Gosh Golly Joe, That's A Goot One!

Credit where credit's due -- Sarah Palin performed admirably on Thursday given the ridiculously low setting of the bar. I couldn't limbo under that bar, but even my 42-year-old bad knees ass could jump over it.

Still, the popcorn went to waste; there was no trainwreck on either side. Joe Biden's main task was not to be seen as bullying Palin, and to take on McCain instead. To that end, mission accomplished. Palin's task was to stop the heavy bleeding inflicted by big bad Katie Couric, and come across as someone who could at least form a couple of coherent sentences in a row. Again, to that end, mission accomplished.

Now, I think I can confidently predict that you've pretty much heard the last of Palin until the election. Now, she can go to her strengths of charming the private fundraisers (such as the one in Denver yesterday), and certainly a fair number of canned teleprompter-fed stump speeches. But she seems to have been able to either shed the tag of abject trainwreck (or at least cross through the bar code), and would seem to no longer be the top story.

The Good Doctor Mondo and I saw Religulous on opening night last night. Pretty fuckin' blasphemous to just about every one of the world's largest faiths, and pretty fuckin' funny, to boot.



The greatest documentary ever? Hardly, especially in a screening room where they didn't have the sound properly surrounded, and brought up the lights part way with ten minutes left. And towards the last few minutes, Bill Maher because less observational and more preachy, if you will (how ironic) that people should not be religious. Well, I'm not, so that's no big deal, but I think he risks losing a lot of points he may have earned during the first hour. Still, this was more entertaining than any of Michael Moore's works, from where I sit.

However, from the pre-Religulous previews, I'm really jazzed to go see Milk in a few weeks. Fantastic cast, and the preview looks extremely promising. I'd say awards-worthy season has just about started. But seriously, wtf is up with Josh Brolin again having two big roles in award-worthy flicks in back-to-back years? Did anyone really see that coming?



The Good Doctor Mondo's studying for her licensure exam this weekend, so if I'm really really lucky and a good lil' Mondo, I may just be able to get some online poker in the books.

HPT Main Event is going on, but yeah, I never did get up to one of the qualifiers. Time to man up next time.

Weekend Roundup

Before going further, please take thee quickly to the inernational house of Hoyazo and congratulate him on his massive win in FullTilt's fitty/fitty last night for nearly $11 large. That's his third major cash in just a couple of weeks, and he must be over $20k in MTT cashes just this far in 2008 already. Dude, we're all proud of you.

Well, hell's bells, I shoulda gone to Vega$, given my Oscar picks. In a surprise, I managed to correctly predict six out of eight categories in my blog yesterday, and during the show, I correctly called Film Editing, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing on the fly. I coulda been a contenduh!

At any rate, the show was fun enough. I'm glad no cheeseball Disney song won this year, which saved me at least one trip to the bathroom to hurl at such sugarcheese overload. In a surprise, the 2nd biggest winner was The Bourne Ultimatum, which is a really cool thing indeed.

I'm writing short today, since I'm writing late today, but just wanted to update a bit of weekend pokering. The theme of the weekend was, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Much like last week, I was able to final table a Bodog guarantee tourmanent, yet my bankroll was pretty much neutral, since picking up cash elsewhere was difficult, at best. However, in a tribute to some other blogger's recent bloggery...



Dems Quads, Bitches.

But it gets better:



Dems Quad Bitches, Bitches -- and getting bet into, no less.

Unfortunately, aggro-Euro LaGork folded to my less-than-pot-size-raise:



This was in the PokerStars $3 rebuy, a tourney I love dearly, but one in which I barely profited today. I've recentely tried playing rebuys without an upfront rebuy, and waiting for semi-premium hands to double up early. Well, yesterday, that did not work, and I was in this tourney for four rebuys and an add-on. At least I survived into the $$$ this time, but going out shortly after the bubble, I only managed to barely cover my buy-ins for this tourney, as I went completely card dead in hour three, and sunk like Ashlee Simpson's recording career.

The Stars Sunday $100k donkafest was even worse, as my QQ got cracked by AKo very early, for most of my chips. And no, not by an A or a K, but by four miserable little spades, none of which were higher than an 7. But all was not lost, thanks to Bodog.

After crashing two $11 attempts to squeeze into the field for their $100k, I managed to stay alive in a $2k guarantee (that was over $3k, with about 320 runners), and nursed a short stack until the bubble. At that point, it was fly baby fly, double double toil and trouble, until the final table, where I sat down in 6th. Well, we get down to 7, with first paying about $800, when I see AKs in late position. I don't recall what blinds were, but i had about a 5th place stack at this point, and I went my normal 3x to 3.5x preflop raise. Clearly, this must have looked like a steal, because big blind, who had me covered by a small bit, decided to shove.

So I call.

He flips AQo, yay me, we're playing for what would be a 2nd place stack. And then the Q hits the flop, and I go home. Once again, the final tables are there for the taking, and I can't avoid having a 70/30 or better hand getting beat on the way to a likely Top 3 cash. And, apparentely, I'm going to need one of these mythical top threes to actually grow my roll. Someday, kemosabe, someday. In the meantime, I'll have to vicariously live through Hoy's cashes, I suppose.

