You know what day it is

If you don't, you better ask somebody.

[Edit: To those of you who were thinking Pi day please get out of the house (your mother's basement) more.]

Read this

Amazing profile of David Foster Wallace. The pain of genius that I will never know and am glad that this is the case. The tradeoff just isn't worth it.

[H/T Will Leitch @ deadspin]

It's a valid question

Baaaa! Baaaa!

I put up a good fight but ending up losing. Acting upon a discussion at The Highlander before viewing The Wrestler this past weekend I signed up for Twitter. I'm not sure how all this shit works but I promise to be delivering the best scat derivative prose my juvenile mind can come up with. Or more likely I'll forget about the whole thing. Either way my handle is halsbowels.

I always wondered about this

An Open Letter from Doc Brown to Marty McFly

Too bad he didn't tackle the bullshit that cocksocket pulled in Spin City.

A drink needs me

I'm not fucking kidding. Why is the ratio of employees who tell me what they can't do to the ones who tell me what they can do 15:1? Why do they wait until I can't get them help to tell me they need help?

/end rant

Of course, starting late March I will be responsible for 45 more people. I've worked with half of them in the past. A decent fraction of those are competent. This ought to be interesting.

And yes, that is a fitting return to this quiet corner of the intarwebs for me. Straight up bitching. And cajoling for alcohol.

Away Game

Much like Gnome did recently, I played at a new home game. LB and I were stopping by a party that her coworkers were throwing and there just happened to be a poker game going on. Playing in the game was a woman I had met the night before and upon learning she played the game and would be traveling to Vegas I lent her my battered copy of Small Stakes Hold 'Em (now with bonus book review by Dr. Pauly). She invited me to take a seat, and I happily complied.

It was an interesting situation. Most of the people at the party were Icelandic folk celebrating Thanksgiving. Everybody at the table but myself was from Iceland (well, there was an Aussie who lost 3 buy-ins and was gone quickly). Great people who are a lot of fun to hang out with. Especially if the card sharks at the table were the ones who had been playing for "almost a year".

It was .25/.50 NLHE with a $10 buy-in. What did I care, I was just there for a laugh and free beer. I played a straightforward TAG style, showing almost every hand when I didn't get a call. I went to four showdowns all night and won every time, even though the first was a suckout. I just wanted to show an uncomplicated playing style and get invited back when there might be real money at stake.

It was a min-raise fest. One would expect a pushfest with the stack to blind ratio, but soon there was enough money on the table that there was actually room for postflop play. Not that it mattered at this table. If somebody put out a slight overbet they were bluffing, and if they massively overbet they had you beat. And a 1/10 pot size bet was normally a highcard hand.

LB had initially only wanted to stay 30 minutes but we stayed there about 3 hours. I told her we could leave whenever she wanted to go. But every time she came and checked on me she said she could wait for me to get my money back. The only problem was that I was up from my second hand of the night and never looked back. She finally declared we were leaving at midnight. I was fine with that.

I ended up the night plus nine buy-ins. I felt like a jackass because most of the kitty was IOUs since all these people work together, and the host insisted on giving me all cash (85% of cash available, when I had 45% of money on table). I would have been happy with just my buy-in back, but will deal with having drinking mobneys for the weekend.

In the end, it was a great time hanging out with these Icelandic people. It was especially nice that they were celebrating an American holiday with as much force as they could muster. LB's corporate Viking overlords are interesting people and my only regret was not drinking enough. I might have to start attending her company outings. If only I didn't work nights.