Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

Baby steps at first, you got this friend

👍

I finally put in 3 hours at the poker table. I had to quiet my thoughts in order to do it. I have what I call Hamlet Syndrome. My thoughts will often make an extraordinary case for inaction if I allow them free rein (free reign? could be either, really, although rein is the accepted noun. The former liberation allows for the latter subjugation).

How did I quiet my thoughts this time? I did not use a Zen Buddhist mantra; instead I used an obnoxious old Italian-American stereotype...Hey, shuddupa you face, huh?

I'm sorry about that, but it worked.

I will try for 6 hours of poker later today, then a day off Saturday, then 8 hours on Sunday.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 3 hours
+$234.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 1.5 hours
(-$30.35)

2024 Running Poker Total: 238.5 hours, +$1557.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 128.5 hours, +$5595.03

2024 Grand Total: 367 hours, +$7152.03

Rolling Stone's 469th Greatest Album of All Time: Clandestino by Manu Chao (1998)

Clandestino is the debut album from Manu Chao, aka José Manuel Tomás Arturo Chao Ortega, a French/Spanish artist who paid his dues in several bands for over a decade before going solo in the late 90s. Chao recorded Clandestino as he toured around various locations throughout the world, using a laptop for capturing most of the album, a fairly impressive feat in 1998.

On the album, Chao sings in Spanish, French, English and Brazilian Portuguese. His English songs are my least favorite on the record, so my failure to connect with most of the album likely doesn't stem from my lack of foreign language skills.

I've mentioned the language thing before, and how when I'm stuck with just my native English, I try to shift my engagement with songs from other languages away from the lyrics and towards the music and the voice; well, I'm not qualified to judge whether or not Chao has a great voice, but I didn't love it.

Behind Chao's voice, the music of Clandestino represents the sounds and simple production values of the buskers and street musicians in Mexico, Central America and South America that Chao experienced throughout his travels, and one might be thankful that he went easy on the pan flute elements from some of those locations.

Like all the albums in this list, Clandestino is beloved by critics—otherwise, it wouldn't be here—the album also sold and charted well all over Europe. Two of the songs stood out for me. I liked "Luna y sol" for its energy.

And I liked "La vie à 2" for its cadence.

Since I've started this project, I've developed an enthusiasm for hearing all sorts of well-regarded music for the first time; unfortunately, with the exception of the above tracks, Clandestino just didn't do it for me. I didn't dislike it, but neither did I find a striking virtuosity in it, but that's a me problem. and your mileage may vary.

Rolling Stone Says:
[Clandestino] was a tribute to “clandestinos” everywhere: a derogatory term for undocumented migrants. Running on an internationalist platform of peace (and legalized pot), Chao was a digital busker (“a clown making too much dirty sound”😉, strumming his acoustic guitar as he moved effortlessly between languages and styles, singing with a playfully light touch as he made feel-good reggae rock for global nomads like himself.

Definitely a dude I'd like to have a beer with some day. And between you and I, I would probably fib and tell him that I like the whole album.

Manu Chao is incredibly known and respected in the Spanish/French speaking world ; back in the late 90s/early 2000s, you could not go to a backpacker joint (and especially a reggae bar) without the tunes of Manu Chao being spewing out of the speakers repeatedly a la Bob Marley Mano Negra (his punkish/ska/reggae prior to having a solo career), was equally known, albeit a bit less accessible. And yeah, by all accounts, Manu Chao is seemingly a positive fellow/fun to be around

Dubnjoy000, I thought of you when I was writing this, as I figured you'd be familiar with his stuff. Thank you for your insight! I appreciate you.

I think you were spot on Suited in your analysis : his voice is nothing to write home about, nor is his guitar playing, for that matter, and overall his songs are quite... simple and perhaps even monotone... But, and here again you hit the target, he was all about good vibes yo A sort of happening. And quite the entertainer. Singing of topics that directly spoke to folks, right, like combining the themes of the Rastas (Revolution, f**k Babylon, ganja smoking, solidarity etc.) with Latin America social issues (Zapatistas uprising, daily economical struggles etcetera etc.)

