Jan 31
My life as late has been dominated by poker and whatever scraps fall off the felt are claimed by my actual job as a programmer. As such the only recent stories I have to relate involve the play of various hands or the theories behind my latest stored procedure. I have begun saving interesting hand histories while playing online with the intention of revisiting them later. If I feel I played a hand badly, could have played it better, or simply found it confusing I drop the history into a text file and then replay it in my mind, looking for ways that I could have played it better. I suppose I could post some of those histories, but I don’t imagine you would find it all that interesting.
I watched Syriana today. Basically it is the movie Traffic, but with oil instead of drugs. The story is told in the same stylistic, multi-faceted manner and ends with a similarly depressing, though realistic conclusion. Coming away from the film I swung over to The Moderate Voice to play a half-hearted game of Catch Up on recent national politics. I have to say, and I don’t want to dwell on the point for too long, that the frustration of a movie like Traffic or Syriana is only compounded when you look at American government and big business and realize that the horriffic storyline you just witnessed on film is in fact your reality. The movie ends, but the problematic situation continues. I voiced my concern to my roommate Matt who then pointed out today that Exxon announced recently that they just posted a fourth quarter profit of around 11 billion dollars (that’s only for three months… and it’s all profit). There yearly profits totalled more than $36 billion, which is more than a 40% increase over last year. It is the single largest corporate profit in the history of the world and the company credited their success to, “higher gas prices.” Well, no shit. Conspiracy theories aside it is also worth mentioning that one of the major differences between this year and last is the devastion of Hurricane Katrina which damaged our oil capabilities and was offered as justification for the price hikes at my local pump. Common sense would lead me to believe that horrible natural disasters should shrink a company’s profits, but once again I find that it’s Opposite Day in America. Matt then complained how ridiculous it was that our government allows the oil companies to get away with that, to which I replied, “You voted for Bush, not me.” He then touched his thumbs together while extending each index finger, “Hey man, I gotta vote for the W!!” How do you argue with that?
Incidentally the State of the Union is on tonight. I usually watch these things for about a half hour before changing the channel. Within that thirty minutes I am lucky to hear two minutes of content among the twenty-eight minutes of raging applause. “We need to beat the terrorists!”
To distract my mind from the frustrations of reality, I laced a cotton cloth with concentrated fiction and held it over my mouth until the pain was gone. I only did a brief and cursory search (I clicked on the very first link returned by google) but landed upon what so far seems to be quite the gem of a website. I only read a few of the shorter short stories, but they were generally pleasant. Particularly useful to me were the comments and ratings attached to each story. Anyway, if you like words, sentences, or the ideas they convey you might not completely be wasting time by visiting this site.