Excessive Variance

Welcome to Total Random Friday, where anything and everything is possible!!!  Okay not really, but it’s an exciting intro right?  I was going to try and do this every Friday, but discovered I’m sort of lazy… so every other week might work.  So onto my random bullshit…

Poker

Games have finally been picking back up couple weeks.  Last week I put in 3 sessions.  Monday at 2/5 was a small loss, Tuesday at the 15/30 HORSE game I had a pretty good win, and Thursday I played a little 2/5 PLO and 2/5 NL.  The NL game Thursday was one of the sickest games I’ve ever seen.   At one point there was nearly 20k on the table and half of that was split up between the two loosest maniacs that play there.  You know it’s an insane game when you make is 75 as a opening raise in first position and get 6 callers.  I couldn’t tell you the number of times it was an opening bet of 100 or more and there would be at least 3 callers.  I only pulled out a small win for the night, but that’s because I was stuck 2 buy-ins in the feeder game before I got to the main game.   I put in about 22 hours of play last week, and my hourly rate was pretty good, so no complaints.  This week I haven’t gotten as much time in, mostly because games have not really been going thanks to really bad weather.

I redeposited on Stars and started grinding out some micro stakes games to see if I can stay focused on online poker for any real period of time.  The full ring games are so tight it’s kind of easy to exploit them for small wins, but it seems short handed and heads up seems to be where all the action is.  I’ll keep feeling my way around and see how things go.

Other Stuff (News/Entertainment)

I watched the Golden Globes when they were on.  A few things stood out about the show.  First was Robert Downey Jr’s acceptance speech for whatever award he won because he the most entertaining guy in front of the camera.  That guy is pure hilarity… The second and third things that stood out was Christina Hendrick’s (of Firefly and Mad Men fame) cleavage.  Hottest ginger ever, possibly… and in her honor I bring you the picture of the week.

The non-animated Jessica Rabbit?

I’m sure by now you have seen previews for Kick Ass the movie.  At first I thought it looked really sort of dumb, but a while ago I got to see this clip on YouTube and now I think I want to see it.  I mean it’s Nick Cage shooting his own daughter in exchange for ice cream.  How great is that?

Speaking of Nick Cage, if you enjoy making fun of him check out Nick Cage as Everyone.

It’s amazing how quick things go viral on the internet.  It took me all of 5 minutes for the novelty of Pants on the Ground to wear off.  Though I have to give credit to some of the creative people who keep remixing it and putting new videos out, but I can’t wait for its 15 minutes to be up.  Based on this weeks Google trends it looks like we might have Greg Oden’s penis to thank for one upping general Larry Platt.  Or maybe not… fucking internet.

While I didn’t watch any of it, the clips I’ve seen of the last week of Conan on the tonight show have been pretty funny.  There were jokes about him blowing a ton of NBC money during his last couple weeks on the show.  This article seems to back up that claim.  Must be nice to make a song that someone has to pay 25k a second to use.  I’m in the wrong business.

Here is an early submission for dumb ass of the year… Paul Shirley.   For those of you not familiar with Paul he is a former Iowa State basketball player who had a brief stint as a bench warmer in the NBA but has become a bit of a celebrity for his blog and Q&A sessions on ESPN where he discusses basketball and pop culture.   His latest blog entry on the disaster in Haiti might be the most ill timed and horribly written pieces ever.  I get some people are going to agree with him on some level, but this might be the worst timing on voicing that opinion ever.  Aside form being an ass on this issue, some of his older entries are entertaining reading.

Sports Betting

I made a small profit the divisional  NFL games thanks to the Jets, but for the most part I hated the lines on the that weekend so I stayed away from them.  I did make a small play on the Jets to cover vs Indy and the NFC game to go over, one out of two isn’t bad I guess.  Cricket continues to be very profitable though as I have yet to lose a bet on it.  It’s weird trying to pay attention to five day long matches though when you don’t understand the scoring.

