introduce the real historical characters like Madden and Luciano and introduce the fake characters like the Lasagne family.

I wanted the pregame to play more like an ARG than puzzle hunt game. So I figured we could have teams interact with characters from the game and the whole thing could set up the storyline for the actual game on the 28th. But teams didn't understand ARGs too well and the whole thing sputtered. Here was the original timeline of the pregame...

Letter from OM appears - puzzle solves to bank name - googling reveals bank website - bank employees photos have clues to their email passwords - teams talk to bank employees on the phone to socially engineer their passwords, get access to OM's box - I go to bank and find baseball cards and old race form in the box - puzzles solve to hotel pennsylvania - map is in the drawer in particular room at hotel - note from Lasagne gangster found - googling finds website with bios of the members of the Lasagne family, including police records - map leads to bottle buried in hot springs - fingerprints on bottle match one of the Lasagne family member's police report fingerprints - players are contacted by various gangsters but know which one has the real map because of the fingerprints, so they know where to start the game.

Teams basically gave up on the bank because they never understood that they could actually speak to all the bank employees on the phone. To accomplish this we had someone agree to man the phone line at his job all day on work days and he used a voice modluation program to change himnself from character to character. (incidentally, the first program we used created all the horrible feedback that teams heard when they first started talking to the bank. we quickly swapped it out for a new headset and the sound was much better, but I fear it kept teams from calling back)

I eventually ended the pregame early so we could utilize the race form puzzle in the game, because I was proud of it and didn't want it to die, and it was clear time was running out on teams getting through in time and very few people were trying to solve the puzzle anymore. So we ended it and just had the Feds and Mobsters call teams on the phone with some story about how the Lasagne's got into the box first and needed the teams to come work for them to help them track down the money in Hot Springs. The FBI phoned them asking them to help them catch the Lasagnes. Both GC's explained what they paid, how much the money was worth during the game in terms of time and hints, and that Mobsters were lying 20% of the time. Then teams had to pick which GC to work for and the starting line was revealed to them.

Here was the deal each team was offered: FBI paid $200 per puzzle solved and charged $300 for a hint before 15 minutes was up (except the first hint which came after 30 minutes). $100 was worth 5 minutes at the end of the game. They would never lie. MOB paid $300 per puzzle solved and charged $300 for early hints but there was a 20% chance on every hint that it was bogus. 6 teams chose FBI and 4 teams chose MOB. One of the MOB teams dropped out before the game started.

STARTING LINE

Our original idea for the starting line would be that there were two seperate starting lines, one for the Mob and one for the Feds and the Feds would watch the Mob starting line on hidden video. But the internet connection at the Fed starting line kept crapping out on us the day of the game and we had to redo everything at the last minute. We also needed to find last minute replacements for Special Agent Johnson and Tommy Lasagne. The folks we got to do it had never played Midnight Madness before and were intrigued. They were prepped in literally 20 minutes before the game began.

The concept for the two seperate teams was that each team would have different pay scales but because of the false hints it would be pretty much balanced. However we wanted another aspect of gameplay that would allow teams to tip the scale so to speak by earning extra money throughout the night. This would be the Tommy-Johnson game. Mob teams were told at their starting line that they would need to shuttle around the boss as the night went on, and if he was captured by an FBI team while in their care they would have to pay the arresting team and Tommy would pay the arresting team. If the team could make it 2 hours without Tommy getting caught he would pay them. However they had to do everything Tommy said and couldn't hide him or leave him in the van. FBI teams were given photos of Tommy to identify him with. They were briefed that they would have Special Agent Johnson riding with them from time to time to evaluate them but that if she was harmed in their care they would be fined. Mob teams were told there was a price on her head and given a photo of her.

We wanted Tommy and Johnson to make it hard for their teams to protect them by being out in the open a lot. We suggested that teams dress them up in their costumes or uniforms or disguises. Some did, and early in the game Tommy at least made his teams take him to get dinner and stuff that slowed them down. But as the night wore on they allowed teams to keep them in the vans and were much more out of sight. But overall I think we accomplished what we wanted because this part of the game ultimately decided the winner between two very close teams.

Teams were given a map that was supposedly part of the contents of Owney Madden's safe deposit box and a CD. The map would come in handy several times throughout the night.

GODFATHER CD

The CD was a short track with quotes from the Godfather and words beeped out. It was a simple puzzle. The words were OFF WITH THEIR HEAD which was meant to refer to the Queen of Hearts on the map, which was on Oaklawn Race Track.

OAKLAWN NONOGRAM

At the track teams were supposed to find Salvatore Lasagne betting on the ponies. A few actually did. This wasn't easy as teams weren't really sure what to be looking for. The first couple of teams to arrive didn't find him for a long time, actually. The teams that did were given copies of a race form and told to come back after they had solved it.

We intended for teams to stay at the racetrack and work on this puzzle there but security started kicking teams out after some team explained to a security guard that they were there for Midnight Madness. Bad idea, kids. The security guards stood at the front entrance and started turning away teams that showed up. Once I heard about this I went down to the entrance to argue with the security and explain that we were just handing out a piece of paper and that people would immediately leave. Security were total assholes, though and said that handing out paper was considered peddling and against the rules. As I'm standing there arguing with them Dave Tortorella comes bounding in the door with a jumpsuit covered in patches and a headlamp and the guard says "are you with Midnight Madness?" and Dave smartly says "no I'm just here to gamble with my friends" and they let him go!! See how easy it is kids?

I decided to stand outside the track and hand out the clue to teams there then sit in my car in the parking lot to give out hints in person. This worked out fine and no more teams were given a hard time, and Tommy Lasagne got busted a few times in the parking lot, too.

The puzzle was a recycled one from the pregame that we were just too proud of to scrap. It was two pages of data from last year's Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn with many of the numbers in red. The names of the horses were changed to the names of Arkansas Derby winners throughout history. If you took the first letter of the first name and the second letter of the second name, etc you'd get NONOGRAMS. There were exactly 25 lines of past performance data on each page so each page was an axis and the red numbers were the nonogram squares. The solution looked like this...

and the next puzzle was taped under the desk in a hotel room at the Austin hotel. We timed out solving this puzzle and we all took from 45 minutes to an hour to finish it, however we didn't think that many teams would use online solvers to finish this one much faster than that. In fact, the hardest part for some teams was figuring out the word NONOGRAM from the horse names!

HOTEL ROOM BACKGAMMON SAMPLE

The next location was the Austin hotel. I wasn't at this site so I don't have many good stories about it other than Spike's car was broken in to and his laptop stolen. He called the police but called Game Control to make sure they knew what was going on and that he would NOT tell the police about Midnight Madness. Way to go, Spike. Sorry about your computer, though! Let me know what happened with everything.

The puzzle was taped under the desk in one room and a hand of blackjack was lying on the tables. However the dealer hadn't yet paid the hands off. The solution was to complete the action by paying off winning hands and collecting from losing hands to produce another room number.

The solution was Room 402. In this room there was a big microscope for teams to use to view the sample. Some teams were also able to take a photo of the sample with their digital cameras through the microscope. It was a representation of a backgammon board at 1/500th the width of a human hair. Josh made them at his lab at IBM. People were pretty impressed with them, too.

From here teams went to the lobby where there was another backgammon board with a different position on it and two dice with street names on all sides.

Teams needed to figure out what dice roll produced the new position which would produce an intersection for them. The correct answer was Prospect and Central, 1-1, but many teams made the mistake of going to Central and Greenwood, 1-2. Because of the rules, teams were not allowed to confirm locations before leaving a clue site. They had to call once they arrived at a clue site and only then could confirm if they were right. This was to keep teams from eliminating locations by guessing. So teams who went to the wrong site lost some time here.

MAXINE'S LIGHTS

At the intersection of Prospect and Central is a bar called Maxine's. Our original puzzle at this point was going to be much, much cooler. Winston had designed christmas light relays and programmed them to blink a message in morse code. Then we went downtown and looked at the plug boxes that the light displays were plugged in to and Winston put the relays into boxes that exactly matched these boxes. The night before the game I went downtown to test out our gadget and try to hack in to the light displays that lined the street on Central Avenue and I almost got arrested. I had 4 police cars and cops everywhere. I was afraid they'd think I was planting a bomb or something and we'd end up with our very own aqua teen hunger force scandal. Instead, it turned out the cops thought that I had stolen the metal box from the light display rather than something I was GIVING the city! After showing them the little lego computers inside the box, they let me go. We all agreed it would be a bad idea to set this clue up since the cops now were hip to us. I also decided to eliminate another puzzle that was set for downtown that involved lasers and the spinning statue by the parking deck because it was obvious that cops were crawling all over downtown on weekends looking for troublemakers. So we had some problems.

We were determined to use Winston's relays so I called up Maxine's and they agreed to help us in a pinch and let us hook up their lights to the relays. Basically teams were led to the bar but from there had to identify that the lights were flashing in strange patterns. The trick to this puzzle was that there were two different displays flashing. One said "LOW KEY ARTS," the location of the next puzzle, but the other one said "GOPHER." Many teams headed for Low Key Arts without decoding the other light display, and other teams had trouble figuring out what the phrase "KEY SLOW ART" meant.

Eventually the bar closed but Steph convinced them to leave the lights on so teams could decode it through the window. Steph also said that while she waited for teams to arrive, she saw the police show up at this bar no fewer than 5 times and remove patrons and take them away. Maxine's aint the bar it used to be. Last time I was in there I saw a big bar fight, so I was a little worried about this spot, but also thought that the flavor of the crowd would make the puzzle that much more fun.

The Maxine's folks seemed to enjoy us using the puzzle. Not only did they dole out a few free shirts to people, they asked us to consider using them again some time!

OWNEY'S CASINO

At Low Key Arts, teams were asked if they knew the password. It was, of course, GOPHER, the name of Owney Madden's old gang. Teams who failed to decode this part were forced to return to Maxine's without entrance to the game. I was surprised at how many people didn't get the password. And so were teams who were already in the club. When one team showed up and proudly told us the password: POPHER, everybody roared with laughter.

Inside of Low Key Arts we set up a two-table casino. The teams were told that they could have $3,000 for their whole team to use however they wanted. They could play 50-100 holdem, or they could play blackjack for $500 a hand. Once the games filled up a waiting list was started and if a team member busted out they had to vacate their seat for someone else.

The cards weren't regular playing cards, but had strange symbols on them instead. Teams were also given a cipher using the symbols on the cards in two colors.

The idea with this one was that teams would play poker long enough to make enough money to play blackjack. We felt it was easier to identify the symbols on the cards by playing blackjack than poker, or at least would be faster.

Some people never played blackjack, only poker. Some people had no idea how to play either game. This lead to some pretty funny interactions. Damon Deluca knew how to play poker, but didn't really have a good handle on how to solve the clue, so he just played poker the way he knows how: to win. Whenever he made three of a kind or two pair, he raised! Other players would groan but he didn't care, he'd rake in the pot pleased as punch. At one point Jed asked another player why she kept raising. "These chips are worthless! They don't mean anything. We need to see the cards!" She checked the rest of the time but I'm not sure she ever took any notes.

This clue was the hardest for me. I had no idea how many people we should have had at this spot. We had Josh and me, but we also had to keep fielding calls from teams who were stuck two clues back. Plus my car alarm kept going off for some reason. And teams would want hints on the cards, so I'd have to pause the game and go talk to them in private. It was stressful as hell. We needed a bunch more people to make this one go smoother.

CHROME GENZ

At some point while teams were here the second clue in the meta-puzzle went off. Teams all got text messages that they should listen to KLAZ 105.9 at 3:20 am. KLAZ is a statewide top-40 radio station, one of the most listened-to stations in the state. At 3:20 am, anyone in Arkansas listening to KLAZ heard this.

The solution to the song was in the chorus, which was hopefully obvious from the four times we say "this is the clue" before the chorus starts. Each line referred to some element of a different gambling game. They were: Insurance, Nine, Straight, Invasor, Doubling cube, Eleven, Over. The first letter of each word spelled "INSIDE O," which would come in handy later on.

Soon after the song first aired (it was on twice) Team Goat started telling me that they had solved the song and knew what to do. I was amazed. We hadn't considered that even if a team knew the solution to the song they would know what it meant, but evidently we were wrong. We told Adam to not go until sunup, and they agreed.

The solution to the card cipher was I DONT SHARE YOUR GREED, THE ONLY CARD I NEED, an obvious reference to motorhead's "ace of spades." I was so disappointed that nobody knew the reference. The ace of spades on the map was on an old country road past carpenter dam. Out in a field on that old road was a burning fire and...

THE MAZE

Out in the middle of a field we built a 30 square foot, 6 foot tall maze. It was black, so at night it was pretty hard to find your way around it. There was an entrance and a couple of exits to the maze, but the exits were just red herrings. The real solution to the maze lay somewhere inside, where in one of the corners of the maze teams stumbled upon "the device"...

A box with 10 switches on it and an LCD display. The box and the maze worked together as one puzzle. We didnt spend all that time and money building that maze to make it "sorta" hard to find the device. We hoped it would have been obvious to teams that the maze and the placement of the device were important to the solution. But some teams tried some weird shit, and in at least one instance, the weird shit worked. Team Goat said they solved this puzzle by using the numbers said in the rap song on each switch. It's like 10,000 to 1, but they got the right combination using some random-ass method and moved on. Unfortuantely they shared their bogus solution with Mutant Ninja Monkey Squad, who got stuck on it for too long. And since they were getting conflicting hints from GC, they couldn't tell if they were getting their 20% bad hints or not. In fact they were getting bad hints from GC, but they wouldn't have needed hints to begin with if they weren't lead down the wrong path to begin with.

The real solution used the turns in the maze. It took 10 turns from the entrance to get to the box. If you used up for left and down for right, and ordered the switches, a phone number would appear on the display. The message on the line told teams to go to an address on Lake Hamilton.

OWNEY'S PILLOWS

This was a familiar location, it was the finish line for the game two years ago. It's also my family's lake house. Inside the house there were pillows all around that had playing cards on the tags and weird patterns sewn on to the fronts. This was Stephanie's puzzle. She's really into sewing and quilting and this puzzle started off as a quilt and soon evolved into pillows. She dubbed this the "call your mom" puzzle because she was sure people would need to call their mom's to solve it.

Each pillow had a tag with an example of a kind of stitch on it (and a playing card) and the front of each pillow had a design sewn into it that was a kind of rhebus puzzle for a name of a stitch. The correct pillow (and card) was the one whose rhebus correctly named the stitch on the tag.

Team Goat arrived at this puzzle first, but the die came up bad for them and they got a bogus hint on this clue. They asked Steph if it had something to do with the myriad of horseracing photos around the house and she told them it did, so they took pictures of the photos and left. I'm sure this cost them a lot of time.

The correct card lead them to Greenwood Cemetery.

THE JAIL

Before we get to the cemetery, I should tell you about the jail puzzle. This coupled with the rap song were the metaclues to know what to do at Greenwood Cemetery. Here's the scenario...

At some point during the night the team got a call from someone telling them to come to the parking lot at Mowery Wyatt Plaza. These stories varied throughout the night, I think they were trying to entertain themselves with silly stories, but the idea was that mob teams were being arrested by the feds and fed teams were being abducted by the mob.

When they arrived at the parking lot they got another call telling them to send one person out of their vehicle around to the back of the building. At this point teams realized that another team was also there and being told to do the same thing.

When the two team members got to the back of the building, they were blindfolded, handcuffed together, and taken away. When the blindfold came off they were in a dingy basement with nothing but a desk and a box on the desk.

The box was just a plain brown box with a knob on the top. You could spin the knob clockwise or counterclockwise, but do nothing else. Every now and again the box would vibrate.

Meanwhile, the two teams were told an address to come to to retrieve their teammates. At this address the teams were led into a room with yet another box.

This box had a button on it you could push, and it had a numbered dial like a combination lock that seemed to spin randomly in either direction. There was a combination written on the box as well.

The way the clue worked was that the box with the spinning knob was controlling the combination on the other box, and the button was controlling the vibrations of the basement box. Teams could theoretically get the right combination by pressing the button to signal their teammates to stop turning the knob and reverse directions.

When the combination was reached, the box would open and the key to free the teammates was inside.

Some teams unfortunately solved this clue entirely by accident from spinning the knob so fast and randomly that they managed to trick the box into thinking they got the combination. I think only one group solved it correctly. If a team worked too long without solving it, they were given the option to pay money to send a teammate into the jail to join the others. If they still couldnt solve it, they could pay more money to bring the person back out of jail.

One team, Team Goat, had to work on this puzzle by themselves because of an imbalance in teams. The goal of this puzzle was to get teams to work together on a clue, so its too bad that they had to do it alone. However they seemed to solve it as quickly as the other teams, maybe even quicker, so I don't think it hurt them.

When teams completed this puzzle they were given a map of the cemetery. However they weren't supposed to know it was a map of the cemetery yet. It was just an old line drawn map with no street names on it.

GREENWOOD CEMETERY

At the cemetery, if teams followed the map they got and the coordinates they got from either Tommy Lasagne or Special Agent Johnson, they would find Owney Madden's grave. Unfortunately Special Agent Johnson didn't know to give the coordinates to the teams, but luckily the first two teams to get to this location were mob teams who had the coordinates, so fed teams needed only to look for the other players who were already at the right place. Only one team called us and complained that they didn't know where to go and we told them the coordinates.

At Owney's grave there was no puzzle, just his tombstone. Every single team called us and asked us what to do, and we told every team the same thing: "if you had solved every puzzle up to this point you'd know what to do."

The problem? Nobody, not one single team, had bothered to solve the rap song puzzle. So nobody had the instructions "inside o." This was a huge disappointment for us because we really wanted the game to end in the morning, and we assumed that by the time teams got to the cemetery itd be a mad dash for the finish line. In fact we were already at the finish line setting up fires and getting food ready expecting a team in the next half hour after the first team arrived at the cemetery. But instead we had to wait for EVERY team to solve the rap song, and it took hours.

The "inside o" solution referred to the O in Owney Madden's name. The numbers on the map teams got at the beginning were the same as numbers on the tombstone. When you lined the map up with the numbers, the finish line sat right inside the O in Owney.

Some teams were able to figure this out without the "inside o" from the rap song. They simply recognized the numbers from the map and guessed that was the solution. In fact, the first two teams across the finish line solved it this way.

