This is an amazing story. I wonder if the kid really has a gift for basketball? I wonder if he'll get the chance to see? Hmmm... 6 3pointers in 4 minutes during a game. I think that's pretty good, and not just luck.

The whole port deal with the UAE brings up a LOT of interesting points. As I've been reading, the UAE is fairly moderate where Arab/Muslim countries are concerned, and in fact ahve come under pressurer from other Arab nations for being too close to the US in terms of policies and friendship. And voiding the deal at this point will certainly look like bigotry to Arabs and Muslims. What about Democrats/liberals that are against it? Isn't that going against all their crap they've been spouting about being tolerant and all that jazz?

How freakin' stupid is the administration to approve the sale of major ports to a company from the United Arab Emirates? Even if you think denying the sale is a sign of bigotry, it's still incredibly tone deaf. And facts are facts, some of the 9/11 terrorists were from the UAE. This needs to be reversed. You can be damn sure that the UAE wouldn't sell control of any of their ports to US companies. It's just plain retarded. Bush had better get his head out of his ass and stop this before he loses any sympathy from people who have previously suported his national security intiatives.

I managed to get a little bit going in poker. Two days in a row I've made the final table in tourneys where the top prize was about $1K. Both times I should have been chip leader going in to the final table, but got sucked out on right before. Last night I had pocket kings, some guy goes all in, I call, he shows 8s, and of course flops another 8, taking about 1/3 of my stack and putting me in the middle of the pack. And both nights I made absolutely retarded mistakes right away at the final table to knock myself out in 9th place for about $80. I keep kicking myself, because I knew better each time. That's $2000 I should have had a decent shot at, but basically gave away when I got hit by a stupid stick. At least for last night I can use the excuse that I was high on nyquil.

Wish me luck for tonight. Won't be able to play too much for a week or so after that. I have a final I need to study for, and since I missed last week being all sick and such, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Funny zinger that Britr Hum got in... Got this off Boortz. Someone asked Hume if he had gotten an exclusive with Cheney about the shooting because FoxNews is supposedly pro-Bush. He responded that no, they got the exclusive because the White House wanted the interview on the network that the most people watch. I love it!

American Idol is down to the final 24, and there's this one dude, Taylor Hicks, that I love. He's the one with gray hair that twitches like Ray Charles when he sings. I don't know if he's got a shot, but then I didn't think Bo Bice had a shot even after he stole my vote with his "Whipping Post" last year. Even if Taylor doesn't make it far, I'd love to see what he can do as a blues singer. The guy could probably already make a decent, and fun, living, travelling around singing the blues.

This entry is full of some rather disgusting stuff regarding my health, so you may want to skip it.

So here's my theory on my current illness. If you have any real medical knowledge, feel free to chime in since I'm really fairly ignorant on this stuff. Anyway, about two weeks I wasn't feeling that great. I was also getting post-nasal drip, which has long been the fist sign of an oncoming cold for me. Well I took some medicine and started to feel better, and actually think I was fighting off whatever virus it was before it really caught on. But then one of my roommates came down with a bacterial infection, either bad bronchitis or light pneumonia, and I caught that. I think that weakened my immune system, allowing the virus that had been in retreat to come back strong. I got antibiotics for the bacterial infection, and now my mucus is no longer lots of pretty colors, so that seems to be taken care of, but I still feel like ass, so now I've got a full blown cold, a viral infection, which the antibiotics aren't going to crap for. So I just have to wait it out. Sound reasonable?

Also I just quit smoking a week and a half ago. I've found that everytime I quit smoking, about a week later I start coughing up a lot of nasty black stuff, which I think is just my body's way of expelling all the nasty crap that has built up in my lungs during my time as a smoker. So not only was I getting multicolored mucus when I had coughing fits, but it also has even yuckier looking black stuff flecked in it. That will usually go away about two weeks later, so I got another week or so of that, and hopefully just a few more days of the virus, and I only have two more days of antibiotics, so the bacteria should be basically gone by now. Fun stuff. I'm tired of being sick. I can barely even drive because I feel all wierd when I try, and you know what they say about not operating heavy machinery....

My momma sent me this:

Subject: Article from Spanish Newspaper

All European life died in Auschwitz

By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez(*)

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a
terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz.

We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims.

In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We
destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced
great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science,
art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the
world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to
ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our
gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance,
religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an
unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world,
drowning in filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they
plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical
hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for
backwardness and superstition. We have exchanged the pursuit of peace
of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future
for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is
holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire
for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

This is a translation of an article from a Spanish newspaper. Please
send this article to as many people as possible, with a request to
forward it on. The truth must be told!

