You Learn Something Every Day; If You're' Not Careful

Most of my days are pretty much the same. I wake up, get myself ready for the day (I eat, take care of the dogs, sometimes I work out either at home or on the way in), play poker for 5-8 hours, then do something in the evening to try to not think about poker. Also at some point I try to read two plus two, in an effort to learn something. This last week, however, my days were much less interesting, as I had the flu (not H1N1, just the regular old kick you in the ass flu) and didn't play a single live hand from Sunday night until Thursday morning. Even sequestered in my apartment, avoiding all possible human contact and wishing only for my temperature to drop back to double digits, I managed to learn things at an astounding rate. Here now I will present to you the knowledge that I have gained since I woke up Monday morning with a fever of 102.5.

Peyton Manning Will Kill You

Just do not bet against this man unless you're laying him a ton of points that he doesn't care about. He's gonna win the damn game. Danielle asked me when I got home Sunday "so how was the Pats Colts game" since she'd been recording it and I responded "Pats won by 2 or 3 touchdowns I stopped watching". Way to go Jesse, way to go. Danielle deleted the game from the DVR and was none to thrilled the next day.

Various Steven Seagal Tidbits

Now, don't feel bad if you already know some of this stuff. Knowing all of it might mean you have a problem, but if you only know a few of these things you should be fine. First of all, TNT seems to show a Steven Seagal movie every day, promptly at noon. Monday's offering was "Belly of the Beast", followed by Tuesday's "Today You Die" and Wednesday's "Urban Justice." I am ashamed to admit that I did actually watch the first two of these films and almost tuned into the third just to see if I could accurately predict every single thing that would happen during the next sequence of the movie during each commercial break (instead I watched 5 hours of the History Channel's "WWII in HD", which while good is decidedly not in HD). On Monday I had a pretty good excuse; I didn't even make it outside to get my laptop from the trunk of my car. Tuesday is harder to explain away. Anyways, the next thing I learned from this was the simple fact that "Holy shit Steven Seagal is still actively making movies!" This is an unassailable true fact. The man is making 2-4 crappy kung fu movies every year and still going strong. Do these movies get to theaters? They can't possibly! Even "Under Siege" wasn't that good, and it represented the zenith of his career. In 1992! I also learned all about the basic plot line and characters of any Steven Seagal movie. First, he plays a spiritual bad ass who, despite being 40 pounds over weight, is faster than a shaved rabbit/panther with turbines thingie and can break your leg in 407 different ways (approximately 200 of which you will see during any given movie). There are always monks, nuns, or voodoo priests involved at some level, and they usually get into it with each other, with the good monks all praying really hard and in unison to stave off the pin pricks of the bad-ass voodoo guy. There is of course a love interest, and the only requirements for here are that she is not white and cannot act. At all. He will have a partner throughout the movie, and this character will also typically be brown-skinned and not exactly Tom Hanks. Moving on to the actual plot; there is none. At the beginning somebody will fuck him over and you'll be pretty sure who did it. He'll probably end up in jail, at which point he'll start killing people. Then, for the next 90 minutes he will randomly kill more people. Who will he kill next? There's no point trying to guess, because they won't even bother to tell you how HE knows who he's supposed to kill next. He'll just show up at a house and start killing people. Why is he there? Left as an exercise to the viewer. Will he have a gun? Sometimes, but it really doesn't matter. He is never outmatched. 14 guys with automatic shotguns? No match for Steven Seagal and a single pool cue! 6 guys with swords? He'll kill them all with his shoe. Tanks and armored vehicles surrounding the house? He'll leave his brown partner downstairs to kill them all while he fights, mano a mano, upstairs with the head bad guy, winning when he actually chops the wooden arrow that's been fired at his chest in half with a samurai sword. You can't make this shit up, people. Unless, of course, you're Steven Seagal. Then you're making more of this shit up even as we speak.

Japan Took Over Alaska

OK that's not really true, but they did take over a couple of Alaskan islands early in WWII. I had been under the mistaken impression that nobody had ever seized control of any US held territory at any point in human history. How did the United States Army wrest back control of the island? We sent in Steven Seagal, of course. He killed 2000 Japanese soldiers with a single can of PBR. Game over.

I Am Awesome at Wii Mariokart

There's really not a lot to this one. I kick ass. I'll kick your ass if you want.