We assumed this might happen. In fact we assumed that based on how we structured the game there would be multiple ways to shortcut the game. Team Goat proved this by figuring out the map was of Greenwood Cemetery, or assuming, or whatever, and then trying to force every answer to every puzzle to be Greenwood Cemetery.

To deal with this possibility we wrote into the rules that you had to solve every puzzle to be eligible to win. We discussed whether or not we should enforce this rule if one of those two teams happened to win after the money was counted. Luckily it never even came down to that.

FINISH LINE

The finish line was on a point on anthony island in lake hamilton. My mom made up lots of smores and hot dogs and stuff and we made a few fires in fire pits. Teams hung around the finish line for quite a while, which made me happy. I always hated how we always ran off in seperate directions at the end of every game. I never get to meet the people on the other end of the phone or hear stories about how the game went. This year we made them wait while we tallied up the money to decide the winner.

The top two teams were Team Goat and Mutant Ninja Monkey Squad, both mob teams. I think this said something about the correct strategy. And the team that won, Mutant Ninja Monkey Squad, had more false hints than Team Goat by far. They managed to win because they had more money from busting Agent Johnson so many times throughout the night. Again, I think this showed that our assumption was correct: that the real equalizer in this game would be hunting for Johnson and Lasagne. It was the deciding factor in the game.

Of course, the two teams finished so close that any number of things could have been the deciding factor. Like how Goat didn't go back to the tombstone after they solved the rap song because they figured the O would sit on the queen of diamonds. We did that on purpose. When Goat called us and said they were headed there, we didn't tell them it was wrong because we made it a rule in the beginning of the game that you were supposed to call dispatch when you arrived at a location, not on the way. This was to prevent teams from guessing and getting bad guesses confirmed before venturing out. MNMS suffered this fate as well by driving to the wrong intersection after backgammon.

Mutant Ninja Monkey Squad was so sure they had lost that they almost didn't even come to the finish line because they had to return a rental car. In fact they only stuck around at the finish line for a few minutes and weren't there when we announced that they had won. We called them on the phone to tell them and they were shocked to say the least.

At any rate, MNMS has passed their game control rights (obligations?) on to Team Goat for next year, so they will be at the reigns in 08.

All the teams that played this year were in contention to win at one point or another. Nobody drug too far behind, even the new teams. Its obvious to me that teams are getting better and more competitive. The new teams even played to win which made me happy. Nobody ever gave up on a puzzle, everyone tried as hard as they could to solve every one. And people were very patient with Game Control (for the most part.) I had a great time, probably my first time to ever have fun as game control, which I think had a lot to do with having more team members this year who helped put the game on.

Thanks to everyone who played and helped out on Game Control this year. As usual, I cant wait till next year. I especially want to thank my family for all their patience, understanding, and help, and my girlfriend Katie for returning to the Game after a 6 year hiatus, a charter member of the Meat Machine.

See y'all next year!

Love, Dave

MORE PHOTOS ON FLICKR

If you have any photos on flickr please tag them with "mm2k7" or send them to me and I'll upload them for you.

Too Late! Game Over.

2007-12-15T14:12:00.000-08:00

I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that I finally found the password to get into Owney's box. I called James at the bank and after talking to him for a while found out how old he was and that his birthdate was June 22 1956. So I tried that as a password and sure enough it worked. Anyway, after browsing through his email I found out that Owney's password was "gopher."

So I drove up to Syracuse on a recent trip to New York and got access to the box. I got a bad feeling in my stomach as soon as James Ionescu at the bank told me that I was the second person this week to come by. I knew before he even gave me the box it would be empty.

So the treasure is gone. My only hope is that one of you guys got it and will at the very least let us know what was in there. But I think someone was probably following our progress here and on paregoric and beat us to the punch.

If it was one of you, please let us know what you found! I know we can't make you split it with us (although that'd be nice!) but we'd like to know what was there.

:(

Owney's Account

2007-11-29T15:31:00.001-08:00

Just a rundown of where we are with this adventure...

We know that Owney has a safety deposit box at Anthiem Acme bank in Syracuse.
We know that he left the bank instructions that in order to access the box someone would need the account # and a password.
We know the account number.
We got the account number by hacking into Christine's email and looking in her sent messages.
We knew how to get her password by clues in her photo on the webpage and by tricking her into telling us the information we needed.

The only piece of this puzzle missing is the password. Whenever you guys find it, I'm volunteering myself to go to Syracuse to get into that box and see what's in it.

Don't worry, if it's money I promise to split it with you!

Who is Christine's Dog?

2007-11-19T14:19:00.000-08:00

So our search has brought us to Anthiem Acme Bank, a small bank in Syracuse New York. Some of our detectives have figured out that Owney Madden has a safe deposit box at this bank. They also have deduced that one of the bank employees, Christine, has a dog. What they haven't figured out yet is the dog's name. So far it seems that this bit of seemingly trivial information could unlock the secrets of Owney's fortune. But how do we find a dog's name?

"Secret Message" solved?

2007-11-08T20:25:00.000-08:00

I recieved an email from someone who claims to have figured out Owney Madden's "secret message" that he refers to in the letter below. I've posted the solution in the comments in case readers don't want to be spoiled.

Hot Springs' seedy past

2007-10-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

You wouldn't know it if you visited today, but Hot Springs Arkansas has a really crazy past filled with underworld mob bosses, houses being bombed, political officials on the take, and fortunes being made and lost in what was described as the largest illegal gambling operation in US history.

One of the most notorious Hot Springs personalities was a guy named Owney Madden, a killer from the Hells Kitchen Irish mob in New York. He came to Hot Springs later in his life to hide out and to run some casinos for his bosses back home. He became a real fixture in the local community with a huge house on trivista avenue where he lived until the mid 1960s. He went from being a notorious killer to a civic leader in the bible belt. An unbelievable story, really. Once my dad told me about his house being bombed. You'd never believe this stuff if you came to Hot Springs, I swear to God, but it's all true.

And recently I was going through some old stuff my great aunt left behind when she passed away and came across a bunch of old letters and photos and junk and found this letter that I am convinced was penned by Madden himself. I even think the "L.L." he mentions is Lucky Luciano, another Hot Springs underworld refugee. Check it out and tell me what you think...

Midnight Madness X, NYC

2007-08-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

Every year since 2004 I've played in Midnight Madness in New York. If you're reading this blog, I'm going to assume you already know what that is. Well, the NYC game has its faults but it has always been one of my favorite games to play in every year. Mainly because it is so unique. You're on foot, there are literally dozens of teams, and New York is such a perfect game location. Plus the GC that hosts Midnight Madness EVERY YEAR (yes it is the same group, they dont hand off duties) always try to reinvent the game structure and add in new gameplay elements, which I always appreciated.

Well Game Control announced that this year was going to be their final year. The tenth year. Midnight Madness X.

Team Pink was going to be huge this year. We had recruited new players and grew our team to twice its size. We also spent time before the game discussing strategy, structure, and organization. I think it paid off. We finsihed 10th last year. This year, well I'll wait for that part...

The game kicked off at 103rd and Riverside. This was my old stomping ground. I was hoping that the entire game would be around the Columbia U area since that was the section of the city I knew the best. We quickly found out that the game would be played in zones and that Columbia was the first zone. We had until midnight to solve as many puzzles as we could in that zone before GC shut down the hint line, the solution line, and waited for us all to gather at Union Square. There were 4 puzzles in the Columbia "zone."

At the game start we were given two clues and a hint "dongle." The hint dongle was an electronic contraption that blinked a number every few minutes. The number represented how many hints we had, and it went up one every hour. To get a hint we had to plug our dongle into a member of GCs dongle and it would decrease our number by one. This meant we would be getting our hints in person, which was good.

The first hint was a weird glass block with words inside you could barely make out. One of our first ideas turned out to be the right idea, we submerged it in water and could read the message fine. So we had one puzzle down within the first 15 minutes. That seemed like good timing, but at the location we ran into several other teams already there.

We set up our office at a McDonalds at 105 and Broadway. Winston had agreed to be dispatch for the night, text blasting us with updates and info. He also brought along a copier so we could copy clues for everyone to work on at once. That was a great idea. It was far easier to solve when we all had our own copy rather than everyone huddled over our only copy.

The other clue we got at the starting line was a sheet divided up into what seemed to be Tangram shapes and had building name abbreviations on them. One shape had a star on it. We cut the pieces out, arranged them into a rectangle, set them on a map of columbia that was provided to us by GC, and the star lined up with the Schapiro Center.

At the Schapiro Center there were a lot of teams looking in to some classroom window where an unfinished game of hangman was on the board. Jed deduced that it was a red herring since it didn't have a codeword to text like all the other clues did. He smartly advised us all to keep searching and eventually someone found the right clue behind the building back on 120th street.

At both locations there were identical posters of a mad scientist with lots of bottles labeled with weird chemical names. But in each photo the bottles had changed order and the amount of liquid in the bottles was difference. Our first idea didn't pan out, that you use the letters on the bottle that were in the difference of liquid from one photo to the next. Instead, we figured out how the bottles shifted from one photo to the next then arranged them in order and read diagonally from the first letter in the first chemical name to the second letter in the second name etc etc to get the answer. The AHA moment was pretty hilarious, because Jeff had written the chemical names in reverse order, he was doing it right but exactly backwards. When Margaret suggested this, he immediately saw it and circled it in his notebook. It was pretty cool.

The next puzzle was a craigslist personals ad with lots of misspellings and abbreviations. I embarassed myself with my vast knowledge of craigslist acronymns. I don't know why I assumed everyone would know that VGL stood for "Very Good Lay." I suppose I haven't always been happily in love.

This one we had to solve crowded around a newspaper box. It was getting closer to midnight, the deadline for the zone, and we still had to make our way down to Union Square. We knew this was the final puzzle, though, so we pushed ourselves to solve it in 20 minutes. Some of the team jumped in cabs to make sure that someone was at Union Square at midnight just in case. The rest of us huddled around it and started shouting out ideas.

The solution came to us after either Jeff or Andrew noticed that the first paragraph contained every number from 2-0 but no 1. We had already been operating on the assumption that each paragraph would give us one letter (or number as it turns out). This bit of insight cracked the puzzle for us. Every paragraph had every number or had every letter except one. Find the missing letter or number. We solved the first 3 since they were all numbers and were easy. We got 105 so we figured it was an intersection of 103 and something. So we started from the bottom and got D and E and knew to go to riverside. We called in the solution with 6 minutes to spare.

Union Square was a mob scene. In addition to the normal Saturday night freakshow, add in 200 sweaty geeky gamers converging on their bikes and setting up their laptops. We waited for like an hour for something to happen. Game Control was busy setting up the second stage, which took a bit of time, but everyone was patient and our team had lots of water and candy and snacks (they said it was potluck!).

Eventually someone came around and gave us a flashcard. Teams were given the card in order of how they finished the Columbia zone. I think we got ours third or something like that. Team Marmalade finsihed the zone first, I know that much.

The flashcard had two photos on it of two locations. One was an auto parts store on the Lower East Side, the other was of an apartment building in Chelsea. Of course all the teams descended on each location looking for the next puzzle. Some on our team knew better and insisted there was a puzzle here. The first idea we got was to follow the trajectory of each photo and see where they intersect. That ended up being a Community Garden near Tompkins Square Park. However on first search we didn't find anything. And I'm pretty sure we were the first, or one of the first teams to that location. We left and came back several times. Every time we were so sure we were right but never saw another team or any clue so kept doubting ourselves.

About an hour and a half later, with no new solution, Jeff said he wanted to go back and look again, and I went with him. This time there were other teams there searching. We decided to not leave until we found something. After all, the rest of the team were in other places pursuing other leads and would text us if they found anything, so we had nothing to lose. Eventually I saw the clue, or a corner of it anyway, peering out from underneath a large rock by a fence. I nonchalantly grabbed it and we walked away pretending to still be searching.

I was pretty peeved by this clue, but we only had ourselves to blame. We solved it quickly but gave up on the hunt way too soon. We should have learned from last year that GC likes to hide the clues.

This envelope had three paper puzzles in it. One said something like "Meet a Man in the Outback at Rivington and Washington" or something like that. Near that intersection was a bar called Aussie's which was a big red herring and probably intentional. The Man in the Outback was a guy sitting in a Subaru Outback. Jed was first on the scene for us there and he got some alligator clips.

The other clue was a string of numbers spelled out in different fonts, some in wingdings. And the final clue was a sheet of incomplete sentences with the heading "statements."

We took the sheets to our new HQ, Jessica's apartment near Union Square. We copied them all and set in to work on them. Half the room took fonts and the other half took statements. I had statements but I watched them solve fonts.

They latched on to the "identify the fonts" angle right away. Once you identify the fonts, you count however many letters the number was in the font name to get your letter. They solved it pretty quick. We sent a team of bikes to the location to grab the next puzzle.

Statements might have made our game. We got married to the idea that it had something to do with states right away. Eventually someone on the team suggested state abbreviations, and then I believe Jeff saw ND in the first line, then WY in the second, and it was off to the races. We saw a state abbreviation in every line. Before we even had them all IDd, Winston printed out several US maps and we took to tracing them, like we immediatley instinctively knew what to do with them. We solved it in like 20 minutes with no hints. That is only noteworthy because a few clues later we went to GC for a hint and saw like 7 teams working on this puzzle still. Then later after that we saw a team at Starbucks working on it. I think teams really struggled with this puzzle, and it may have made our game for us.

The next two puzzles were location puzzles, so the team bailed on HQ and split up. One puzzle was a bunch of little toy animals glued to a ledge. The other was a playground with lots of numbers and weird shapes stuck all over it.

I went to meet the team that was at the playground, which was its own fiasco. But later on I had ran across the Animals team in a Citibank ATM and worked with them for a minute.

Lots of people came and looked in at us and/or came in to use the ATM, but nobody ever inquired about what we were doing. I guess in NYC you see things like this all the time.

The team was struggling with the animal puzzle, so I went to get a hint from GC, but the team solved it before I could even get the hint. So we used our hint on the playground puzzle.

The solution to the animals was to take the number of difference between the placement of like animals and use that number on the animal's name. Pretty decent puzzle.

The hint GC gave us for the playground puzzle was that we didn't have all of the numbers. We had 1-9 but were missing 0. So a few of us went back to look for it. Meanwhile the team in the ATM were working from a sketch of the shapes that Tim had given them.

Back at the playground the lights were now shut off and we only had one flashlight. Plus, there were now like three or four teams here, including Team Black! Now I knew we were in the lead. We searched for the 0 to no avail for a long time, but eventually the team solved it without the 0. I suggested to GC that we could try to solve it without the 0 if he'd give us a hint about the ideas we had. He insisted we needed the 0. I'm just glad the whole team didn't go try to find the 0 with us.

Basically each number had two shapes and you ordered the shapes based on the right edge of one shape and the left edge of the next shape. It was obvious where 0 went when you did that. The digits formed a phone number, and we knew the missing number was 0, so that was that.

From here I get foggy on what clues came when, so I'll just use some artistic license.

I'm pretty sure the next puzzle was the stickers. This was the lowpoint of the game for us.

We arrive at the location and find a bunch of MMX stickers that are different colors and a little cradle that the dongle fit into perfectly. Whenever you put the dongle in the cradle it would say "Start Over" on the dongle. We were the first team to this site, but not by much. A couple of teams showed up right after us.

We tried to think of ways to use these stickers in conjunction with the dongle. After putting the dongle near one of the stickers we noticed that we got an asterix on the dongle, so we figured maybe there were photoelectric sensors or rfid transmitters somewhere near the stickers.

From here we set off to try to put the dongle on each sticker in order of the color spectrum, then on the cradle, but every time we got "Start Over." We tried several different orders, but nothing worked. But we knew we were on the right track because of the asterix reading we'd get every once and a while. Meanwhile teams were showing up one by one. It was getting bottlenecked.

At least the teams who were showing up didn't know what to do. Up to this point we had hidden what we were doing pretty well, and other teams were trying to use their batteries and wires with the dongle and cradle. We were still holding out hope that there was yet more pieces to go with the batteries and wires we had picked up and that it would be the final metapuzzle.

Eventually someone from Game Control came to watch what we were doing. He told us that he had been watching and that we were doing it right, we were the only team who was doing it right, and he had no idea why it wasn't working.

What he didn't know was that we were doing it wrong. Not entirely, but we didn't understand a key part of what was happening. There was some kind of gyroscope in the dongle, so tilting it at the angles of the stickers was making it register with the asterixes. When we put it on the stickers, we would turn it all around thinking we were trying to get some kind of sensor to register, so we weren't doing it totally right.

When we finally got it, it was really by chance. Since we figured it was time sensitive and that was why we weren't getting it, Jed just ran through placing it on each for a split second, literally pushing teams out of the way and running in traffic to get back to the cradle in time. By the time we got it, we were no longer in the lead. Team Black got it before we did. But it felt like we had dropped way behind and were now bunched up with lots of other teams. We had no idea that we had already solved more puzzles than most other teams at that location.

There were two pieces to the next puzzle, one at each of the next two locations. One was a game board and one was a poster with some weird looking celebrity photos. Our team convened at a nearby park and blazed through this one.

Each photo was a morph of two celebrities' faces, and each space on the game board had a description of a third celebrity. So for a description that refered to Billy Joel, you used the number of the photo that was a morph of Haley JOEL Osmond and BILL Clinton. It gave us a phone number with the next location.

I want to say the next puzzle was this one...

which came with this...

which isnt one sheet its a small strip. This was one of if not my single favorite puzzle. We all sat around on the sidewalk working on it, and we had tons of crazy ideas. It took a hint from GC to get us going in the right direction. We were told that we didn't need to fill in the circles with letters or numbers or anything, in fact we didn't need anything external to what we were given to get the answer. Up to that point we were working on patterns. After some nudging we realized that the lines were instructions. You were supposed to fold the strip on the line in the spiral and the circles were character breaks. Each pattern of lines would fold into a shape of a number or letter. Great puzzle. At one point while trying to solve it Chris said "this is going to be one of those puzzles that when we solve it we will love it." This was before we had much of an idea of what to do, and he was totally right.

