No.

Life is short, and we are just now emerging from a quarter-century-long golden age of television. Plenty of series are still out there for you to love right away, without potentially wasting your time on stuff that you don't favor on the first go-round.

Same for me with The Expanse. I watched most of the first season but gave up at some point. Not sure why, it was not terrible, but at the same time there was nothing that really kept me watching it. Different folks, different strokes, I suppose....

No. Listen to Zeno.

The pace of the TV series is a little off-kilter, I think, due to the first book not ending until halfway through the second season. That may have thrown off the first season finale, which I don't remember, so maybe it wasn't particularly great.

In any case, art is subjective and there's a lot of it out there, so we don't have to spend our time on stuff that we don't enjoy.

He makes a good point, but I'm still never going to play poker while I'm contagious. It's not the right thing to do, given how conducive the design of the poker table—with its cramped seating, shared cards and chips, and automatic shuffler—is for spreading colds and flus.

Here I am again, at 4AM, with my sleep cycle gone completely off the rails.

I woke up at 1AM on Tuesday, after sleeping on and off for most of Monday, recovering from my cold, and I decided to stay up and play a Tuesday afternoon and evening session at the casino. I got home from that around 11PM, and I couldn't fall asleep until almost 3AM, having been awake for more than 24 hours. I woke up around 7AM on Wednesday, stayed up until 10AM, then fell asleep until 2:30 PM.

Then when did I fall asleep last night? I don't remember, but I woke up at 1AM again and here I am on Thursday in the wee hours. I will try to stay up and play an early session, and hope that the sleeping works out better than the last try.

I couldn't stay up. I went back to bed and slept on and off until around 5 PM, then I started my day and headed to the casino. I finished up around 3:30 AM, drove home, finished the last hour of 1955's East of Eden (James Dean was a major ham and tore up the scenery with more abandon than Nicolas Cage), and I went to bed around 7 AM.

Here I am up at 10:20 AM, looking to do a session on short sleep and to try to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Fortunately, there's free coffee, tea and soda at work.

My results over the last two workdays are below, and they're lackluster, to be sure, but at one point I was down more than $250 at both the poker and the slots, so grinding back to breakeven felt good, in contrast to say, being up $500 and then losing it all back, which would have resulted in the same tally but a different mindset. even though it shouldn't have.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 14 hours
+$11.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 7 hour
(-$14.60)

2024 Running Poker Total: 372 hours, +$4743.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 184 hours, +$6294.67

2024 Grand Total: 556 hours, +$11037.67

Don't play tired. Your reserves of patience are depleted and need to be restored with rest.

Signed,
The World's Worst Poker Player

Are you ok @suitedjustice?

One more day to complete July and unlock August.
Let's goooooo!!!

I'm okay, uberkuber. Thank you for asking!

I had another short, bad poker session. That and no high hands capped out another bad month, financially. But the fault, as always, was mine for not putting in enough hours.

All I can do is to try to make this month different.

My car failed its annual inspection a few days ago. Bad ball joint, apparently. I'm not supposed to drive it until I get it fixed, but the earliest I can get it fixed is this Monday.

I'm driving it. I need to put in some hours and book some wins.

I'll post my monthly update on the booze thing in a few minutes...



MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 4.5 hours
(-$415.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$4.54

2024 Running Poker Total: 376.5 hours, +$4328.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 186 hours, +$6299.21

2024 Grand Total: 562.5 hours, +$10627.21

The Dry 2024 Challenge Update

January: ✓
February: ✓
March: ✓
April: ✓
May: ✓
June: ✓
July: ✓
August: UNLOCKED

I did it. Once again I forgot about the getting down on my knees + higher power + yada yada, and I had to do all that just now. It's obvious by now that my "forgetting" every month is a passive-aggressive protest, but against whom? I had a moment where I thought you know, I don't have to do this prayer, nobody will know if I don't, but I did it anyway, for the same reason that I stay on the wagon. I would know, and this exercise is for me.

I ended the prayer to the higher power with "Okaythanksbuhbuy," just like I would end a quick phone sales conversation with an occasional vendor or customer.

Edit: I just tried to change "occasional" out with "low-tier", but I shelved that edit because I didn't want to denigrate the higher power. Lol.

Other than that, I find that I don't have anything new and pithy this month to report about my recovery journey.

Well, there is one thing. It has to do with the fact that I'm down three belt notches since the beginning of the year, almost four notches if I suck in the gut. What I'm going to talk about is quite disgusting, so I'll put it in a spoiler.

You've been warned. Don't come crying to me if you hit the spoiler and leave grossed out.

^Thats some good **** right there.

The thread that keeps on giving.

