The governmental shocker

I've never given or received "the shocker," but if i were to imagine what it would feel like, it would be similar to the way i felt when Turbo Tax produced the final number for my taxes...and it was a non-refund (read- payment) to the federal and state government over $9000. That's a proverbial kick in the jimmy...

So I did my taxes and I owe the man over 9K. Wow. Note to others...if you gamble, have them take out MUCH MORE than the recommended amount of money they ask of you. there's not a lot that will take the wind out of your sails than realizing that once you've filled out your information on Turbo Tax, and you look up in the corner for the refund numbers (in the green) and instead see red numbers adding up over $9000. What to do, what to do, what to do. Well, how about a trip to Vegas? Does this make me a degenerate gambler (some, well, most would say I'm a degenerate anyway, gambling notwithstanding)? Probably. But of the many many lessons I've learned in is it is necessary to live in the moment, to enjoy what life has to offer, and to be thankful for all given situations...i'm thankful the man doesn't need all of his cream on April 15, I'm thankful that my heart kept beating during the entire ordeal, I'm thankful for California's very liberal medical marijuana laws (for all of the blind AIDS patients out there that need the compassion), I'm thankful I have working vehicle, some Marriott points and a desire to see the southwest, and most of all, I'm thankful the city of Las Vegas allows you to play poker 24/7.

When i go to Vegas, I try to make a point of going to at least one top tier eatery while in the city that never sleeps. I actually, in my ideal world, would be able to come down once a year, where i intend on doing nothing but visiting the fine dining establishments. It's literally like being able to take a trip around the world in six miles (the distance between the Sahara and the Mandalay Bay, wouldn't have believed it but for the cabbie and the meter both indicated it was 6 miles)...makes up for the copious amount of (usually free or really expensive) alcohol and generally bad living i try to make a habit when i'm in town. Usually, the top tier eatery stops and ends at Delmonico, an Emeril joint brought from the streets of the Big Easy to the bottom floor of the Venetian, a place that seems to make a steak that aligns with the senses, and at the end, seems to make the world just a little bit better. I have been told that anybody that really enjoys food needs to go to Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill, described as "an orgasm in your mouth," which didn't make ME want to dine there, but i have been assured the food is amazing, so I will be giving it a try, even though me and spice go together like black people and mayonaise.

dd

taxing it like the government

I really enjoy stand-up comedy. every time i get a chance to hear some stand-up, i make a concerted effort to seek it out. I think this has a lot to do with enjoying humor, and the execution of good humor is wonderful. I was in Las Vegas over Labor Day weekend to see Chris Rock, and if you get the chance, you would be cheating yourself if you don't get a chance to see him live, in the same way people need to see The Roots, Bruce Springsteen and Garth Brooks play live (best three live shows i've seen, and it's not that close, in reverse order, but i couldn't bring myself to download a picture of Garth Brooks)




i'm watching the news and there's a story about the debut of the president's new dog. When this was initially made a story during the election, it was cute, but it was cute in that "cool, now i don't have to hear that again," kind of way. it seems like we may be running out of actual news to report...i know, i have heard of a "feature" story, but this has been a feature story for the last 6 months. There's even a pictire of the dog on TV right now, with a hawaiian lei on, which makes me hate dogs, leis, and Hawaii simultaneously...


i know the economy is in the toilet, i know you can't talk about pirates forever, although at this point, i'm not sure if this is true or not, and there are wars on multiple fronts. I also understand sometimes we need to think about better things, it's the functional purpose of feature stories in the news. But the presidential dog? The debut of the presidential dog? Are things that bad? If so, just let me sulk on my own..