This one took us to the Blue Building where we found a bag with 3 batteries. We also ran in to Team Red, who dispatched two of their teammates to follow us. We walked all the way to David and Andrew's apartment to try to lose them, but they followed us the entire way. We thought it was pretty funny so we started messing with them. We inspected light poles, fire hydrants, and empty lots. We took photos of random things and acted excited. Every time they would saunter up behind us and after we left would inspect what we were examining. After the game we posted a photo of them on the MM board and made fun of them, which drew lots of scorn from Team Red. It also drew some interesting justifications for their tactics and revealed a pretty pervasive attitude that stuff like that is inbounds and fair play because it doesn't break any stated rules. I thought that was ludicrous, personally. I don't like being followed and I wouldn't follow another team. I think the winners should have solved all of the puzzles faster than the other teams. Or in the case of last year's game with the points system, have earned more points than other teams however they can given the rules of the game. But whatever. I apologized to them on the board.

The next spot gave us two puzzles, or maybe we already had two puzzles, I can't remember. We ended up at Seaward Park where we could sit and work on puzzles and dispatch the bikes again.

One puzzle was a long poem. I worked on it for a second, we thought we had brute forced a quick answer, and Andrew took off on his bike to see if we were right. In the meantime, luckily, David and Margaret kept at it and found the real solution. To be honest, I don't know how they did it because I was working on the other puzzle. But it led us to a dress shop where there was a video playing in the window of a woman dancing.

We solved the dancing puzzle standing in front of it. We identified each dance (well as many as we could) and took the first letters and it spelled the next location, a bike shop somewhere nearby.

I didn't go to this location but heard about it. There was a bike on a bike rack outside of the shop with another dongle cradle on it. Unfortunately our dongle was at GC trying to get a hint on another puzzle so Carl had to carry it all the way back across town to Jed at the bike shop. Evidently if you put the dongle in the cradle and pedaled the bike it would display a message on the dongle.

From here we got the final piece of the metapuzzle, a small metal plate thing. It was actually two metal plates glued together. We knew we had to use the batteries and the alligator clips with the plates to get them seperated, but we weren't sure how. And we still had one more puzzle to solve.

I'm embarassed I didn't solve this one, being a geocacher and all. On the face of it it looked like a list of crossword puzzle clues. One list was labeled "Across" and another was labeled "Down." Many of the clues had numbers in the solutions, so we figured they all had numbers in the solutions and would give us phone numbers. But we got stuck on some that we couldn't force numbers into, so we needed a hint. GC told us that not every answer was a number, and then we realized that "Awestruck," a possible solution for one of the clues, had the word West in it. David figured out that it was GPS coordinates, and from there we were off to the final location.

The GPS coordinates took us to an envelope with a weird schematic for how to assemble the metapuzzle. There were two teams here already, Black and Spicy Mustard. Team Black, however, were in the wrong area completely. They were searching a playground a block away. Spicy Mustard (I think) grabbed the clue the same time we did, so we figured we were in a foot race with them, with Black close at hand.

The schematic said to make a circuit with the three batteries, attatch the clips and hook them up to the plates and wait. We did this, then we formed a human wall so Team Black, who was milling around us, couldn't see what we were doing. Black was worried we were hiding the clue so they couldn't get it, but we assured them we weren't. Our whole team was huddled together shoulder to shoulder watching the contraption waiting for it to pop. It never did, so we pulled it apart ourselves after letting it heat up for a while. Inside was a keyword. When we texted it, it texted us back to go to the ampitheater in a nearby park. We looked at each other and smiled. This was the finish line and we knew it.

Jed and Andrew took off on their bikes while the rest of us footed it. We had no idea if the other team that grabbed the clue the same time as us was already there, or if we were in the middle of the pack! A few minutes later Jed called me.

"Get down here fast!"
"What? More puzzles???"
"No."
"What then? The finish line?"
"Just get down here."
"Are you going to tell me anything?"
"No."

I relayed this conversation to the team. Tim looked at me and smiled a huge smile and he took off running. Everyone else ran, too. When we got there we were elated to see Jed and Andrew standing all alone with GC. We had won.

This was a sweet victory for us. We had a lot of discsussion before the game that we knew we could win. Our last two finishes tainted by circumstance, all we needed was to avoid silly complications and compete based on our ability to solve puzzles. We also discussed our team organization a lot and how to communciate and work together well. In the end, it all payed off. A very satisfying victory, winning the final Midnight Madness. And to win so decisively, too. Team Black came in 15 minutes later, but they hadn't solved the final puzzle yet. They tailed us to the finish line. Then Team Goldenrod showed up an hour later but they had some kind of weird quasi-cheating thing happen to them, too. I don't even know how long after Goldenrod the next team, Team Red, showed up, because we got tired from waiting, as bad as we wanted to, and we went to get dim sum and celebrate.

Anyway, if anyone from GC reads this, thank you so much for all these years of awesome games. We have enjoyed the challenge year after year. Now that you are hanging up the guns, we are hoping to do your tradition proud next year with our own game.

See you then.

gordy

2007-08-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

"hey, this is new. who is this?"

my neighbor dave was headed down my driveway with his three dogs in tow and a dog i had never seen before. a skinny short haired german shepherd.

"this is gordy. his owner just died and we've taken him in. we're looking for someone to adopt him."

of course i immediately wanted to, but not because it was love at first site. i've wanted a dog for some time now. perhaps it has to do with loneliness or just getting old. maybe it is the part of me that wants a family, a domestic life. i need something to take care of to test my nurturing mettle. but this is a topic katie and i had gone over many times before and the verdict is always the same: not yet.

i explained all this to dave and he shrugged his shoulders and his clan scampered off down the street.

fast forward to two weeks later and dave and his wife gabriella are taking a two week trip to singapore and leaving the dogs at home. he tells us that his brother will be caring for them but asks if we can check in on them from time to time. being dog people we agree. we had no idea what was in store for us.

i'll spare you most of the details of the other dogs and the adventures they caused. i want you to know about gordy.

i could immediately tell that gordy was aware that something was wrong. he was in a strange place with strange people and strange dogs. he was well behaved but shy and subdued. i walked gordy every day and took him to the park to play. he loved to ride in the car, which i took as a sign that this was a part of his former routine. but i also worried that it meant he was anxious to go for a ride back to his old life, to his old home. i worried that every time we ended up back on 28th avenue he was disappointed.

gordy escaped from dave's yard one day and showed up on our porch scratching at our front door. we decided to take him in and let him stay with us until dave got home. we instantly fell in love with gordy, and the best i can tell he fell in love with us, too. he followed me from room to room, always tried to sit or lie next to me. eventually he even took to sleeping in our bedroom by our bed.

i took gordy with me every time i got in the car. i took him to the high school so he could run without his leash. i took him jogging with me. i took him to the park to walk around the lake. i showed him a pelican. i showed him a fox. i showed him a duck and a fish breaking high above the water. i taught him to sit still and be calm and take it all in. i ran next to him with no leash until we both got tired and i crashed onto the grass and he bounced back and forth over my deflated body trying to revive me. i watched gordy sleep. i watched gordy notice other dogs. i told gordy it was ok whenever another dog growled at him. i fed gordy from my plate, but only once. i bought gordy a new collar. i sat on the porch with gordy and stared off into the distance. i wasn't alone anymore and neither was gordy. i figured this was good. i figured this should go on forever. i planned to tell dave all about it when dave got back.

but before that happened i had to make one quick trip to los angeles. so i put gordy back in dave's yard and headed off to the airport. in the airport bookstore i perused dog books. on the tarmac i wrote katie text messages teasing her about how much she loved gordy. 38,000 feet up i wrote about how i felt about gordy in my journal, a book usually reserved for my constant musings on my own fears and anxieties. i planned to make this trip go quicker by daydreaming about gordy moving in.

when i landed katie left me a voicemail that gordy was dead.

i've spent the whole day obsessing about how i should feel about this. undeniably i feel an incredible sadness, a heavy and overpowering feeling of pity. but what puzzles me is why.

for one thing, setting aside for a moment that i only just met this dog a short time ago, and i only spent a short time with him in my home, the fact still remains that gordy is a dog.

he isn't even my dog. he is someone else's dog that i was hanging out with. but it still hurts as if i had known him all my life.

then there is the question of what gordy's death means to me existentially. do i cry for gordy because death in and of itself is sad? people die every day. on the news this morning i remember feeling a sense of grief when i heard about a family of five including one infant in korea who fell to their deaths from a ferris wheel. think about that one for a second. that is certainly as depressing as you can get without making it up and yet that didn't bring tears to my eyes. and those were human beings.

as to the first question, i think there is no reason to distinguish between animal companions and human ones. while there are plenty of reasons to distinguish between humans and animals generally, when it comes to companions there is little reason to. we seek out all of our companions for much the same reasons. gordy comforted me. he showed affection towards me and he showed appreciation when i showed affection towards him. it was obvious, even if it wasn't spoken, that we liked one anothers' company. in that sense he differed little from my human friends. i shall not cry for the death of just any animal, but if that animal was a friend of mine, then its life means something to my life. and there is much more reason to be concerned with whether it lives or dies or feels joy or pain.

as to the second question, i have no idea. i am pretty much fucked up on these questions anyway lately. ive been obsessing over my own mortality now for a while and in some very unhealthy ways. there is no doubt in my own mind that im not exaggerating how i felt about gordy when he was alive. but i could be amplifying how bad i feel about his death because of how it makes me feel about my own impending expiration. i wonder what gordy felt right at the end. i wonder where gordy went, where he is now, if he is at all. i wonder if gordy's life on earth was complete to him. did he have any dreams he never fulfilled? did he have any regrets he had yet to atone for? this is silly of course, but these are the questions that are left at the end for me.

in my imagination gordy had no regrets, however he must have felt terrified still at the end. after all, he died trying to jump a fence to get back to me. i believe he wanted to live the rest of his life with katie and i. i believe that gordy saw some promise in a future with us and was as excited about it as i was. i believe that excitement carried him to his death, ironically, and was present in his final moment.

that is so fucked up.

the thing that scares me about death is that feeling. as the plane is headed down towards earth and everyone is screaming and shit, that thought will be present for me as well. the things i was preparing for, the future i was imagining for myself, the life i wanted to live before i died, these are the things that will haunt me in those final moments, making them so much more terrifying than they need to be. this is why gordy's death is so much sadder for me than it should be.

but there is some uplift in this whole saga.

being around gordy made me happy in a strange and wonderful way. i know now that i want to have a dog very badly. and on a much deeper level i know that i want to have a family, have people to care for and to care for me. i want my life to matter to someone else and i want someone else's life to matter to me. i know that i am lonely and need connection and companionship. i know that there is a part of me that isn't being used at all, the part that can love an old skinny german sheperd that i only just met enough to cry myself sick over his untimely passing. this part of me needs to be used or i can't be completely happy. i have to figure out how to turn it back on and make sure it doesn't get shut off because of what happened to gordy.

i keep thinking about that day at the school. lying in the grass looking up at the clouds. he ran around me in circles, jumping over me and poking me with his nose. he was just playing and having a good time. he had no reason to think that there was anything special about it. just another day in the park. but i remember how serene it felt to me. i never once thought that it was the only time id play with him. but i did feel like it was the first time i had ever felt like i could have so much fun all by myself. i remember thinking to myself as i lay in the grass that if gordy hadn't come to us i would have spent that day inside working or wasting time. and there i was, out in the sunshine and fresh air, flat on my back arms spread wide smiling ear to ear.

the sun was shining. the wind was blowing. it was a perfect day. i could have missed it.

there won't ever be another day like that for gordy. but the truth is, there won't ever be another day like that again anyway. that day came and went. neither one of us missed it. we were both there, together.

Back on Top

2007-07-13T09:11:00.001-07:00

I had a big day yesterday. I started out the day drinking lots of espresso at coffee pub to get myself wired and ready to make the long stretch. Then I headed over to the Bellagio to start gambling.

Dave, Josh and I went to the racebook to place some horse bets at Arlington. We missed some races and watched the chalk horses finish 1-2 3 races in a row, and figured this wasn't going to be the spot for a big score. Josh and I went over to poker and Dave stayed behind to keep betting horses. Like a rational and intelligent person, he figured he'd just look at the odds and put the top two favorites on top with several other horses in a trifecta since the first three races came down chalk-chalk. This strategy worked. Twice. He cashed two trifecta tickets for over $200. He admonished me for not being there to celebrate with him. I reminded him that if I was there I would have talked him out of such an obviously smart play and he would never have won.

In the poker room, I was confronted with another dilemma. The 15-30 list was super long, but the 30-60 had a seat available. I tell the floor that I'd take the 30-60 seat but that I want a 15-30 seat when one opens up. Then I sit down in terror, knowing that it is completely possible that I go dead broke for my whole bankroll before they ever call me up for 15-30.

Fortunately that doesn't happen, and I win some pots for around $400. I play a little more aggressive than I normally would at this stake. I think I was motivated to because as I sat there I watched one gigantic poker star after another stream in to the high limit room to play in big games. I wondered to myself "what is the difference between me and them?" I came to the conclusion that the best players in the world play to win. They build pots, they put in value raises, they constantly attack pots and weak players. I asked myself if I wanted to be a shark or a minnow. Do I want to sit there and call people down, letting the sharks raise me off of hands, or do I want to be the shark who takes pots from other people? So I loosened up a bit and got tough with people and managed to win a couple of large pots I didn't otherwise deserve. I felt good.

When they call my name to move to 15-30, a voice in my head says "stay here, you're going to win thousands!" But my better judgement took over and I picked up and moved from the game $400 closer to even, and in a great frame of mind to play aggressively in the 15-30.

My 30 game had a great mixture of passive old people trying to see the river as cheaply as possible and one loud, chubby, drunk, aggressive player who was hooting and hollering and spewing chips into every pot with all kinds of hands. It was 12:30 pm in Las Vegas and this guy was tossing back pints of Guiness and drunk as a skunk. What a town. The game was set up perfectly for me to play tight and aggressive. Many people think they are playing tight and aggressive when they are really playing tight and passive. The tight part is easy, but the aggressive part takes real balls. Most people wait for a good hand and will raise or three-bet them but then shut down when someone plays back at them or shows any aggression of their own. But I think tight aggressive in a situation like this one meant to tighten up and play fewer hands against people playing lots of hands then bet them like crazy,k even when you miss. With so many passive callers in the game, I decided I should reraise as often as I could to try to get Guiness heads up. Then I played Guiness by raising him on flops where I had just overcards. This strategy seemed to be working. I was raking in pot after pot. Of course I caught a few cards as well. But I even won a huge pot with 7-2 in the blind when the entire table limped in.

The drunk guy was fantastic. He was building lots and lots of pots and playing every hope wish and dream he had. Gutshot draws, bottom pairs, runner runner flush draws. Occassionally his hopes and dreams came true and he raked extremely large pots. So his stack fluctuated pretty dramatically. The man sitting next to me kept commenting how he was going to go broke eventually the way he played. I said "those guys never go broke. They just see saw all day. And if he does bust, I guarantee he pulls a nut out of his pocket and peels off another grand."

The guy next to me couldn't stand the drunk guy, and kept taking joy in the drunk's losses. I on the other hand wanted the drunk guy as riled up as possible. I was quoting movies with him, telling him jokes, egging him on. At one point the drunk lost a big ass pot and started sulking and of course he tightened up. The guy next to me says gleefully "he isn't such a big talker now." I shoot him a glare and say "no shit, we have to cheer him back up." So I start joking with the drunk again, berating him for not straddling, talking to him about how bad he plays, all to egg him on to start playing more hands again. It works, and soon enough he's tilting his chips off again.

At one point I get up to go tell Josh about my good fortune. I was up around $600, which is a great score for that game. When I return, I missed the blinds, so I decided to wait a round and go back to the racebook. I look at the current race at Arlington and on first glance into the form notice a horse that stands out to me purely based on beyer figures, but the horse is 13-1! I go wheel her on top of the field in exactas. She wins by a mile, but the favorite comes in second, so instead of scoring a big bomb I get a booby prize of $160. Still nice for so little effort though, and it boosts my spirits even more.

We all get up because everyone is winning and feeling good and decide to go eat. XXX insists on Hooters, and he insists that it is close enough to walk. I dumbly assume that XXX knows a Hooters that is closer to us than the Hooters casino and agree. It is 105 degrees outside. And I've never been to Hooters. But XXX is in full-on XXX mode, explaining to us the wings at Hooters as if he was talking about fine wine or steak.

On the way there, I ask if anyone else has never been to a Hooters. Josh never has, but suprisingly Peter has been once, on a bachelor party with some very conservative Christian friends. He tells us about how they ate at Hooters then went back to someone's hotel to watch the movie Orgazmo, a movie with no nudity at all, and that half the party objected and went home before the movie even started. A bachelor party where Peter is the wildest guy, now I've heard everything.

Hooters is a corny and embarassing place. Setting aside for a moment the obvious objectification of the waitresses, Hooters also seems to take some kind of tounge-in-cheek glee at their own lowbrow reputation. There is self-depricating humor on the menus, t-shirts, even in the descriptions of the food. At this particular Hooters, there is a pool right outside the restaurant where The Best Damn Sports Show Period is taping an episode, and there are girls on bouncy balls bouncing around the pool. There appears to be a very bust girl on a raft in the pool being pelted by guys throwing footballs at her in some kind of weird game. XXX is ordering for the table without even really asking people what they want. He orders like 500 wings. The food is completely unremarkable and it is beyond me why anyone tries to argue that they enjoy the food at this place. I ate 3 wings and called it quits.

Our conversation was a little raunchy though, because XXX brought up prostitution and wanted to know if any of us had ever slept with a hooker. He claimed he never knew anyone who had. Nobody owned up to it, and I pointed out to XXX that he likely knows several people who had but that was the kind of thing people didnt really admit to. Then I suggested that XXX was probably feeling us out to see if this was a safe place to reveal his own desire to pay for sex. I remark that "the guilty dog barks first" or "the one who smelt it dealt it," and say that XXX should just come clean and he'd get more honesty from people. Of course he refuses to, and insists that he finds the whole idea strange. But several people tell stories of almost getting with hookers or attempting it with bad results. And one person in the group finally admits that he lost his virginity to a prostitute and the floodgates open up. Even XXX tells a hilarious and raunchy story about himself that he made me promise not to reprint on the blog, but pretty much confirmed many of my suspicions about him and other square-ish, whitebread types: that below their vanilla exterior lies a sick demented pervert. I am pretty agog at the level of sexual perversity being revealed, and go from once feeling like the most experienced of this group to feeling like a little ashamed I didn't have more skeletons in my closet. I'm laying 2-1 that XXX brings up prostitution again this weekend and 8-1 that he flat out suggests that someone hire a hooker in total seriousness. I don't think XXX wants to get with a hooker, though. I believe he wants someone else to do it to satisfy his own curiosity.