Manu Chao was a component of the world music effusion of the late 90s/early 2000s - now to what extent he was an instigator or a product of the movement, is debatable, although I would lean towards the former... - that exploded during the release of Clandestino. In Montreal, not only did a myriad of bands sing in French-English-Spanish a la Manu, but gypsy music, Italian solo artists, folk tunes, a fusion of hiphop-electronic-dub-ragga-ska-punk-tango-flamenco bands appeared out of nowhere This also transpired a little in the anglo-saxon world with bands like Thievery Corporation and projects like The Buddha Bar. But anyhow, Manu was definitely an integral part of this world music happening.

And thx for the kind words Suited and am rooting for you to come back strong at the poker tables friend ; GL

Thanks Dubnjoy000!

So far so good, but I'm not yet halfway through the session, so we'll see.

The cup was actually for a diet soda or soft drink of some kind. Strawberry Zero Sugar Powerade™ IIRC. MGM Springfield has free soda fountains, as well as tea and (atrocious) hot coffee, so the teetotalling nit doesn't even have to rely on (i.e. tip) the cocktail waitresses, unless he/she wants a hot chocolate, Virgin Daiquiri or Shirley Temple. The machines dispense Coke products only, but that company has sucked up so many smaller brands in the last 3 decades that the machine has more than 120 flavors.

During March Madness I thought about designing a bracket for the 65 kinds of diet drinks from the machine and running a tournament to determine the best flavor, but I was pressed for time and had to drop it.

Chip porn! ♥

That sounds fun, but don't limit to diet, or even sodas. Might be interesting to see if old-fashioned stuff gets traction, or healthier (?) options like sports drinks move forward.

The porn that's almost always SFW.

I've given this an amount of thought that may be surprising and/or boring. Can something be surprising and boring? Yes! Tax audits come to mind.

In a fair taste test, I would always pick the regular stuff over the diet. My taste buds prefer sugar and, failing that, high-fructose corn syrup, over the low-calorie sweeteners. Also, 60-something cups of corn syrup in the first round of the tournament would be a ****-ton to drink in a short time, so the non-diet drinks are out. Not that 60-something cups of artificial sweetener would be much better.

After I took the picture, the table went south as several decent to very good $2/$5 regs came on. From what I can glean by playing against regs from those games when they've been slumming at the $1/$2 tables, the $2/$5 and $5/$10 games at Springfield are reg-infested and tougher than they should be.

Quite often, the floor will have enough players on the list to open a new $2/$5 table, but when they call the list, nobody shows up at the table, because they all know each other and have assessed that there won't be enough donators at it. Instead, they hang on at the $1/$2 tables and make my games worse.

Typically, when I find several good players at my table, I transfer, but yesterday, our table consistently only had 5 or 6 players at it, while the others had 8 to 9, and the floor frowns on transfers from emptier tables to fuller ones.

All this to say that I left early. And to avoid admitting that I left early because I wanted to book a solid win for the first time in a while, which is not the professional way to go about playing poker. It was, however, a psychological boost. I'll be back at it tomorrow, Undesignated Higher Power willing.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 4 hours
+$771.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 1 hour
+$2.50

2024 Running Poker Total: 242.5 hours, +$2328.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 129.5 hours, +$5597.53

2024 Grand Total: 342 hours, +$7925.53

Oh, I wasn't thinking you do the 64-drink playoff. I was thinking of it as a thing like we've done in OOT (maybe Lounge?) occasionally, where the people vote and we play it down that way.

Glad to see you've recaptured some motivation and are back at work.

