What Dubnjoy writes is true; it's quite beautiful, but you're on your own out there. I had just turned around at Delta Junction on the way back, and heard this train whistle out in BFE.

"WTF?" I thought, "where are the train tracks?" Turns out it was the air escaping rapidly from one of my tires. Fortunately, even my meager automotive skills can change a flat, and I had paid attention to the advice to bring a full-size spare.

Further down the road, in the Yukon, IIRC, I wasn't paying attention and my fuel tank ran dry. Again fortunately, my dad bought the truck with dual fuel tanks, so I was able to just flip the switch.

It's definitely a bucket list item, Fire.

I'll be sure to consult you for a checklist when the time comes. No AAA to save the day up there, I imagine.

I'm staying home today with an upset stomach, so I might as well get something done. Here is...

Rolling Stone's 482nd Greatest Album of All Time: Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by The Pharcyde (1992)

If you've been following these reviews, you might be familiar with my quixotic quest to approach each of the new Top 500 albums with a "baby mind", or a way of observing that is free of my preconceptions and prior opinions. You might also have the inkling that the baby mind thing has been a running joke. Enlightened masters and Dostoyevskian holy fools approach things with a baby mind; I am neither of those.

Like many middle-aged people, my observations are largely the sum of my preconceived notions, sparing only a half of an eye out for those rarefied eureka moments, whenever they choose to hit me over the head with their Zen master whooping sticks.

I was excited for some eureka when I saw The Pharcyde on the list, as I'd never heard of them before, despite the band having been around for 30 years, and still touring and recording to this day.

Upon hearing the first few songs on Bizarre Ride II, I was immediately taken back; but not so far back as to an enlightened babyhood; no, back to my mid-teens, around 1984, when I used to listen to a radio show coming out of Dean College, a student-run show that played the new underground rap sound.

I say underground because MTV—the 80's arbiter of all things musical—was not playing much rap in 1984. Run DMC's King of Rock wouldn't come out for another year, and the Beastie Boys' License to Ill wouldn't drop until another year after that. In '84, MTV played a couple of songs from the Fat Boys, and that was about it.

So I got an early taste of what we now call Old School rap: Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, Slick Rick & Dougie Fresh, along with Run DMC, who put out their first, self-titled album, which I still own on vinyl.


It's not a pristine first pressing, so it's only worth around $15, but in terms of sentimental value, I wouldn't sell it for $500.

I heard my first Beastie Boys song on that college show: Cooky Puss, off the band's first EP from 1983. Cookie Puss is a registered trademark ice cream cake from Carvel, a northeast USA ice cream franchise.



In the song Cooky Puss, the boys call up a Carvel store and demand—in the most hip-hop way possible—to speak to Cookie Puss.



My 14 year-old self found Cooky Puss to be deeply hilarious, whereas my current self finds its casual misogyny to be offputting, to say the least.

Another profane, juvenile and transgressive tune that I loved back then was La Di Da Di by Slick Rick & Dougie Fresh.



So I was a hip-hop kid for a year or two, despite having grown up in a Connecticut suburb that was 97% White, thanks to race restricted covenants in the town's property deeds that weren't repealed until only a few years before I was born.

I liked hip-hop for the same reasons that I liked Eddie Murphy's 80's comedy albums: because the songs were funny (at least for young males), profane, juvenile and transgressive. Then in the late 80's and early 90's, rap took a serious turn with Public Enemy, Ice-T and NWA, and then it progressed from there into gangsta rap.

I, being about as gangsta as an NPR radio show about bird songs, fell away from rap and hip hop, and into hard rock, speed metal, grunge, industrial and techno, before expanding my horizons later in life, and lately embarking on this album review project.

Now that I'm through with that vastly overlong introduction, I can get back to The Pharcyde. Their first album: Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde (there is no Bizarre Ride I, AFAIK) came out in 1992, at the heart of the gangsta period, but the songs on it hearken back to the fun, laid-back, casually misogynist tropes of the mid-80's old-school rappers.

And I don't like the album very much.

Some people like it just fine; it's on this Top 500 list above Muddy Waters for some goddamn reason, and it scored positive reviews with critics at the time. It's labeled as alternative rap, but I wonder if it was just an alternative to the glut of gangsta albums that were flooding the market.

The point of the long introduction is that I believe my 14 year-old self would have liked this album a lot, but my present self does not. This album was not made for me as I am today, and I'm okay with that, but I'm not going to try to grade it on a curve. That would be patronizing, I think.

I like one song on the album: Passin' Me By, and that turned out to be the hit single, although I've never heard it played on the radio.



Passin' Me By has a good groove, unlike the music on some of the other tracks, which tends towards choosing repetitive samples.

Four of the tracks on the album are quite short, ranging from 23 seconds to just over 2 minutes, and those four are labeled as either 'skits' or 'interludes', and not one of them is worth a damn. They're filler, as far as I can tell. This makes me wonder if the critics were judging the album by Passin' Me By, its superior song.

As I mentioned, the album was not made for me, so take my review of it with the shaker of salt that the introduction poured out, but that doesn't mean that I dislike all funny, juvenile, transgressive, alternative rap from the early 90's. Paul's Boutique and Check Your Head from the Beastie Boys are near-masterpieces in my book. And then there's Digital Underground. I love this song so much. Humpty has vast, effortless charisma here. He just powers it.



Rolling Stone Says:

These high school friends from L.A. were a little like a West Coast answer to De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, offering their own spin on alternative hip-hop in the Nineties and showing there was something going on in Southern California beyond G-funk.

And there's my hypothesis about getting an extra star for not being gangsta.

I just now noticed the vagina dentata on the cover of the Pharcyde album.

Do not do this.

I wear socks virtually everywhere. I wore them in Thailandmøller and Cambodiamøller without issues. It doesn't bother me if other peeps have different footwear habits.

+1

My sleep cycle is completely out of whack. I didn't get to bed yesterday until 8 AM, then I woke up at noon, feeling fuzzy. I forced myself to stay up to 9:30 PM without napping or drinking, only to wake up this morning at 1:45 AM, with my eyes wide open.

Ah well, I'm going to head out for an early morning slot and poker session, and try to stay up until 9 or 10 PM again tonight.

I played two short poker sessions recently, and I spent the hours stuck, unable to connect with the board, and unable to hit any of the promos. Finally, towards the end, I spiked my first set in days on a wet multiway flop, but I got folds on my modest checkraise and took down only a medium pot; better than set over set, or losing to a straight. At the very end of the session, I caught a punter punting his $200 stack with an underpair to my KK, so thanks to those two hands, the figures didn't end up too far down.

The slot grinding field continues to grow more and more crowded. All members of the Asian Syndicate are back, so they must have been on a holiday break. Again, this was a Chinese holiday, so my wild hypothesis about the crew being all-Chinese has gained a slight crumb of credence.

In addition to this, plenty of new local grinders are showing up to check the machines; some of them have been going around in pairs, with one teaching the other the ropes. I still believe that the endgame to this business is approaching, and it will be neither profitable nor pleasant.

On the sports betting front: it's over. MGM has changed their football promo. They will no longer double the promo payouts to players with sports betting slips. Knowing this, I made a longish-shot $5 bet to try to break a little better than even with the sportsbook: I picked the Lions to beat the Raiders by no less than 7 and no more than 12 points at +400. Lions won 26-14, so I binked it. After today, I will fold my football betting total into my slot tally. I would lump it in with the poker for categorical reasons, but the tally is not an even dollar amount, so it's going in with the slot total for aesthetic reasons.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6.5 hours
(-$85.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 4 hours
+$17.67

MGM Springfield Token Sports Bets: 1-0
+20.00

Running Poker Total: 583 hours, +$11329.00

Running Slot Total: 297 hours, +$9554.91

FINAL Sports Bet Total: 6-6 +$13.90

Grand Total: 880 hours, +$20897.81

Never bet on football or baseball. Just watch and enjoy the games and drink lots of beer. This advice alone will save you thousands of dollars.

.

Thanks for doing the hoofwork, Sheep!

In any case, Zeno's advice is sound, and I will be suspending all sports betting indefinitely.

Also, Gambelina pointed out that the II in Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde is likely a Prince-like conflation of number and word, so the translation is Bizarre Ride to the Pharcyde, and so it has nothing to do with a sequel number.

Never Get Out of the Boat, and Never Limp



Today, I was the only TAG at a table full of limp/folders and limp/callers, and I was getting hands, and raising, and raising, and raising—as one does—and getting lots of grumbles from everyone, as everyone just wanted to see a flop, and eventually I got a few limp/call traps and limp/reraise traps from premium hands as responses.

I'm human—a social creature—and I don't want all of the regular players who I see every day to hate me, so occasionally—maybe once or twice a week—I will relent and limp along with a speculative hand, and sometimes it works; but really, it's always a mistake. Fold it or raise it is better over the long run.

We come to this hand: MP limps, CO limps, I pick up 43 on the BTN and limp along , SB completes and BTN checks.

(Pot $10) - 5 players

Flop: 567

Bingo.

SB checks, BB checks, MP checks, CO bets $10. I raise to $25, SB folds, BB calls, MP calls, CO 4-bet shoves for $90.

(Pot $166) - 4 players, 2 left to act, $65 to call

I have the dummy end of the straight, and a straight flush redraw. A straight flush will give me around a 90% chance at the $300 high hand payout. I stop. This is not an autopilot play by a long stretch.

I have limped along and put myself into this spot. I look to my left at BB, who is widely acknowledged to be the biggest nit in the room, and who in fact has been taking a good-natured ribbing for it today from the other players.

The nit BB has his thumbs literally circling around the back of his $350 stack. I've played with him a lot. He is not a phony grabber of chips; when he reaches for them, he means it, as far as I know.

I look at MP and his $400 stack. He seems interested, very interested. I look at CO. He's still all in.

I tank and I tank and I finally announce that I'm going to make a very nitty fold, which is a breach of etiquette, as the hand is multiway and still far from over, and in any case I should just shut up and fold in that spot and not bring undue attention to my play.

But I'm frustrated, because it's my fault, because I limped along instead of raising or folding.

BB shoves his $350 and CO calls him.

(Pot: $866) - 3 players

Turn is J and river is 2, which would have given me a baby flush—but not a straight flush—had I called.

CO and BB both show 98o for the flopped high end of the straight, and MP shows A8 for the nut flush, pushing him a very big pot for $1/$2. I would have been drawing almost dead to a 6 (one out) to win, or runner runner non-spade 9 (one out) and the case 8 (one out) for a chop.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5 hours
+$459.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 5 hours
+$324.51

Running Poker Total: 588 hours, +$11788.00

Running Slot Total: 302 hours, +$9879.42

Grand Total: 890 hours, +$21667.42

Good fold, I prolly would of been completely uncapable of that, even without the promo. If you can pick up physical tells that is good, I suck at that.

But yes, it's always a mistake. And if everyone complains about your playstyle, tries to trap etc. that's what you want. That's how the game is supposed to be. If peeps lament too much I usually remind them politely that they have the option of calling or reraising me. If I know them well I might say something like why are being so cheap?

Also I got rich betting on the lions. Said nobody ever. But they seem to be doing ok this year, so what do I know.

Also leave my fellow countrymen alone, they are just trying to make an honest living exploiting big gambling!

I think it's different if you're there week in and week out, playing with the same people, as opposed to just dropping in for a few sessions. I like a lot of the folks there, and my job makes it so that I have to be the bad guy at work every day. I can see how it slowly turns good regs, who know what they're supposed to be doing, into bad regs.

I do the job and hold the line, but there's a certain sympathy creep that I have to fight all the time, so I don't give up and check AJo in the BB "just this once" after 5 limps instead of making it $22 for the third orbit in a row.

Besides, you're a Euro, and not Han Chinese as you claim, and people in the US (and likely in Asia) expect you to play aggro.

It's 24°F (-4°C) this morning.

Everyone's windshields are frosted over for the first time this season, and I'm sitting on the couch, nice and toasty. I've never had the luxury of a garage, so I used to have to get out there and scrape either ice or snow off my windshield, or start the car and wastefully run it for 15 mins to defrost, or more often some combination of the two, nearly every weekday morning from November to early April.

The bitch of it is that the windshield ice will usually burn off on its own by 9:30 AM or so, but work always started for me at 8 AM.

Such a wasted effort; now I don't have to do it if I don't want to. I also promised myself that I won't be driving in the snow this winter. I have the luxury to let the plows do their work first, and I don't have to be blazing trails at 7:45 AM.

I'm sure that I'll be caught in the snow a few times—we had some flurries yesterday afternoon, but it didn't stick on the ground—but overall, I'm looking forward to a more relaxing and less harrowing winter.

Lots of aggro "han" players too. Just FTR I never claimed to be that variety, it was obv a little bit of a play on my personal situation but, I mean you know where I live, for all practical intents and purposes it is my country too, for now at least. If you deny me that it's basically like saying to the Mexicans or whoever, who settled in the US, this is not your country. Go back to your country.

Nobody knows anything, especially about the future, but for the moment I am staying here. The place has a lot of good and a lot of bad but I've come to get kinda quite attached to it, so for the moment at least, this is my home. My only home. Whenever I write these kinda things my life tends to be pushed upside down, at least it was like that in the past, but whatever...

And believe it or not, actually it is moderately hard, esp the real Chinese passport, there is also a HK one, with some different characteristics, but anyways there are peeps who are not Han, not even Asian background, Caucasian white or others, who are or have become Chinese nationals, I know quite a few. They have voluntarily surrendered whatever other nationality they had cos that's one of the conditions. In some cases they might of had a crap passport before to begin with, so there's that...

Sorry for the interruption, just to set things straight.

Fair enough, Fire. I was just kidding around.

I wish you the best of luck if you decide to become a national. It seems to be a risky proposition, given the governmental situation, but if you love a place, I can understand that.

