"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread

I'm getting a legal opinion tomorrow. Not spending money on lawyers is the #1 advice from literally everyone I know who has separated from their spouse and we are going through a Mediation process which will hopefully lead to fair outcomes but I definitely will go into that process knowing what the range of outcomes are and what I can justifiably push for

perhaps one of the bloodsucking lawyers may have a different opinion

but I'm of the belief that you should get a ballpark estimate for the cost of legal fees - triple that

then consider if you win, will you get a significant return on that investment - it needs to be a home run because there's always a risk you lose and the most likely outcome where you get something very similar to if you'd not gone the legal route

had two family members recently squabble over the personal items of an estate, things like lamps and dishes etc - the will clearly said that one of them should distribute the items as they felt was fair, the other one said that it wasn't done fairly - both sides fought it with their own lawyer who both said that they had a good and just case (obv because they are scum sucking lawyers) - since they were being paid out of the estate, it didn't feel like real money to either side since they weren't paying for it out of pocket - judge ruled that fairness was subjective and basically same outcome as if it was never contested in court

everyone ended up receiving about 20% of the money they were earmarked for out of the estate because it all went to the bloodsucking lawyers

like i literally want to sue both those lawyers... but therein lies the problem that i'd require the services of a lawyer to do so

but I'm sure the lawyers in the thread are ok people despite doing the devil's work

I had an hour right at the beginning with a divorce lawyer just to understand the process etc and she was $660ph. That was enough to persuade me that avoiding lawyers as much as possible was the best outcome. Albeit, to your point given our settlement will be dividing several million $$ a small win or loss can result in 5 figures.

the Mediation process here is run by a third party. they have a structure around child supervision, financial split, maintenance etc that is guided by the law and likely outcomes. So in an ideal world you get to a fair split of $$ and responsibilities via the Mediators and than you each get that ratified by your lawyers and then it gets signed and agreed.

I think the danger is when the lawyers review what you've agreed via this process and then persuade one or both parties to argue for/push for more. Hopefully it won't come to that but...I'm guessing it won't be totally amicable.

I know what I want to get out of it and that I want to be fair. The challenge will come if she lases back into drinking and the rest, in which case I will push for full custody and it could get really messy

we'll see. the process is just starting now and prolly has 3-4 months

****, glgl

if you fly to vegas and degen away then there's less to lose in arbitration... think about it

Ok, but prepare to be disappointed. We're NOT food savants. Simple is better. Mrs. Breeze wants Broadway and music, so we do Broadway & music.

Wednesday: Up at 3:30am for a full day of travel. Finally get to hotel in Manhattan @ 7pm. Have massive headache so Mrs Breeze orders room service and a couple cocktails which were AMAZING.
Thursday: 9/11 Memorial and a quick bite at a little cuban cafe on the way back to the hotel. Saw the play "& Juliet" that night. Play is REALLY good. Like really good. Solid A day.
Friday: Museum of Broadway in the afternoon which took us longer than expected so we grabbed a bite at Applebees (Fail) before the Billy Joel concert at MSG. Another A day.
Saturday: Spent 4 hours at The Met and saw like 1% of the place. Went to an expensive steak place on the same block as our hotel (Gallagher's?) which was good but felt a bit overpriced. My steak was a bit underdone, but I like mine "almost medium well" so whatever. And before you come at me about steak cooking, if it's cooked any less than that, I'll be sick for 2 days - save your takes. We saw The Heart of Rock & Roll in the evening - a brand new rom-com based on the music of Huey Lewis & The News. B- because the play prolly doesn't make it past 6 months and my back is kinda crappy at this point.
Sunday: Breakfast at an italian bakery (Angelina's) across the street from our hotel (W52nd @ Broadway) and the donuts were A+, the breakfast sandwiches were A+. So good. We wished we'd eaten there every morning. Walked most of 5th Avenue and back through Times Square and we took WAY too long shopping at a certain location (Kate Spade owns me now) so we grabbed dinner at an Olive Garden in Times Square before seeing Chicago (which was at 7pm, not 8pm, and we discovered this at 6:05pm). An A- day only because I'm a dolt and misread that we had an hour less than we thought. We had our sights set on a little italian place we'd seen a day or two before but that's all on me.
Monday: breakfast at Angelina's again - they had an $11 lemon eclair that I would push people into traffic to get it was so damn good. A little more walking around before we have to grab a cab to JFK, spend the first hour of the flight sitting on the tarmac watching plane after plane take off before we get to take off. Eventually get home around 2am.

Was super worried about hotel choice - I flopped the nuts on that one.

Great trip overall. Will definitely go again once my wallet recovers.

did you eat at the national chains for convenience/time or familiarity?

Nice TR. Gallagher Steakhouse is one of my favorites. Have had several bday dinners there. I agree it's pricey, but it's got a pretty great feel to it, and the food is generally top-notch. Their meat room is impressive and worth the price of admission, imo.

