+1000. To add to the above : entertainment is such a MAJOR part of first world expenses, so I do not think it can be overstated, on the contrary! That said, so many (young) pros do not get it and act like the entitled/arrogant f**ks that they are suppose to cater to - imho, a pro should cater to the VIPs (in an authentic way) much like the casino does.

I also need to watch Poor Things, but did catch Dune 2 though

So I watched it now too cos late last evening, I was like f*that, that's not how it's gonna be, spoilers ahead

Sting played Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in the David Lynch version, so I took Butler as an improvement on that. I think that Lynch's Dune was underrated to a certain extent, especially after seeing the full version—the original screen release was butchered in editing to the point of incoherence. His was an ambitious and fascinating failure...but Sting? Nah.



We should also note that Kyle MacLachlan's and Timothée Chalamet's Pauls were both pretty boys, so we could see Feyd-Rautha as sort of a comparable foil. I think the Baron does make some remarks about Feyd's beauty in the book, but don't hold me to that.

I've started rereading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Both the book and the late author have become fraught with a lot of handwringing in recent years, and rightly so over several facets. I'll get to that business if I write a review when I finish the book. It is over 1000 pages long, with another 200+ pages of endnotes, so it's going to be weeks or months before I finish.

For now, I'd like you to take a look at how a master constructs sentences and paragraphs with dialog. This is from the first few pages of the book.

'The issues my office faces with the application materials on file from you, Hal, involve some test scores.' He glances down at a colorful sheet of standardized test scores in the trench his arms have made. 'The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test scores from you that are, as I'm sure you know and can explain, are, shall we say...subnormal.' I'm to explain.

It's clear that this really pretty sincere yellow Dean on the left is Admissions. And surely the little aviarian figure at right is Athletics, then, because the facial creases of the shaggy middle Dean are now pursed in a kind of distanced affront, an I'm-eating-something-that-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-I'm-drinking-along-with-it look that spells professionally Academic reservations. An uncomplicated loyalty to standards, then, at center. My uncle looks to Athletics as if puzzled. He shifts slightly in his chair.

The incongruity between Admissions's hand- and face-color is almost wild. '—verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we're comfortable with, as against a secondary-school transcript from the institution where both your mother and her brother are administrators—' reading directly out of the sheaf inside his arms' ellipse— 'that his past year, yes, had fallen off a bit, but by the word I mean "fallen off" to outstanding from three previous years of frankly incredible.'

'Off the charts.'

'Most institutions do not even have grades of A with multiple pluses after it,' says the Director of Composition, his expression impossible to interpret.

'This kind of...how shall I put it...incongruity,' Admissions says, his expression frank and concerned, 'I've got to tell you sends up a red flag of potential concern during the admissions process.'

'We thus invite you to explain the appearance of incongruity if not outright shenanigans.' Students has a tiny piping voice that's absurd coming out of a face this big.

I started tonight's poker session with a bluff that didn't go through.

Here Villain in MP is fishy but not terribad. Effective stack is around $300. MP limps, folds to me on the BTN, I make it $12 with 99, SB folds, BB calls, folds to MP, who calls.

Pot ($37) - three players

Flop: J84

BB checks, MP donks $20, I call on the BTN, BB folds.

Pot ($77) - heads up

Turn: 4

MP checks. Normally I should check back to get my 9s to showdown cheaply. I shouldn't bluff hands with showdown value, but the action so far gives MP a narrow and face-up range. He really should be leading with a boat or trips here on the turn, and he may never have limped 88 to begin with, so he may not have a boat. 44 might want to slowplay, but that's an exceedingly rare holding.

Likely he has an 8x or Jx, given the action. I bet $35 to get value from the 8x, or to set up a bluff on the river vs a J with a bad kicker. MP calls. He doesn't checkraise me, and this serves to further cap his range, as I think that J8 might have checkraised here, along with most of the other value holdings.

Pot ($147) - heads up

River: 2

MP bets $35

Blocker bet! He has a jack, bad kicker! A good player holding 44 might induce with this bet, but MP is not a good player. I raise to $125. I can have AJ or QQ-AA all day given the action.