First, congratulations on July! Keep it going.

On the ball joint: Be really careful. There's a good reason you're told not to drive it.

If it breaks, the tire folds under your car, and you take an immediate and uncontrolled turn into oncoming traffic, or off the road, depending which side. If it seizes, that tire quits turning while the rest of them continue; nearly as bad results.

Of course, I'm not an expert, just a long-time listener to Car Talk.

Spoiler of the month and we're only the 1st!

#goodsh*t

Congrats on both these accounts friend

So that would be 30-35 lbs shaven off, amirite???

Thanks guys!


Thanks golddog! Yeah I enjoyed the Car Talk guys as well. And I remembered that my friend Will lost a wheel down in New London many years ago. Fortunately for him, he was just starting from a stop light and didn't get into a wreck. I texted him asking if it was a ball joint. It was that; so I'm staying home until mine is fixed on Monday.

Thanks Dubnjoy000! I don't have a scale, but I think it's in the 25 lb (11 kg) range. OTOH, I ate 1100 Calories worth of donuts this morning, so I need to cut that **** out.

I can see clearly now the rain is gone.

seatedjustice

I've been away from the blog awhile, and am still catching up. Came across this item re the ATV earlier today, and loved it! SJ, if you wrote anything like this when you were younger, you must have aced every English Composition course they offered at your high school. Any decent teacher should have encouraged you to pursue writing as a career.

Hoping that as I continue to catch up, you continue to be well.

I'm glad that you can; I'm still stumbling around.

Common outside of mint condition. Don't pay more than face value for it.

The standingjustice coin, OTOH, is far more rare and valuable.

Thanks for reading, TopGun in VA! I appreciate you.

I was very good at the five paragraph essay structure when I was young, and I cranked out a lot of unimaginative As and Bs at the very last minute.

West Side Story

My Jeep is still in the shop. It should be done today.

In the meantime, I've watched a few classic movies to pass the time. One of these was West Side Story, from 1961, a movie about tough Manhattan gangbangers singing, fighting, and doing ballet-style choreography. I rather enjoyed it.

Natalie Wood, in brownface, is fantastic as Maria, the princess-like waif sister of the Puerto Rican gang leader. The great actress Rita Moreno also stars, in her own face, as Maria's hardcase friend.

The Puerto Rican gang are the Sharks, and they are opposed by the Jets, the "White" gang. I use the scare quotes because the Jets are largely from Polish, Italian and Irish stock. A few generations beforehand, their people had to form gangs in order to counter discrimination and harassment from the city's WASP population, ala Scorsese's Gangs of New York.

In West Side Story, they're the oppressors of the new Puerto Rican immigrants. Puerto Rico is part of the USA, so they're not really immigrants, but tell that to any of the White characters.

This dynamic was enough to hold my attention, but then there's also the fact that West Side Story was written as an updated musical version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

I'm a sucker for R&J, always have been. I fell in love with it in high school, fell in love with the wordplay and the music of the words as spoken. I still read it every few years, and it holds up.

Maria is Juliet, and her Romeo is Tony, the sometime leader of the rival Jets, played by Richard Beymer, about whom I don't know anything. According to IMDB, he played Benjamin Horne on Twin Peaks, which is on my to-watch list, eventually.

The plot plays out in a neat modern parallel to Romeo and Juliet, except that there's a lot more singing and dancing, and that's fine. I can, with effort, suspend disbelief enough to enjoy musicals, if they're good, and this one is.

On top of the plot, the movie also addresses social issues in a manner that's quite frank for 1961. I've talked about the 1934-68 Hays code and what that entailed for movies during that era: no nudity, no profanity, no perversions (LGBTQ+ behavior being considered as such), no miscegenation (mixing of races), no illicit drug use, no mockery of Christianity, and so forth, and I've always been fascinated by how some of the 50s and 60s movies started to skirt around those art-killing restrictions.

West Side Story definitely takes a few shots at the old Hays bulwark. The "Gee Officer Krupke" number, for example, covers alcholism, domestic battery, delinquency, drug use, sex work, and trans family members, and how the various pillars of society fail to address these issues, and caps all that off with a hearty "Gee, Officer Krupke, Krup you!"



Somehow this number made it through the US censors, but the BBC in the UK cut the song from the movie's release.

Also, there is Anybodys, who at the time would have been called a tomboy. She dresses like a boy and wants to become a member of the Jets.



This is all very much in keeping with Shakespeare. Women couldn't be actors back then, so Shakespeare had boy actors playing girls and women. And he often had his female characters pretending to be men.