Did you go to Sbarro for a New York slice?

Glad you had a great trip, Prairiebreeze!!

The Sbarro in Times Square was shut down. Looked like it had been for a while. Sucks cuz I kinda wanted to do that.

It was because we got time crunched and was in the path to our evening location.

Why did you make that call? Because of the bet size? Because otherwise, you re blocking his busted draws.Or was it some other tell about villain?

That sounds fortuitous to me. I could be wrong, but I think bombing Germany was more dangerous than bombing Japan.

I never did figure out how to port over the long-since-unsupported PokerJournal, and I'm far too cheap to pay a subscription service for the new stat tracking apps / their importing features, so I'm stuck with my Excel spreadsheet for the foreseeable future.

Also can't for the life of me seem to include an android in a group message chat in my 5s (something my previous 4 could do), sigh.

GifyouwantmeI'llbein1987anddoingjustfine,thanksG

New itunes version don't allow porting apps from your computer to your phone, but if you have an old backup of your phone, you can download an old version of itunes (don't remember which, you have to google), find the backed up version of pokerjournal and copy it into your phone (as long as pokerjournal is compatible with the ios version your iphone has).

Because MadSkillz

he never spoke about the war, remember once while visiting him I was hanging out in the living room and he was reading a book, he said it was the first time in his life he ever read or saw anything about the war that even remotely captures it

like the idiot 12 year old or whatever i would have been at the time, i didn't ask any follow up questions because i would have loved to have read the book - even scoured all the books on his shelves when i got back to usa#1 to look for anything that had anything to do with the pacific and didn't find anything

what he did speak about the war, was the basecamp stuff, how they'd show up at some island inhabited from people from the stone age and within a week all of them quit doing everything because you could get easier meals just taking what the army threw away after each meal and you no longer needed to thatch a roof because soon enough the military would toss some sheet metal away and you could use it - how they'd hire locals as house boys to clean their barracks etc, how the only time he ever fired a gun was while going hunting on the islands for boar in between sorties

never got shot down been hit plenty of times - i only know this because once he ran into a vet at something and the vet really wanted to trade stories, my grandfather had zero interest (never did any reunions or anything) as he was a bomber pilot in the pacific as well and he said he got shot up and shot down and my grandfather only responded that he got shot up plenty but lucky enough to never been shot down - think he may have lost some crew here or there in those situations hence why never wanted to talk about it

the one thing he ever told me about the war (shared it a few times here at 2p2 i think) was they'd just taken a new island/airstrip and the right before the Japanese fled, they killed all the locals and put their heads on stakes at the airstrip

but yeah, without knowing any details, I'd assume it was a lot safer to be a pilot in the pacific, japan's airforce was pretty much knocked out the game early and they couldn't replace it and had no access to fuel as we put that under embargo (huge reason why they hit us at pearl harbor was the oil embargo we put on them unless they relinquished all the land they had taken)

the entire reason for kamikaze was simple, they had a bunch of training planes and poorly trained pilots - even if they built up new planes, they didn't have the fuel and time to spend training those new pilots - but as 9/11 showed us, it didn't require a nice plane, endless fuel, or highly trained pilots in order to crash a plane into an aircraft carrier - even with using those "smart bombs" they still overwhelmingly failed - very few actually hit the target as they were shot down or even actually missed

so yeah, with minimal fighter defence and no worries about flak/aa guns for majority of the voyage over open water, i imagine the survival rate was significantly higher

not to mention down time you're living in paradise instead of some barracks in England

I do hope this is irony. Though I'm tempted to agree with critics who say the best NY pizza is in Jersey. Damn near lived of Basile's, getting off work, the two months I did there. Razza's pretty damned good too.

Bummed to read about the marital strife from everyone else.

Query: was he primarily in the SW Pacific or Central Pacific with 20th Air Force? "Touched With Fire..." is an excellent history of the Allies in the SW Pacific Theater, and its unique challenges. 20th, of course, had a really bad time until LeMay revamped their procedures. Hell of a way to learn about the Jet Stream.

Europe for awhile in the USAAF, was rough. 50/50 chance of making it through a 25 mission tour is grim.

I was thinking, if there was ever a need for the pen's favorite clip.

that's a thing?

I don't think we were in bombing range of Japan until right near the end of the war. That was the point of Okinawa. OTOH in Europe we tried daylight bombings without escorts, at least in the beginning.

My grandad flew bombers in WWII. Our good friend Sir Garick wrote and published an article from a diary of his. It's great.

Link?

Did you know that the US Air Force in the Pacific gave birth to numerous cargo cults? As in, a plane would drop a chute with supplies by accident in some random island in which a remote tribe lived and that was such a huge event for them that they would start elaborate rituals in order to make the gods drop more cargo from the skies.

yeah the cargo cults wiki gets shared in the interesting wiki chapter occasionally