Our bill was also absurd. $100 for a pile of chicken wings. We roulette it and RBDT wins. He also won at Coffee Pub so he's 2-2 on the day!!

After our sexually depraved lunch at Hooters, we cab it back to the Bellagio where I start off by hitting Wheel of Fortune for $60 after one spin. Then I get back on the list for 15-30. While I'm waiting I go to the racebook where I notice that my friend Mario is there playing Lone Star's night card. I go talk to him and he's trying to decipher a pick 3 bet. I check the form and see that there are two races with 6 horses in the pick-3, so I decide to play it. I make a $20 wager, then they call my name for the game.

This game has fewer drunks in it but a few older guys who are playing lots of hands and calling lots of raises. There are also more guys with ipods and sunglasses, too. I think the later it gets the more of these guys that show up. I still do pretty well, winning about $400 more before all the older guys seem to disappear and more ipods appear in their places. I also hit my pick 3 for about $100. I get up from the table and go find the other guys on the other side of the room. I'm feeling like a million bucks, back from being stuck, back on top, winning everything I play. But I'm done gambling for the day, I tell them, and I want to go swimming. Josh agrees to join me and gets up from his game. RBDT and Chonko are celebrating a baseball parlay they just hit and want to stay and play poker.

Josh and I hit the pool. It's 7:30pm but it's still light outside. There is hardly anyone left down there so it feels like we have the place to ourselves. Eventually they close the pool and the hottub is still open for another hour. We go play some chinese poker in the hottub and talk about how much we love our signifigant others. A saccharin conversation to be sure, but one that was despereately needed after the raunchy conversation at lunch. And it was sincere and a nice conversation, the kind Josh reminds me that we rarely have anymore.

Eventually we notice that the place is completely shut down and we are the only two people down there, well past closing time. We head back up and Josh takes off with Wayne and Nick for dinner. Peter, RBDT, Chonko and I decide to head over to the Sahara for the 11pm tourney.

Readers of my blog will remember this tourney from my last trip to Vegas. This a very popular tournament for the low roller set because for $60 you get 5000 chips. We draw our seats and somehow Peter and RBDT are not only at the same table, but right next to each other. This was particularly hilarious because over the course of the day a poker rivalry has cropped up between these two. Evidently they sat at the same 4-8 table all day and Peter not only constantly critiqued Dave's play, he also kept offering up unsolicited life advice about Dave's job situation. I have been reminding Dave that both of these things were completely and utterly absurd considering the source and that he had no reason to get upset. However it was clear that Peter was bugging Dave, so Dave starts giving Peter poker advice. We have to set up a heads up match before the week is over.

There are 10 tables and we all go pretty deep in the tourney. There are so many bad players and characters that I don't feel like describing them all. I make it to close to two tables before busting. But I win a last longer bet from Peter.

I have good stories from the tournament, but they will have to wait because Josh is here and I'm getting out of here. More later.

Poker: It's all over but the crying

2007-07-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

As if I needed anymore reminders that I'm getting old, last night I slept a full 8 hours. I would have updated last night, but I learned my lesson about prematurely updating when, after I posted the last update, Brandon and RBDT show up in the room at 4am after having been robbed by a toothless man in the Paris bar. He approached them and offered them "VIP passes" to nightclubs if they would buy him a drink. They refused, and he grabbed Dave's lighter and smokes and took off running. Security chased him down and caught him outside, and then later a large, square man named 'Whitey' shows up with Dave's smokes and lighter, although somewhat crumpled. Dave describes Whitey as the guy from Casino who put the dude's head in a vice. "Charlie M? You stole these smokes for Charlie M?" Anyway, it was a reminder that the good stuff usually happens after midnight.

But last night nothing happened. At least nothing that I know about. I just woke up to a cacophany of snoring in my room. I believe Josh and Chonko arrived last night after I went to sleep as well. So there may be a story there, it will just have to wait till tomorrow. That is, if I can remember it.

Yesterday was also Brandon's last night in town. He flew out at 9pm last night. He was filled with emotion about the end of his career as a professional poker player. He was also filled with ambivalence about his failure to win any money on this trip and losing more than he was comfortable with. Although if he was truly uncomfortable with it, he hid it well. We spent the last few hours he was in town shooting dice and he was spreading the money out on the layout like a madman again, however the Bellagio stickmen offered him no advice. Instead, they kept selling him more bets and reminding him to get his come bets down. Vultures.

Brandon got up from his poker game at one point yesterday and asked me to come to the Bellagio sportsbar to "have a talk." I think he was just feeling a little wired and weird and wanted someone to listen. He was going on and on about how he still liked poker despite getting a job and that he wanted to continue to challenge himself. He couldn't understand why he had been performing poorly at higher limits and in live games. He questioned whether or not he had the mettle to keep playing that high.

My advice was simple. I told him that we all had jobs, he was one of us now. How much money any of us make at our jobs is irrelevant. I'm probably one of the lowest paid members of this group, but every penny I bring to Vegas is money I made playing poker or gambling somehow. As long as he plays and builds a bankroll, he can play any limit he wants without worry. And it just takes experience to get better at a certain limit, once you have the bankroll. I also said that we play for fun and for the challenge, and that's much more liberating than playing for a living.

The Brandon situation is weird. We all admired him for becoming a professional poker player. We all lived vicariously through his adventures. The time he made the final table at the WSOP, we were all sweating him and bursting with pride. And now it is over. Which is fine, really, but the job he's getting is really no different. Being a trader is basically gambling, and he admits it. Sure he will have a pension and health insurance, but I wonder, after hearing him be so nostalgic and emotional about leaving poker, why he did it.

I think the market for professional online players has bubbled badly. I don't think the games are there anymore for prop players to beat up on. I don't think the potential is there anymore to earn 6 figures a year for anyone but the very best. With the deflation of the market, the competition got fiercer, and I think Brandon is smart enough and unegotistical enough to have recognized it and jumped out of the water before he got gobbled up by sharks. A fate, he reminds me, that very few of his friends weren't smart enough to avoid. Even now, as the WSOP rages on for another year, not a single one of Brandon's pro friends from the year before were out here playing high limits. The end of Brandon's run is actually pretty symbolic of what is happening to poker right now everywhere. This year was the first year in the history of the WSOP that there were fewer players than the year before. And last night in the Bellagio poker room as I was cashing out, I saw Jamie Gold playing 300-600 mixed games. It's all over but the crying, man.

We went to the room to help Peter with his job interview he had. It was pretty underwhelming. Peter had been all stressed about it, his first interview with a finance company. He brought tons of books of brain teasers and whatnot to study to prepare for it. He ended up on the phone with some lackey who was asked to talk to him since the interviewer couldn't make the call. The guy hadn't seen Peter's resume and just asked him finance questions for 20 minutes then said he'd reschedule a time to talk to the actual interviewer. We gave Peter some feedback and advice and reminded him that he shouldn't get disappointed, he would ahve to do dozens more of these before he landed a job.

Peter is pretty bad at stuff like this. His current job, from what I'm told, was handed to him by his adviser in grad school. He hates it terribly and wants to make big money like his friends in finance. But he has no experience at all interviewing for jobs or selling himself this way. Anyone who knows Peter knows that he has a small amount of social anxiety and akwardness, so the prospect of doing something foreign to him and the pressure of being desperate for a new job just implode inside of him. He had been up like $600, but after the shitty interview he lost $200 playing poker then started complaining that we were going to too many fancy restaurants and he couldn't afford it. He got testy and started snapping at people. Then at dinner that night he lost credit card roulette for the check and that was the last I saw of him. I heard he was last seen at the 4-8 table turning down RBDT's request to go get a beer at the bar with him so who knows what kind of state he's in now?

Oh and Wayne arrived last night and b-lined for the 4-8 game. 2-1 says he's still there.

I took a shot at the old 30-60 game. Less because I wanted to gamble high and more because the list was about a fifth the size of the 15-30 list. There are two big tournaments going on right now. The Bellagio World Cup WPT event is going on as is the WSOP main event so the poker rooms are overflowing. I got a seat fairly quickly and quickly went up $700 after winning a huge pot with AK against A2 who flopped a worse two pair. Then ended up losing about $500 in the game after my own two pair got rivered in two seperate hands. It was a nice game, but I just didn't want to blow any more than that in it so I got up and went to bed. That game plays sooo much bigger than 15-30. I was winning and losing in each pot what it takes me all night to win or lose in the 15-30 game. So I'll wait till later on to take another stab at it, assuming I don't go broke in other games.

My girlfriend is coming out here on Friday for some work stuff and I told her she should stay through Sunday. But it is going to be a little weird having her out here. I'm sure she will spend the day laying out at the pool, but it sets a new precedent for the UWSWSOP. I'm still excited to see her though. I'm hoping that she can learn to love Vegas as much as I do. And she can also loan me money if I'm bust.

Coming of Age in Las Vegas

2007-07-10T23:41:00.000-07:00

It's sweltering hot outside and thousands and thousands of socially inept losers are swarming through the Rio convention center for the World Series of Poker. That can only mean one thing, it is time for the old Upper West Side gang to reunite once again in sin city for the UWSWSOP.

This year's pilgrammage carries a special relevance for me, however. On Friday the 13th I turn 30 years old. It is a milestone, indeed. The boy can no longer pretend to not be a man. And what better way to come of age than in the city I've come to love so much specifically because I associate it with my childish desires to play and pretend?

This year may be somewhat different than past years' group outings. For one, several of our members are now married. For another, almost all of them have finally finished their schooling and have moved on to lucrative and important jobs. I'm anxious to see how it affects their sensibilites. I'm anxious to see how turning 30 will affect my own.

Already as I sit here at the end of my first full day in Vegas I am experiencing some of this collective coming of age. Brandon, our resident professional gambler, our patron saint and hero, has been out here for some time now recklessly destroying what little is left of his once proud and sizeable poker bankroll. He recently decided to give up on his life of wager and chance and accept a real job as a junior trader. And Peter is out here, too, enviously pestering Brandon with pleas for assistance and advice at landing his own finance industry gig. I remarked to them that it was a pity to see them use their incredible brains and talents to make already insanely rich people even richer. These two guys are PhDs in PHYSICS. They are some of the most precious minds of our generation. And they are going to be junior traders. The title alone just oozes with inadequateness. It doesn't belong to someone who understands string theory or can grow a nanotube. And a mind like that doesn't belong in a trading office.

But of course, if it doesn't belong there, it certainly is wasted in the Bellagio poker room. And I find this realization profound. This game, as fun and challenging as it may be, does all of our minds a disservice. And there is no greater reminder of this fact than the incredibly banal and idiotic conversations I continue to have with my opponents across the table wherever I go in this fucking town.

So Brandon is retiring, and going out in style. Our safe here at the Paris is bursting with rolls of bills and stacks of yellow chips and flags. He is playing high stakes poker games that he barely knows the rules to. At one point today he comes up to me in the Bellagio poker room and tells me a bad beat story from a badugi hand, and he realizes that he doesn't even understand the game well enough to explain to me what happened. But he was at least comforted by the fact that the other players told him, after losing a huge pot, that he played his hand fine. As an afterthought while walking away, he turns to me and says "they probably just don't want me to quit."

None of us do, Brandon. But for so many different reasons, none of which have anything to do with your skills, you probably should.

So I arrived in Vegas late on Monday night after airplane hell and immediately took to Brandon's laptop in his hotel room to play some poker. I know it seems strange to be in Vegas and play online, but for the past couple of weeks I've been propping to build up a bankroll for this trip. And I needed to get some more hands in to get paid for the week. What I meant to be a quick two hours mindlessly folding turned in to an all night three tabling stress fest where I slowly and stressfully climbed back from being stuck about $800. After finally getting even at around 4am, I grabbed a pillow and a slice of the floor and went to sleep.

Today we played some poker at Bellagio, made a trip to the Rio to gawk at the insanity of the main event, and then to the Palms so I could buy tickets to see Coheed and Cambria. There we settled in to some $10 craps and I managed to quit the game $100 winners, my first craps win I've booked in a decade probably. Peter and Brandon continued to play, Brandon still burning up the bankroll like it was Brewster's Millions by spreading so many green chips on the layout that the goddamn croupier had to stop him. "That's too much, man. You're risking too much money to win too little." Have you ever heard of such a thing? An employee of a Las Vegas casino urging a customer to STOP making bad bets? That's how bad it is, friends.

Despite his best efforts to lose, and true to Brewster's fashion, Brandon manages to book a $500 win, and Peter another $200. We go to the Palms poker room to kill time before the concert with a little 1-2 no limit. I of course manage to piss away my $100 craps victory plus another $100 without ever even saying all in. Peter managed to post yet another win, around $200, despite checking aces full in last position on the river. Add this to Peter's $200 win in 4-8 and he is rolling pretty hard. For context, please go back and read some of the old trip reports.

He is also sitting right next to none other than Sully from Godsmack the entire time, and has no idea who he is. After we retire from the game I tell him about his famous tablemate and he says "I suppose it would be to dumb to go up to him now and ask for an autograph since he will know I didn't know who he was before." I answer "no, what's dumb is that you want the autograph of a rockstar you've never even heard play before." "But I listen to them whenever they are on the radio!" he replies. I have no answer to this, but Peter still decides against the autograph.

I take my leave of Peter and Brandon and go see Coheed and Cambria play. I'm embarassed to admit how much I like this band, mostly because I've seen them 3 times now and every time I felt like I was easily the oldest person in the crowd by a factor of 2. And because they sell their records at Hot Topic. But I really do like them quite a lot and was excited to see them.

I got seated in the mezzanine level because floor tickets were sold out. This really sucked because I like to dance and jump around when I see bands I really like and that would be even more akward and weird if I was in the Mezzanine seats. I sat down next to some other lonely guy about 20 years old. He is here on vacation with his sister and her husband but is too young to gamble so he has spent every day this week walking from the Palms to the strip smoking weed. He has seen several celebrities in the Palms and has asked each of them to smoke weed with him. None have accepted his offer yet. He asks me if I want to smoke weed with him after the show and I decline but assure him that I don't judge him for it. He couldn't care any less.

I notice a cute girl standing near the wall that seperates our seats from the main floor and I walk over to her.

"You're going to jump the wall, huh?"
"Yeah, but that porter keeps looking over here."

She's british or something, probably about 18 tops. I look over at the 'porter' and realize he's probably not much older than her and completely bored out of his mind.

"That guy? That guy doesn't give a shit what you do. Tell you what, as soon as that security guard goes into that tunnel let's go for it."

She no sooner nods her head than he turns and goes into the tunnel and over the wall we went. We quickly merge into the big crowd and we are safe. I spend the show dancing and saving the cute girl from getting trampled in a sweaty moshpit over and over again. She stands next to me the whole show. I get weirded out and move farter away from her. Afterwards I take a cab home alone. I smile when I realize that if I was 18 and did drugs that I could have just had the night of my life. I'm truly getting too old for the proverbial "shit like this."

On my return to the Paris Brandon and Peter are already in bed exhausted. They both continued their winning streak at blackjack before leaving the Palms. Peter is having a trip for the record books so far, and was so proud of his new fortune that he brought it over to me like a small child showing off his new toy. He handed me a stack of 10 or so c-notes and said "do you want to see?" God I hope he can hold on to this money all week. He needs it and he deserves it.

Brandon, who is leaving tomorrow and has just 24 more hours to either get rich or die tryin', is conked out on the bed snoring as I type. The poor guy. If only he were 18 and did drugs, he maybe could put those stacks of bills in our hotel safe to some good use. Instead, he is sleeping, fully clothed, soundly on the bed at midnight in Las Vegas.

Brandon turned 30 three years ago.

Fuck.

why i shouldnt be a doctor

2007-05-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

First Saturday in May

2007-05-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

It's here. I've been anxious for today all week. Since I'm not working I've had little else to do but worry about the derby. I've spent a lot of time this week reading about the race and checking out the past performances and pace figs. My selections:

Circular Quay: One hell of a horse who has done nothing but improve since last year's Breeder's Cup where he was bested by Street Sense. Three angles here: bred for distance and a natural closer, this horse should be coming on strong at the end. Picks up JR Velasquez for the race, which is important considering that Velasquez and his agent, Angel Cordero, get first choice on Pletcher's horses. Lastly, Pletcher worked this horse out alongside Rags to Riches over the last several weeks, and Circular Quay managed to go stride for stride with that monster of a horse. Should also be a great price.

Any Given Saturday: The flipside to Circular Quay getting Velasquez, who is Pletcher's favorite jockey, is that AGS gets Garret Gomez, who is mine. Here is a horse being downgraded after a third in the Wood. I think this is a horse who bounced after an amazing race with Street Sense in Tampa Bay. Is Street Sense a better horse than AGS? Maybe. The problem is that the Blue Grass didn't present any reason to think so, and that race was probably a throw out. If Street Sense is a Derby Winner, he should have also been able to take control of the Blue Grass. The Wood was a much more taxing race than that prep. Not to mention, AGS will be a nice price,too.

Tiago: Originally was going to be my sleeper selection, he's now bet down to a sick underlay at 8-1 and it may get worse. I'm including this horse because of his pedigree and the way he closed from last place in Santa Anita. Welsch in the DRF says he hasn't looked great on the track in the mornings. I think I'm less high on him at this price and with that information, but will still include him in exotics.

Curlin: There's reason to like and reason not to like. What can I say, I'm going to have to put the hometown boy in my tickets so I have a rooting interest in him. Despite being a sickening underlay and having no experience racing against graded stakes winners or any races as a 2 year old... you never know.

I'm going to throw in some Zanjero and some Stormello in there as bombs to help boost some ticket prices. At some point today I'll figure out how to arrange these horses into a superfecta.

The weather is still shitty in Kentucky today. Not sure how that will affect the race. I know yesterday it killed me as I went 1 for 6 in the pick 6, my 1 being a saver ticket with Rags to Riches, who I was hoping to beat with High Heels. So really and truly I went 0 for 6, a sad thing indeed. Probably the first time I ever goose egged it.

