I couldn't get through the second episode of The Wire.

I couldn’t get through the first chapter of Genesis without throwing up!

Always the contrarian. Prolly comes from standing at an obtuse angle relative to most people.

I'll give you the cliffs for the next few chapters. Adam and Eve were cancelled so hard that all of us descendants are still guilty of their eternal sin of learning right from wrong. The inbred issue from the incest of their children begat several generations of freaks until everyone was cancelled with extreme prejudice, except for Noah and his family, who at least brought some in-laws along to tamp down on the incest...but only for a generation—you're still looking at cousins on cousins.

Also, don't eat shrimp or owls, don't plant two or more different kinds of seeds in a field, don't mix fabrics, and women are ritually unclean when they menstruate. And there are a few guidelines about how to treat your slaves.

I admit that the cliffs kind of make it look bad.

I'll try to think of something good. Um, some people lived to be like 800 years old. That's cool. There were giants, too. But that part may have been a mistranslation.

Today I realized that I'd never seen Dumb & Dumber, the Farrelly Brothers' 1994 classic, their first movie.

I've seen and enjoyed their next two films: Kingpin and There's Something About Mary, so I figured that it was fairly mandatory for me to watch Dumb and Dumber.

It was fun. I laughed out loud in a few spots, though it took me a while to adjust to the pure slapstick theme of the movie. The writing and the plot were nothing special, but that wasn't the point. The point was to put Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels into almost every scene and to let them work their magic.

I had to put myself into a Three Stooges mood to properly appreciate Dumb and Dumber. You don't go looking for plot and writing in the Stooges' shorts and films, you just laugh while you watch them be the Stooges. Same thing for Carey and Daniels in Dumb and Dumber. In fact, the Farrellys would go on to make their own Three Stooges movie. I'd be willing to see that some day.

There were a few gay jokes in Dumb and Dumber that wouldn't make the cut nowadays, but they were par for the course back in the 90s, so it's not particularly fair to retcon today's standards on to them, so I won't belabor the point.

Dumb and Dumber was probably the last movie from my lifespan that nearly everyone else has seen but I had not yet seen. Maybe Transformers qualifies. Has everyone seen Transformers? It looks really dumb, but not in a good way. Anyways, now I'll have to start looking at top 100 lists and whatnot for classics that I've missed.

Oooh, one more thing...

Tomorrow, for Valentine's Day, MGM is paying $100 for every heart flush and $2024 for every heart straight flush, so I expect to be putting hands like Q2 and 73 into most everyone's ranges.

I wonder: if tomorrow I open 53 on the button for $12, and Villain in the SB 3-bets to $45 with a $200 effective stack, should I continue for the promo? I wouldn't shove on anyone except for a reg who knows how to 3-bet bluff/fold in that spot.

What did you think of the soundtrack of Dumb and Dumber? I liked it a lot. I haven't seen Transformers, by the way.

If you like keeping track of things, this website might be just for you. It also has tons of movie lists.

That is such a cute promo!

I got a bag of chocolates for tonight's bar poker league. Everyone who makes a heart flush gets one. While quantities last.

We don't have quite the resources of MGM.

Hope you get a nice one, SJ!

I did like the soundtrack for Dumb and Dumber, but I forgot to mention it in the post. A lot of good 90s alternative songs in it plus some Roy Orbison and Todd Rundgren. And of course the Crash Test Dummies' Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was perfect for that movie.

Thanks for the movie link!

Sweet promo, golddog! I'd like to play in that game some day.

We'll have room for you if you're ever out this way!

Thanks brother!

Well, I didn't make the bonus for Valentine's day. I wasn't dealt many heart-suited hands at all. I did cold call an EP $10 open and an MP call from my spot on the BTN with Q5, which was a first for me in all the hundreds of thousands of hands I've played online and live.

I have occasionally 3-bet squeezed a Qxs or Jxs with a low x from the BTN or SB, in rare and specific circumstances, but I've never flatted. In this case, the SB came along and 4 of us saw a ragged flop with one , giving me a backdoor flush draw to the $100 promo and nothing else at all. SB checked, EP bet $15, MP shoved for $100 and I turbo-mucked. Turn was a and river was a brick for no flush.

I did, however, manage to pick off two bluffs, this time with better bluff-catchers than fourth pair, so I had a good night in spite of bricking on the promo.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5 hours
+$359.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 1 hour
+$19.60

2024 Running Poker Total: 66.5 hours, +$1048.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 48 hours, +$2929.30

2024 Grand Total: 114.5 hours, +$3977.30

Between two tables, we only managed to find two heart flushes. They were on the same hand. Sigh.

It looks good on paper, but there was only one heart flush on my table in 5 hours. The $4/$8 limit table had three in the same hand, and the promotion was set up so it actually paid all three players, so that was nice for them.

I assume that everyone at the limit table was playing every suited heart hand from every position. At $1/$2, I folded K4 and T5 from UTG. I probably could have limped them at a normal $1/$2 table, and it wouldn't have been a terrible play given the promo, but we had a "fun" player who was raising most limps, and I don't like limping in general.