Pot ($307) - heads up - MP tanks and tanks



MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6 hours
+$286.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
(-$31.41)

2024 Running Poker Total: 119 hours, +$1166.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 81 hours, +$3695.80

2024 Grand Total: 200 hours, +$4861.80

I did it. I put in my first 40 hour week of this year. Next week—that is, starting later today—I'm going to move from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days in order to save gas and wear and tear on my old Jeep. The same rules will apply: I can check out any time I like, but I cannot leave the casino until the 10-hour shift is over.

The slot floor yesterday was—swarming is not the best word; teeming is better, I'll go with that—teeming with slot grinders. Advantage slots are dead. Long live advantage slots. I'm still going to do my rounds on the floor, because that process yields higher EV than just the zero EV of goofing off on my phone while I wait to get on a poker table, and there are still a few occasional slot plays, and one of those may give up the Big Score one day.

The St. Patrick's Day poker promo runs later today. $100 for any club flush, and $2024 for any club straight flush. I will be open/raising and calling open/raises with hands like 63 and 74. Weeeeeeeee.



MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6 hours
+$100.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$5.75

2024 Running Poker Total: 125 hours, +$1266.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 83 hours, +$3701.55

2024 Grand Total: 208 hours, +$4967.55

I would love to reread this, but I don't think it will happen unless there is another plague and I am holed up in a mountain cabin.

C'mon clubs!

What's the relationship there? St. Patrick's walking stick like a club or something?

guessing three leaf clovers

Nice recovery, SJ, despite the failed bluff early. Re. that hand, you kinda already said it, but important to remember that usually you can only bluff a good player. Bad players are too call-happy, and should be value-bet to the ends of the earth.

Noteworthy, but not worth celebrating. An aside...I was a very good student growing up. Friends would take home report cards with one or two A's and be rewarded with a treat, a few bucks, or some other congratulatory prize. I would mention this to my parents while presenting a straight-A report card, and the usual response, always from my father, was something along the lines of "You're supposed to get A's, aren't you?" While the young me wasn't at all happy with this response, I do believe it taught me to do the right thing. or what needs to be done, not because of an anticipated reward, but because it's the right thing/what needs to be done.

Also, nice nod to the Eagles/Hotel California. I wonder where that will show up on the Top 500.

Just made the $100 club flush with 72 lol. Limped along on the BTN and hit the flush on the river like a true fish.

Say my name.

suitedhookdeuce

Heisenberg?

How do you eat an elephant?



The good thing is that DFW is easy to read compared to other 20th century literary giants. He occasionally sends me to the dictionary, but I always enjoy learning a new word.

Could be the head of a shillelagh.

Could be 75% of a four-leaf clover.

I believe that self-praise levels should correlate with personal difficulty levels. If you ask Gargamel to be nice to the Smurfs, and he somehow pulls it off, then he should be quite chuffed with himself, even though it would be plain easy for many of us to be kind to the Smurfs.

As for Hotel California, I would think that a committee voted for the top 500. If the realists within it prevail, it ought to be in the low 2-digits; if the snobs prevail, it might be in the 100s.

Nice. suitedsevenduck?

I am the one who chases.

My days of prematurely calling out the end of advantage slots are coming to a middle.



This wasn't the Big Score, but it was a nice one. I set it up by accidentally misclicking on the previous hand. At the time, the board only had one upcoming 3x multiplier on it, which is a marginal play 10-handed. You don't see it here, but it read "Next hand 3x" on the board. The correct play was to bet 5 coins per hand and collect whatever came down, and hope that something nice hit on the 3x hand. Betting only 5 coins per hand resets the screens to no multipliers for the next hand.

The game, however, makes it easy to misclick and accidentally max bet 10 coins per hand. That costs twice as much, but it potentially activates the multipliers for the next hand. I max bet the previous hand by accident and got the 10x multipliers you see on the board for this hand. Then I bumped it down to 5 coins and hit a nice hand. Easy game.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$130.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$758.39

2024 Running Poker Total: 133 hours, +$1396.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 85 hours, +$4459.94

2024 Grand Total: 218 hours, +$5855.94

Well said. Congrats on the 40 hr week!

This. I find Proust easy to read. I even find Joyce easy to read, but I have to read him out loud. If I don't, my head starts swimming.

For some inexplicable reason, my days of reading fiction have come to an end.