Fevers May or May Not Help Your Body Fight Infection

According to leo doc, who is in fact a doctor, fevers do nothing to help your body fight infection. According to lots of other sources throughout the interwebs, fevers do help your body fight infection. OK actually I didn't learn anything here, other than the fact that having a temperature in the 102s for 36 hours really freaking sucks and at least one really smart guy is sure that the fever is doing nothing but make me miserable and that I should just take as much Tylenol as my liver can safely handle to get my thermostat back to 98.something.

The Police Department is Like the DMV, Except Not Everyone Inside Could Pass A Driving Test

Why did I spend an hour inside the SJPD yesterday evening? Because there is a giant scam going on whereby Bay 101 and Garden City can only hire people who pass a certain set of requirements set forth by said Police Department. For the right to be vetted as having passed these requirements, one must show up at the station, sit around for a while, then have his picture, finger prints, and $385 taken. Oh, but why did specifically I have to do this? It's basically public knowledge already, so here is the official announcement. I have jumped through 8 of the about 10 hoops required to become a prop player at Garden City and should have a badge in "2-3 weeks...after they do the background check." How that can take 2-3 weeks is beyond comprehension. Probably sometime in January I'll be Garden City's newest 40/80 prop player. In a way this makes me feel like I have failed, but it's too much money to pass up given how poorly the last six (6) months have gone.

2012 Is a Truly Terrible Movie

As an aside, I've also learned that I have very bad taste in movies when I'm sick.....Yesterday I found myself in the Garden City 20/40 game at 12:15 PM, unable to see straight or string together two coherent thoughts, but having to be at the SJPD with the paperwork I'd just gotten notarized at 5pm. I had 3 choices: play on, drive home and sit on the couch for three hours then drive back, or go watch a movie. Turned out that 2012 was playing at a theater nearby, had an appropriate start time (which is to say, very soon), was longish, and was on the list of movies that I'd consider seeing but Danielle had no interest in. So in short, I was working with a pretty short deck here.

Just wow was this movie terrible. I've put some thought into this and I think it's the worst movie that I've ever bought a ticket for....awe crap. I just remembered "The Talented Mr. Ripley" which was probably worse. But anyway, it definitely gets mentioned. The basic premise (Spoiler alert) is that the sun is having more and more solar flares and that the nutrino particles it's bombarding us with are actually starting to melt the Earth's core. Eventually everything will melt the tectonic plates will just slide around all willy nilly and basically "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" The government knows about this because some super smart guy in India figured it out and another black dude came back and told them, so Danny Glover (the president) puts a plan in action to save humanity. The rest of the movie involved John Cusack leading his kids, ex-wife, her new husband, Russian billionaire boss, his kids and bimbo girlfriend all over the globe, repeatedly taking off from airstrips as they crumble behind him or are bombarded with volcanic debris (as an aside, Woody Harrelson's character was a rare bright spot). Eventually they get to China, which is apparently where the leaders of the world decided to build 10 big ass arks. There is even a gratuitous shot of helicopter's flying in a pair of giraffes. Except, what's this?! Only four of the arks are finished in time? Oh no! See, the government sold tickets for $1B Euros a head for seats on these arks (it is never mentioned what becomes of the 60% of the people who don't have seats...they just don't show up for some reason as the world explodes around them) to fund the project, so basically 400,000 super rich people show up in private planes (somehow in the middle of the Himalayas). But wait, there's more! One of the "finished" arks is damaged. The Russian billionaire is screwed! Then John Cusack and the rest of his motley crew sneak onto the ark (thanks to the brother of the guy who played Steven Seagal's partner in Belly of the Beast who worked on the thing as a welder) but in the process damage "the gate", which is like a giant drawbridge of a medieval castle.

At this point the people on the ark have a crisis. The smart black scientist argues that they must let the people outside come onto the ark, capacity be damned! Keep in mind that the 100,000 people outside are just the people who bought tickets to the other broken ark, not like the several billion people who are already dead. The tsunami is coming in 15 minutes! Hurry up! They open the gate and of course it won't close because John Cusack's ex-wifes' dead husbands body is all jammed up in the gears (that was kind of cool) and the ark starts taking on water as the tsunami hits (in the meanwhile the Russian billionaire fell to his death during the act of throwing his sun onto the ark). Of course John Cusack saves the day, fixing the gears, while underwater, and everyone, except, you know, 6.9996 billion people who died, lives happily ever after.

So what have I really learned? I should have gotten a flu shot.