Nothing Says Tornado Safety Like a Double-wide

It must come as a great relief to the evacuees to know that, after seeing their cities obliterated by a Hurculean hurricane that they're getting an all-expenses-paid ticket to live in the largest trailer park ever conceived. Kinda makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I wonder if it'd be cheaper for the government to simply draft everybody that stays behind. Since they declared martial law in New Orleans, technically the military is in charge. Anyone who thinks he or she is tough enough to stay behind should be put to work immediately cleaning up wreckage on the GI Bill, or shipped off to somewhere where tough people are needed. I'm still waiting to hear about somebody looking back and turning into a pillar of salt.

The best solution I can think of is to let New Orleans flood again, then pour a megaton of cement mix into the water. Presto, instant land reclamation.

I've Discovered How to Fix Social Security.

All you have to do is forbid anyone over 55 from entering a casino.

I guess I should back up a little bit. I took Wednesday off from playing poker, and then made an unspectacular showing on Thursday night at Sticks. On Friday, though, I took third place, which was worth $15 in food and stuff (woohoo), and not a moment too soon, b/c I'd spent all of the $60 I won there two weeks before.

On Saturday, the weather was gorgeous, so I went to check out Garden of the Gods park. There were really big rocks, as promised, and I had a great time driving through there, and even hiked a little bit (maybe a half a mile total; the rocks weren't close enough together to provide any shade). Then, it being so pretty and all, I went for a drive.

You're not going to believe this, but somehow I ended up at a Casino. Ok, so you'll probably believe that part, but the serendipity of the thing was uncanny. I was just cruising along these mountain roads, taking in the sun and wind and big rocks, and enjoying the absense of traffic, when I saw the sign for Cripple Creek (no relation to the crippled tribe of the same name). I recollected that there was an establishment there that claimed to have poker tables, and, seeing as how I'd been a good sixteen hours without playing, thought I'd stop by.

Sure enough, at about 9800 feet, right next to the DalaiLama's summer home, there's a whole mini-vegas thing. Whodathunk?

Anyway, I found the place I was looking for, called the Midnight Rose (not a rose in the place, by the way, especially by Pasadena standards). I was duly shown to the Poker Room, and allowed to purchase chips. This was a new thrill for me, but, what the hey. You've got to speculate in order to accumulate. I put up a sum that was modest by their standards, and played at the cheapest table.

Ten hours later, I had lost 75% of my initial buy-in, won it back and risen to 200%, then lost that, slowly and excrutiatingly. While not strictly profitable, at least I was losing much slower than the other people at the table. The game was limited, as opposed to no-limit, hold 'em, so that was an adjustment. Plus, nobody ever busted out and left, or the few who did were quickly replaced. The blind stayed the same all day, and the food and drinks were free...all in all, it's a setup I could get used to.

Anyway, it turns out I was probably the youngest person at the table, and I haven't felt so much animosity to previous generations since...well since the last time I thought about 20th century history, or any of the history before that. But this was the first time I'd ever thought about punching a guy on a respirator (so smug, making his Darth Vader sounds, with enough chips in front of him to call anything).

It's not that the people were beating me by playing well; they just played every hand without regard to the value of their cards, hoping to catch all kinds of unlikely hands. Granted, I made a couple of stupid calls (usually involving holding two pair and going up against somebody with a flush draw), but I watched old people pay out money faster than an ATM in Times Square.

The trouble with the table was, they were just good enough to know not to beat me, but bad enough to lose to everybody else. I'm good at knowing when to fold, and in fact yesterday I won second place (and a $10 tab) by doing just that (in the whole tournament I didn't pay for one river card without wining the pot, and only invested in two turn cards before having to fold). I'm not as good at bluffing, especially against people whose sensitivity to losing money is nonexistant and in a limit game. I would've gladly left when I was up, but I wasn't in a condition to drive, so I stayed put and watched my luck, and my money, run out.

Anyway, I figure I only lost about six dollars an hour, and was well taken care of the whole time, so it was a good trip. Most people I've talked to said it was a heck of a roll for $60, especially since it was my first (and last, if I know what's good for me) casino venture.

Irreplaceable

I guess it speaks to my misanthropic tendencies to admit that the closest I've come to crying in the (I'm drawing a blank trying to come up with a less over-used word than "wake", "aftermath", or "devastation") of Katrina is in reading about the loss of decades of research data and thousands of laboratory animals. I realize of course that everything they were working on can be restarted, although some of the studies involved covered decades, and that the people lost can't be restarted as easily. Maybe I can appreciate data loss more because I'm closer to information than I am to people, or maybe it's just that the loss is easier for me to wrap my mind around than the human cost.