The movie Shakespeare in Love from 1998 played around with this idea by having Gwyneth Paltrow's character pretend to be a man so that she would be allowed to act in Shakespeare's company, where she ended up being a girl playing a boy playing a girl playing a boy.

Damn I love those meta levels. Just shoot 'em into my veins.

Nowadays, we would call Anybodys's character gender fluid, or nonbinary. That's all fine now, outside of a few Deep South school boards and several middle-aged White guys wearing Oakley sunglasses and making YouTube videos from the driver's seats of their Ford F-250s, and it was fine in Shakespeare's time, but in the mid-20th century, it was unusual to see trans folk who were played not just for a laugh, as in Some Like it Hot.

Anybodys takes a lot of crap from the boys. They call her ugly and tell her to wear a skirt, but she gives it right back to them in spades, so it's a neat character study, coming out of that time.

So that's West Side Story. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I would recommend it. I mean, if you just can't get into musicals, then you might not like it, but otherwise it's worth a watch.

Two More Movies

Hamlet (1948)

The 1948 film version of Hamlet was a Lawrence Olivier joint. He directed the minimalist production, and he starred as a 40-year-old version of the sometime college student, fatal procrastinator, and heir to the Danish throne, Hamlet.

To say that Olivier pulled it off would be a massive understatement. He and the movie were showered with Oscar nominations, and he shipped the Best Picture and Best Actor awards, along with Best Art/Set Design and Best Costume Design.

Seeing as how I seem to mention Hamlet quite a bit in this blog, I was surprised that I hadn't yet seen Olivier's version until just a few days ago, given that it's reputed to be the best.

I still have a warm place in my heart for Michael Almereyda's postmodern Gen-X version of Hamlet from 2000, starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Julia Stiles and Bill Murray (it's great!), but Olivier simply put on a tour de force back in '48, one that made and sustained his towering reputation over the rest of his life.

Not much else to say about the movie, except that Olivier wrote out two of my favorite minor characters: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's dudebro college buddies and unwitting patsies, whom he condemns to death in place of himself, thwarting his uncle's murder plot.

I liked those guys. Like more than a few of Shakespeare's comic relief characters, they were simultaneously witty and stupid, which is hard to pull off.

The playwright Tom Stoppard liked them so much that he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an excellent play wherein the two dudes are the main characters, and Hamlet's story goes on, but gets pushed far into the background.



Olivier cut them, presumably to keep the movie under 3 hours, as the play runs a bit longer than that on average. And the thing is: it worked! Olivier presumed to give the legendary William Shakespeare the equivalent of notes, and he cut out two of his beloved characters, and by God it worked. It was kind of a revelation to me that the movie really didn't need them, and that was a feather in Olivier's cap to recognize that.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

This one was on my bucket list because I hadn't yet seen a John Cassavetes movie, and he was known to be one of the great 1970s Auteur Directors, and I tend to like those guys a lot.

The movie stars Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands, and I did not make it through its 2 hour and 35 minute running time. I checked out after an hour and 45 minutes, around when Peter Falk's husband decides that it would be a good idea to throw a huge loud party in his small house to celebrate his wife (played by Gena Rowlands) coming home directly from a month's-long involuntary stay at a mental institution.

WTF?

I hated those two characters. It didn't help that Peter Falk was so deeply ingrained in my mind as Columbo that I couldn't help but think of his character as Evil Columbo, and Gena Rowlands did quite an excellent job of playing a character whom I couldn't be in a room with for more than 20 seconds.

After I bailed on A Woman Under the Influence , I tracked down Roger Ebert's (very positive) review of the movie. He talked about how Cassavetes's characters are constantly making noise and fomenting chaos in order to stave off existential dread.

That makes sense, but I couldn't stand watching it in practice. I felt my energy being drained out within the first half hour. There's an old saying that goes: you get on my last nerve, and those characters did that to the point where I had to sign off.

while you've been Jeepless, I visited a few friends in Great Bearington and we drove over to MGM Springfield for a few sessions. If I was condemned to grind somewhere, it seems to me like a nice place to log hours. We had a fun time.

Hope you have a smooth return to the felt!

Thanks bob_124! I'm glad that you had fun. I'll be there tomorrow, ~2 PM-11 PM, if you're still in the neighborhood.

Belay that. I'm not going today. I still haven't gotten my sleep together. I woke up yesterday at 11AM, stayed up all day and fell asleep at 10PM., So far, so good. But then I woke up at 1AM and couldn't get back to sleep until 6AM. Woke up two hours later at 8AM, and couldn't go back to sleep.

I'm a basket case on this sleep business. I'm going to hit the pharmacy today and try some OTC Melatonin. Hopefully that will straighten me out.