The slow exhale of poker on television...

Last year 9 players reached the final table of the world series of poker and for the first time ever, play had been postponed nearly 4 months. The elite 9 took a chunk of their riches home to their families and friends and prepared for what would be the toughest thing they might ever have to deal with in their poker careers…celebrity (and maybe taxes). As Phil Helmuth, Mike Matusow and other pros dropped off the list with 5 or fewer tables to go, ESPN executives were likely squirming in their seats with their decision to hype up 9 nobodies for months without a big name to keep fans interested. Still, the event was well received and despite a table unmarked by poker nobility, play was customarily exciting. After editing, a final table looks pretty much the same no matter who you put in the seats - a slew of all-ins and coinflips.

Like it or not, this gaggle of inexperienced players emerged to become minor celebrities. They were invited on talk shows and even to ballparks to throw the first pitch. America, and the world, began to fall in love with these doting nobodies. These once beggars and borrowers were now first class all the way. Operation November 9 was a success.

In the year since, poker on TV has changed a bit. The everyman was getting more confident in his abilities. More nobodies were making final tables and fewer “pros” were seeing the spotlight. Young Internet kids emerged from their tiny bedrooms across the globe and were hitting the big time by cashing in along the WPT and EPT circuits. But this was all getting boring for the spectator. There was very little personality at the table; nobodies just don’t get out of line like stuck veterans do. Respectful fist pumps and shoulder shrugs were taking over “one time” declarations and tasteless name-calling. If things stayed the course, people might actually have to resume playing poker to be entertained by it, instead of watching it on TV!

So, network execs finally decided to throw in a wild card. Poker after all is a game, and they figured it was about time for it to be marketed in gameshow format. To a true poker fan, this format was a little off-putting and childish. But to the casual observer seeking something to watch on the days after Monday night football and before kickoff Sunday afternoon, a less technical form of poker was just the right thing to crack a can of Milwaukee’s Best to. Replace the hours of stone-faced amateurs folding their cards with a gambling priest, a guy from the sopranos and some scantily clad women and we have ourselves a poker game!

Fast forward through a series of junky permutations and we come to the big game once again, the 2009 WSOP Main Event. In a lauded attempt to show the game of poker in true form, ESPN broadcasted over 30 edited hours of the month long exhibition of gamesmanship. Unlike years prior, ESPN ran the majority of their coverage on the Main Event itself, and spent much less time televising smaller buy-in events. They wanted it to feel like the 9-day-war that it was, with the courageous November 9 being raised up and crowned with laurels. And this year, in all their elaborate detail, they had succeeded where they had not in their first attempt: Nobility had reached the final table.

The name amongst names, the living legend; Phil Ivey was among the final nine. Like battling against Achilles at Troy, the remaining eight players had to debate the earthly possibilities of beating their rival. Among the swarm of hopefuls was a poker publishing mogul, a reclusive logger from Maryland with a monstrous stack, and some very determined live and online players. In their second attempt, the execs had roped a winner.

But when the final table played out live, it took a bit of reclusiveness on my own part to keep from hearing the turnout. They brought the final 9 together and began play at noon on Saturday Nov 7^th. When they had gotten heads up, in the daylight hours of Sunday Nov 8^th, play would again stop and the duel would commence Monday night Nov 9^th. The important thing to understand is that ESPN would not air the final table until Tuesday Nov 10^th. This would give them time to edit the footage down to a few hours’ worth of entertaining television. But in no way could this ever be considered a televised live event. In a way it’s like TiVo’ing the Super Bowl. If you don’t watch that game within a few hours of it ending, you’re bound to hear a spoiler and the whole game is ruined. So I had to try and avoid the internet for nearly 4 days. I couldn’t listen to any podcasts. I had to avoid Facebook altogether. I was even nervous to watch ESPN in fear of seeing a text update roll across the bottom of the screen. As I write this, I currently just found out a spoiler about the live UFC 105 event I am watching on Spike. While researching a fighter who just pummeled Michael Bisping in the first round, his updated fight card on Wikipedia notes this fight as a loss. The fight took place live earlier today in England…

Essentially, my Main Event final table experience marks the recognition that poker as we know it can never be a live event. I’d much rather be given the opportunity to watch an entire day with no hole cards exposed than only be able to see 20 hands picked by some editors to tell a story that I already know the outcome of. Add in Norman Chad’s incessant comments with the ticking clock of the program and televised poker is like watching a mystery movie that I forgot I already watched drunk a few weeks ago: vaguely predictably and rather boring.

TV, you just don’t do it for me anymore. The internet has whooped your ass and you’ll have to settle with being the 2^nd broadcast. But unlike how TV forced print journalism to rise above sensationalism and produce quality content, the internet only seems to make TV a jealous copycat. You’d better stop trying to one-up other mediums and realize what you’re actually good at: documentaries, HD sports, and episodic programming.