Then the non-fiction of the Bible should be next, old man.

At least that'll be a quick read.

Thanks bob_124!

I won't be rereading Proust's In Search of Lost Time any time soon. Those several hundred pages of him whining about his lost Albertine—after only a few pages of him barely acknowledging her while she was alive—wore me down.

I mean, I get it. Lost opportunities in romances have shaped the course of my life as well, but I've never been able to get more than 10 pages out of any of those before even I got bored with them.

I've read and enjoyed Joyce's The Dead and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but Ulysses has eluded me so far and Finnegan's Wake was just appalling gibberish. As always, your mileage may vary.

I read the bible. I read Job in the Hebrew Bible and I read the gospels of Mark and Thomas in the Christian Bible, but try as I may, I haven't found any non-fiction yet.

Stick with the Tao Te Ching and the Analects if you want non-fiction.

Rolling Stone's 472nd Greatest Album of All Time: Ctrl by SZA (2017)

SZA, aka Solána Imani Rowe, had already been a highly regarded songwriter for superstars like Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna before she wrote and performed her 2017 debut album Ctrl: a huge commercial success with 5 certified platinum singles on it. The album would go on to hit#3 on the Billboard top 200. Ctrl was also widely praised by critics across many publications, and it brought recognition and stardom to its young singer/songwriter.

As I've mentioned before, I have no pretentions towards being a professional critic. I don't possess the musical background for it. I only know what I enjoy and don't enjoy, and in the case of this album, I'll give you my CliffsNotes up front:



One of the functions of music over the past several thousand years has been to help young people along in their never-ending quest to get laid. I've been out of that demographic for several decades now, so I may not be equipped to judge an album on which the lyrics are largely about the libidinous surface of things: partying, hooking up, getting laid, cheating, and being cheated upon. I'll post a few lines from the track Doves in the Wind as an example.

Real n***** do not deserve pussy
Meanin' it's more, you see right through walls
Ain't talkin' about pussy
Meanin' you deserve the whole box of chocolates
Come at me

Forrest Gump had a lot goin' for him
Never without pussy
You know, Jenny almost gave it all up for him
Never even pushed for the pussy
Where's Forrest now when you need him?
Talk to me, talk to me, ay, ay, ay

As far as the music is concerned, SZA sings over a barely present, often atonal electronic musical backing, accompanied by a dull series of sparse drum machine tracks. According to the wiki, this is an example of the trap subgenre of hip-hop. If that's the case, then I'll consider myself duly warned about that category.

In a previous review I floated the opinion that the music in rap songs doesn't need to be dense and intricate, because the focus of the song is on the lyrics. SZA's Control, however, is not a rap album, and in any case its lyrics may not stand up to careful scrutiny by the poetic-minded. Again, a ton of critics loved this album, so I'm probably wrong about that.

SZA's voice on the record is good, possibly great, but the album doesn't put it to the test often enough. The songs are laid back and largely undemanding, and her voice is occasionally auto-tuned.

The Weekend is one song that allows SZA to show off some of her vocal chops, and it also has a musical track that isn't entirely characterless, so I'll post that.



Rolling Stone Says:

Thanks to SZA’s lyrics about insecurity, jealousy, loneliness, and her search for “lovin’ and licky,” this assured debut brought a new self-searching spirit to R&B. The tracks are gentle and erotic, but beneath the singer’s soft-grained style, there’s fierceness; in “Dove in the Wind,” she tells a lover she can easily replace him with a dildo. On “Love Galore,” a duet with Travis Scott that describes an ambivalent breakup, she makes clear the vulnerability beneath the bravado: “Gimme a paper towel, gimme another Valium.”

I don't know how much of a "self-searching spirit" I found on the album versus searching for someone new to hook up with, but okay.

Huh, SZA was just at Lollapalooza Buenos Aires this WE, which is literally 5 blocks from my house, thus why I have been attending it for the past 3 years. Lolla is obviously a far cry from what it was in the 90s and the EV is now getting 1-2 solid shows per year over the 3 day festival, not 5-6 like it was for the single day festival of yesteryears . Last year, this honor belonged to 21 Pilots and Jane's Addiction ; this year it was alas only Arcade Fire that popped : The Offspring sucked balls and I (fortunately?) did not attend SZA