Better a short session than no session. Here's where I normally write that I'll be back at it again tomorrow, but I seem to take a perverse enjoyment in following up with those sorts of announcements by not showing up when I say I will; so, I'll go back when I go back, and I'll report it here when I do.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 3.5 hours
+$149.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2.5 hour
+$44.89

2024 Running Poker Total: 246 hours, +$2477.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 132 hours, +$5642.42

2024 Grand Total: 378 hours, +$8119.42

TV Shows To Watch

*** = in current queue
x,y or (x,y) = season and episode reached

30 Rock
3 Body Problem *** 1,2
American Gods
Arrested Development
Babylon 5
Barry
The Bear
Blackadder *** 1,4
Black Mirror (1,2)
Bojack Horseman *** 4,12
Bupkis
Castle Rock
Community
Conan O'Brien Must Go
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Dark
Devs
The Dirt
Euphoria
The Expanse (2,6)
Falling Skies
Fargo (2,1)
Flash Forward
Fleabag
Fringe
Game of Thrones (1,3)
The Good Place
History of the World Part II
Hit Monkey
Holey Moley
Invincible
Justified
Kingdom
The Larry Sanders Show
Lazarus Project
Louie
Mad Men
Maniac
The Man in the High Castle
Mr. Robot *** 4,6
The Office
Orange Is the New Black
Only Murders in the Building
Our Flag Means Death
Outer Range
Ozark
Parks & Recreation
Reservation Dogs
Santa Clarita Diet
Schitt's Creek
Seinfeld
Solar Opposites
Sons of Anarchy
The Sopranos
Sweet Home
Stargate
Ted Lasso *** 2,3
The Twilight Zone
Twin Peaks
Under the Dome
X-Files
Watchmen
W/Bob & David
Westworld
The Wire
The Witcher

Caught Up or Finished

11.22.63 (Fin)
Archer (Fin)
Better Call Saul (Fin)
The Boys (3,8)
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (Fin)
Delicious in Dungeon (1,13)
Disenchantment (Fin)
Fallout (1,8)
Foundation (2,10)
Good Omens (2,6)
The Handmaid's Tale (5,10)
Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law (Fin)
I, Claudius (Fin)
The Last of Us (1,9)
Letterkenny (12,6)
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (1,8)
M.O.D.O.K. (Fin)
The Orville (Fin)
The Queen's Gambit (Fin)
Rick and Morty (6,10)
Shoresy (2,6)
Squid Game (1,9)
Star Trek Picard (Fin)
Ted (1,7)
Wandavision (Fin)
Wednesday (1,8)
What We Do in the Shadows (5,10)
The Wheel of Time (2,8)

Shelved

Andor (1,3)
I Think You Should Leave (1,3)
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2,3)
My Next Guest Needs No Introduction (1,6)
On Cinema At the Cinema (8,4)
Stranger Things (3,4)
The Sandman (1,3)
Trailer Park Boys (1,5)
Veep (1,3)

Movies to Watch

All About Eve
Amadeus
American Movie
The Apartment
Badlands
Bean
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Breathless
Casablanca
The Deer Hunter
Ed Wood
Enter the Dragon
Flash Gordon
The French Connection
The Hateful Eight
The Haunting
High Anxiety
Hot Tub Time Machine
Husbands
Kingsman: The Secret Service
The Madness of King George
The Magnificent Ambersons
Modern Times
Night of the Hunter
The People vs. Larry Flynt
Rear Window
The Searchers
Shakespeare In Love
The Sound of Music
Spaceballs
The Seventh Seal
Soylent Green
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
Top Secret
Trainspotting
The Trouble With Harry
West Side Story (1961)
Westworld

For the TV, I usually bounce between 5 different shows, with the current lineup being marked with a ***. I've only really binged 2 shows so far: Fallout and Ted Lasso.

I'm a big fan of several of the Fallout games, and the TV show really nailed the theme, tone, canon and history of the games, while seeming to tell a good story for people who aren't familiar with the games, so bravo for that.

The first season of Ted Lasso caught me by surprise, as I'm not a big fan of soccer (football), but I still found the show to be fantastic in just about every way. I'm currently on season 2 of Ted Lasso, so no spoilers please.