I've tried to refrain from joining in the pundit-party surrounding this Kat 5 deal, but one more of us isn't going to hurt. I'm getting tired of hearing about how long the response of FEMA took, because frankly it's just a smokescreen preventing people from asking the hard questions. Yes, the federal help could have come faster; yes, red tape prevents numerous obvious things from being done; yes, FEMA is run by people who are even less qualified to lead than the Bush administration itself; naturally the gross incompetence and terrifying inefficiency that characterizes practically everything the Department of Homeland Security stands for was laid naked for even the most obtuse observers to see. However, in my humble (yeah, right) opinion, none of these things are central to the problem at hand.

What I'm angry about is not the timeliness or organization of the reaction; it's the total lack of foresight at all levels of government for what happened to New Orleans. Everyone had access to the obvious information that (1) the city was below sea level and sinking, (2) the levee system was not designed to handle greater than a moderate hurricane-level storm surge, (3) the only evacuation routes from the city were likely to be severely disrupted, and (4) in the best case evacuation scenario, thousands of people would, for a variety of good and dubious reasons, fail to get out of harm's way. The problem was that few people in power (and I use the term loosely here, as the distribution of discretionary authority in this country is one of the Constitutional and bureaucratic quirks we live with) acted proactively on this information.

Granted, before 9/11, the general public was blissfully unaware of the vulnerability of our urban centers and the fragility of our infrastructure. Now, after sacrificing billions of dollars, and priceless Constitutional liberties, we're no better off than we were before. If we can't handle one little storm with 72 hours' advanced notice, imagine what would've happened if some Al Qaeda operative had invested a couple of thousand dollars in pipe bombs and set it off at the bases of one of the levees. It's not a pleasant picture, but after the last couple of weeks, it's one we can at least begin to fathom.

Of course, they wouldn't stop at just one city's worth. It would much more likely be a simultaneous attack in six or eight places, each calculated to cripple the first responders' ability to respond first. It's taken us two weeks to get a handle on this (local) crisis, using every possible response mechanism from all over the country. Imagine if a series of attacks of this (moderate) scale were coupled with explosions on a few critical interstate cloverleaves, knocking out Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, etc. If you think the Katrina response was a debacle, you'd best think again.

I'm not even going to bother pointing out that if anything even quasi-atomic had gotten loose, we'd have the problem of quarantining a city of half a million people. If everyone is irradiated, there's no herding them into stadiums or sheltering them in other parts of the country. We would've had to station armed guards everywhere to shoot all Cajuns on sight. I'm wondering what the trillions of dollars spent on Cold War preparedness bought us in terms of our ability to clean up a real mess.

Wanted: New Hobby

So I've been pretty negligent on the punditry front for like a week and a half, and there's no excuse for that in my case, as I'm rarely more than a few feet from access to the internet, and you the reader. The main reason for this is a nine-day poker binge, during which I played somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 tournaments. I managed to win a $60 gift certificate at one venue, plus a few other small prizes.

In the Benchmark Gaming league, I'm currently 24th in the city out of 687, although the bottom hundred and fifty or so of those haven't played. It took them forever to update the stats, and I might have had a higher rank earlier in the week if they'd updated it quickly enough. The restaurant and bar trips required for this pursuit would really add up if I weren't already doing that.

Tonight I'm in the finals at On the Rocks' in-house tournament (played without the aid of Benchmark). Should be fun, but I have a feeling I'm going to need help against all of the better betters. Cards are the best way to win, although plenty of players use other techniques half the time. I'm guessing they won't get away with any of that tonight. I'm brushing up on my probability, but I'm still gonna have a tough time coming out on top. Last year my roommate won a t-shirt, so that's something to aspire to.

52 Card Pickup

I wouldn't have thought this to begin with, but there are more single women playing poker than there are swing dancing, it seems like. Maybe it's just that the poker players are easier to talk to, or that women are less comfortable dancing alone. Then again, I haven't been keeping the most accurate statistics.

Speaking of statistics, you can now check my ranking in one of the local poker leagues at benchmarkgaming.com. I won another turbo tournament last night, and might have fared better in the main tournament if I'd had a seat at the start of the round, but I didn't, on account of a clerical mishap, so I had to play as an alternate, entering after the blinds had already been raised twice. That's really just an excuse, though. Anyway, it doesn't look like they've finished updating the stats from last night's games. This season the total prize money for the whole thing is like $2000 (all the tournaments are free; the money comes from the restaurants), and first place takes home $600+ of that.

That reminds me; I need to fill out my 401(k). Not as much fun as Poker, but a more respectable kind of gambling I guess.

Oh, and I also got four of a kind yesterday, which gets you free stuff if you play at On the Rocks, but since I was playing at Hooters, I just got kudos. On yet another side note, one of the waitresses had just moved here from Dothan, Alabama. I didn't even know they had a Hooters down there, but since I left that town at age 7 I probably wouldn't have noticed if they did.