The United States has just eased travel restrictions to Cuba. Nice. I can get my tickets to go to Havana and see Guantanamo Bay upclose and personal (hopefully not that upclose and personal)...maybe we can stop crushing the Cuban people and lift sanctions. Someday, i'll rant about sanctions, but for today, I'll just give Obama a big thumbs up for at least moving in the right direction.

music...it's tax season, so i have a song for everyone...Nicolay and Supastition

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ReBuCAjo0E

But it's April 13, taxes are due in the next 48 hours, which means i actually have to DO them tomorrow, as opposed to looking at them. You ever notice when you think you're gonna owe taxes, you have no real desire to file, but if you think you're getting a refund, you file that shit immediately so you can take your return to the check cashing place, as to not wait for your loot for even one more second? That may just be me, but i doubt it. i talked to a friend of mine, who has managed to never pay federal income tax, and i wish him luck. i don't know much, but i do know when the man needs to get his loot, he's gonna get his loot, even if it means you can't eat. Once my taxes are done, then the last of my obligations will be dealt with and i can leave for other pastures, as i can't imagine i'll find many pastures greener than the ones i currently have. but if you didn't go on vacation, and you just stayed home, you'd find yourself in the same rut that the vacation is supposed to resolve. I know there is nothing stopping me from doing my taxes right now, other than i write as a reason and or means to avoid things i should rather be doing, but have already decided to put off until tomorrow- only problem is i only have tomorrow to procrastinate.

more later...

Vacation Hating

I have a catch-22 that i have to deal with. I hate. for those who do not know what hating is, please feel free to watch a little of one the smartest shows to hit the TV airwaves, as well as give a solid snapshot on the topic at hand...

http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=24419

but back to the topic at hand. I hate. But i love hating. it's one of the largest quandries in my life, how to deal with the burning contradiction of loving hating. I find myself in all kinds of interactions everyday, at the store and even at work, i find myself almost looking for interactions where a little good spirited hatred can rear it's ugly head. I'm convinced one of the main reasons i enjoy the game of poker as much as i do is beacuse it allows me to just hate without any regard for human life or safety. This is especially true with the online game, which i hadn't played in over 40 days, and found out it's a lot like playing baseball- you can't just take a month off without even swinging a bat and get in there and start raking the ball all over the field. more likely, you'll hit the ball like Michael Jordan, Mario Mendoza or any other dude that can't hit well enough to stay in the league legitimately. To quote one of my favorite bands, Binary Star, "Rodney King never felt a beat like this." My game was not tight tonight, which is probably for the better, as i need to step my game up to get ready for the trip to Vegas...

...I am convinced my boy NCP is correct, that Facebook may be the most effective timesuck in society today. I'm on vacation (did i mention i don't have to work tomorrow- they should have never gave us niggas money!!) so i have some free time, and i decided to see what all the hype was about Facebook. It's cooler than i thought it would be, as it's allowed me a chance to catch up with people i would never have thought to contact...which begs the question...why am i getting in contact/acception contact with people i haven't seen in 10-15 years, and have been pretty much OK with not knowing about them? If i didn't need to know about you three weeks ago, why do i need to know now? Because I'm a voyeur. Not the creepy kind that looks into your window without your knowledge, but the kind of person that enjoys watching people and the interaction of people. I used to enjoy going to dance clubs and watch guys and gals work, and found particular enjoyment in their failure, which gets back to the hating thing. I don't really enjoy reality TV, which is like voyeurism with creative editing, but true voyeurism, where people can't fake it, is wonderful to view. Realtime interactions between people and watching the reactions from comments is really interesting to me, so Facebook just gives me another avenue to show the world how much of a dork i am (i played pool as a physics experiment, i play poker because the math is really easy to figure out for me, etc). i will preface this Facebook rant with saying that it allowed to find a couple of good friend of mine from back in the day (the Tejas days) and so i can't totally front. Long John Long and PSim are two guys I'm glad i got a chance to re-find, so it's all good. Both of them are into some solid hip-hop, and i still have the company flow CD PSim repped up...