Tonight after the Derby is the De La Hoya Mayweather fight in Vegas. I'm as excited for that fight as I am for the Derby, and again will be hoping to beat the favorite. We are cheering for Oscar but inside I'm nervous as hell that he will get knocked out.

My two favorite sports, boxing and horseracing, on display on the same day. It's too much for me to handle! What will I look forward to tomorrow?

Oh yes, the World Series of Poker. What a goofy life I have.

"that's so sick..."

2007-04-29T16:22:00.001-07:00

Behind "nice hand," this is the most overused statement in poker. In the past week, I've heard more people exclaim "that's so sick" after poker hands than ever before. What's worse, usually whatever they are exclaiming to be sick isn't sick at all. Guys get all in preflop with 7's against AQ, an ace hits the river, and they start in with their pitiful speech. "That's so sick." Actually, no, it's not sick at all. It's something you see all the time. Pretty ordinary.

I've been around some pretty terrible poker players this week. Hanging out up at Black Hawk playing in the low buy in tournaments, I've been witness to (and occasionally party to) some awful poker. But the good news is that out of 5 tournaments I've played this week, I've cashed in 4 for a grand profit of almost $2,000. Not bad. I will play a few more this week and then try the insane Friday night tournament... $50 buy in with 9 $50 rebuys. First is usually over $5,000.

I'll tell you what's really sick, though. If you read my last post, you know about my relationship with the horse Flying First Class. Well, my dad phoned me this morning to let me know that he ran yesterday at Keeneland! I thought Friday was the end of the Keeneland meet! I had no idea! Not only that, those Kentucky morons let him out of the gate at 7-1!

Of course he won, with fellow Oaklawn shipper UDGhetto coming in second for a huge exacta. I was wasting my time winning a $60 tournament when I could have been getting back all the money I've blown on that horse. I'll never get 7-1 on him again. Argh.

Another great day at the races

2007-04-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

The Derby is over, the damage is done. Another season comes to a close and another Kentucky Derby is set. I'll do my best to recap the day for you, two days later.

This was Katie's first Arkansas Derby. She's slowly becoming more of a horseracing fan. As much of one as I could hope for, anyway. She has been to two Travers with me and watched the Preakness with me at Fairgrounds in New Orleans. This was her first trip to my home court, however. But without all of my family there (most cancelled their trips) and with the track in disarray (more on this later) and with pretty cold and shitty weather, it wasn't quite the experience I hoped to share with her.

It wasn't all bad, either. I had a great time yukking it up with her and Adam Webb and my family. And I didn't do too awful at the windows, either.

I stayed up the night before picking the Premier Pick 4, which I posted here. That was going to be my one big investment on the day, at around $90. In fact, I even sat the first race out when we got to the track, other than betting a couple of doubles that didn't hit. The second race I sat at as well. The third race I singled out a horse that was 7-1 and wheeled him over the field. Katie and I handicapped it together. She was fascinated by the horses' "hats" and after a discussion with her about why horses wear them, I pointed out to ther that the 4 horse was taking his "hat" off for the first time in this race. "That's bad, right?" she asked. I responded that it wasn't bad at all, and could actually be very good. I showed her that the trainer had only opted to take the hat off 3 times before on other horses, and that one of them won the race. We talked about how a trainer decides to put the hat on or off based on things he observes in the way the horse is running, and he clearly thinks the hat is a liability in this case. We looked at the rest of the horses form and decided that other than its last race, he had all the speed he needed to compete with the field and settled on him. I wheeled him and hoped for the best. He won the race easily and a good 5-1 horse got up for second place and a $200 exacta. It was very early and I had all the money I needed for the day already.

I played some small bets as the day wore on trying to preserve money for the Pick 4 without going to the ATM. As we got closer to post time at Keeneland, I learned that one of my picks for the Arkansas Derby, For You Reppo, was scratched. For You Reppo, named for the father of a kid who bullied me my freshman year of high school, was one of my longshot hopefuls. I had a decision to make: leave him out and buy a cheaper ticket, or replace him with another horse.

I had sold shares to my father and Adam, so they and I and Katie deliberated what to do. I could also opt to throw in another horse in the Bluegrass to keep the ticket price where it was. If we were to do that, we decided we'd throw in Domincian. If we stayed with the number of horses in the Arkansas Derby, we'd throw in my father's favorite Officer Rocket (a local favorite that had fans sporting "Officer Rocket Fan" buttons all over the track). Katie lobbied hard for Dominican, thinking he had quite the winning name. I leaned towards Officer Rocket, thinking the AR derby was going to be much more competitive and needed more coverage than the easier Bluegrass.

Those of you who saw the races know how everything unfolded, but I'll recap it from our point of view. The first race at Keeneland was great. My second A horse, and the one with the longest odds, Silent Name, ran exactly the race I wanted him to and kept the majority of my tickets alive. The Blue Grass was a thrilling race, led most of the way by our longshot choice Teuflesburg. He set a miserably slow pace around the second turn, and the jock seemed to be holding him back with every ounce of strength he had. My dad commented that the jockey was straining to hold Teuf back, and the time showed it. The first half mile was run in like 51. I started thinking we'd wire to wire it. In the stretch, Teuflesburg took off like a shot and seemd to have the race in hand, but he wasn't the only horse with gas left in the tank. The field closed in a pack, and Teuflesburg drifted and seemed to foul Great Hunter, another of my horses. As the finish line approached, it was clear that one of either Street Sense or Dominican would win, and as they crossed in a blanket finish, I could tell that Dominican got the nod. My dad wasn't so sure. He said "You got it, man." That reassured me for a second, but on the replay, it was clear we had lost by a nose, which would be yet another big bet for me this week blown by a nose job. Katie was indignant about me refusing to include Dominican like she had lobbied for. I was sick.

There's been a lot of discussion about this race, and how the Polytrack surface probably contributed to the finish. I have to agree that most of the races I watched at Keeneland this week seemed to follow this same pattern of slow pace and lightning stretches. But that information does me no good now, nor would it have helped anyone handicap the Blue Grass. Even Teuflesburg was running with the surface in mind it seems.

The Oaklawn Instant Racing Breeders Cup put me out of my misery, however, as none of my 5 horses won. A 30-1 Assmussen horse won: Cream Only. That was the horse to have, the horse that would get the pick 4 up over $3k.

The Arkansas Derby was my last chance to make some scratch. I had blown most of my winnings at this point, and decided I needed to beat the 1-5 Curlin to redeem myself. I looked to the 10-1 Flying First Class, the beaten chalk from the rebel, but more importantly, the horse I had a $50 future pool ticket on sitting on my dresser back in Denver. Without a win today, FFC had no shot at running in the KY Derby, and I had no hope of cashing that ticket. What really pains me about that ticket was that the day I bet it I could have grabbed Curlin at 50-1.

We braved the cold to watch the race outside on the apron. There was a crowd outside, but it was still the smallest I'd seen on Derby Day in many years. It was the closest to the finish line I had ever stood for this race. There seemed to be as many Flying First Class backers out on the apron with us as there were Curlin or Officer Rocket.

He broke miserably in next to last place, but closed the gap in the back stretch, and took the last turn off the pace in 4th. At the top of the stretch he made his move and took off, and it looked like we could win. We started cheering excitedly and jumping up and down. But our excitement was short lived. As the jockey slowed Flying First Class down, we looked at the screen and realized that the horse that was distancing himself from the pack was none other than the freak Curlin. It was obvious nobody could beat him, and nobody, not even Flying First Class, dared try.

Curlin romped to victory and as we were shuffling back inside, one of the other guys who was rooting for FFC said "I think we just saw the Kentucky Derby winner."

He may be right, although this was a source of debate yesterday as well. Curlin earned a 103 beyer and broke the record for the number of lengths he won by. But "smart" horseplayers still consider him a throwout because of his lack of experience. What I read into the Curlin skepticism, however, is a bias against the Oaklawn track and the fields Curlin competed against. If commentators keep dissing this horse, I'll become his strongest backer. Right now, though, I'm looking for some value in what is really a wide-open race.

Oh, I also managed to fenaggle an extended vacation from my job, so there's a strong chance I'll be in Kentucky the first Saturday in May, even more reason to hope for a standout and a triple crown winner. I'll keep you posted if I do.

The rumors that Oaklawn has been or will be sold to Harrah's seem unexaggerated. There were no bathroom attendants, no ushers, no redcoats, fewer tellers. The staffing situation during this year's biggest day seemed bleak. One can only speculate that the Cellis family is trying to pocket as much cash as they can before they hand the operation off. A sale to harrah's could be a good thing, particularly if Harrah's builds a garage and a hotel. And let's hope they return the staffing levels to where they once were. This was embarassing.

After the races I suggested we all go to Osaka, the local sushi/hibachi place. Being the big winner for the day, I paid the $200 check which pretty much wiped me out. But it was worth it. We laughed a lot, the food was great, and the chef let me cook a little bit.

All in all, another great day at the races.

Derby Day!

2007-04-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

I'm about to leave for the Arkansas Derby. The weather looks gloomy, but so far at least it isn't raining.

The big story today is the horse Olympic Chief, a first time starter who has been entered as a last ditch effort for some rich Arizona couple to make it to Churchill Downs.

My big investment today will be the Premier Pick 4, a national bet covering the two features at Keeneland and Oaklawn. I'm posting my selections here. They may change as the day goes on.

Keeneland Commonwealth Breeders Cup Grade 2

A Horses: 7 Midnight Lute, 8 Silent Name(Jpn)
B Horses: 4 Steel Light, 10 Gin and Sin, 11 Lewis Michael

Keeneland Bluegrass Stakes Grade 1

A Horses: 4 Street Sense
B Horses: 6 Teuflesberg, 7 Great Hunter

Oaklawn Instang Racing Breeders Cup 100k

A Horses: 10 Chatham
B Horses: 1 Champagne Sue, 6 Wellofaprize, 7 New Edition

Oaklawn Arkansas Derby Grade 2

A Horses: 2 Curlin
B Horses: 5 Flying First Class, 9 For You Reppo, 10 Deadly Dealer

I'm investing $87 like so...

AAAA ABBA
AAAB BAAB
AABA AABB
ABAA BBAA
BAAA BABA
ABAB

Still waiting to hear from any of you who want to go in with me. There is some good value in there. Particularly in the Commonwealth.

More later. Wish us all luck! Especially Flying First Class, who I still have $50 on in the KY Derby Future pool at 30-1. If he doesn't win today and win big, he may not even run in the KY Derby!

4 of 6

2007-04-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

today i only played one ticket at the track, a $32 pick 6 ticket. i went 3 for 3 in the first 3 races. in the fourth, i had originally picked 3 horses but needed to toss one to get the cost of the ticket down to where i wanted it. of course the horse i tossed won, but even worse he won at 34-1. fortunately i lost the next one too but hit the last race. 5 of 6 paid $300 and change. i hate myself.

i havent been blogging much because the races didnt run sunday through tuesday. yesterday was uneventful as well. in the first three races a horse broke down, and twice it was the horse i bet. but i did hit a $50 tri to fund my losses for the day.

today i met steven davidowitz, who is a great guy, extremely nice and open to discussion with his fans.

tomorrow it is supposed to storm, and more rain scheduled for derby day. ugh.

Racing Festival of the South

2007-04-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Hot Springs last night in the middle of the night after driving up from Houston and stopping for a few hours in Shreveport to play some poker. I managed to lose some money in a shitty little 1-2 no limit game, so my gambling vacation got started immediately in the red.

Today was a warmup at Oaklawn with my dad. The first race we went to the paddock to check out the horses, and the 8 horse, Black Giraffe, flipped over in his stall and rolled around on the floor flailing his long, giant legs in the air. I thought they'd scratch the poor animal, but they stood him up, walked him around the paddock, saddled him and stuffed him in the gate where he broke out and ran an amazing stretch run to show. I picked the winner but didn't bet it. But I saw a track bias for early speed on the rail and managed to win the next two races by betting on the best early speed horse. Up about $100, I started betting heavier and by the feature had lost all my winnings.

Tonight I'm staying up late picking horses for the Santa Anita pick 6 where there is a million dollar guarantee. It won't be easy. There are over 10 horses in every fucking leg.

Tomorrow is a big day of racing. I'm planning on getting to the track early to secure a table at the bar. I'll post some of my picks I've made so far below so you kids at home can follow along. I've only picked the first 4 races so far....

1-6,2,7
2-8,6,2
3-3,6,4
4-6

Back to the books. More tomorrow.

Con Ti Partido, Bellagio

2007-03-19T06:22:00.000-07:00

This trip is nearing it's end, and I realized I stopped updating the blog after Katie got to town. Unfortunately it's going to be hard to remember all the details all at once like this, so I'll just give you the broadstrokes.

Poker: -$2,000, almost entirely at 15-30 but a few tourneys. I bubbled every tourney I played, and every time had the best hand going in. I think I'm playing much better no limit these days, and clearly playing very poor limit.

Horses: -$200, not bad considering I lost $200 in the first day of playing horses. But again I'm perplexed by my results and need to do some thinking before derby week to see how to fix what I'm doing. As is want to be the case, I picked a lot of good high-priced winners but never seemed to bet them the right way. Most upsetting, my 30-1 derby future horse Flying First Class ran a pretty poor race.

Katie got to town and we moved over to Bellagio, which was a smart move. I don't know why I expected her to suffer that squalor over at the Sahara. Here, even though you are losing money, you can spoil yourself and feel like a winner. We had dinner Saturday at Shintaro, which was disappointing, and saw O, which was probably the highlight of my whole week. I'm still thinking about it. It was one of the coolest things I think I've ever seen. Don't get me wrong, I'd have rather seen the fight Saturday night instead, but only because O plays twice a day every day. O was far and away worth every penny and something I'll more than likely go see again. If you get a chance to see it, do so.

There are probably other good anectdotes to tell, but I forget them. Perhaps they will come up in causual conversation at some point down the line.

I now focus my attention 100% on horses in preparation for the Arkansas Derby. I'll post more then.

Can Do, Can Do

2007-03-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

This morning as I strolled in to the Bellagio sportsbook, I was floored by the crowd. It was elbow to asshole in that place, thick with backwards baseball caps and polos with the collars turned up. It was like spring break or something in there. March Madness cretins, hooting and hollering and taking up all the fucking chairs.

I first thought about leaving to go watch the races somewhere else, but I quickly realized it was going to be this way no matter where I went, so I decided the best place to find a seat was the poker room, and I put myself on the 15-30 list.

I got a seat pretty quick, since it was still before noon, and played extremely tight while I read the form at the table. I played all of 4 hands and lost $500 on some extremely awful river cards. Kicking myself for my mistake, I got up and went back to the sportsboook and found a spot to stand against the wall to read my form.

After a couple of races, this old man sitting in the back row of carrolls called me over and asked "are you playing horses?" "Yes, actually." "Here, sit with us." He had a whole row reserved and took pity on me realizing I wasn't there to holler at the top of my lungs over my $10 basketball money line bet.

His name was John, and he was a former jockey agent from Los Angeles, now a professional handicapper living in Vegas. His friend's name was Mario, just another local racebook fixture who he had befriended. They were playing Santa Anita, and I was playing Oaklawn. They were playing all pick 3s and pick 4s, and I was playing trifectas. I managed to hit a couple of $100 trifectas and was feeling better about my luck.

Eventually, Oaklawn ended and so I started playing Santa Anita with them. By the 8th race they were alive on a pick 3, a pick 4, and 5 of 6 in the pick 6. If the 6 horse, Can Do Can Do, wins the 8th race, they would cash for about $10,000. John tells me the 6 is a mortal lock and I look at the toteboard and its 8-1. I bet a trifecta with two other horses, and figure if it hits it will pay me close to $1,000. Now we are all sweating the same horse, and that's the way I like it.

The race starts with 13 horses, and the 6 breaks to the front of the pack for the 6 furlong sprint. By the time they hit the stretch, the 6 is 3 lenghths in front with no sign of stopping. We all throw our hands in the air in jubilation. It is a cinch! We are all going to cash! My horses are in position for 2nd and 3rd, the 6 is on the lead, we are all rich! In the last furlong, nobody can catch the 6, it is all over, even John, ever dignified and calm, is standing with his arms in the air.

Then the unthinkable happens. You knew that was coming, right? The 10 horse, in second and behind by a few lengths, shoots like a dart over the last furlong and catches the 6 by a nose. Boom. In less than 3 seconds we are all losers. It felt like the wind was sucked right out of the room. Everyone mutters some curse words, then silence. I don't know what to say. John gathers his things and walks away. It felt like someone died.

As I leave the sportsbook, the cretins are howling just like they do after every fucking basket. I am disgusted by them all, talking on their cellphones in the sportsbook and betting $10 5 game parlays. What a bunch of lowlifes. They couldn't carry John's raceform for him. They don't even deserve to stand in this room, let alone reserve seats.

I make my way back to the Sahara to play some 2-4 and enter the tournament. I do well in the tourney, making it to the final 2 tables. They pay 10, but I go out 13th with 1010 against A5 when an Ace hits the flop. Another bubble. More wind sucked out of me. I walked back to my room feeling knotted up from the tension and disappointment. I immediately called Katie to talk about it, and she was gracious as ever. I really felt motivated to win by knowing that she was getting here tomorrow. I really wanted to impress her with some good news, and it really helped me fend off my usual self destructive behavior and stay focused on winning. Hopefully it will help me tomorrow, when I brave the throngs of flipflopped frat boys and try to get to the window early enough to make some horse bets.

Basketball is a good game, but this is the sport of kings, boys. And we do our share of hollering, but when we holler, it actually effects the outcome of the race, unlike your pointless obnoxious wooing after every pointless free throw.

We are hollering our horses home, and maybe if you fuckers weren't here today screaming, that 6 horse could have heard us better.

Cretins.

Time Warp

2007-03-14T22:48:00.000-07:00

In order to get my $34 a night room rate, I have to play at least 3 hours of poker a day in the Sahara Poker Room. At first I thought that might be totally easy. Three hours? No problem. There's a problem though. In the Sahara Poker Room, time moves slower than anywhere else on earth. It's a lot like that island in Lost. It's like being caught in a time warp or something where you know that outside the rest of the world is moving by at regular speed but you are trapped in the Sahara Poker Room moving in slow motion. I read this morning in the New York Times that since they blew up the Stardust, the oldest structure left on the Vegas Strip is the coffee shop in the Sahara. Not the Sahara itself, or any one entire building in the Sahara, but the little coffee shop near the check-in desk. How that works? I have no idea. Shit like that is only possible in a time warp mind-fuck like the Sahara.

I started today off waking up bright and early, too early in fact. I made it to the Bellagio sportsbook two hours ahead of post time. Somehow I fucked up the time again and ended up killing two hours reading in the sportsbook. If I knew how early it was I would have gone to breakfast or at least for some coffee.

I planned to spend the day betting Oaklawn. I watched all the replays from yesterday's races and read over the form the night before. I had picked most of the races based on what I figured was a strong bias towards frontrunners the day before. My instinct was correct. Early speed pacesetting horses won every race yesterday but the two turn races. Nobody closed in the stretch all day. And the first few races of the day today shaped up the same way. I just missed some big trifectas and had cashed a $100 exacta (if it went the other way it would have been over $300). And of course, dumb fuck that I am, I start betting much bigger since I was winning.

Then I miss an obvious huge exacta in the 6th race that put me on horse-tilt. Two horses both over 5-1 come in 1-2, and both were the only two true frontrunners in the race. In fact, up to this point it was clear to me that if someone just picked the two biggest frontrunners in the field without paying attention to any other factors, they would have cashed exactas in the majority of the races thus far. I missed it that race and was pissed at myself. I vowed to weigh the bias much heavier in my future bets. Then the closers started winning, and before I knew it, the day was over and I was stuck $200. What a shitty day.

I decided to shrug it off, go log some hours for my room, and maybe catch the 7pm Sahara tourney. I show up in the Sahara Poker Room exactly 3 hours before the tourney to make sure I don't play a minute more than 3 hours.

There are two kinds of poker offered in the Sahara Poker Room, 2-4 limit and 1-2 no limit. I opted for 2-4 limit. It was amazing how easy it was. Every single time I saw a flop, whether I raised or not preflop, I bet the flop no matter if I hit it or not. And the majority of the time, I took it down, even with 4 or 5 people in the pot. Whenever someone called me, I just shut down if I missed or bet again if I had any piece of it. Nobody ever raised me. Nobody ever raised. Still, I only won $10 in three hours amazingly. And let me tell you, those 3 hours seemed like an eternity.

The room is old, musty, the chairs wobble and squeak, and the players in the room seem like they came right out of central casting. None of the oakley sunglasses ipod douchebags from the bellagio here, no sir. This is night-shift vegas all the way. Friendly people who won't raise out of fear they will make you mad. People who ask EVERYBODY who sits down where they are from and what they do for a living. People who have no business playing cards for money if for no other reason than most of them can't seem to add or even figure out which hand won when the cards are turned over. All of this just makes the 3 hours go by that much slower.

I played the 7pm tourney, and it was ok. $40 for 3k in chips and one $20 rebuy anytime for 2k more. I was the only person at the table who automatically took the rebuy. In about the third level I put a horrendous beat on a kid when his flopped straight lost to my top pair when I went runner runner full house on him. Everyone acted like I had committed some kind of high treason but a funny thing happened... From that moment on every single time someone was all in preflop, the worst hand won, usually with some kind of dramatic turn and river. It had us all freaking out, like my suckout put some kind of poker bad beat hex on the table. Then this new guy is moved to our table and we no sooner tell him about the hex than the Mavericks, playing on the tv above us, in a game he had been sweating all night, one where he had the Suns on the money line, hit a last second three pointer in OT to tie the game. His face turns white. We all look at each other in amazement. "The curse is real!" We put a bad beat on this man's basketball bet.

Of course the Suns come on strong to win in 2OT with another last second shot, and the bad beats at our table eventually subside, but not before the whole room has craned their necks to see what all the fuss at table 8 is about.

I make it to the final 4 tables out of 12, but bust out with AK against 33 to a guy who looked exactly like Jared from the Subway commercials. I was dying to make a crack at him all night, but never did. That's the kind of thing I would do if my friends were here, but without anyone around to tell the story to later, things that seem hilarious hardly seem worth doing.

It isn't the same being out here alone, without any of my friends. But if nothing else, this trip is teaching me to appreciate our yearly trek even more. There is a painting in my room over the bed, and today I figured out what it is... its the kabba stone in Mecca. Kinda weird, a painting of the Kabba in my hotel room in Vegas, but still strangely appropriate.

Josh emailed me some notes from Handicapping 101. Hopefully they will help. Tomorrow I spend some time playing real poker at the Bellagio. I plan on being up five hundy by midnight. Wish me luck.

A Week in the Sahara

2007-03-13T23:40:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Vegas, this time for a whole week. Spur of the moment, really. I was taking some time off before I start my new job and just hanging around the house when I realized that I could be spending this free time gambling!

My plan is to spend a week here in Vegas, then a week in Denver, then a week in Austin visiting some friends (but probably doing some gambling there, too) then a couple of weeks in Arkansas hanging out at the track and the whole thing culminating on Derby Day at Oaklawn, my family's yearly tradition, where Katie is flying down to join us for the first time, ever.

The whole adventure starts here, in Vegas, at the Sahara. I chose this dump because they offered a poker room rate of $34 and you only need 4 hours a day to qualify. I should be able to do a whole weeks worth in one session. And even though this place is a dump, its fine by me. I have a great view from atop the 14th floor, which is really the 13th floor but they skip that one of course. The room is very very large, even if it is a little bit musty. But I don't care about any of that. I'm all alone in Vegas and I came to veg out in the racebook betting on horses and to stay up all night in the bellagio poker room playing 15-30. I didn't come to pamper myself with big fluffy pillows and tvs in the bathroom.

However, it's only my first night and already the sound of the poker room PA system, which broadcasts outside for some strange reason, is getting on my nerves.

I plan on blogging as much as I can. Hopefully I can get up some of my race picks before the day's card so people can sweat me. And I'll take some photos with my cameraphone if there is anything good.

They imploded the Stardust last night. If only I knew sooner I'd have planned on being here in time for it. The Stardust was the first pokerroom I ever played in in Vegas. That was a wild trip, indeed. I drove here with some friends from Texas for a wedding. We stayed four to a room, two guys and two girls, at the Budget Suites behind the Stardust. I played some craps and lots of 3-6 holdem with old guys trying to hit the jackpot. I remember losing the last of my $300, all the money I had in the world at the time, at the Circus Circus on the last night we were in town. One guy at the table wasn't even wearing a shirt.

The way home, I had no money for gas so we drove to LA where my cousin gave me a hundred bucks for a check that promptly bounced like a basketball. I used the $100 to get back to Texas and the same day I got back I drove away from Texas forever, never to return.

Ah, Vegas, my old friend. The more you change, the more you stay the same.

So long ago, so far away...

2007-02-17T22:16:00.000-08:00

these days i find myself checking the towncraft site every so often and almost crying. it sucks getting old(er). it sucks being so far away from home, even though this home doesn't even exist anymore.

Threepenny: Mamet, Workers and Managers

2007-02-12T23:14:00.000-08:00

Threepenny: Mamet, Workers and Managers

I have always loved David Mamet dearly. After reading this, I love him so much more...

"We know this at work—why do we forget it in politics?

Because it is in the interest of management to keep the workers divided.

I am not a Marxist. I do not believe that the corporation is, per se, bad. I do not believe that capital is, per se, bad. I believe that the corporation, like any powerful entity, will, unchecked, progress toward tyranny, and that it must be kept in check.

The force which kept it honest was the American labor movement."

Hyping the Horse Race Instead of Feeding the Horses | The Huffington Post

2007-02-12T08:38:00.000-08:00

The Blog | Benjamin R. Barber: Hyping the Horse Race Instead of Feeding the Horses | The Huffington Post

I was thankful for this article by Benjamin Barber, author of Jihad vs. McWorld, because it articulated something that has been bugging me for a while now.

He couldn't be more right that the media and the public are overly obsessed with the candidates and the race and not at all focused on ideas, policy or *gasp* politics.

We are in the middle of a terrible conflict, we have a massive deficit, people are out of work and out of money and we just go on and on arguing over Hillary and Barack.

The retarded thing about it all is that in a year, it is entirely probable that we are arguing about some other dipshit that nobody even thought of a year before any votes were cast. And we won't be any further along in figuring out what we really want our leaders to do, or how to break the political stranglehold in Washington.

I for one won't vote for anyone who doesn't advocate for pulling the troops out now. I can't stand the fact that even when the vast majority of the country says they want the war to end, politicians are still paralyzed with fear over ending it, because they worry that some fucking republican back in their home district will campaign against them that they didn't "support the troops."

How about that for a starting point, Democrats? End the war. Now. How do I get in touch with the foreign policy plank committee? They can stay at my house in Denver when they get here.

Lost in New England, Lost in the Drafts Folder

2007-01-27T13:00:00.000-08:00

Here's one of several emails I found sitting in the "drafts" folder in my gmail account. There were about a dozen unfinished emails in there, and it was weird to read them all. Some were intensely private and emotional and I'm glad I didn't send them (and won't post them here). This one was all about poker and gambling, after a long night at Foxwoods, to my girlfriend...

Somewhere in Massachussetts off 395, 10am, anonymous coffee shop in a strip mall. I just woke up a couple of hours ago from my four hour nap in the driver's seat of my rental car parked behind a mobile station at a rest stop. The 7 hours before that were spent mostly gambling at Foxwoods. I only lost a couple hundred bucks, but I hardly could have lost it in a more dramatic fashion. I went up and down thousands, literally thousands, of dollars on my way to my eventual surrender. My intention was to go somewhere fun to watch the basketball game. I ended up staying up all night gambling like a madman.

In some ways it reminded me of the old days. For one thing I hadn't been in Foxwoods in who knows how many years. I used to go there all the time, and spent several nights much like last night, gambling until the sun came up with no idea how I would manage the following day's work. Being all alone in the middle of nowhere with no idea what to do with myself other than play poker. Perhaps if I ever had started drinking I wouldn't need to gamble so much, since it seems to fill a similar void for me. It makes me feel good, it gives me a rush, its fun and entertaining, and its a way to connect with human beings when I'm lonely.

In another way it felt very new and nothing at all like the old days. I was gambling at a very high limit, and playing much more aggressively than ever before. In the old days I'd take a few hundred bucks and chip away at the game all night until I went broke. That isn't entirely true. I can remember a few nights at Foxwoods were I lost a grand or thereabouts. But last night I was playing 20-40 holdem with serious bravado, and playing like I was the best player in the room, aggressively, raising and reraising and putting moves on people. Over the course of playing this way I created huge variance for myself and the swings were pretty wild.

This is where I think poker, or gambling in general, becomes a drug. Its easy to gamble recreationally and have no problem. You play with an insignifigant amount of money, play carefully and try to protect it, hope you come out on top, and have fun along the way. Or you can do what I did last night, and play wildly and without any caution whatsoever, putting large sums at risk on small edges, and watch the chips move back and forth in huge huge piles. This is exhilarating when you win, and devestating when you lose, and I can understand why people like to gamble.

One thing you may never understand or accept is that in the world of gambling, poker is the least dangerous of all. For one thing, your odds aren't fixed, they change with every situation, and understanding that can help you make smart decisions. Poker is much more like the stock market than anything else. Hands start with a certain value, but when the market closes, their value can be anything. Your ability to predict whether they close high or low is how you make money. Your willingness to take more risk determines how much money you will make.

Last night I was up thousands of dollars and lost it all back, then lost a lot more, then won a lot of it back. All told, I've certainly played poker with and for larger sums of money. But this morning I feel rattled by the game a little bit

...I welcome their hatred.

2007-01-26T16:43:00.000-08:00

Channeled By Krugman: What Obama Needs To Learn From FDR - TalkLeft: The Politics Of Crime

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ... Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” -Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936

Paul Krugman's NYTimes piece today really hit it out of the park for me. And this blogger at talkleft.com is on point, as well.

I'm personally sick and tired of hearing Obama go on and on about how "partisan" our politics have become. Ever since Clinton's 'triangulation' strategy in 1996, the Democratic Party has believed that they needed to reclaim the political middle. But like this blogger says...

[T]hat is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle. . . .

We don't need a namby pamby president who will bring all sides together with watered-down compromises. We need a President who will challenge Americans on the way they think about politics, the way they view government, the way they view the rest of the world, and most importantly the way they view themselves as citizens of this country. That's what presidents like FDR and JFK did, and that's their legacy. They changed politics and they changed the way our society viewed itself. They left the country stronger than they found it, that is for sure.

Just watch this video of Senator Kennedy yesterday on the Senate floor during the debate on the minimum wage bill...

Now Obama might call Senator Kennedy's speech "partisan," I don't know.

I for one call it leadership.

Towncraft

2007-01-23T18:22:00.000-08:00

Towncraft - Little Rock - 1994 - Basil forms

It's 9pm and I'm still sitting in my office. Why? Because my hotel I'm staying at has no internet connection, and I can't stop listening to songs on the towncraft site.

I'm currently on 1991-1995 and will probably work my way through 1997 before I stop recognizing the songs.

The video I've linked here is special, because my ugly teenage mug is in it rocking back and forth to the sounds of basil at state street. i remember it like it was yesterday.

Midnight Madness 2006 Recap

2007-01-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

Here's my lengthy recap of this year's incredible game. Photos can be found on the flickr pool. If you have any to add, please do!

There was a lot of filming going on this year, and supposedly a documentary is in the works. I'll keep you posted.

Without further ado:

The Pregame

The initial tip-off that the pregame was live came in the form of a spam email from Walton-Maxwell Dynaceuticals (WMD), a pharmaceutical company promoting a new drug called “paregoric.”

Searching for paregoric produced a website: www.paregoric.org which was the trailhead for the pregame.

Navigating around that site didn’t produce much. There was a form to fill out for more info, and after filling it out we received an email from “Teddy Gonzalez” telling us about a special offer. The link he provided in his email took us to another part of the site that included a messageboard (www.paregoric.org/phpBB) and a few puzzles.

I won’t go through the whole pregame for you, because Game Control has put a walkthrough up on the paregoric board (http://paregoric.org/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=4&sid=b636196afe32460a4816dbe286475a9d) so you can go read about it there.

Most teams abandoned the pregame around the “Metal Plate” clue. It was very very hard, almost impossible to solve. It took hints from Game Control for us to solve, and even then was still tough. The discouraged teams never joined back in in time to finish the pregame. There were only 3 or 4 teams that made it to stage 2, and only two that made it to the finale: The Domino Tournament.

The tournament was me against two members of Team Goat (whats up with that? I gotta beat two of them?) because nobody from my team showed up to play. We met up at Joe Muggs and played a best of 3 and I was totally demolished. The winners of the tourney, Team Goat, received a 5 minute time bonus for their efforts. Our team received a 5 minute bonus for completing the webcam sidequest.

The most important thing about the pregame was it introduced us to the backstory for the game. Basically that Paregoric was a weird drug that caused memory loss. It was going to be our job to locate the people who took Paregoric and help save them from Walton Maxwell Dynaceuticals, who were planning on something dastardly, but we weren’t sure what yet.

Some good photos from the pregame:

Starting Line

The game began at the Quapaw Community Center. This year the game started a bit early, 6pm. I was glad for the early starting time, because it most likely meant two things: more clues in businesses that are open and an early finish for the game, hopefully around sunup.

Teams gathered in the ballroom of the Quapaw Community Center, which was decorated with banners for Dynaceutical. There was weird girly teen-pop music playing, and teams were encouraged by the staff to mingle, get to know each other, and dance if we wanted.

We immediately thought the music playing might be a clue, so we started writing down lyrics and song titles and trying to solve it. We came up with some pretty good theories before someone on our team figured out that the CD was a children’s party CD that was sold in stores. We laughed but continued to try to “solve” the clue because it was obvious at this point that every other team had followed suit and was trying to write down track names and stuff.

There looked to be 9 teams in total:

Meat Machine: The reigning undefeated champs, with two new additions this year: my friends Stephanie and Winston from NYC who play on my NYC Midnight Madness team.

Tofu Machine: Our auxillary team. This was other friends from NYC who decided to come down at the last minute and after the team cap size was determined. Jaeun decided to join up with them, and then when Dave Fry ended up without a team, we suggested they put him on their team as well. When Jack Medford showed up late for the game, he opted to ride with them instead of us.

Team Goat: sans Matt Rowe and Spike who were filming the documentary, but added Chris Hough, Butch, and Jeremy Webb. They played the entire pregame and Adam felt they had a shot at beating us this year.

Sinister Ministers and Various Nefarious Nemeses: These were some of the former members of 24 Hours of Angry Apes. There were rumors that 24HAA wouldn’t play this year, and I guess it was true. For some reason they disbanded and some reformed into this team.

Shut Up: hadn’t seen some of these guys since the first game!! Basically rookies if not for that first game. They had a van filled with equipment including a blowtorch. No shit.

Team Food: Last year’s third place finishers and near winners, team food was back with a couple of new additions, including Alison who played on the Hagglers last year.

The Hagglers: perennial contenders, the hagglers would sadly be a DNF this year.

Pinky and the Brain: I don’t know much about this team other than they seem super cool and very nice. They are also pretty smart, so I don’t know why they didn’t finish higher. They are mostly from Little Rock, I think. This was their second year playing.

I don’t know this team’s official name, but they were referred to by other teams as “the artists.” I remember most of them from this summer’s photo scavenger hunt. They were sure to bring some insanity to the game this year.

Eventually after we all registered and turned in our van keys, we all started dancing on the dance floor. Our dancing was soon interrupted by the power going out. Members of Dynaceutical told us to be patient while they figured out what went wrong. A few moments later a bunch of guys with ski masks and hazmat suits busted in shining spotlights in our faces. They had guns and were yelling “line up against the wall!”

We did as instructed. They handed out paper bags and hazmat suits and told us all to put the suits on and the bags on our heads. We then had to turn over our cell phones and walkie talkies, and our teams were jumbled up and escorted out to our vans. Each new team was herded into a van with one member of Game Control, who was also wearing a hazmat suit. The whole scene was reminiscent of the movie “Inside Man,” which I think was the point.

The GC member instructed the driver to drive to a certain address, then left the team there with a clue to work on. We were told not to leave until we knew where we were going.

I turned around to survey my new teammates. I luckily ended up in the Meat Machine van, so we had all of our computers, supplies, and most importantly the copy machine. I made copies of the clue for everyone and we went to work on it.