As for the Movies: I've never seen most of the titles on the above list. The exceptions are The Deer Hunter, Enter The Dragon, Flash Gordon, Spaceballs, and Trainspotting. All of those movies I've seen once and only once. But it's been more than 25 years since I've seen them, so that warrants a second viewing IMO.

I recently watched Vertigo, Rope and Super 8. I enjoyed the first two quite a bit, but I've already written a lot about Hitchcock, so I skipped over writing reviews for them.

Super 8 was a decent mid-tier Steven Spielberg movie, which means that I should have liked it a lot; unfortunately, it wasn't a Spielberg movie. JJ Abrams wrote and directed it, but it so closely followed Spielberg's well-known tropes that it became distracting. It was beyond an homage, somewhere between an homage and Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho.

I also watched It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World from 1963, kind of a predecessor to 1981's Cannonball Run, but better made and screwier. Instead of a road race, the packed all-star cast goes on a mutually destructive treasure hunt.

The ensemble has Spencer Tracy, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Jonathan Winters, Phil Silvers, Edie Adams, Jimmy Durante, Peter Falk, Jim Backus (Mr. Howell from Gilligan's Island), and Norman Fell (Mr. Roper from Three's Company), with cameos from Don Knotts, The Three Stooges, Carl Reiner, Jack Benny and Buster Keaton.

The movie is packed with good gags, and cynical as hell. The only issue I had with it was its 3 hour and 20 minute running time, too long for a slapstick comedy, but it was easy enough to watch in stages at home.

The random number generator also picked Rear Window for me to watch, turning these last few weeks into an impromptu Alfred Hitchcock festival.

As always with Hitchcock, I enjoyed the movie, but I've officially had my fill of Jimmy Stewart for a while. His range is limited, IMO. I felt that his news photographer/Peeping Tom character in Rear Window required something a little more creepy and a little less gosh and gee willikers earnest, which is what Stewart typically presents, whether he wants to or not.

Likewise, I found Stewart's same approach a bit too cornball for his erudite, soul-reading professor in Hitchcock's Rope, playing an intellectual who had inadvertently convinced two of his students that superior beings like themselves could murder peons if they felt it was necessary, in the way of Nietzsche's Übermensch, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, and real-life 1920s thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb.

And that reminded me that I've never seen It's a Wonderful Life, which is strange given the number of times it was featured on broadcast television for Christmas during my youth and young adulthood. I'm not putting it on the list, though, on the chance that the random number generator will pick it while I'm still fed up with Jimmy Stewart. Maybe I'll watch it for Christmas.

In 1963, theaters would have an intermission, especially for longer movies. You youngsters have probably never experienced this and have no reference point.

It’s A Wonderful Life is a sick, demented movie and every print should be burned!

The print of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World that I watched did have an intermission. I saw one or two movies in the theater in the late 70s or early 80s that had intermissions, but I can't remember which ones they were. I want to say that one of them was Harryhausen's Clash of the Titans from 1981, but that came in at just under 2 hours, so maybe not.

Richard Attenborough's Gandhi also had an intermission, but I never saw that in the theater.

If you happen to love The French Connection, consider watching the sequel as well. Part II is not nearly as well-known as the first movie, but I thought it was very good.

Thanks Sheep! I will check out the sequel for sure if I like the original.

Yesterday, for a few hours, I was the only slot grinder on the floor, a boon that hasn't happened for me in several months. I took advantage of it and found a number of good plays, but all that good EV didn't add up to much in real dollars.

That's gambling for you. Near the end of the run, I found myself breaking dead even on the slots, but the second-to-last (penultimate) machine of the night gave me a small win, so that was nice.