Sports (Sans Betting)

The Vikings crushed my Cowboys.  Can’t say I’m totally shocked though since like I mentioned last week everyone was jumping on the bandwagon just like they did to the Packers, and look what happens.  It looks like Favre turned back into Favre though against the Saints.  Guess he should have saved that extra TD pass he tacked on against the Cowboys for the Saints. I had no rooting interest in the AFC.  I guess in a weird way I was sort of hoping the Jets win because of the dual entertainment value of Rex Ryan press conferences and the fallout that would happen on the the Dan LeBatard show if a bunch of NY/NJ fans bum rush southern Florida. The Colts however prevailed and now the biggest question we have for Superbowl week is will Archie Manning wear his old jersey to the game while he roots for Peyton.  Not so exciting…

The start of conference play in college basketball has been so bad for one of my teams I’m just going to ignore it until football is over.  I will say Michigan losing to MSU by one the other night was pretty painful to watch.

The NFL draft combine is taking place, and I (along with everyone else) am interested in where Tim Tebow is going to land since he now has to try that complex NFL thing where you take the snap from under center.  The guys at Every Day Should Be Saturday put together a nice preview of the worst QB’s in the draft class, featuring a brilliant breakdown of Tebow’s throwing motion.  Funny stuff on that site if you like college football at all.

For the most part I’m not really uptight about anything.  My friends ask me where I want to go eat or what I want to go do, and I usually let them pick and just go with whatever.  However when it comes to pop culture stuff like movies and music I get a bit anal about labeling everything.  I didn’t even realize it until it was pointed out to me a couple weeks ago when I said something about some song being my 3rd favorite on a CD while driving.  So for the last couple weeks I’ve been watching myself to see how often I do that, and yea… it’s like a habit.

Anyway another one of my friends tells me today that she updated her blog with her 100 favorite movies and suggested I do the same thing.  “It’s fun” she says, so whatever I go along with it.  I took her list, removed all the stuff I don’t like, and rebuilt it to make it better stronger and faster.

I ran into a few problems though.  First I realized it’s hard to pinpoint a favorite movie because on any given day I’d consider any one of the movies that made my top ten my current favorite depending on what I’m in the mood for.  So while the top ten are in fact my top ten, they are completely interchangeable.    Another thing I had a problem with was how to judge films against each other.  Since it’s my list and I get to call all the shots, I decided I’d go with entertainment value as based on quality of the film plus replayability.  So while a movie like American History X is a really well done movie, the subject matter keeps me from rewatching it regularly and dropping it way down on my list.  On the flip side a movie like 8 Mile which was reasonably good, but not spectacular from a film making/story standpoint, moves way up my list because the entertainment I get from repeated viewings.  Also I discovered that after number 40 or so it was getting harder to decide what I liked better between two films, so everything from 40+ is nearly interchangeable.

I also listed the Trilogy’s as one entry in most cases.  Sure we all know Empire Strikes Back is better than Jedi, but I wanted to leave room for other films.  Also note the Matrix is not listed as a trilogy and I shouldn’t have to explain why.

If I left something off I’m gonna be pissed at myself…

I’m bored at work and don’t have anything else to do so I’m going to write something here, so my incoherent rambling that is about to follow may or may not be entertaining.  That’s my idea of a disclaimer, if you don’t like it.  Piss off.

Sports Betting

I made a deposit on Bodog last week to dabble in some sports betting.  My first weekend went pretty well highlighted by hitting a 4 team parlay where I took the Jets, Cowboys, Ravens and the over in the Arizona/Green Bay game.  I also had some small prop bets on individual performances.  I picked Aaron Rodgers to have the most yards of any QB in the first round, and that Ray Rice would go over 85 and 1/2 yards against the Patriots.  Aaron came through in a great QB duel and Ray scores a 83 yard TD on the first play from scrimmage on his way to crushing that line in the first quarter.

To further test my degeneracy I have a parlay in on a couple of cricket matches (go Australia and South Africa!) this week.  So far through the first day of each match the bets are looking pretty good.   Betting cricket matches is really odd, since they last 5 days.  It’s providing one hell of a sweat and I get to read interesting updates from the games where a commentator says things like “That was a wicked googley!!”.  So great!