i will make an attempt to give you a little of my musical snapshots every couple of posts, and i will start it off with the Pharcyde, with a little "Runnin'"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hZKN4AZ63g

more later...
DD

poker in the rear

i decided this year to actually try to give up something i actually enjoy and would have to work to give up during Lent- the original decision was to give up poker entierly, and i realized although that would have been possible, it was merely overkill, since over 95% of the poker i play is online. So for Lent this year, i gave up online poker for the 40 days. it wasn't as hard as i thought it would be, as i have been really busy doing my job in the last 40 days, and it always seemed the poker i was playing wasn't the theraputic, enjoyable poker that makes me happy, but much more the grinding, plodding multi-tasking poker that 1) guarantees you're going to lose your loot- no focus, no winning, and 2) you begin to dread playing, because the thing you enjoy is being tainted by the unpleasentries you bring from the outside world. the thing i enjoy about poker is it allows you to place all your focus on the game, and to block the rest of the outside world and just play poker. The reason i like tournament play is it allows me to play as aggressively as i would like to, but limits the amount of money i can lose in a given situatuon- it does also check how much i can win in a given situation as well, but that seems to be much less my concern. i would actually write more, but i need to hit the tables, and i'm not good enough to do multi-tasking, so here i willl depart.

DD

Vegas, Old Balling

Well, let's get a couple of things out in the open...first of all, I like to gamble, a lot. the game of preference is poker, but let's not kid ourselves, I've lost money at all kinds of tables in all sorts of locations, and recently, the table that has been taking my loot has been the craps table. It is for this reason that i will be taking a trip to Las Vegas next weekend. In one of my earlier posts, i spoke of a trip to Vegas, and I would love to speak in great detail about that experience, but they made me sign some sort of contract, indicating that "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." They were pretty indignant about it, but i'm pretty sure the contract i signed was only about the last Vegas experience...well there was no non-disclosure agreement penalty, so fuck it...

so my boy J and i are sitting in the hotel bar in the Planet Hollywood casino, having a couple of beers and enjoying the evening. As we sit there, J is approached by a young woman, who seems to have decided that J has caught her fancy...we sit down together, enjoy our beverages and conversation when it moves on to what brings us to Vegas, to which both of us respond "to have a great time." Not very specific. So she asks us if "we're up to have a good time together?" Preface 1: I'm somewhat of a Vegas veteran, with a pretty good eye for professionals. I see right through this, and tell the young lady "I think i'm gonna pass." Preface 2: my friend J is not a Vegas savvy kind of guy. He's a great guy, but he's never been to Vegas, so it just seems quite natural to him that a woman would make the hard sell...so they leave together, and i go back to my hotel...the 4:37am message on my voicemail is still the best Vegas message I've ever gotten...and i will choose to not paraphrase...

"dude, sorry i left you to hang out with that trick...i was under the impression i was going to get my dick sucked for free!"

I still laugh when listen to it. i erase almost all of my voicemails, as there's no need once the message has been listened to. that being said, i still listen to that message every couple of days, as it not only brings a smile to my face, but it actually makes me laugh the same way i did the first time i listened to it...

...this time when i'm in LV, there will be a conference going on in Vegas in my field of employment. I've been to LV under these circumstances on a couple of occasion, and it has been less entertaining than one might have imagined. but it is Vegas, and even when people end up being flakes, it seems to somehow be not that big of a deal, maybe its the free booze, but i don't think so. I imagine some of the foolios i'd like to chill with will be there, and i will chill with them for some block of time, but it provides me one of the few chances i have all year to play A TON of tournament poker, as LV is one of the few places in the world, where you can play multiple tournaments in a day (Reno has @ 3 a day, O'Shea's has 3 in a day, and there are 25+ more rooms, almost all offering tournaments almost every day), be the foodie I like being but have a hard time dropping $300 on a dinner in my home town, and live the bright lights big city life. I'll get to chill with my man, big Jim, and have a couple of cold frosty ones and remember times past and pleasent, and that's but one of a variety of people i'll get a chance to see, some of which i have not even considered...

...well, it's Masters weekend. The only weekend anyone ever mentions Martha Burk. The weekend everyone assumes Tiger Woods will pick up another one of those really ugly fucking green jackets (clearly, they didn't assume a black man would win one of those things, since they still don't want a nigga at Augusta National). But this isn't about Tiger Woods, or Greg Norman, who choked on more cock than in a Lexington Steele porno in the 1987 Masters, getting run down by a combination of his failures and the incredible run of Larry Mize...who is back...like the the Governator. As a snapshot of the world of 1987, i was a junior in high school, listening to the Beastie Boys, the Simpsons would appear on the Tracy Ullman Show two Sundays later, and Tiger Woods had not turned 12 years old yet. To give you an idea of how well Larry Mize had been playing, he hadn't made the cut in a major this decade- this decade ENDS in like 8 months. It does my heart good to see an old man getting it done, as I am reminded constantly how old I am (if you need a reminder of how old you really are, spend some time with high school kids, as they have the right combination of youth and insensitivity to say some cold blooded shit). I'm not a really big golf fan, and if i was gonna bet on this, I'd put my money against the old man, but that doesn't mean i won't be rooting for Larry Mize to run the table and win the Masters, and slip his old ass arms into that Green Jacket (a random fact- they don't keep the jacket, they just have it for a year and bring it back before the first round).

There's always more later...

Spring MF Break

Well, here we are at the spring break, the time for high school teachers all across America to refuel and get ready for the last leg of the school year. The kids are all looking at their watches, hoping time would actually move as fast as they need it to, and teachers standing in front of the room pretending they don't want it all to end, but quietly wishing, just like their students. All I know is I need to do something to make my break a memorable and reinvigorating one...it's good to be home with nothing to do.

As i have said before, i am a teacher, and teaching is a great career, with many opportunities to give back to community, and watching the youth of America grow is also a strong positive. However, teachers have these professional development in-service days. you all remember these days as students as the random days off that never seemed to make any sense. It's a day for teachers to get together and fellowship, share ideas, and just keep in touch with each other. I would prefer we do these on Friday evenings, after work, and over beers, but I am apparently a simple caveman, and new-fangled technology frightens me. But instead, we went to an incredible site, listened to great speakers, ate wonderful food (i heard, i had to leave for lunch to run a job-related errand i could have done if we had actually gone to work), and listened to a top notch choir. That being said, I'd still have rather watched Las Vegas, a show I'm at best ambiviolent towards.

i've gotta rep my boys- steve, erik and tribble are three of my boys, and their blog is a place where a true hater needs to check everyday...they give fresh, sharp takes on a variety of topics..how else would i know the story of alfie patton? the website is...

http://2oldformaxim.wordpress.com/

But now it's Friday, I have a job and I still don't got shit to do (if you don't catch the reference, you need to watch Ice Cube movies), so I write, and chill with my man, Sonny Bono (I enjoy '70's music). What's there to talk about today...Pirates..and not the kind Hal Sparks is concerned with...really?!? Fucking pirates?!? Wow. It's not that I'm surprised with the idea that pirates exist, or that they even commandeer boats. Don't Americans read the news? I've been reading about pirate abductions for years (it does indicate that i need to get out more often), and the eastern coast of Africa has been a hotbed for stolen boats. What in the fuck was an American captain doing there? Now we're headed towards a showdown between a few pirate ships with 50 hostages they intend on using as human shields, with US Navy warships headed towards a confrontation that seems to have no peaceful, reasonable end. I'm totally unwilling to take a position on whether or not the US should be involved in a military confrontation with (really?!?) pirates...it's also the beginning of baseball season, and it reminds me that sometimes having it pretty phat means i have to make some concessions that sting a little. I'm a huge sports fan, and i root midwest, MN across the board. The new baseball season, as the new basketball season reminds me of my double edged sword...i love hi-def television, but i live in a wonderful apartment that's only flaw is that it faces north...those of you that know the satellite world know the dish has to be able to face the southern sky, and since my apartment does not have a window that faces south, there's no satellite at the spot. this only sucks because although i can watch my teams, i can't watch them in hi-definition, which means i can't really enjoy watching them at all (i have become spoiled, and i'm ok with it). so i can't follow my twins like i want to, in hi-def like i could i i had the dish...i live in one of the tightest apartments i can imagine for quite a reasonable rate in this town, spacious, solidly located, in a good neighborhood where it seems none of my kids live (a plus 2.5 by itself) and the only disad is no satellite dish...i'm ok with it, although it seems like there's a rant about this twice a season.