On the poker front: I've been running below expectation on the high hand promo (i.e. no hits at all for the last few months). I could have used a high hand last night. Hopefully, the promo gods will come through for me soon.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5 hours
(-$200.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 5 hours
+$76.75

2024 Running Poker Total: 251 hours, +$2277.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 137 hours, +$5719.17

2024 Grand Total: 388 hours, +7996.17

Some Notes on Infinite Jest

I finished David Foster Wallace's 980 page novel. This was my second read-through of a book that is so packed with themes and storylines and character moments and subtle Easter eggs that in retrospect my first reading felt like a 3-hour visit to a massive theme park, in that I had a fun time and got a general idea of the layout, but that there wasn't any way for me see most of the rides until my return visit.

This time I read closely and leaned heavily on Reddit's 10,000-member r/InfiniteJest subforum, containing posts and discussions on every aspect of the book going back at least as far as 2009, with posts that are still being generated today.

I'm not going to do a full-blown review of the book. That would require a massive series of posts, longer than my aborted string of Apocalypse Now posts would have been, had I been arsed to finish it.

I've already written about the addiction recovery sections of the book in previous posts, and how important they were to me, so I'll just touch on the world building, the plot, and the ending, and the false lack thereof, and the actual hidden ending, without getting too heavily into spoilers.

Infinite Jest came out in 1996, and it's set in their near future, which means that it's set in our alternative near past. In that world, Rush Limbaugh defeated Bill Clinton in the '96 election, then Limbaugh was assassinated, and a third party candidate won the '00 election, and that candidate was the "former crooner" Johnny Gentile, very much a combination of fat old Elvis Presley and paranoid clean freak Howard Hughes.

Being a neat freak, Gentile formed the Clean US Party, or C.U.S.P., and he wrangled Canada and Mexico into an EU-like pact called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. Onanism of course is an old-timey term for masturbation.

Gentile's plan for cleaning up the USA was to declare most of northern New England and upstate New York a no-man's land and forcefully expropriate the land to Canada, to become part of the province of Quebec.

Credit: [U]Biblioklept[/U]

From there, the USA would employ massive suborbital catapults (or possibly trebuchets) to launch all of their garbage and toxic waste into the new no-man's land, known as the Great Concavity (aka the Great Convexity, from Canada's perspective). And thus was created a several thousand square mile (km) dump that served as the corner into which the USA swept their filth.

Added to this, Gentile built a series of massive fans that redirected air pollution from the USA north into the Great Concavity, and presumably on from there into the original Quebec.

Accompanying this was the invention of something called annular fusion, a form of nuclear fusion that was so clean that its production radically detoxified everything in the local environment to the point where the flora and fauna became uncontrollably lush and overgrown. So of course, Gentile built O.N.A.N.'s annular fusion plants inside the Great Concavity in order to counterbalance the garbage and toxic waste being catapulted and fanned in.

The result was not a happy medium of an environment, but instead of a fluctuating sine wave of heavy toxicity flipping into toxic cleanliness and back again. The latter unsustainably cleansed stage of the ecosystem caused massive overgrowth in plants and animals, resulting in feral former-pet hamsters the size of Volkswagen Beetles roaming the wastes, and reports of an abandoned 20-foot tall human infant terrorizing residents at the northern border of New New England.

Canada did not appreciate this "gift" of highly problematic land. People in Quebec were especially incensed, as their rate of cancer and birth defects skyrocketed due to the toxicity being sent their way. Around the turn of the century, in both our world and in the Infinite Jest world, Quebec was a hotbed of separatist sentiments. Many in the province wanted to secede from Canada and become their own French-speaking country.

Enter the Assassins Fateuils Rolents, aka Wheelchair Assassins, a Quebec separatist terror organization composed of murderous men in wheelchairs. Most of the men in that cabal had lost their legs as children playing a game on the train tracks.

Credit: [U]Jon from Infinitetest[/U]

216 Quebec boys start the game in 36 groups of 6 each. The groups separate and line up along the tracks, 3 to a side in each group, with one referee watching each group. When an express train comes flying by, the boys all jump from one side of the track to the other, just before the train smashes into them.