HELLGATE! not

sorry if I fooled you all. I am very devious. But if you've come all the way from facebook, you may as well stop and smell the burdock roots here at my blog. Find out about gout, badbeats, lions, and how to deshell a chesapeake bay crab.

Gout vs Burdock

Another beautiful summer weekend has come and gone, I, with my foot suspended on two pillows harboring a smuggled walnut in my big toe. For those of you who don't know about gout, let me have the extreme displeasure of introducing you. Gout, formerly known as the "rich man's disease" is a condition in which the body creates more than its fair share amount of uric acid and doesn't know what to do with it; so it sticks it a joint, for me the big toe, and the uric acid crystallizes and even whispering winds become very painful. The correlation to "rich man" is a high purine diet. Things that I love like mussels and steaks are high in purines. Also brains and anchovies and other things I don't have very much trouble avoiding, except when my friend Erik is cooking. Beer is also at the top of this catastrophic list of things that are gout-attack inducing. So, summertime is here, I'm BBQ'ing, having nice mussels in garlic white wine sauce, and drinking beer in the sun. As far as I can tell, the sun has no effect on gout.

The last time this happened was over Memorial Day weekend. I was stuck inside playing micro-stake online poker for North America's toast to BBQ, beer, and war veterans. I took everything the docs had given me: colchecine, allopurinol, naproxen. The allopurinol I was instructed to take every day for the rest of my life. Aside from all of the above turning my duty into a phelgmy mess, they in fact made my gout worse, as I had not been taking them on a regular basis. My uric acid levels must have spiked and the thing lasted for a week or more.

I was busy, didn't get to a doctor, and less than 2 months later, here I am again, foot propped up on two pillows with a fan poined on me point blank staring at a laptop screen for hours on end leading to indescribable headaches. But i did something different this time. I went herbal.




This scary thing is a Burdock plant. It has no relation to the sinister Murdoch character that always fowled up MacGyver. I mean look at this thing. If anything could beat gout it has got to be this thorny spiderwebbed creature.

Luckily for me, other people have done the work of extracting the needed parts and placing them in little pills that I found at The Harvest Co-op. Friday morning I started to feel the gout coming on and I popped a colchecine. I called my doctor and he told me just to take Naproxen (prescription form Motrin) and rest. Obviously he has never had gout. I took it on my own to beat the ghastly disease. Which led me to pay $20 for some bogus gout report online which should somehow get me a $25 target card....still waiting on that. But the report had a few different methods to try out, so before things got too bad, I got to the grocer.

I scribbled down 8 or 9 herbs, most of which I'd never heard of but also a few flowers which sounded tasty. In the store I found the burdock, which was comparitively cheap alongside its pitchuli stinking neighbors in the aisle. I also loaded up on starwberries and cherries, which are also supposed to tame the beast. To my apprehension, I also picked up a box of baking soda, which I was supposed to add to water and drink...I tried that, and determined gout was almost better than drinking saltwater. Luckily I bought some other teas to aid me, one a Yogi joint relief tea and the other a nettle leaf tea (nettle being one of the herbs I'd had on my cheat-sheet). With the combination of cherries, starwberries, nettle leaf tea, burdock, and a shit ton of water, I'm almost cured in less than 2 days. I stubbed my toe on the cat in the dark and things are a little sore at the moment, but i think there might just be something to this herbal stuff. We'll have a talk with the doc this week and I'll tell him the good news.

Gout vs Burdock. Burdock stands victorious.

D.C., Smithsonian Castle, Maine Ave. Fish Market, Georgetown, Zoo

the horrors - sea within a sea

London spazz goth rockers return with a kraut bliss single. The young spastic sounds of Strange House, a goth-rock glam jam album reminiscent of The Birthday Party and at times Bauhaus, has been tamed by former experimental video director, now album producer, Chris Cunningham. The single is a laid back dance dream with a hibernating electronic pulse, almost like listening to joy division underwater. The new album, Primary Colours, is due out May 4th.

Internet Behemeth Rigs NCAA Round One

In urgent news, Yahoo! Inc. settled with the players and coaching staff of Illinois on a sum of $900,000 in an agreement to lose their first round game Thursday evening against Western Kentucky. The Silicon Valley corporation decided it could make more money running KFC banner ads if W. Kentucky remained in tournament play for a few more rounds. The settlement bears close resemblance to the site's $1,000,000 prize attached to creating an unblemished Yahoo fantasy bracket of 63 correctly picked games.

Late in the second half it is reported that a mobile message was sent from Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz to Illinois head coach Weber which caused alarm among the Fighting Illini. The message, 'your team's money is all gone' induced the 5th rank team to claw back and drain their massive deficit to within one possession. With moments to go, Weber received another message from Bartz, "all GOOD. money's all GOOD. T9 sucks, my bad. now lose!".

W. Kentucky's upset will undoubtedly boost KFC sales, which now offers 10 great tastes starting at 99 cents.








(This post is completely ficticous, obviously)

jan 20th, Inauguration Day, ubiquitous conscientious mob, pt 1

Inauguration day was an amazing, albeit an amazingly confusing, experience. We watched the inauguration from the National Mall on the same plot as the Washington Monument, via jumbo-tron, 1.4 miles away from history. In fact, this distance remained pretty constant; I never saw the Obamas in the flesh once during my entire trip. But I quickly came to the realization that the distance from the President didn't really matter. People are more likely to trust something they see on tv than with their own eyes anyway. Video can be rewound and revisited. Just like a referee can be overturned by instant replay, the camera shapes people's perception of fact and validates their memories of history. People's lack of proof is what makes them question their lives when told to others. Did I really see Bjork in New York City 4 years ago, or was it just an asian in a gigantic blue bubble jacket wearing a ponytail on the left side of her head?

The point is, the history that was happening on screen, on camera, and perhaps through the eyes of ticket holders in vantage, is fact that cannot be altered. This perspective can be corroborated by many and replayed as proof, but the camera is actually a disconnect from the experience. People at home witnessed an event, while the people on the mall actually experienced it. Even though I was over a mile away from the Inauguration, I never once felt distanced from it.

Jan 19th, MLK day

The Capitol was very blurry, all night.





The filming of an episode of Hardball on the mall. The media was basically a circus all week. People didn't care so much about the news, but they desperately wanted friends and family to see them waving a plastic bag in the background.



Sue lives so close to the National Cathedral that she didn't think she needed fingers on her gloves.

Inauguration week photos, jan 18th

Sunday, the 18th, heading toward the mall and Lincoln Memorial Concert. It felt like a post apocalyptic zombie film...but with street vendors. Favorite sales pitch: "Hand warmers $5. Frostbite is free."



Firemen doing their job (taking pictures for people in the crowd, of people in the crowd, from their exceptional view).

There were so many people trying to see the concert at the Lincoln memorial, that they were backed all the way up to the Washington Monument watching jumbotrons of the event. Some even risked life "on" limb....

Jan 18th, Inaugeration week

At 6am in Boston, it was snowing. My flight had been cancelled the night before and I had made immediate rearrangements to catch another on AirTran. I wheeled new bright red luggage down my lonely snow-dusted street, blemished with the marks of one early-risen driver, and toward the train station. I got to the airport early, and was expecting to camp out for several hours during the morning snow storm, but everything went remarkably according to schedule. My window-seat was waiting for me, next to 2 sweet middle-aged black women with american flag painted fingernails. they asked me what I was doing in Baltimore, as if they didn't already know my answer. "On the way to D.C.," I said, "How 'bout you?" Throughout the 40 minute delay these women told me all about the plans they had not yet made. They, like many Americans, were winging it. The important thing was just to be in D.C. for the moment; everything else would fall into place.

As it snowed, Airport attendants sprayed green and orange Nickelodeon fluids on the airplane, getting ready to de-ice us for takeoff. I looked down at the armrest where the XM radio receiver was. The channel was left on Lithium 54. Somehow they had known I was a closet 90s grunge fanatic. REM was on. I waited a few seconds to see what song would scroll by. "It's the end of the world," it read.

Oh great. I buckled up and went to sleep. In a little over an hour, I'd be in DC.

hiccup

10 pm, just 10 hours before my flight, jet blue calls me and cancels my flight.

I found another with a different airline, even cheaper actually, but there might be a storm brewing in Boston which could potentially delay things again.

We shall see. I'll get some great pics of the airport at least...

Bobby Goes to Washington

My bags are packed. I'm leaving tomorrow morning for my first adult visit to our nation's capital. I've been there twice in my life as a child, which means I remember dinosaurs and a giant statue of Abraham Lincoln. This trip will be significantly different. As an adult I've read about Capitol Hill and all of the rotten and sometimes amazing bills that have been turned into law. D.C. is an amazing city to me because it is more of an idea than a place. Living in Boston for a handful of years has given me an interesting perspective of history and location. Every major city in America has a ghetto and a ritzy downtown. Likewise, they have experienced miracle and tragedy. It's easy to live somewhere and forget it's history, and it's even easier to visit some place and forget that people live there.

Through the grace of good friends I have accommodations for this trip to D.C. and thanks to the bad players at Cake Poker, I have the means. I'm excited to feel the emotions of the people who've been charged up by politics and hopefulness, not Britney Spears or the New England Patriots.

Hopefully I will be able to get some great video and pictures for you all who cannot make this trip, though I'm sure CNN will do a more complete job. Stay tuned!