Poker

Last night I was spinning at a table for the first time in a while.  I had the biggest fish in the game sitting on my left and I had to up my average preflop raise to keep him out of pots, but it didn’t matter as he snapped my set of aces with J9o and my set of Kings with 75s, then followed that up by beating my JJ with a running two pair on a ten high board.  The set of Kings was particularly sick as I don’t think I could have played it any better to get maximum value.  So I was stuck 3 buy in’s pretty quick and with the way games have been closing early this week there wasn’t much of a shot for me to make it back up.  I did make a bit back, and finished the night down less than 1 buy-in, but what a frustrating session.  Being emotionally stable I’ve always felt is the strongest parts of my game, but it was sure tested last night.

Other Stuff (News/Entertainment)

I picked up a pair of the Beats By Dre headphones recently after I accidentally ran my nice ear buds through the washer and dryer.  I highly recommend them and I also recommend not putting headphones in with your laundry.

Everyone seems pretty excited about Jersey Shore… I haven’t watched it, and I don’t intend too.  It’s on my list of popular things I’m avoiding right next to Twilight.  I can only think of one circumstance where I would willingly watch Twilight, and lets just say at this point it’s really unlikely.  Not to mention that my memories of Jersey are trying to hold my breath while driving through that pile of trash, so it’s hard for me to get into the idea of watching retarded 20 something from that area despite how entertaining a stupid girl getting punched in the face may be.  I hope they stop infiltrating pop culture, I’m tired of hearing about them already.  Speaking of television there are a lot of shows I like back on again, so I’m busy clearing up DVR space.  Fox is burning through Dollhouse episodes at a speedy pace to end the show, which is too bad since it’s getting really interesting.  Breaking Bad and V will be back soon, not to mention House and Heroes are back on though at this point I’m just watching Heroes out of habit.  I compare Heroes to a ex girlfriend who you randomly get booty calls from.  Sure the sex is fun, but the conversation probably sucks or she wouldn’t be an ex.  I’m not real sure if I will watch this season of 24 yet since I only got 1/3rd of the way through last season before quitting.  Maybe that’s something I’ll download and watch casually on my phone.

I’ve never really watched a ton of the late night talk shows since Arsenio Hall went off the air.  I usually only pay attention to any of them if there is a guest I want to see which is very rare.  However this drama with Conan and Leno has made for some funny TV moments.  Especially when Kimmel starts posing as Leno and Conan just takes repeated shots at NBC.  I was actually shocked to find out that Leno was more popular than Letterman.  If there is a late night talk show I specifically avoid because of the host it’s Leno.  I’ve can’t remember ever laughing at superchin’s jokes… ever.

I ran across an interesting article about people living in the sewers in Vegas, it’s worth a read.  I think it’s odd how we rush to help Haiti after the earthquake, but don’t help out the people who are clearly in need closer to home.  I’m not against helping Haiti by any means.  I actually sent in a donation earlier today which was something I haven’t done before under similar circumstances.  I referenced a previous blog earlier this month that I didn’t publish and part of it discussed charitable work and contributions, which is what kind of spurred me to do something for the earthquake in Haiti.  I’m sure it will be money well spent, but I don’t feel like it’s the best use of my money/effort.  Giving is never a bad thing though, so whatever.

This wasn’t supposed to get serious, my bad.

Sports (Sans Betting)

I wish the NBA had not suspended Gilbert Arenas, that guy cracks me up.  I wanted to see the pretend John Wayne duel with a teammate that he was planning.  I can’t believe the league fined four of his teammates for laughing in that now infamous picture.  Here I was stuck thinking the NFL was the No Fun League.  I think for the next NBA fantasy league I do I’m going to draft the all personality team.  In addition to Agent Zero I think I’d need to grab Ron Artest, Rasheed Wallace, Michael Beasley, and Shaq.  Just the idea of the relationship drama with Shaq and Arenas on the team would make be exciting.

I like how the Cowboys are playing, however I’m a bit nervous about everyone jumping on the bandwagon this week against the Vikings.  It feels a lot like how everyone was so high on Green Bay before the Arizona game so the possibility of a big letdown seems likely.  I’m also looking forward to Jets/Chargers since there are some really interesting matchups in that game.

Now that college basketball has gotten into conference play I’m trying to catch more games.  Michigan hoops has been about what I expected which means I think they end up winning a game in the tournament and if they are lucky a shot at the sweet 16.  The Big-10 is pretty deep and they should be fairly tested going into the tournament.  I can’t say I’m as excited about UNC right now.  They had some tough loses early to a lot of the top teams, but the last couple loses have been scary.  They can play with anyone, but they are definitely lacking some outside scoring punch.

