Random Notes:
I've been having some formatting errors lately. Font sizes seem to be increasing and decreasing randomly, and when I do happen to look at this through IE 7, I see some strange error messages that don't appear in Firefox at all. If everyone will kindly move to Firefox I'd appreciate it bunches. Since that isn't likely to happen, I'm trying to remember to always copy and paste to Notepad, and then copy and paste from Notepad to Blogger. Strips all that juicy Microsoft Word formatting out. The only problem is that I have to go back and re-italicize and re-bold the things I want in italics and bold. Or not.
I apologize for not updating in a long time. I think I may try to make this my last apology. My time isn’t as available as it used to be and maybe I'm just not as interesting anymore. I‘ll still try to update as often as possible, but no more apologies for letting things lag for two or three weeks.
That being said, feel free to check my poker notes as I’ve been doing a little better with updates there. I’ve been playing a little more and I used some of my winnings to triple my library of poker books. This time around I more or less knew what was worth the money. I picked up Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, The Psychology of Poker, Zen and the Art of Poker, Super System I and II, and Hold’em for Advanced Players. All of these address one thing or another that I see as a weakness in my game. My only disappointment so far has been that many of them seem to primarily address limit play. I play almost exclusively no-limit, so I find a lot of the advice about how to play in certain scenarios for “two bets” or “three bets” to be a little irrelevant in a no-limit game. No-limit bettign structure is more about the odds you offer to your opponent or the odds he’s offering you, not that it matters in many of the local games. A lot of these games are about when to take the odds that the four or five maniacs around the table give you.
In the world of literature, one of the greatest living American writers died yesterday. Author of Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle and many other wonderful satirical novels, Kurt Vonnegut offered a view of the world, including the boundaries of time and space, that was different from anything I’d ever read before. I first read Slaughterhouse Five in honors class at UK in 1993. It changed the way I thought about everything, including life and death. Somewhat autobiographical, it tells the tale of an aging writer who witnessed the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. The protagonist is abducted by aliens, who teach him how to live life in a non-linear fashion, experiencing each part of his life in the order that he chooses, no longer bound by simple chronological order. It taught me that while our awareness is chronological, our existence doesn't necessarily have to be. Knowing that, I know that Kurt Vonnegut is still alive, for the last eighty-four years.
Unless you live in a cave, this won’t be the first place that you hear that all the charges have officially been dropped in the Duke lacrosse rape case. We’re in a Catch 22 in this country. It’s hard to get some women to report being raped, and that not only adds to the pain they already feel, but also allows rapists to continue their terrible acts, and probably to become even more aggressive after getting away with it. To overcome the reluctance on the part of the real victims to speak out, our legal system, as well as common journalism practices, offers shelter of a sort to alleged victims of rape. The legal standard for conviction of rape is really pretty low when you get right down to it. It isn’t implausible that a young woman, if she so desires can send a young man to prison for a very long time on the strength of her word. It is even more compelling when there is DNA evidence to back it up, no matter how the sample was obtained, if you know what I mean. When the rules against certain cross-examination techniques are figured in, it makes the legal climate for the accused look pretty grim. The abuse of these protections by a few women has caused many of us to look at many alleged rapes with a certain amount of skepticism. Few of us really believed Kobe was a rapist, and many, including her friend who was there, had serious doubts about the young woman in the Duke case from the very beginning. I can’t in good conscience advocate for tightened standards for prosecution, because I am afraid of the consequences in society if that were to occur; but We do need to start demanding prosecutorial discretion, and not make our prosecutors fear that if they don’t push a case beyond the logical limit that we will denigrate them for being too permissive. Until then, my advice to my son is just, “Stay away from crazy bitches!”
I've been having some formatting errors lately. Font sizes seem to be increasing and decreasing randomly, and when I do happen to look at this through IE 7, I see some strange error messages that don't appear in Firefox at all. If everyone will kindly move to Firefox I'd appreciate it bunches. Since that isn't likely to happen, I'm trying to remember to always copy and paste to Notepad, and then copy and paste from Notepad to Blogger. Strips all that juicy Microsoft Word formatting out. The only problem is that I have to go back and re-italicize and re-bold the things I want in italics and bold. Or not.
I apologize for not updating in a long time. I think I may try to make this my last apology. My time isn’t as available as it used to be and maybe I'm just not as interesting anymore. I‘ll still try to update as often as possible, but no more apologies for letting things lag for two or three weeks.
That being said, feel free to check my poker notes as I’ve been doing a little better with updates there. I’ve been playing a little more and I used some of my winnings to triple my library of poker books. This time around I more or less knew what was worth the money. I picked up Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, The Psychology of Poker, Zen and the Art of Poker, Super System I and II, and Hold’em for Advanced Players. All of these address one thing or another that I see as a weakness in my game. My only disappointment so far has been that many of them seem to primarily address limit play. I play almost exclusively no-limit, so I find a lot of the advice about how to play in certain scenarios for “two bets” or “three bets” to be a little irrelevant in a no-limit game. No-limit bettign structure is more about the odds you offer to your opponent or the odds he’s offering you, not that it matters in many of the local games. A lot of these games are about when to take the odds that the four or five maniacs around the table give you.
In the world of literature, one of the greatest living American writers died yesterday. Author of Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle and many other wonderful satirical novels, Kurt Vonnegut offered a view of the world, including the boundaries of time and space, that was different from anything I’d ever read before. I first read Slaughterhouse Five in honors class at UK in 1993. It changed the way I thought about everything, including life and death. Somewhat autobiographical, it tells the tale of an aging writer who witnessed the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. The protagonist is abducted by aliens, who teach him how to live life in a non-linear fashion, experiencing each part of his life in the order that he chooses, no longer bound by simple chronological order. It taught me that while our awareness is chronological, our existence doesn't necessarily have to be. Knowing that, I know that Kurt Vonnegut is still alive, for the last eighty-four years.
Unless you live in a cave, this won’t be the first place that you hear that all the charges have officially been dropped in the Duke lacrosse rape case. We’re in a Catch 22 in this country. It’s hard to get some women to report being raped, and that not only adds to the pain they already feel, but also allows rapists to continue their terrible acts, and probably to become even more aggressive after getting away with it. To overcome the reluctance on the part of the real victims to speak out, our legal system, as well as common journalism practices, offers shelter of a sort to alleged victims of rape. The legal standard for conviction of rape is really pretty low when you get right down to it. It isn’t implausible that a young woman, if she so desires can send a young man to prison for a very long time on the strength of her word. It is even more compelling when there is DNA evidence to back it up, no matter how the sample was obtained, if you know what I mean. When the rules against certain cross-examination techniques are figured in, it makes the legal climate for the accused look pretty grim. The abuse of these protections by a few women has caused many of us to look at many alleged rapes with a certain amount of skepticism. Few of us really believed Kobe was a rapist, and many, including her friend who was there, had serious doubts about the young woman in the Duke case from the very beginning. I can’t in good conscience advocate for tightened standards for prosecution, because I am afraid of the consequences in society if that were to occur; but We do need to start demanding prosecutorial discretion, and not make our prosecutors fear that if they don’t push a case beyond the logical limit that we will denigrate them for being too permissive. Until then, my advice to my son is just, “Stay away from crazy bitches!”
posted by Brinton
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