Rolling Stone's 474th Greatest Album of All Time: #1 Record by Big Star (1972)

Big Star is the 27th band or artist I've covered so far in this Rolling Stone Top 500 project, and from that list they are the 7th band or artist with whom I wasn't initially familiar, which does a lot to affirm that I'm not a professional music critic. I'm just a guy who's working on a fun project.

Here is the track listing from the first non-children's album that I owned. It was called K-Tel Presents: Music Express. My parents gave it to me on my 6th birthday, along with my first record player.



K-Tel was a record company who bought the rights to both standard and novelty hits soon after they'd fallen off the charts, making them into compilation records, which they then advertised via infomercials, and sold through the mail. They also sold "as seen on TV" type consumer products like the Veg-O-Matic.

The songs on K-Tel albums were usually hits but not the top tier hits. I imagine that price was a factor in their selection. The songs were catchy but mostly not for the ages. The company still exists and owns the rights to a great number of songs, which they license on digital platforms.

I mention this because I feel that most of the songs from Big Star's debut: #1 Record, could probably fit nicely on a 1970s K-Tel album, meaning that the songs were groovy enough in their own time, but weren't for the ages.

A number of real music critics disagree with my opinion. They know that many reviewers at the time loved the album when it came out, and they feel that #1 Record deserved to live up to its name, and that Big Star should have been a band whose name everybody knew. They know that Big Star's label, Stax Records, completely dropped the ball on #1 Record's distribution, and the album did not hit the shelves in any real numbers, and thus it died an untimely and tragic death.

To all this I say eh, I didn't really love #1 Record. To me, it's very much of its time—very 70s—like Partridge Family 70s.



If you're not an old coot like me, then I'll tell you that the Partridge Family was a TV show featuring a fictional family of travelling musicians who played catchy pop tunes that mostly sound dated nowadays. Their show aired right after another family show called The Brady Bunch, and they likely inspired the writers for the Bradys to explore their own musical storylines.



Back to #1 Album: It turns out that I did recognize one of the songs on the LP, and it's somewhat of a piece with this review.



If you watched television in the 00's, you'll likely know that this song was used as the intro to a hit show about the 70s.



Watch The Sunrise is another track that I liked. It has some fine guitar strumming, and it could sit on virtually any 90s grunge album as "the soft, soulful, tuneful number."



If that doesn't mesh with my assertion that Big Star is stuck in the 70s, you should remember that a lot of grunge bands had a hardon wistful nostalgia for that decade.

I struggled to find a third song on the album that I liked enough to post. None of the songs on the album are bad, they're just not outstanding, in my opinion. As always, your mileage may vary.

Rolling Stone Says

Alex Chilton and Chris Bell were the Memphis whiz kids at the heart of Big Star. They mixed British Invasion pop finesse with all-American hard rock, from the surging “Feel” to the acoustic heartbreaker “Thirteen.” Big Star didn’t sell many records but did become a crucial inspiration to underdogs like R.E.M., the Replacements, and Elliott Smith. As Chilton said later, “If you only press up a hundred copies of a record, then eventually it will find its way to the hundred people in the world who want it the most.”

I like a few songs from R.E.M., but you might have noticed that they sort of disappeared off the cultural radar 10 or 15 years ago, after being one of the biggest bands in the world during their heyday. I don't even know if I like the Replacements or Elliot Smith yet. I know that they're in the Cool Kids category, so we'll see...

I forgot how funky and cool this song is.

I remember K-Tel, especially their novelty records.

There was an 80s Austin soul band whose name I loved: Ernie Sky and the K-Tels.

Several songs for the ages on this list imho. "Long Train Runnin'", "Mandy" (a guilty pleasure of mine ), "Get Down Tonight"...

...and this one, apparently. I love it!

I love that one! Never heard it before. My parents did get me a K-Tel novelty album that year as well. I remember that it had Chuck Berry's My Ding A Ling on it.



At age 6, I sort of understood the Ding A Ling reference, but it would be a few years before I grasped—so to speak—the playing with it aspect.

That's a great band name. Damn.

My favorite band name is a 4-dimensional joke. Back in the 90s, they were Young Neil and the Vipers. They're still around today, but now they're just Neil and the Vipers.

My guilty pleasure is Neil Diamond. Kentucky Woman was apparently a favorite of mine back when I was a toddler. I was told that I would bust out dancing whenever it came on the radio.

If anyone has the Malwarebytes Browser Guard Extension for Chrome, it's developed a bug recently where it autoplays all of the embedded YouTube videos on any page. I do 100 posts per page and had a hell of a cacophony on my hands before I tracked down the bug.

Let's talk about poker. I haven't been playing. 5 hours in the last two weeks is a big problem, especially because they were losing hours.

Starting Sunday, I'm doing a 40 hour weekly challenge. 8 hours a day, poker and/or slots, on Sun, Mon, Wed, Fri and Sat. I will check in here at the end of each work day. I'm having trouble being my own boss; that's what caused my failure in Las Vegas. You, gentle reader, may help with that role here in this thread; if you wish, but I'll tell you in advance that the pay is lousy.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5.5 hours
(-$625.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$3.78

2024 Running Poker Total: 72 hours, +$423.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 50 hours, +$2933.08

2024 Grand Total: 122 hours, +$3356.08

Do you still poker?

We shall see, boss.