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does anyone else feel cheated when bad products have great adverts?
carlsberg and the orange cinema ads to name just two

sometimes i feel very hungry. then i remember tarrare and realise i'll never be that hungry. i'm not sure how his story isn't more known. maybe someday someone will make a film about it. then again, thinking about the content, probably not.

and one last pic for now...

the great carbon emission lie

there are lots of clever people in the world. many of them make a difference for the better. some even have positions to influence governments. and some make policies for governments. however, it would seem that most decisions are based purely on politics, rather than what is correct, and sometimes their decisions lead to the exact opposite of what they're supposed to be doing, yet everyone seems happy.

an example:
LED lighting. the new energy efficient lighting that will save the world from carbon emissions caused from wasteful tungsten filament bulbs! or are they?
well, they do run on a tiny amount of the power of bulbs. and they are much more efficient with much less heat wastage. and they last longer! but how are they made? well, they are made at around 100 times the cost of bulbs. that is real $ cost. which comes from the energy cost. which means over the course of the lifetime, from creation of product to when it is no longer working, they generate more carbon emissions globally. but because they are made outside of europe, european governments are generating less carbon emissions. for themselves. which is all they really want to do.

this is not a unique situation. if you know anyone who has a prius, don't tell them to find out what's in the battery of their car. so many rare earth elements, the mining cost of which no doubt exceeds the carbon emissions saved by using the battery.

answer: real clean fuels (and other energy sources) need to be researched. but whilst government policy only cares about their own country emissions, and researches need government funding, nothing will change.

politics. to paraphrase groucho marx, anyone who wants to be a politician should not be allowed to be a politician.

competition

natalie portman finally has some

go here for more

battered

so i played a game of football at watford. to say i got taken out by their striker would be an understatement. it was quite early in the game and it wasn't till i woke up on monday that i realised my body wasn't happy. muscles i didn't know i had were making any movement difficult. i tried to ice my muscles using tubs of ice cream but that didn't work because i just ate all the ice cream.

sitting in my chair to work became slightly more pained so i found a youtube video showing 4 stretches for tendons to help for carpal tunnel.
though i still think i need to buy a chair - any recommendations? might go to sit on a steelcase one in town. they're supposed to be pretty good.

McDonalds' Burger King

you've no doubt heard about the man who's eaten 25000 burgers from mcdonalds. A bit of a weirdo who records how many he buys, it appears he is romarioesque in that we only have his word to take for it.
The best part of the story is of course, the last line added by a special at the bbc (or perhaps a comedian?) "Doctors have said they do not recommend Mr Gorske's diet."
Did they actually go and ask more than one doctor whether it was a recommended diet?

Speaking of doctors i went to see a physio the other day for a troublesome ankle. trying to locate the pain by applying pressure and asking if it hurt wasn't going that well. i thought she was gonna give up cos nothing hurt. eventually though, she found the spot. i was impressed. especially after the GP i saw acted as though i was faking it. turns out a tendon is rubbish. i'll be playing football this weekend anyway, in a proper football stadium and after that will have to wait and see how long it takes to strengthen my ankle. hopefully not more than a few months....

well, google stole my comments

unreal. my last post garnered approximately 21 comments (error margin of +/- 20)
and then google destroys them. as everyone knows, all (most) bloggers say they write for themselves. (except of course i really do just write for myself). but comments are nice. they're the massage equivalent of a happy ending for my brain. and google stole them. i can't blame google, everyone likes a happy ending. except for the guy that wrote the book which the film the mist is based on.

anyways, i bought the mental game of poker. i heard some rave reviews. not believing anyone else i found some excerpts of the book online. read about 20 pages and there were 2/3 really great thoughts written there. i was worried about the style of the book. by that i mean, it's all very well having some great points but i wanted to know if there were exercises in the book so that you could teach yourself to put into practice the things you'd learned. i needn't have worried. it's hard work to set things up, and no doubt will be to maintain them too. examples of this are things like a warm up and cool down around sessions. it sounds ridiculous but it really improves your frame of mind away from the tables.
the book is one of those things that pays for itself almost instantly. i can't recommend it highly enough.
today i played 4 sessions. i don't think i've ever done that before. i didn't let earlier sessions affect later ones. one thing that helped was i stopped looking at money in hem after sessions. i now look just at ev adjusted results. this gives me the results i crave for, but it shows how i played better than actual results do. i also have completely lost the urge to look at results during a session. i finally understand that being able to perform your best is affected when you are worried about results and those two ideas should be kept separate by your brain.

here's my plagiarised thought of the day (brought to you via Prof Sadoway)
graphite is the stable form of carbon. diamond is the metastable form. So which should be the symbol of eternal love?

girls don't like boys, girls like cars and money

boys will laugh at girls when they're not funny.

apologies for quoting bad charlotte although i think there is merit to this second line. i have found in my brief existence that there aren't many funny girls. and last week i had the displeasure of meeting a girl, who not only thought she was funny, and seemed to think she was a stand up comedienne, she was also spectacularly unfunny. beyond the realms of what i thought capable. bruce once lamented that laughing at people who aren't funny so they don't feel bad is in fact the worst thing you can do for them since they continue to attempt humour. ever since then i have oft tried to avoid the nervous laughter that breaks the awkwardness. these days, i try to embrace the awkwardness or increase it through vacant stares. luckily, on this occasion there were a few of us subjected to some words lacking humour. it is a well known fact that when in company you laugh more than when alone. researches suggest it's due to bonding or to prove you understand the humour or something. either way, none of us even contemplated laughter.

this post really is just a public service announcement to let you know that i have hopefully stopped such a humourless career, thus saving you all from being afflicted with words i probably would wish upon my worst enemy.

after all that doom and gloom here's a treat:

2 leaks i have found so far

one is a long standing problem where i never fold when i get raised. this, i know, is a hallmark of a the fish.
two, when i don't know what to do in a hand, i often just click call. need to beat this one out of me.
3, i hate losing to fish and it drives me crazy when i keep losing over and over to people playing 75% of hands and more.
4, my attempts to do basic mental arithmetic are flawed through laziness more than a lack of ability.

swingathon

i still get caught up in short term and medium term variance too much.
it's tough not too when swings like this happen. but i need to not let it affect me!
at the two troughs of the graph i was over1k down for each session and almost stopped.

the second was brutal with consecutive hands against a tard getting tt vs jj and then jj vs qq whilst inbetween those hands, on another table against the same tard losing kk vs tt!

overall this whole year has been just terrible. need to fix it. this begins with 30mins study per day of my hands before playing any new ones. no study, no play.

summertime

i guess the hairdresser was right about no rain on the royal wedding day. i believe his sound arguments were appreciated by the weather.

of course, i don't really believe that. i would think that a more likely scenario is that he has a swiss heritage (and not the apparent greek one he shows off) and kept up to date with the happenings of Böögg, the explosive snowman, which as everyone knows, predicted a good summer this summer.
Furthermore, "Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology found that...it is a good indicator of global climate change."