Until I have something else to bitch or be happy about… later.

Sidenote: Worst Day Ever… fuck me.

A while back I was looking for good podcasts to listen while at work and I ran through probably two dozen suggestions before I heard about the Dan Le Betard Show with Stugotz.   I was mildly familiar with Dan Le Betard from his guest appearances on PTI and other appearances on various ESPN programs.   I was hoping to find some simple  entertaining  sports talk show similar to PTI, so this sounded like a good fit.

To be honest the show wasn’t quite what I expected.  Dan along with his cohost Stugotz lead a pretty lively group that spends more time discussing random topics than sports.  When they do discuss sports they approach it from a unique angle and go out of their way to challenge the standard thought processes of fans while never taking themselves too seriously.  It makes for a highly entertaining show and one that has had me hooked for a couple of months now.  I listen to the previous days podcast every morning at work and it eats up the first 3 hours of the day so quick my job is almost bearable.

So a few weeks ago I found out Dan also hosted a weekly Q&A session Monday afternoons on the Miami Herald’s website.  I’ve followed a few Q&A chats on ESPN’s website before, and most of them are boring because the hosts will only answer serious questions.  Like a Q&A session should be life and death.  These people need to take lessons from Kevin Smith and not take themselves so seriously.  Fortunately, Dan seems to like to entertain himself while doing these Q&A’s so they are fun to read.

Today Travis and I decided we would bombard the Q&A session with questions mostly posing as various athletes or celebrities… and Dan answered quite a few of them for us.  Here are the highlights of how we wasted nearly an hour and 20 minutes of our day today…

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Submitted by Shawn Kemp from Seattle (Travis)
Q: Hey dan, I’m happy for you and i’mma let you finish. But me or Karl Malone had some of the BEST BACHELOR RUNS OF ALL TIME!!!

A: not like jeter, you didn’t….going to have to go out of sports to find better than jeter, i think….wilt married?

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Submitted by Mark Sanchez from The Jersey Shore (me)
Q: Why when I make a lighthearted joke about my old coach going pro does ESPN act like I was serious? Wasn’t us winning a game a big enough headline?

A: it was funny….i think everyone took it as a joke….i love that two weeks ago the jets coach himself said they weren’t going to the playoffs and now they’re calling their season a success regardless of where it goes from here….funny

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Submitted by Aaron Rodgers from My attempt to kick a football to myself while being sacked (travis)
Q: boom goes the dynamite

A: agreed

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Submitted by Kurt Warner from Arizona (me)
Q: Hey Dan, I’m just curious why when I have games where I have more TD passes than incompletions in the playoffs everyone still goes on about how great Farve is at his age and I don’t get nearly as much love. Can you explain that to me?

A: kurt warner has kind of become a hall of famer, hasn’t he?….i think rodgers had the most amazing season i saw this year….his oline stunk….he was sacked 50 times….can anyone name the yardage passing later in a year of great passers? romo and rodgers and peyton manning and drew brees were all great but the yardage leader with nearly 5,000 yards was…….

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Submitted by Travis from Iowa
Q: Future request for a Goal call – ‘You can call me aaron burr from the way i’m dropping hamiltons!’

A: excellent…..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3b_7S-sGBo

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Submitted by Manny Pacquiao from Hiding from drug testing (me)
Q: Are you going to say I’m ducking the big fight too?

A: i won’t believe that fight won’t happen until it doesn’t happen….too much money involved….and i know pacquiao has scheduled another fight

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Submitted by Lebron James from Cleveland (me)
Q: Dan… you got any pull at TMZsports? I need to make sure no one is trying to Tiger Woods me.

A: we’re lurking, king….and we’ll get you, and i’ll rail about it, and everyone will ignore me and laugh at me and consume the cotton candy happily….the worst will be when tmz sports ruins someone’s life by outing the first active gay athlete

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Submitted by Nick Saban from Alabama (me)
Q: See my Gatorade bath? What kind of punishment do those two players deserve for trying to knock me out. I think i need to hire Levitt or Leech to handle these situations for me.

A: that was kind of the reaction, wasn’t it?