Anyway, good luck on the virtual felt this week. I leave you with the three-outer that knocked me out of the $100k satellite, only about 10 spots from the seats. As you can see, it took a miracle turn to even make a three outer possible (the all-in was on the flop):

Oscar Overload

Yesterday was a zero poker content day for me yesterday. Why? Because of fun times at this:



For the second straight year, AMC Theaters ran a special promotion where, for $30 and 12 hours of your life, you could sit through all five Best Picture nominees in one sitting. And, for the second straight year, the Good Doctor Mondo and I stepped up to the batter's box for this marathon of movie madness.

The Good: The films. All of them. The only nominee we'd seen previous to this was Juno, a film the two of us already adore. My twee as fuck musical taste dovetails with the soundtrack nicely, we're both huge fans of cast members from Arrested Development days (and news of an A.D. movies makes us swoon), and yeah, pretentious yet cute dialog is a major turn on. So we got to see Juno again, awesome.

But more importantly, we got to see films we've been waiting months for this very event, to see. Having done so, I think we both would love to see Juno get Best Picture, but that seems unlikely. The Good Doctor Mondo would have voted for Atonement in a heartbeat, except for a glaring problem to be mention in The Bad. Michael Clayton was a fantastically acted and shot movie, with great pacing, and enough suspense to be riveting all the way to the end. However, the ending itself contained what, for me, was one really large hole of logic that required enough suspension of reality to make it not Best Picture material.

No Country For Old Men was was, simply, amazing. Of course, in my book, the Coen brothers can pretty much do no wrong, going all the way back to Blood Simple and The Hudsucker Proxy. I am an Achiever, after all -- even if only in my feeble mind. That said, No Country is so dark, so wantonly violent, and for some, so unresolved, that it may fall short in the voting, to the one film that seems objectively, the Best Picture of the Year. That, folks, is There Will Be Blood, a character study tour de force, in which Daniel Day-Lewis pretty much chews up half of California. The supporting actors are all stunningly talented, the cinematography is stark and really hints at the roughhewn nature of life in 1910's California, and Jonny Greenwood's score is just about perfect.

With that, I predict the following:
Best Picture - There Will Be Blood
Best Director - Joel & Ethan Coen
Best Actor - Daniel Day-Lewis
Best Actress - either Ellen Page or Julie Christie
Best Supporting Actor - Javier Bardem
Best Supporting Actress - Tilda Swinton (but I've not seen them all)
Best Original Screenplay - Diablo Cody (Juno)
Best Adapted Screenplay - No Country For Old Men

The Bad: This particular theater's print of Michael Clayton, or at least, the audio of same. The sound kept cutting from what sounded like blown speakers, to not, that the theater was forced to give us all two passes for any other movie, just to keep the natives from getting restless. I mean, tix to this were $30 a head, and no, we weren't settling for anything less than Best Picture-nominee sound.

Also bad, in Atonement, there were at least 4-5 separate occasions where boom mikes popped right down on the screen enough that the entire audience laughed. I won't say this ruined the movie, because, while it only looked like a period piece, it was in truth more a story of deception and deceit. The style of movie-making (costumes aside) was actually far more modern. However, that many obvious gaffes in simple filmaking automatically disqualify you from best anything. I mean, really. How much of the film did the nominating committee actually see? Obviously, not enough.

The Ugly: AMC Theaters. Last year, our $30 smackers apiece also got us popcorn and soda, with free refills. This year, only ONE refill on the soda. Cheap bastards. The profit margin on that pop is enormous, and we're there for 12 hours? C'mon.

That'll pretty much take care of that. Perhaps the neatest part of the whole event is that I'm much more charged up for the awards tonight, than I otherwise would have been. By all accounts, 2007 really was a great year for movies, and there are certainly deserving films not in the category this year, if only because of room.

Happy viewing!

Careful Man, There's A Book Here!...

...aka, this is what I am currently reading:




I'm A Lebowski, You're A Lebowski - Life, The Big Lebowski, and What Have You is an absolutely delightful book that exposes readers to the the cultural quirks that are Lebowski Fests (and their attendees), and introduces you to the man whose rug really did tie the room together. If you've enjoyed the movie The Big Lebowski even a little bit, it's a quick and enjoyable read, available at all the usual suspect locations, of course.

If you've enjoyed the movie as much or as often as myself, you are most likely already an Achiever. If not? Then get thee to your Netflix queue, now. As we are now in the ascendant cycle of what is pretty much biannual awards season critical fellating of the Brothers Coen, it seems appropriate to again celebrate not only what is it is about those talented, twisted fucks that makes them so entertaining, and their scripts so quoteable, but what also makes them so goddamn funny.

In the meantime, spend a few minutes today with the most Dude-like poker blogger* in the blogosphere today.




*Obviously, the very idea of tilt represents a failure to abide, but life really is like poker -- strikes and gutters, ups and downs, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous...