a weekend

so an average weekend.

a saturday night out in a club which reminded me i am confused by my hearing. in most regular situations my hearing is superpower-esque. i can hear conversations through walls, and people eating popcorn in cinemas is, to me, louder than the film.

but put me in a club and i can't hear a conversation with two other people centimetres from my face. worse still is that they are able to hear everything. so everyone around me laughs whilst i look miserable. or simple minded enough to not understand a basic joke. then when i ask for a repetition, half the time i still don't hear them properly so i just feign laughter as i don't have any other choices.

then today i reneged on my deal with myself to not play sunday league football anymore. i let in another fabianski but much much worse is i missed two opportunities.

background:
we are 2-1 up.
i miskick a couple of goal kicks in succession and the little cunt of an opposing striker shouts "he can't even kick the ball 20 yards", then runs up to me to gleefully repeat himself at levels i would clearly hear, even in a nightclub.
i ask him if he knows he's losing and how much that hurts.

opportunity 1
situation: we are still 2-1 up.
ball comes to my feet. i don't pick it up forcing their cuntstriker to jog up to me. i go to pick the ball up and he turns around. but i don't pick it up and it takes him some time to realise so he has to jog back towards me. when i do finally pick the ball up he starts wildly applauding to/for me.
i forget to bow.

opportunity 2
i slip as catching an attempted cross (which was more like a pass to me) in the dying moments. the ball bounces a yard off the line and i recover to get it. the entire other team (apart from keeper) run over to the ref to protest it had crossed the line. their nearest player would have been about 15 yards away and the ref isn't having any of it. i look up to see our striker on his own, on the halfway line. i kick it up to him. he runs in on goal with no one any where near him and dinks it beautifully over the keeper to seal the game. ref blows for full time moments after kick off
after the game cuntstriker has disappeared for the handshakes ritual so i don't get a chance to ask him to rate my kick for the last goal.


the pokering has been going well.
having implemented this system to encourage playing well when winning and stopping when losing i have done exceedingly well. today i came pretty close to quitting when after about 200 hands i was $771 down (very almost 2 buy ins) but i recovered to finish about $800 up after 800 hands.

still 8 buyins down for the year but am pretty confident i'll be level there by end of april and level on ptr at 2/4 by the end of may.

i missed a trick

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8587469.stm

i'm really hoping it's just bad reporting and this didn't actually happen because as far as i can make out the story goes like this:

dude buys a newspaper for £1

part of the agreement is that the people that he bought it from PAY HIM £9.25million.
so by my reckoning he got paid £9,249,999 and got a newspaper.

this sounds like a game of monopoly when you were a kid and two people ganged up together to take down an in game oligarch. but this is real life!

and in true monopoly spirit, i would have made them a much better deal.

argh

just when things were starting to go well, and all the little things i was doing well again for the first time in ages let everything else fall into place, i go over $1k down in ev in about 10 hands, just when i decided to quit $600 down for the day. unchecking all the post big blind buttons and instead lose 3 buy ins - $2400 in pots! and so i'm left almost $2k down for the day instead

angry face

so back to $5k down for the year

2 aims are to get level for the year, and level on ptr at 2/4

both done by end of may imo

oh! dessa

so, odessa was a pretty place

as evidenced by this photo



of course, that wasn't the first thing i saw when i arrived. oh no. the plane lands, and i'm one of the last people to be getting off the plane. we're kept on the plane for a bit as we're waiting for a bus to take us to the terminal.
i get off the plane and can only see one building. about 100 yards away. well, that's not the terminal, i think. we could just walk there.
i get on the bus, and here's a photo of how close the building is.



that doesn't look so close as you may have thought from my description but that's because the bus went round in a circle from the plane to the terminal, rather than in a straight line, in a comical attempt at protocol of some sort.

and of course when i say terminal, really, its just two and half rooms.

anyways, the person i was meeting was arriving after me and i didn't wanna leave the hotel in case they arrived so i was set to eat the remnants of the food i brought with. this turned out to be a disaster as the can of tuna i planned to eat wasn't one of the ring pull variety. having some rare foresight i brought my trusty pen knife, complete with can opener! it's called a can opener, but i think thats very deceiving. my last pen knife which i'm convinced was stolen by a cornish bird in south spain worked like a dream, whereas this one....

let's just say after 15 minutes of struggling, the can was 1/8th open and the can opener part of the penknife was so bent out of shape that i couldn't even think of closing it back into place.
this made it awkward to get to the tuna, so i went and found the only tool in the hotel available. a plastic straw. i'm not sure what i intended to do with this, though drinking fish oil through a straw was becoming more appealing with each passing minute.

so oil ended up everywhere and here's a pic of my lovely meal



(just to be clear the tissue is soaked in oil)

so things were off to a bad start when i got a phone call to relieve me of my futile attempts at feeding myself. something or other about a missed flight so had to sort that out instead.

in closing, i would like to point out that parts of odessa do in fact live up to it's name of the pearl by the sea (or whatever it used to be called) but it is falling apart rather quickly.

i was gonna write about how my blind play has deteriorated so much that i should be playing blind from those positions in order to lose less.
i was also going to say that i didn't yet get a hair cut but am leaving the unanimous poll up till i do.
i was also going to say maybe i'll do more of those polls so other people can make decisions for me. is that a good decision? maybe i should do a poll for that too.
but since tonight's meal consisted of 3 chilli's, a pickled cucumber, a twix, a kit kat, the thought of some fruit and/or cereal bar and finally half a tub of ben and jerry's ice cream (chocolate fudge obviously) i don't feel sated enough to write a post.
i've also been lazy in putting pics on my computer. one of which includes me trying to eat tuna with a straw because my penknife broke.
gonna eat some real food tomorrow. and along with that comes a real post.

offside!

so the offside rule was invented back in the day probably by a pe teacher. noticing that there was one slow kid who used to just stand in front of the goal to try and score as many tap ins as possible the offside rule was invented to put a stop to this football killing tactic.

then along game michelle pratini and sepp batter who decided that they want to make a name for themselves. and thus the interfering with football rule was brought into action. this says, unless you are interfering with play, you're not offisde.
off course, being the retards that they are, they forgot to define what interfering is, and left it up to the discretion of the ref. or the linesman. they're not sure.

so what happens is that no one really knows whats going on. barcleona tonight have (probably unintentionally) shown a great tactic that should be implemented more by managers. i have drawn diagrams because it's easier than writing a thousand words.



the player in the middle is offside when the initial ball is played, but isn't flagged for it cos the ball isn't going directly to him



so now when the ball goes to him, he's onside since he's now behind the play.


what i would like to see is bendetnener standing on the penalty spot the entire game, goal hanging, like the lazy 8 year old looking for a tap in. play a long ball over the top down the wing for walcott to run on to. being faster than light he will surely get there first. as he then turns to run in on goal he can either shoot or pass to bendtentner to try to score.

surely this tactic can than be repeated by england at the world cup.

then the anti goal hanging version of the offside rule may return. removing any interfering by both footballers trying to score tap ins and bureaucratic dinosaurs.

brief trip report

the first thing i noticed was that there were dogs everywhere. big wild dogs that looked like wolves/huskies. i'm not familiar with types of dogs but these weren't ones i would want to get into a fight with. and they were just lying around some of the streets, from the countryside to the city centre.
it's not like there was an infestation, but now i understand why they say watch out for rabies.
for the most part they seemed pretty harmless. sometimes they would be playing dead (a couple of times i thought they were dead) only to spring to life when nameless joe would throw them a piece of pretzel which they wolfed down happily.
and only a couple of times did i see crazy dogs running at people in the street and barking. i had to look away to avoid walking into a pothole the size of orion to see the outcome, but i guess most people survived.

for a city once called the pearl of the sea, much of it has fallen into a sorry state of disrepair but parts of it still hint at the beauty that no doubt pervaded the entire city.
and of all the ex soviet states and eastern european countries i've been to (which i'll be the first to admit isn't many) the people were very friendliest i've encountered. and that's not because the competition for that prize was no exsistant, but simply because they were rather a friendly folk.

so i'll add some pics of odessa after i've had a sleep or two.


(oh, and remind me to do a useful poker post on how the small things quickly add up. something which has gone from a strength of mine to a weakness)

SENSATIONAL NEWS

one of the best things about the interweb is that it has a good memory unlike people.
however, it's also subject to many false memories.

luckily, that's not my point for today. merely, i would like to point out how every time (insert football team here) win/lose* a game they are suddenly hailed as magnificent world beaters/worst team ever with worst ever players.*

This is rubbish journalism. now that people can see what you wrote a few months ago with ease, you might think they would become slightly less sensationalist, however, peoples memories are still short, and they're too lazy to click to check anything, and ultimately organisations want to sell copies/have people read what they sell.

luckily (for you) i haven't sold out to get paid for what i write. although i'd like to think if i did i wouldn't go down that route. it's mentally exhausting enough to win/lose $10k in a couple of weeks. if you were a journalist your headlines would have to be things like
WORST. PLAYER. EVER. EVER.
As i predicted at the start of the year mudwig is the worst player ever having done $5k in one day! he should probably never play again. sadly for him, if he does play even one more day he'll be busto and have to concentrate solely on haircuts in the future.
or...
GREATEST. PLAYER. EVER. EVER.
having won $10k in just over a week, even whilst doing other time consuming things like sleeping, showering and eating, mudwig will soon be taking on isildur at his own game. anonymity for tax reasons. with some poker thrown in.

what's even worse with football is that bendtndneter, misses 2 sitters and a few other decent chances and is lambasted as being worse than a great dane of the canine variety. then he scores two sitters and a pelanty (thanks to chris for the correct spelling of that) and he's now the answer to the worlds water shortages.

so i'm either quite nervous that i'll have to put up with sensationalist news forevermore, or there's still a bug in my stomach playing havoc. either way, i'm gonna try to go outside and get a haircut.

apparently there was a ancient greek joke which went something like
A man goes for a hair cut and the barber asks how he would like it cut. The man says: "In silence".**


*delete as applicable...
**stolen from qi. i dunno if i'm supopsed to quote others, but it would be nice if they quoted things stolen from me so i guess i'm reciprocating in advance.

theatre

i do not understand why people like the theatre.
i understand that many many moons ago it was the only entertainment around. and that's fine.
but now, unless it's something specific/unusual like perhaps Kabuki theatre in Japan, surely the cinema is better?
Not only do the people act for you, you get the added bonus of backgrounds that are believable along with a better all round production imo, stadium seating as standard, no interval and many other benefits.
and worst of all the theatre shows are the musicals. who stops what their doing to sing a semi relevant song and dance about it, with other people joining in, only to forget that they were singing as soon as the music ends.

it's probably, like the opera, so that people can go and feel cultured. they should read a book instead.

or maybe there's something I'm missing. but no one I've asked has so far been able to explain this to me.

anyway, something went wrong with the timing of my poll. google thinks 11am on Wednesday is in fact sometime tonight. so far it's been a unanimous decision to get my biannual haircut. weirdly, biannual can mean twice a year, and also once every two years. whoever wrote the English language made a whoopsie there.

i have been making mistakes of my own. i ate some badly reheated rice yesterday and my stomach is exacting revenge my sending pain back to my brain. amongst other methods at its disposal...

that time of year

when my hair looks like what bob dylan's would look like if he was a tramp.

seeing as i dont have any job interviews approaching cutting it seems futile. however, i am going the ukraine, a land with similar people to nikolais and could do with not looking like a tramp.

so i maybe need to cut it but not sure i can be bothered. so i will leave my fate in your hands/mice.


sometimes i wonder how crazy i am. i think everyone has a touch of ocd, more in hope of me still being relatively normal, than anything else.
my car aerial is currently stuck up (which reminds me of an awesome joke - 3 tampons are walking down the street. which one stops to say hello? none. they're all stuck up cunts). but the car thinks the aerial is down. so when i listen to the radio i can faintly hear this little motor in the back trying to wind up the aerial. and it never ends. so i don't listen to the radio to avoid that noise.

i almost forgot to put a title here

so this was today. ups and downs and ups again. this puts me levelish for the month after some depressing stuff yesterday.
in fact, yesterday was so bad i spent time looking at my stats and play etc to find out where i was doing bad.
i realise that lots of the bad i do is mental. after the play i can see what is wrong, thus, i need to be able to learn to see it at the time.
being objective whilst playing is my current aim. i'm not good at sticking to things (eating lots and learning russian isn't going well, although that does mean im not a fat incoherent dude just yet - every cloud...)

anyways, this reminded me of a funny. cos i went to a therapist who told me i needed to relax and be more selfish. a week before i'd been on a (diabolical) management course in bonny scotland and the one piece of constructive criticism - which we had to refer to as developmental feedback in case the word criticism offended someone - was that i was too relaxed.

this was an interesting dilemma. take the word of a professional, or the collective decision from a group of people. i think i read somewhere that often groups tend to the right result, but there are probably exceptions, and i imagine one such exception to be the group one that i was stuck in. a group of retards. being only semi retarded (or maybe 70%) i guess they took me in as one of their own. but i digress. and i shall digress some more. another thing i read, was that in a group of people, all heading through a narrowing, as intuition would suggest, the best place to be in the crowd is at the sides.
ive drawn a technical diagram in case it wasn't clear:




don't say you never learn anything coming here

latex

is awesome.

loads of websites are devoted to it.
the many ways to use it, how your stuff looks when it's done.
pictures etc

it's pretty tough to get into it, but when you do the results are much better than any other word processor.

oh, i guess i should have spelt it LaTeX so you'd know I was talking about that, rather than a similarly named plastic.

it's starting to feel like summer. i know this because twice this week i've worn sunglasses when driving.

was playing a bit of poker and am beginning to think i lack mental consistency. i'm much better at not getting too depressed when things go well/bad/boring etc with each passing year, however i think i am way behind what normal humans are capable of. i think i can correct it, i just hope it doesn't take a lifetime cos that'll mean i'll never win much.

current aims are just to get breakeven for the year, then breakeven at 2/4 on ptr, and then win 100k. that was quite easy to write down, but i think it'll be harder to perform. i guess tripling volume from may/june onwards will help.
it might also help my mentality in thinking in the long run etc
the worst part is i'm sure i used to be better at that. more and more i seem to try to win back all the money i've ever lost in one hand. which is more retarded than it sounds, and to me it sounds very retarded.

i fell asleep today at 9 after a relatively hard days work trying to get my latex files to work and slept for about 2 hours so now i am not tired. siesta's that late in the day should be banned as now my sleeping pattern is in danger of becoming chaotic. currently though my aim is to fall asleep soon. which is not possible with my increasingly noisy computer fan whirring away.

vultures

i worry about too many things.

one thing would be that people i know find out about this blog. i like the anonymity but there's always something in the back of my mind that knows i can't write completely freely just in case.

and then google buzz came along. and google forgot about privacy. and any blogspot blog that you had linked to an email (a-mao) address would be told of to pretty much everyone who you had emailed before in your life.

thanks google.

once again i find myself sleeping awkwardly. probably my bed is too short. and so when i woke this morning my neck once again hurt. only this time it got worse during the day so that i had shooting pains running up my neck every now and then.
so i went to the uni medical centre who said "you're not registered" which to me sounded like, "we don't care if you die." as i walked out the building i almost bumped into a mildy fat girl throwing her guts up next to the door.
i was going to congratulate her on making a stand on their non treatment of patients policy by showing them what she though of it, but she seemed a bit busy.


so i went home and ate a kit kat. i needed a break. and i remembered how kit kat's sometimes used to have no wafer in them, and how those were the greatest moments of being a kid. and then you heard rumours of how people sent them back to nestle and got boxes of chocolates in return but i never did because i always enjoyed eating them too much.
so my point is i was eating a kit kat and on the last bite a bit of wafer got stuck in my throat. i hate how it's always the last bite. and today was a day i didn't need things stuck in my neck.
i still can't look up or right comfortably and went to a doctor to get some pain medications. these scare me because now i go home and google them out of interest but end up just reading side effects. which for some reason includes vultures eating carcasses of beef fed on these pain killers, which caused renal failure in said vultures and some people are gene deficient in things vultures also don't have. and that scares me even though i'm not like a vulture. i hope.

ps fo poker.