I'm playing around with an online radio station...it's my station, where i can play my music, what i want and when i want, and other people can listen to it if they choose. at some point in time, i will create a weekly schedule, so people can listen to the music that suits them best...its' called "Grammatical Chaos Presents Three Fists and a Tip." If you have to ask what that's about, you need to read White Boy Shuffle, by Paul Beatty, and it'll all make more sense. and if it doesn't then i got nothing for you. But I digress, if you're looking for my station online, look for me at

http://10.0.1.195:8000/listen.m3u

save the URL and i'm sure you'll hear some solid music...tonight is Prince night, starting at 9:00pst...8 hours of the Purple Pirate....

My girlfriend has a blog, it's called uncoveringfood.com, but i imagine that if there's anyone reading this shit, it's because she's repping it up, so i figure i should write something.

Tomorrow- Larry Mize and the segment I like to call "old pimpin", the final stretch for the NBA season, maybe something about facebook and twitter, and my book of the week section...

Looking forward to the weekend

I've been working so hard recently, i'd forgotten my name wasn't Toby. Putting in slave hours for the cause isn't that big a deal to me, if you know me. if you don't, then you'd assume the things i do are borderline insanity. I teach everyday, work with my team after school, and then go home and grade papers and get ready for the next day. on the weekends, i usually take between 6-50 high school students to competitive tourmanents all around the state and country. It means I haven't had a free weekend in over 3 months. I'm going to Las Vegas. I've heard there's gambilig there, and I have been known to play a card, roll some dice, bet arbitrarily on sports teams, etc...

I'm also going to get a chance to catch up with some old friends, all from college debate. it's ironic, the National Debate Tournament is going on while i will be in Vegas, and ususally the NDT is an opportunity to catch up with old friends, and fondly remember times when all involved had lesser resposnibilities and were much more likely to just sponaneously have a good time. It's a free weekend and going to a debate tournament during my free weekend would be like the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry REALLY wanted his girlfriend the massage therapist (the licenced type, not the happy ending type) to give him a massage, but she hated doing that, beacuse it meant she had to think about work during your free time. A very smart man told me once (should be smart, I was paying him) if you want to make sure you hate doing something, take something you love and do it with something you hate. Hence, no NDT for me...i'll just hang out in Las Vegas with old friends, play poker, maybe have an adult beverage...

I'm going to get to see my boys Zach and Jay while I'm in Vegas. I have not seen either of these guys in many moons, and I anticipate there will be a wonderous time had by all. Both guys have had prominent roles in my life, either by bringing forth the easiest decision I've ever made (should I leave Ogden, UT to move to Eugene, OR? Really? That was a question?) and another being a dude whose model for a small debate program is one I still utilize and have just had it grow with our team. It's good to get to see people that have mattered, even if it's only to remind them that they did matter, and that it always means something. I hear a rumor of the Jared's, and if Ellis is there, I definitely owe him a beer from taking his "pot" from him at a debate camp when he was a high school student (we "flushed" it). Always makes for an ackward situation after a few road sodas...

I'm also trying to rock the internet radio. i like my music taste, and am just arrogant enough to think other fools would like to listen to my beats as well, as eclectic as they happen to be (johnny cash and eminem and gladys knight and grant green...happens).

Internet- http://68.122.74.198:8000/listen.m3u
URL- http://10.0.1.195:8000/listen.m3u

Look for programming schedule to follow. If you have any requests for a show and for it's contents, please feel free to contact. It's not that different than the beginning of XM when you could call in and actually hear your song within the hour...

DD