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Submitted by Janet Reno from Picking my teeth with Elian Gonzales’ femur (travis)
Q: All this talk about Cuban defects is making me hungry!

A: femur, funny word

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Submitted by Josh

Q: Tiger Woods sex tape, your trying to track down a copy aren’t you? Can we get Roy to do a Top Ten Most Wanted Sex Tapes?

A: i have my own personal copy ….Range balls

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Submitted by Woody Hayes from Deep south (Travis)
Q: With the talks about Leach, Levitt and Mangino, we need to settle the score now. Worst treatment of a student/student athlete by a coach. Mangino, Levitt, Leach, myself (Hayes) or the dean of mean Bob Knight? Certainly not Mike Gundy, he’s a man, he’s 40!

A: leavitt, i think……physical and then lying….

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There were a few other ones that have to me taken in the flow of the conversation, like Travis as Captain Kirk and me referencing his cohost pick of the Packer to win the Superbowl.  This will now be our new way to kill Monday afternoons.

Also I highly recommend the podcast, as long as you are okay with a lot of discussion about southern Florida.

The holidays have been pretty uneventful for me.  My family Christmas got canceled due to the unyielding amount of snowfall, and I really didn’t want to do anything on New Years since the plans I had been making for a trip during it a few months ago fell through.  Although I got invited a few places I ended up just playing cards on New Years Eve and there was some talk of people heading to KC for the weekend to play in a deep stack event at the Harrah’s casino.

Since I had nothing else to do, I called up Shiva and asked if he wanted to go and we took off Friday afternoon and met up with some other people we know down there.  Friday night I played in one of the worst 2/5 games I had ever played in and apparently Shiva’s was worse.  He called it a early night, I wish I had done the same.  On the bright side I was heading back to my room early in the morning and there was a big crowd in front of the Voodoo Lounge.  For it being all of 6 degrees outside there were a ton of hot women with extremely skimpy outfits on.  Way more eye candy than I was expecting to run into in KC.

Saturday was more fun, while he played the deep stack event I played 20/40 with a lineup of guys who probably shouldn’t be playing higher than 3/6.  They made ridiculous lay downs in spots that they never should have, which is why I managed to come out slightly ahead in a game I was running horrible at.   In a pot where I had KK and another guy had QQ, we got a guy to lay down AA for two small bets on a 755 board, and I got another guy to lay down a set of 6’s when I bluffed the river on a Kh, Qd, 9d, 6d, 5s board when the 9d hit and lead out at it in a huge pot with my 74.  It was such a bad lay down I was shocked and happy to show my bluff while stacking up chips.

I got stuck early in the game and it took about 12 hours to grind myself back to being ahead.  Bye that time it was midnight, so I called it a night thinking I was tired.  After the deep stack finished Shiva played in a 5/10 game, and it was breaking up the same time I was quitting so we decided to crash early and get a quick start out of town on Sunday.  But when we got back to the room I had the following text conversations with one of the other guys we knew who came down for the trip.  This guy was stuck pretty big on the day as he ran bad in the same 20/40 game and then lost a buy in or so at the 5/10 game, so he was in the mood to go have fun.

This is our text conversation, completely uncensored and with spelling errors left in.

I’m not entirely sure what having my cook get the shit shak’d out of it would feel like, but I’m pretty sure my cook didn’t want to find out.  Instead I opted to hit a cafe for a late meal and get some sleep.

Got back to town in time to have lunch at PF Changs and get home to hopefully watch the Dallas/Philly game, but instead we had the stupid Packers/Cardinals game.   I followed the Cowboys game on my laptop and enjoyed the 24-0 beating of the Eagles.  It just sucks that we’re going to have to face them for a 3rd time, and historically it’s pretty tough to try and beat one team three times in the same year.  The other highlight of the last weekend of regular season NFL games was watching Steelers fans cry about teams not playing starters when they couldn’t beat the Chiefs, Raiders or Browns.  Funny stuff.

Probably won’t have much to update with for a while.  I plan on playing 1-2 events at the WSOP event in Council Bluffs next month, and then heading to LA in March to get some play in at the commerce and the WSOP event at Valley Center.  After that things are a bit up in the air I guess.  I did a lot of traveling (by my standards at least) the last half of 09 and I’m not sure I’m really in the mood to keep this pace up.