It's a test of courage: the first boy in each group of 6 to jump is sent home in shame. Jumpers 2-5 are allowed to stay and watch subsequent rounds of the game. The very last boy to jump across the tracks in each group gets to advance to the next round; that is, if he is not smeared across hundreds of yards (meters) of the tracks by the train, or also if he is not slightly luckier and loses only his legs, as seems to a be common enough occurrence in the game to eventually find those legless boys inducted into the Wheelchair Assassins.

If boy #6 is killed or incapacitated, then boy #5—assuming that he survived the jump—takes his place in the second round of 36 players: 6 groups of 6. The surviving last jumpers of the second round go to the final round of 6, and think of how courageous/foolish those final 6 would be, and know that the legless boys were even more foolish and courageous than that.

The Assassins Fateuils Rolents are the main baddies in Infinite Jest, and they are after a master tape of a film produced by the deceased father of one of the main characters. The film, known as Infinite Jest V (or possibly Infinite Jest VI) is so stupefyingly entertaining that anyone who watches it even once becomes useless for the rest of their life. The only thing they'll want to do after that is watch the film again and again and again; they will not eat or drink or sleep or do anything but watch the film until they die of dehydration or lack of sleep or what have you. If the film is taken away from them, they will make every effort to get it back, or die in the attempt.

The Assassins Fateuils Rolents want to copy the master tape (viral Internet videos haven't yet caught on in this world) and spread it throughout the USA and Canada in order to kill thousands, or more, and somehow achieve their goal of an independent Quebec—though it seems like they want to cause havoc and misery, much more than they want to break off their own country.

After almost 1000 pages, the book ends suddenly, without a seeming resolution to the plot, which like the ending of The Sopranos caused some people distress. But unlike The Sopranos, Infinite Jest actually does have an ending, it's just that we the readers have to extrapolate it from the clues that David Foster Wallace left in the extensive endnotes and in the almost-forgotten flash forward at the beginning of the book. It's a pretty cool ending, and it's not terribly vague or open to interpretation.

I did not realize this about the ending on my first read, but I still enjoyed the book, just like I would have enjoyed a few hours at that huge imagined theme park without being able to go on its most famous ride, especially since I hadn't known that that particular ride existed.

On my second visit to Infinite Jest, through the help of close reading and poring over a lot of posts and blogs, I got to experience the rest of the rides, including the cool one.

If you're interested in giving this book a shot, I would not recommend close reading and study on your first go-round. I think it would have been too much for me if I'd tried it, though your mileage may vary.

I've given just the most basic layout of the plot and the lore here in these notes; they're a lot more ornate and complicated in the book, and when all is said and done, the book is not really about the plot and the lore, they're just interesting trappings put in place to showcase the more important parts of the book.

After all, it's lonely to go to a giant theme park by oneself; the rides are in place for us to enjoy with others. The three main characters in the book are all loners, but they are also constantly in the presence of other people who are ostensibly close to them, as well as an occasional narrator who is sort of spying on them from beyond the grave, but that's another ball of wax.

And it's those obligatory interactions that the book is really about. The ways that the characters communicate and fail to communicate with themselves and others, and the ways that they hurt themselves and others, and the ways that they deal with the hurt and refuse to deal with the hurt. That's what I got from the first read-through, and that was enough.

David Foster Wallace wrote his masterpiece in order to impress a woman: the writer Mary Karr, he wrote it as "a means to her end" as he once quipped, so the themes of loneliness, communication and connection ring especially true.

Unfortunately, although DFW did win over Mary Karr, their relationship was brief, and he turned into a creepy stalker ex-boyfriend type and caused a bad time for Karr, and he was posthumously cancelled for that.

I'd say never meet your heroes, but I'll venture that at least some of them are nice. Most people are. DFW was a creep, in some respects. And that sucks. But his book lives on without him.

*Sorry, the president was Johnny Gentle, not Johnny Gentile.