The first thing I noticed about my new team was how shy they all were. Nobody said much at all. I tried to lead the team by giving everyone something to work on. We had a strip of paper with letters and numbers on it, a letter from Game Control telling us the rules, and a letter from Teddy explaining what was going on.

Evidently he was instructed to kill us by Dynaceutical, but instead is going to try and help us locate the Paregoric antidote with a series of puzzles and codes.

The strip of paper had exactly ten unique letters and ten unique numbers, so I figured it was a grid. I asked on group to work on matching the grid points to letters in the letter, and another to plot them out like a graph.

Eventually our bag of cellphones (which were my team’s cellphones and walkie talkies that were given to me by GC) started buzzing and ringing. It was a text message from Game Control, and it was a string of ten digits. My first instinct was the correct one: that they were T-9 code, but I asked a couple of my new teammates to try it and see what they came up with, and they reported back that they couldn’t find anything. So we got stuck. I called for a hint and was told that it was T-9, at which point I started decoding it myself. “L-O-O-K…hmmm must be look. U-N-D-E-R… look under…” “yeah, we got look under before…” “You got look under before??? Why didn’t you say anything?”

Look under rear bumper… Under our van’s bumper was a large tube with some soda pops, a plastic bag, and a long ribbon with letters written on it. One of Shut Up, Reid, immediately recognized that it was a scytale and started wrapping the ribbon around the tube. It told us an address, and off we went, even though we hadn’t solved the grid yet.

At the intersection there were a few other vans in the parking lot and teams were reuniting. I found out from the other Meat Machiners there that the grid was a battleship game and that Josh and Jay had it solved. There were two versions, one for each side of the game, and you only got both versions when your teams were reunited. Josh and Jay had communicated over the phone evidently, so we already had it solved even before they got to the parking lot.

But we hadn’t, because in order to use it you needed a map that GC had hidden somehere in the parking lot. We looked everywhere, but found nothing. A member of GC was there, but she had no idea where it was either. So we had to wait for another member of GC to come and make sure they were still there. Then he left the maps out in the middle of the parking lot for others to find.

We had to wait for all the vans to arrive before we could leave, because there was a member of our team in every van. That sucked, because we knew where to go but couldn’t leave yet. The good news was no one else could leave either.

The Office

Eventually we sped off to the point on the map we were instructed to go to, the South Park shopping center. We immediately noticed the black light in the bakery window. We knew to bring a blacklight from the pregame, and had one in the van. I was disappointed that GC provided one for us anyway, because it kinda eliminated whatever edge we thought we had from the pregame.

We and the other teams all started shining everything we had with the blacklight. Nothing was showing up. GC kept telling us we hadn’t found the clue yet. We walked up and down the shopping center turning over flower pots and newspaper machines, missing the obvious… the sign in one of the storefronts that said “Walton-Maxwell Dynaceuticals.” Steph saw it first and radioed us on the walkie talkie that she had it. We went in to the office one at a time, because the shopping center was thick with other teams searching for the clue and shining shit with the blacklight. Nobody had found the office yet, but it was a matter of time.

When I got inside I was impressed, but immediately panicked. There were puzzles EVERYWHERE, and they seemed pretty cool, but there was no way we could just grab it and go. We needed some time in here, and time without other teams finding us. I radioed the team to go to the van and wait, and to send in someone with a camera to help me take photos of the place.

Jack and I photographed the walls of the office, which were adorned with maps, clocks, and random posters with unfunny jokes from last year’s game. The floor was covered in maps of various countries. There was also a TV in the office playing a loop of a news report of a plane crash shot at the airport. There was an air traffic controller in the background doing semaphore, but it was going so fast it was hard to write down correctly. We did our best and ran out to the van to work on it. Eventually the teams all found the office and mobbed it, but we couldn’t solve the clue because we wrote the semaphore down wrong. We kept sending people back in to try to write it down, and kept getting different interpretations. Eventually we were able to brute force the letters we were unsure about and came up with an address, even though we hadn’t solved any of the clocks and maps, we took off for the address, which was very very far away. On the way there, Game Control called and told us to meet up with a “friend of Teddy’s” on a corner in town, and to be there in 15 minutes.

The Heist

We drove to the corner and met a guy who said he was a friend of Teddy’s. He told us to leave our van there and follow him up to Leon Lurch’s mansion. Leon was one of the guys we met in the pregame, he owns W-M-D and was the guy instructing Teddy to kill us all.

When we got up the street to the mansion, Teddy’s friend herded us into a uhaul parked outside. The uhaul had a TV monitor set up in it, and this weird equipment and maps and blueprints on the walls. Teddy’s friend gave us this puzzle of a blueprint of the house and told us to assemble it. Then he told us it was a blueprint of the inside of the house, and one of us would need to break in and locate a few things. One catch, though: whoever went in had to wear this helmet that blinded their vision. The helmet had an earpiece inside and a camera mounted on the top. The rest of the team would watch him on the monitor and instruct him through a microphone what to do. The house had lazer tripwires and guards, so we were provided a “gun” with 24 bullets in it.

I volunteered to go in with the helmet, and my team coached me on what to do: take very small steps. Don’t move without being told to. Turn means turn your body, rotate means turn your head. Etc, etc. I put the helmet on and went inside. It was so weird. I could hear things but couldn’t see anything. Almost as soon as I got inside I was discovered by a guard, who I promptly shot with my “gun.” Inside the house was a room with a computer, but the computer had a biometric keypad to log on. I had to go find the guard I shot, drag him to the computer, and put his finger on the keypad, all totally blind and following the instructions my team was giving me in my ear.

Once I logged in to the computer my team was able to copy the clue down from the screen. Then I had to find Leon’s desk and take a paper out of it that had a key for solving the clue.

After the game the documentarians, who filmed the entire thing from inside the house, told me I took longer than any other team, and that I was ‘boring.’ Evidently other teams ran through the house shooting and jumping and yelling, while we were deliberate and careful and slow. Ah well, I’m sure the video of me looks ridiculous. Without the benefit of hearing the instructions I was getting, I probably look silly.

The Crash Site

After we got the stuff from Leon’s head we were off to the address out in the country we were headed to before. When we arrived, there were 3 teams already there, including Team Goat who got there first. By now it was raining, and this clue was entirely outdoors, so it was time to put on our raingear. We had anticipated the rain, and we brought not only raingear but changes of clothes, which proved to be the best idea we ever had.

This clue was a lot of people’s favorite. The location was a really big field out in the country. The scene was the plane crash site we heard about on the news report in the office. Our job was to locate a specific part of the airplane in the crash site by triangulating from three points.

The field was large enough that even with four teams out there working, you couldn’t even see the other teams they were so far away. The points were marked with glowsticks and little flags, and the crash site was littered with actual airplane debris and dead body parts, including according to some a severed head. The whole set up was very cool and together with the rain was very realistic.

Our team broke up into two groups. One stayed back in the van and worked on the clock puzzle. We had noticed that one of the maps from the floor of the office had some points on it that were illuminated by the blacklight. Together with the latitude and longitude of the clocks, you ended up with a series of 1s and 0s. At the top of the hill at the crash site, there was a shed with a table that had our instructions on it and a “black box.” The black box had exactly as many switches on it as we had 1s and 0s, so we used it as a code for the switches, which worked, but didn’t do anything other than illuminate the “ready” light. There was a keyhole on the box, so we figured what we were searching for in the field was a key to turn on the black box.

Out in the field the rain was coming down harder and harder, and we were having a tough time finding our spot to dig. (We actually brought our own shovel, not knowing we’d need it, but GC had provided shovels as well.) At one point we actually broke ground right over the right spot, but then convinced ourselves it wasn’t right.

Eventually we found it and headed back up to the top of the hill. A couple of teams had already solved the clue, but they had no idea that they were at best tied with us, because they had yet to complete the “robbery” clue. It must have felt good, thinking for that brief moment that you were ahead of the Meat Machine. I couldn’t help myself and texted Adam from Team Goat to let him know that he wasn’t in first place. He was incredulous, but soon after that got called to go to Leon’s, and realized I was right.

When we used the key with the black box, it blinked its lights in morse code and spelled out Waffle House. Off we went….

The Song

At Waffle House we were greeted by a member of Game Control who asked us to choose a “special.” There were two plates on the table. I chose plate 1, and underneath it was a CD. I heard from GC after the game that they had an internal argument about two of their clues, and for a moment thought theyd ask us to choose so that some teams would do one clue and others would do the other clue. At the last minute they decided to use both clues since we were moving faster through the game than they thought, so this “choice” was a fake one. We all got the CD.

I’m glad they didn’t make us choose, because the other clue that would have been under that plate, which you’ll hear about later, was much harder.

The CD had one track on it, a pretty song that referenced a lot of Bob Dylan song titles. We tried a million things, but the correct solution, which we needed a lot of hints to get, was to identify the songs, then take the year that they were released as singles, and use the last digits to produce a phone number.

The kicker to this clue was the “single release” bit, because the first 3 songs had the same digit for the single release and the album release, which gave us 501, the Arkansas area code. This was a false positive and gave us the wrong number. It took Game Control telling us to use the single release year to solve this one, even though we had got to the year part without their help.

Does anyone have this track on mp3? I'd like to put a link to it here.

Penelope's Card

When we called the number, we got a message from Teddy telling us to meet someone at the Longshot Saloon on Central Avenue. The Longshot is a biker bar across from the racetrack, and when we pulled up it was going strong. There were all kinds of surly types in there drunk and crazy. My first thought was that we’d have to do some kind of karaoke shit here and humiliate ourselves in front of these drunk bikers. Instead the bartender told me that if I bought a drink she’d give me “the lady’s card.” I bought a ginger ale and, no shit, the bartender made fun of me. “I’m driving” I sheepishly told her, and took Penelope Cruz’s business card from her and bolted out of there to the van.

The business card had all kinds of stuff on it. The first two lines anagrammed to “two binary numbers” and “factor primes.” The next few lines were binary code, which we decoded to two numbers that, when we factored the primes, gave us a phone number. The rest of the card was the standard “lorem ipsum” filler text.

When we called the number we got a message reading a long string of digits. At first I suggested that we operate the numbers to the letters in the lorem ipsum text, but since there were more letters than numbers, we stupidly ruled it out. In retrospect, that was a stupid reason to rule it out, and it cost us some valuable time. But we tried several other things, eventually getting a hint from GC that we were right the first time. It went something like “Tell me what you’ve tried.” “Well, we first thought it could be this but then we realized there were more letters than numbers.” “Well that shouldn’t matter.” “Oh yeah duh.”

So we added each number on the message to each letter in the lorem ipsum text to get another letter. There were like 50 numbers but one of them was wrong. Our translation broke down at the wrong number, so we called GC. They told us that the message was right. We listened to it a few more times, then called them back and read them our numbers. They told us the right number, but again insisted that the message was right.

Here we had an ethical midnight madness dilemma. We knew there was a mistake in the clue, and Game Control seemed to believe it worked. Should we tell them so they could fix it for other teams, or let other teams suffer through it the same way we did? My attitude was that as soon as the next team made the same “mistake” that we made, GC would realize there was a mistake on the recording, so we may as well just move along and let the second place team suffer the way we did. Everyone agreed and we were off to the lake.

After the game I found out it was a moot point, because of what happened at the next clue, they rerouted people by changing the message to spell something completely different.

The Boat

Our next location was a boat ramp and fishing dock on the lake. This was the RC Boat clue we had learned about in the pregame. There was a small little house floating in the middle of the lake with a tunnel under it to drive a boat through, and there were RC boats with rope attatched to them sitting on the dock. We had brought our own RC Boat, having solved the preclue during the pregame, but again our advantage was nullified.

We outfitted our RC boat with led lights so we could see in the dark. I ran to the dock and put it in the water and shot it towards the little house. The rain was pretty heavy, and the wind made it nearly impossible to navigate the small RC boat. Combine that with the weight of the leds, and the boat was completely impossible to navigate. No matter what I did, the boat just drove in a giant circle, and spun farther and farther out to sea.

We abandoned our ship and grabbed one of the provided boats with the ropes on them. We drove the boat out to the boat house and right under the tunnel, but nothing happened. So we tried to lasso the house with the rope on the boat and drag it back to shore. It came pretty close but eventually stopped. It was tethered to the ground and couldn’t come all the way to shore. And to make matters worse, the RC boat was stuck to the house, so we couldn’t retrieve it.

We were mortified that we may have ruined the clue, so we tried desperately to free the boat from the house by yanking and tugging at it. It wouldn’t come free. As we stood there in the rain trying to get the boat free, someone noticed that you could hear something playing in the house. “It’s making a noise!”

Sure enough, there was a recording playing in the house, but it was so quiet we couldn’t hear it with all of the rain.

I called GC and explained the situation to them, and they said “just cut the rope loose, fuck that boat! Don’t pull it any closer to shore!” I looked out from the shelter to the gang on the shore yanking on the rope, and noticed the house teetering up on one side, and before I could even finish yelling the phrase “fuck that boat!” the house tumped over into the water.

I ran down to the shore, completely horrified, but before I could get down the ramp Dave Fry had taken off his shirt and shoes and pants and was in the lake trying to save the clue. That’s dedication to the game right there. Especially considering that Rob from Game Control was sitting nearby in the warmth and dryness of his car watching this whole ridiculous scene unfold and never once even cracked his window.

Dave couldn’t save the clue. Capsizing the house stopped the CD that was playing in it so in order to start it over someone would have to go inside and reset everything, which GC was unwilling to do.

I don’t blame them. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Here’s the idea behind the clue: there was a recording playing inside the little house, which you could barely hear from the shore (we couldn’t hear it at all because of all the rain). If you put a walkie talkie or cell phone on the boat and drove it under the house through the tunnel, you could hear it(nobody would put their phone on the boat in this rain and wind anyway). A pretty cool idea, but was rendered impossible by the weather. Too bad.

We were told where to go next, but to our surprise when we arrived Team Goat was already there! They were on their way to the lake when we were destroying the clue, and GC immediately gave them the next clue location, which erased a good 45 minute lead we had on them. Needless to say the people in my van were pissed off. We argued about how to handle it.

”If they beat us, we should complain about this.”

“Yeah but if we wait to complain at the finish line, it will look like sour grapes.”

“Yeah you’re right let’s call Game Control and complain about it now.”

“They will just laugh at us. They don’t want us to win.”

“Yeah! They are doing this to us on purpose!”

“What are we supposed to do, file a complaint with the league office?”

We decided to send a harmless text message to GC voicing our displeasure with their decision. This was one more thing we would be criticized for at the finish line.

The Artwork

This clue was a piece of artwork hanging in the window of an artist supply company. It’s accompanying artist bio made reference to being blind, so we figured it was Braille. There were several different color tiles in the mosaic, so we tried to separate the colors out. Fortunately we had lots of crayons in the van, so we took to coloring in the color separations to get the right letters, and the right address jumped out. We found this one to be pretty easy, and didn’t expect to gain any time on our competition with this one. But when we pulled up at the next location, we were surprised to see we were the first ones there.

The Memory Recovery Clinic

The scene was a doctor’s office. We were greeted at the door by a labcoated doctor, who directed us to remove our shoes and took us to the reception desk. There a receptionist gave us a clipboard with a form to fill out. Once we filled out the information and waited in the waiting room (they were really playing up the doctor’s office experience!) we were shown back to an exam room. Our team was left in the room and told we were going through “memory recovery.” We had 10 minutes to sit in the room and try to recover as much memory as we could.

The room was dark except for a strobe light blinking. There was a recording playing weird quotations in a robotic voice. Josh tried to figure out if there was a pattern to the strobe light, and I tried to write down as many of the quotations as I could. We weren’t sure at first if they were really quotes or just funny things about memories and midnight madness, but a couple of quotes stood out to me.

Eventually a doctor came and showed us to the second exam room. Again we were given 10 minutes to try to recover memories. This room had seven test tubes in it, each with a weird liquid in it. We smelled the liquid and the scents were extremely strong, some even putrid. We figured we were supposed to identify the smells.

The actual list of smells was Peach, Raspberry, Orange, Cherry, Tomato, Onions, Root Beer. The list we came up with was ?, Robitussin, Orange, Cherry, Tomato, Onion, Wintogreen Lifesaver.

This clue was fucking disgusting, by the way. The smell of both tomato and onion was so sickening I thought I was going to puke. I seriously couldn’t handle it, and for the rest of the day I tasted those little tiny onions in my throat no matter what I ate or drank.

We were escorted out of the exam room and back to the lobby and told that if any memories came back to us to let them know. As we walked in to the lobby we noticed both Tofu Machine and Team Goat in the lobby waiting to go in. We sat in the corner and worked on what we had.

The quotes were tough to identify. The only ones we were sure of were the Bill Clinton and the Fresh Prince quotes. Eventually someone figured out both William Shakespeare and William Burroughs and we realized the quotes were all by someone named William. So we figured that the solution to the smells would provide us with a last name. The only ones we were sure of (and only by chance happened to be right) were OCTO. So we had WILLIAM _ _ OCTO _. On a wild guess, we went to the receptionist and said “William Proctor?” She smiled and handed us a doctor’s file with the name “William Proctor” on it.

Inside the file was some information about William Proctor’s medical history and a map with a star on it. We thought this might be the finish line, but remembered that we still had the solution from the puzzle we got in Leon Lurch’s house, which we assumed was a 3-digit combination.

On the way out to the site, I proposed to my team that we throw the game and let Team Goat beat us. They flipped out. “Are you nuts?” “What’s wrong with you?” I told them that it kinda sucked that we always won, that we should give someone else a shot at it. Josh said “You know Dave, even if I agreed with you, which I don’t, I don’t think I could physically allow myself to do it. I’ve played competitive chess since I was 10 years old. Competition is in my blood. I can’t let someone else win.”

I believed him, too. And I took some weird comfort in the fact that what was about to happen was on someone else’s hands.

The Antidote

When we arrived at the destination, it was a house out on a point on Lake Hamilton. It appeared to be the finish line, with all of Game Control standing around, but we noticed a safe sitting in the middle of them all.

We went up to the safe and tried the combination and it worked. But when we opened the safe door, a wire pulled out a stack of dynamite and a note that said “You’ve triggered the Booby Trap! Wait 5 minutes and try again!”