Do you remember the approximate ages of the players involved in this hand?

I have no intention of doing that for now, actually I have applied for permanent residency. It is under consideration, and I will keep my passport. If approved, that would be kinda the best of both worlds. For now. That paragraph with the nationality was just to make the point that there are these peeps, there are some who are willing to go all the way. Not me for now. I mean I don't have a ton of emotional attachment to my nationality, I mean I'd be willing to defend my country if it was invaded or something (you know these kind of things happen in Europe, apparently...) but apart from that I just view it practically, I have a good PP, I can go to many places with little hassle or visas, the HK PP (which is also a Chinese PP, just special version) is a lot better than the standard one for that, but still much worse than my current one. Also social benefits and all that. Also China has massive demographic issue due to the one-child policy, if you think whatever country you are reading this from has a demographic issue, it is nothing against China's. But they have overcome grand challenges in the past. 5000 years of civilization and all that.
More generally speaking the point you raise is quite textbook-like though. The outside view of a country is most of the time politically shaped but the inside tends to be quite different. Again, like saying China is *hit because of the govt is kinda the same like saying the US is *hit because of Biden. Or Trump. Or whatever morans are in charge. There is that perspective and it is not for no reason, but everyday life is like, quite different.

Pure gold.

I don't mind overlimping with 43s from the BTN once in a while when you know the lineup and the fact that there's very little chance of getting raised preflop. Even if it's a bit -EV, it makes for more fun and you won't be the bad guy for once. And if you hit gin, you could hook a station down the line, who knows?

P.S. The flop you hit was far from gin despite the appearances.

This was the "first table," basically the same group of older guys who show up before 9 AM to sign up for the 10 AM opening. If I'm at the casino for an early morning slot run, I'll be one of those guys.

The BB is in his 50's, and the rest of the players involved are 60's-70's.

Thanks uberkuber!

See, that's what I told myself: What could it hurt if I limped along here? And then on the flop it was: Oh that's how it could hurt. It's insidious.

I think 43s is a fold preflop, even on the BTN, while higher suited connectors are raises. The possibility of Ax suited and better suited connectors (all of them are better since I block 32s) calling a raise and overflushing me, not to mention hitting the dummy end of the straight, makes the hand belong in the muck.

I think I won my biggest 1/2 pot of the capped-buy-in era with 4s3s on the button. The board was 2s5s6h, 7s, Ax. I started with ~1300 and was the short stack active. I never bet, just called my stack off. On the turn and river I was weeping uncontrollably, so I guess we should call them crying calls.

Opponents were guys in their 20's with their caps on backwards and Beats. I was so astonished that I posted the hand here on 2+2. Within 30 minutes I had two responses that told me exactly what the BB and cutoff had. I pictured the responses coming from high school kids with 6-figure online bankrolls, tapping away furiously during study hall.

Keep playing 43s. Find some younger opponents. They're tight, they're aggressive, they're Game Theory Optimal!

Nice hand, Phat Mack!

Look, 43s is a marginal hand, but it's not junk. I would still consider calling an open with it with appropriately deep effective stacks, in late position vs a tight opener from early position who I knew was not going to fold top pair or overpairs for most or all of his/her stack, and both of the blinds would also have to be tight, and thus unlikely to come along with slightly better suited connectors or suited gappers.

This exact setup is very rare in $1/$2.

My last poker session comprised 5 hours of being more card dead than I've ever been.

In 5 hours, I drew only 3 pocket pairs, none of them above 66. I don't remember how many suited connectors I peeled, but it was fewer than 5.

No AK, no AQ, no AJ: my best Ace hand was ATo. I got that twice, and those two hands accounted for most of my losses. On the first ATo, after I'd folded for more than 90 minutes, villain called me down with AK high and no draws, and he was good. He wasn't impressed with my supernit image.

I lost the second ATo to A9o, who in the SB cold-called my $30 preflop raise over a $5 straddle and 2 calls, and who spiked his 9 on the river for two pair. Fortunately, I checked the river back and saved $100. I might sometimes go for thin value there with TPMK, but my spidey senses caught V perking up on that last card.

The rest of my losses came from just posting the blinds and folding absolute garbage to either a straddle or an open/raise, over and over and over again. I certainly was up for getting out of line from the blinds with a cheeky 3-bet or two, but I don't do that when every hand I see there is 93o and nobody at the table gives a **** about my super tight image.

I'm not complaining about the table; it was a great table. I hope to see many more of those, only under more favorable circumstances.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5 hours
(-$177.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$27.80

Running Poker Total: 593 hours, +$11611.00

Running Slot Total: 304 hours, +$9907.22

Grand Total: 897 hours, +$21518.22