Game Control started a 5 minute timer on us until we could try the safe again. Meanwhile Team Goat was hot on our trail. Plus they had a 5 minute time bonus, but it didn’t matter because we had one too. This, too, was controversial, since the members of Meat Machine who actually completed the sidequest to get the time bonus were on the Tofu Machine. But we decided to keep the time bonus since Tofu wasn’t really playing to compete, and because we finished the pregame as a team. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. After our penalty was up, we opened the safe ever so gently, reached inside, removed the test tubes with the antidote, toasted them and drank up. We had three-peated, and it felt good.

Then Team Goat showed up, and for some reason, everyone started egging them on telling them they had 1 minute to open the safe. They freaked out and started spinning the wheel, but didn’t get it open in time, then when they finally did they triggered the booby trap. Needless to say they were extremely disappointed. Adam Webb came up to me pissed off and challenged me on cooperating with Tofu Machine all night. Then Matt Rowe came over to me with a video camera and asked me why we took Tofu Machine’s time bonus. Then Rob started in on us for whining to them after the boat clue, when we were the ones who should be penalized for destroying the clue. A sweet moment quickly dissolved into a guilt-ridden disappointment. I felt like everyone would have been more excited if we hadn’t won. We had become the Yankees of Midnight Madness. The Lakers. The team everyone loves to hate. Suddenly winning didn’t feel so good.

(see what i mean?)

I expressed my feelings to my team, but Winston set me straight. “I didn’t come from NYC to play and lose. We won fair and square, and I’m glad we won.” Plus there was the added excitement of getting to plan next year’s game.

That night we celebrated at Jason’s Burgers and More with greasy food and beers. Winston immediately pulled out a notepad and instructed everyone to put down their ideas for next year’s game, and passed it around. When it got back to him, it had great clue ideas like “Beer” and “I love Bert.” Unfortunately for one rookie, the team has grown jaded over the years. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t create a great game next year, even though this was a tough act to follow.

Every team but one finished what was easily the best Midnight Madness we have ever had. Even despite the awful weather, the game played well. Where’s My Dynamite introduced new concepts to the game with mixing up the teams and the side-puzzle, brought a backstory to the game, and took clue design to a new level with the mansion robbery and the crash site. We have our work cut out for us next year. Bravo to Where’s My Dynamite and congratulations to everyone who finished the game and recovered their memories.

See everyone next year!

Not fun at all, really...

2006-12-16T22:59:00.000-08:00

"Not fun at all, really. But a few weeks later, or maybe a few months, you'll think back on it and wonder if maybe it wasn't actually fun, because you'll have this great feeling of satisfaction about it."

-Darren Skilton
on racing in the Dakar Rally

As I prepare for Midnight Madness, I was struck while reading Jonathan Miles' article about the Dakar Rally, a death defying 15 day race through sub-saharan Africa, how much this sounded like the way we all feel about Midnight Madness.

Sure, nobody is in any real danger of loss of life or injury. But it is certainly grueling, and in the moment, can seem like no fun at all. I have memories of being stuck on a puzzle and scratching my head wondering what the hell is supposed to be fun about staying up for dozens of hours on end trying to solve one incredibly hard and pointless puzzle after the next.

But for some reason, some inexplicable reason, we always look back on each game as if it was the most fun experience of our lives. And we look forward to the next as if it will top the last.

2006-08-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

Matt Bradley's American Princes Video

My old pal Matt Bradley made this video for the American Princes.

2006-08-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

Phil Ivey is Sick

this is a fantastic example of why poker is such a great game

So close...

2006-07-16T18:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I played a couple more satellites to qualify for the main event at the World Series of Poker. I actually did well in one, making it to the final table with a huge chiplead. They were giving away seats plus $2k to the top 3 places. I had almost 2-1 on the next two stacks. But I was a little uncomfortable, having never made it that far in a satellite that awarded multiple seats, so I was confused about how best to play it.

I had Brandon sweating my hands with me, which was a lifesaver. He just bubbled at the limit holdem event at the WSOP, finishing 10th when the final 9 made the ESPN table, so I figured he'd have good advice.

Everything went fine until we got down to 4. I was still chip leader. I was still autofolding. But the blinds were going up crazy fast, and the two short stacks were correctly pushing every single hand. And just as Brandon and I decided it was time to start playing some hands, my computer froze up and I couldn't do shit but restart. Lord knows what hands I got during those painful moments. But when I got it back up, the stack sizes had changed dramatically, with the 2nd stack having doubled one of the short stacks. The blinds quickly put me into 2nd place, then 3rd, and when I picked up pocket 9s against the short stacks autopush, I called and his 10 Jack connected with the flop and crippled me. One hand later I'm all in with Q6 against 96 and the guy hits a 9 on the river to bust me 4th.

I was so depressed. I won about 3 g's for my effort, but I was already tasting Vegas. Brandon says I would have busted early in the WSOP and would have only had the 2k to show for it, so this way I made an extra G, but its no help. I feel totally destroyed. So close.

I've been going to vegas for the WSOP since 2000. Back then hardly anybody went out there but the tournament circuit guys. Nobody ever heard of online qualifiers back then. I played in supers and single tables at the Horseshoe, never doing so great, but always dreaming.

As poker has exploded, so has the main event, and it has lost some of its luster for me. But at the same time, I feel like I'm the only poker player left in the world who hasn't played the main event yet, so my jealousy motivates me to get a seat as well.

Alas the online supers are over for now, so no 2006 WSOP for me. I'll have to wait another year. But the sting, oh the sting.

When I played the $2k No Limit event at last year's WSOP, I sat down feeling like I was going to lose. My every play was designed to NOT LOSE, rather than to win, and that kind of scared play never works in poker. But I was out of my comfort zone, so I couldn't help it. The same thing happened last night at that final table, and it hurt me. I knew I'd bust on the bubble, and it became a self fufilling prophecy.

Enough whining. On to more important matters...

Toussaint heads to jail

2006-04-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated this blog in a long time, but I figured today was a day I'd want to remember. Today is the day that Roger Toussaint reported to jail to serve a 10 day sentence for leading an "illegal" strike against the MTA in New York City.

here is a link to Roger Toussiant's statement to his membership on the eve of the strike about why they were calling for it.

and here is a link to a story about the head of the MTA's brand new $260,000 ferrari he just bought.

Amazing Hot Springs Punk Scene Photoset on Flickr

2005-11-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

Paul Curtis has scanned some amazing flyers from shows in Hot Springs through the 90s, and has a few choice photos on there as well.

Looking through this stuff nearly made me cry.

Google SMS

2005-09-13T13:21:00.000-07:00

This is going to change my life.

You can text msg google and ask it all sorts of shit and get answers.

* Get local business listings when you're on the road and want to find a place to eat.
* Obtain driving directions to get from point A to point B without having to ask for directions.
* Find movie showtimes and theater locations of movies currently playing near you.
* Check weather conditions and 4-day forecasts to plan your day.
* Study the latest stock quotes and stay on top of the market.
* Get quick answers to straightforward questions.
* Compare online product prices with ones you find in retail stores.
* Look up dictionary definitions to expand your vocabulary or prove a point.

Black people loot, white people find things

2005-08-31T14:58:00.000-07:00

Racism
Originally uploaded by dustin3000.

ugh.

Reunion Shows

2005-08-19T06:48:00.000-07:00

So many reunion shows lately. With CBGB's closing down, a slew of old bands reunited to play benefits there, including the Gorilla Biscuits, who I missed being stuck in North Carolina for the weekend. Luckily I got to see this video of the show and it totally blew me away.

Since then I've been listening to nothing but old hardcore and being nostalgic for the old days, and I was even flirting with going to Hellfest when the shit hit the fan and the fest got cancelled at the literal last minute.

So now all of these surprise reunions are popping up this weekend. 108, Lifetime, Good Clean Fun, Coalesce. I've seen all of these bands but 108 and I'd love to see 108 play with GCF but I don't think I'm going to make any of them since on Saturday I'm committed to playing in the haystack, a midnight madness-type all day game in NYC.

Priorities, man.

A novel without a word telling a love story?

2005-07-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

A novel without a word telling a love story?

：？

：！

“‘……’”

（、）·《，》

；——

I miss Ink & Dagger

2005-07-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

Hi and Lois

The Dollar Dances On Our Asses

2005-06-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

Where little dogs wear suits and ties

Fried Oreos

2005-06-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

ready to eat
Originally uploaded by spies.

Josh and I found a recipe for fried oreos while looking for photos of oreos to photoshop and email to our Vegas email list.

Out of sheer boredom and tilt from busting out of the $215 tournament on Party, we decided to make them tonight.

This flickr set has our step by step instructions.

Our apartment is totally saturated with nasty oil now, and I feel a little sick, but that shit tasted soooo good. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

Playstation Busted, gg nh

2005-06-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

Here is the article from the NYTimes about the Playstation being raided.

Playstation is a club in NYC where we all play poker. We hate the playstation. The guy who runs the place is a total asshole. The place is decorated like a bus station, and at times it feels like one with all the derranged players that hang out there.

But sometimes cool shit happens there, and I certainly have plenty of good memories of the Playstation, like winning 3 grand in the pot limit holdem game and playing 10-20 with Paul Rudd and three final tables in the Sunday tournaments. Even though on its best day it was nothing like the Diamond Club on its worse, its still another tragedy in the NY Poker scene.

This article was especially hilarious, in that it scoops all the other NYC papers on reporting that Playstation served us with Chips Ahoy and Oreo cookies.

Well, its true I suppose. The paper of record. How about that?

It certainly spawned a new gag among the upper west side game.

Who needs Playstation anyway? We're headed to Vegas.

The New York Times
May 28, 2005
2 Manhattan Poker Parlors Are Raided and 39 Are Arrested
By JENNIFER 8. LEE

The police raided two of the city's largest underground poker parlors late Thursday night, arresting 39 employees and charging them with promoting gambling. Police officials described the raid as part of a campaign to counter the growing number of illicit poker establishments in the city.

In coordinated sweeps, more than a dozen police officers stormed two Manhattan poker casinos: Playstation at 4-6 West 14th Street and New York Players Club at 200 West 72nd Street. At the time of the raids, about 11 p.m ., there were between 100 and 150 players at each casino, the police said. Only employees of the parlors, however, were arrested. Prosecutors said it was not illegal to play poker in New York State, only to profit from promoting it.

The casinos were members-only establishments that drew thousands of players weekly, among them men and women including cabdrivers, businessmen and actors. The management kept records of who came to play and new members could join only if they were referred by current members.

Neither establishment served alcohol. At Playstation, members were served Oreo and Chips Ahoy! cookies. New York Players Club offered its customers valet parking and massages. Games would go until 7 a.m. or around the clock on weekends, the police said. Tournament prizes could be as much as $10,000. The most popular game was Texas hold'em, a version of poker that many say requires the most skill and the least luck. The clubs were incorporated businesses that followed fire codes, the police said.

But the police and prosecutors asserted that the operations were nonetheless illegal, and the more than three dozen employees were charged with possession of gambling instruments as well as promoting gambling.

Lt. Pasquale Morena, who oversees special investigations in the Police Department's vice squad, said the parlors would bring in between $20,000 and $30,000 a night in fees that they charged their players to play. The police, he said, recovered $100,000 in Thursday night's raids.

"We realized that this was the start of a problem because there is lots of money involved," Lieutenant Morena said. "We don't know where the profits from the gambling are going."

Waves of police raids have followed the explosive popularity of poker across the country, including the arrests of 70 people in Passaic County, N.J., last month.

The decision to raid poker clubs walking a finer line with local laws has caused concern for lawmakers and individuals who believe that law enforcement authorities are overreaching and prosecuting legitimate recreational activity.

Many clubs, for instance, say that as long as they are simply renting space and not taking in a percentage of the money wagered, they are the equivalent of billiard halls.

And some members and an employee of the two raided poker casinos in Manhattan made just that case, saying members paid to rent space by the half-hour - $5 at Playstation and $4 at New York Players Clubs.

"It was done in every way like a legitimate business; you crossed your t's and dotted your i's," said an employee of Playstation, who was not among those arrested, but did not want to be identified.

People with alcohol on their breath were barred at the door, the woman said. The company had a payroll, deducted social security taxes and gave its employees health insurance, she said. "I can get unemployment," she added.

But the police said even the rental fees the clubs charged are illegal and amount to promoting gambling. Lieutenant Morena said the clubs also took a percentage of the tournament proceeds.

Janon Fisher and Daniel J. Wakin contributed reporting for this article.

Vegas Fever

2005-06-02T00:41:00.000-07:00

WSOP is coming

every year around wsop time i start getting poker on the brain. vegas fever. it infects all of us, my whole group of friends. we start calling each other just to talk about the upcoming trip, about poker, about gambling, about whatever... anything feels like getting a head start on our yearly pilgrimage, our yearly adventure out in sin city.

this year promises to be unlike any other. the wsop will be capped at 6600 players. it will be larger than life, a small fucking city posing as a poker tournament. im still frantically trying to win my way in to the main event, and furiouslly practicing my tournament skills in preparation for the action out in vegas.

i will, as i do every year, post daily updates on rec.gambling.poker newsgroup, and maybe to this blog as well. after its all over, check the poker page i linked above for the full recap and some incriminating photos.

wish me luck.

Nawlins

2005-05-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

New Orleans - a photoset on Flickr

I've got some photos from our trip to NOLA up on my flickr page.

Not mentioned in the photoset is that I played in the $500 event at the New Orleans WSOP circuit event and placed 43rd out of 800. Deep in the money but not really a great payday for 11 hours of grueling poker, and pretty tough to finish so close to $100k, which is what they paid the total noob who won the thing. All in all I was proud of my finish and it was a good warm-up for Vegas in two weeks.

CCC | How to fake fingerprints?

2005-05-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

CCC | How to fake fingerprints?

This is a good step by step on how to use latent fingerprints on glass and whatnot to fool fingerprint sensors.

I'm sure it will come in handy for some of you one day.

Crazy Ass Video on Machinists Website

2005-05-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, AFL-CIO/CLC

This video was on the IAM homepage. The video itself makes no sense, but it also makes no sense why the hell its on there.

Completely surreal, I promise you.

Mark Cuban's new hedge fund

2005-05-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

My New Hedge Fund - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com _

yes, mark cuban blogs. his blog is quite interesting, too. he really doesn't hold back on there, and shares some interesting insight into both basketball AND finance with his readers.

this post is of particular interest to me. he is planning a hedge fund where they will gamble with their investors' money: literally... by betting on sports, blackjack, poker, even slots.

an excerpt:
A sports or blackjack or poker bet doesn’t have value beyond that game or hand. In that respect it’s just like the hundreds of millions, if not billions ,of options that are traded, but never converted, on stocks, commodities and other assets around the world every day

The Time Traveler Convention - May 7, 2005

2005-05-01T23:25:00.000-07:00

The Time Traveler Convention - May 7, 2005

some students at MIT have come up with an amazing idea. they are holding a time traveler convention in hopes that someone from the future will show up.

they figure if we get the word into enough newspapers, chisel it into stone, enter it into public record, that one day when time travel is invented the word of the convention will still exist and they can come back into time.

Of course, this begs the question, wouldn't time travelers of the future already know about the event, having heard about it from atendees?

the paradoxes are endless.

Proof That Online Poker Is Rigged!

2005-04-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

Proof That Online Poker Is Rigged!

this is pretty funny. courtesey of bill's blog.

Board Game Saturday Night

2005-04-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

cattan2
Originally uploaded by spies.

Just another typical Saturday Night in NYC for the UWS gang. As Josh and I traipsed around union square in the rain discussing what to do that night, he had the brilliant idea that we go to Compleat Strategy to buy some German Boardgames and play while we watched basketball on tv.

Holy shit, that sounds awesome!! Will there be any girls or booze or drugs or loud music?

Hell No!! Just us guys, some dice, some cards, some wood pieces, and maybe even ice cream.

Even though I had to get up early for work in the morning, I decided this was too much to miss out on.

We bought three games at Compleat Strategy: Settlers of Cattan, Carcassone, and Diplomacy. I had my heart set on playing Diplomacy, after hearing so much about it from friends who had swore off risk forever after playing it. But when we busted it open, we realized not only was the rules book 30 pages of diagrams and detailed instructions, but that it also suggested setting aside about 4 hours for a typical game. Carcassone was much faster-paced and easier for beginners to pick up.

Carcassone is a tile-based game where you have to play tiles in patterns that create cities, roads, and fields, and play your pieces on the game board in strategic positions to gain points as the gameboard grows.

Settlers of Cattan is like a cross between Diplomacy and Carcassone. You use a combination of game board strategy with negotiations with other players in order to build an empire of cities, ports, and roads in Cattan. Peter swears its like the computer game "Civilization." Perhaps, but Settlers was invented ten years ago in Germany, and has really caught on with board game freaks.

We stayed up all night playing games and goofing off, and as I made my way back downtown around 3am, passing drunken revelers, clubhoppers, barflies, dealers, howlers, and all-around general midnight misfits, I briefly wondered what I was missing out on.

I bought a copy of the prior day's paper at the newsstand at the train station. The guy said "the new paper will be out in about an hour."

But I just wanted to do the crossword puzzle on the way home.

Even if I wanted to check out what I was missing out on, I'm not sure I'd last very long.

But it's ok. It takes all kinds to keep this city interesting.

Getting Things Done

2005-03-31T13:34:00.000-08:00

gtddesk1
Originally uploaded by spies.

So I'm a member of the GTD cult, I admit it. But it has really made a profound difference in my life in the short-term, both professionaly and personally.

The thing I love about GTD is that it isn't so much a system as it is a bunch of principles that you can apply to your life to come up with your own system you know will work for you.

GTD teaches you to come up with tricks and hacks to not only simplify and organize your life, but how to have enough confidence in your system to not feel stressed and panicked about things you may not be working on at any given time. You will be at peace because you know things will "get done" so long as you stick to your system.

David Allen calls it "mind like water."

I put some photos on flickr of my desktop gtd system, but it only touches the tip of the iceberg.

The real meat of my GTD system is how I have started keeping EVERY idea I have on paper, and filing them all into one system. I no longer keep distinctions between personal stuff and work stuff. Everything into one reference system, everything into one calendar. And nothing escapes the paper->inbox->process->file->nextaction cycle. My stack of 3x5 cards in my pocket at all times acts as a trap for scatterbrained ideas, random wishlists, reminders, or whatever.

You should pick up a copy and give it a whirl, and check out the 43folders wiki here.

I elaborate on my GTD system after the jump.