Worst day of poker ever!!! Maybe not in terms of money lost, but now my account is emptied, and I'm not going to be able to reload anytime soon. My last $5 I lost when I reraised all-in with pocket queens and got called by AQ offsuit. And the flop is 234, the river a 5, giving the jerk a straight and knocking me out.

Earlier I played a $10 tourney. 18 places paid, we're down to 27 and I'm the chip leader with about 20k in chips. I get pocket kings, raise a good amount, get one call, flop a third king and go all in. He calls me with a GUTSHOT straight draw, and of course picks it up on the river. Then I flop a straight and go all in and get called by two pair. Big surprise, his boat fills up on the river. I don't feel like running the numbers, but I was like a 5-1 favorite in both situations. So now I'm shortstacked and pick up pocket 6's and push. Get called by AKo, and he gets a K on the river, leaving me slamming my hand on my desk repeatedly yelling, "Why me!?!"

I suppose you could call this the butt-end of variance, and that I could handle if it hadn't wiped me out. Overall I'm still like a $2k winner in online poker, but all that money is gone in to my car and I'm left with nothing. At least I've picked up a nasty sudoku habit. Turns out I'm pretty good at 'em. I've been trying it out for about two days, and I'm already finding "medium" level puzzles to be too easy. I wonder if I can make money as a sudoku champion?

I read a story today about a group of 50 people or so who have vowed to buy nothing but food, underwear, and medicine in 2006 because they want to save the world. According to the group (who is based in San Fran, big surprise!), first market consumerism is destroying the world, and recycling does not go far enough. I see several problems with this. One, I feel like I have plenty of underwear, and barring disaster, I don't expect to need to buy anymore this year. Seems like they could do as well as me, right? Two, food packaging seems to me to be one of the biggest wastes of trees on Earth (well that and the Federal Reserve Bank, where we probably used a forest of trees everyday, and the mortgage industry). If they were really hard core, they'd mvoe to a rural area and grow their own food. Just living in a city uses up a lot of resources. They may decide to only use public transportation, but that uses plenty of fossil fuels also. And I see they've already made compromises. One couple needed a new shower curtain and weren't allowed to buy one, so someone else "found" them one. So if you stocked up a year's supply of crap like shower curtains before 2006 started, then it's ok?

And my biggest problem with this? It's an empty, meaningless gesture. I believe very strongly that science will take care of most of these problems in the next 50 years or so, or we will have blown ourselves back to the stone age. These people will feel pretty silly not buying a new TV when nanobots can utterly destroy any waste products inherent in such devices.

Ha! One person said they almost bought a $300 pair of shoes, but resisted because it was against the rules. I'm sorry, but anyone that has a hard time resisting $300 shoes has far greater problems than their underwear. Another lady is excited because she has more money to buy cherries for her martinis. Hmmm... Alcoholism or a new TV? I'm gonna pick the new TV. And someone bragged about buying a Razor scooter for $15 at a thrift shop. I wasn't aware that Razor scooters could be eaten or worn as underwear.

It's just neo-Luddism. Look, I'm not stupid, I see nothing wrong with using a bit more effort to reduce pollution, but I'm so very excited about the day when I can give all these environmentalists and Luddites the finger because science has solved the pollution and energy problems. And it WILL happen, definitely within my generation's lifespan.

I suppose you've heard about Dick Cheney accidently shooting his friend while hunting. So today I hear that the big deal is "What did Bush know about the hunting accident, and when did he know it, and why did it take so long to tell the press?"

Who cares? It was an accident while the VP was hunting, and had nothing to do with his job. He spent time after the accident with the guy he shot, making sure he was gonna be ok, and presumably apologizing a lot. I see no reason why the press needed to be alerted immediately, except to give people another excuse to bash Bush.

And don't tell me it's about "the public's right to know." The resistance that the press is having to printing the riot-causing Mohammed comics shows that they don't really care about the public's right to know, and that they are cowards.

So I started not feeling that great yesterday, and decided to see a doctor today. Georgia State's health center is only open on weekdays, so I went to a doc-in-the-box place and paid full price for a visit. Turns out I have bronchitis, maybe even pnuemonia, so the doc, knowing the visit wasn't covered, gave me enough samples of cipora to last me a full run. Now I'm all bundled up watching Tech basketball. Whenever I cough, it feels like there's a little elf inside my lungs slashing around with a knife or something. Lots of fun.

American Idol has grown up... Sort of. The very first American Idol winner, Kelly Clarkson, won a Grammy (or was it two?) for Best Pop Performance. Ms. Clarkson, however, seems to have forgotten her roots. Not only is she ot allowing American Idol contestants to sing any of her songs, but in her acceptance speech she did not thank the show for getting her to that stage. If not for the "biggest talent show on Earth" there's no way in hell she'd ahve that Gramm. Talk about ingratitude! I understand that she wants to protect her rights and the integrity of her work, but she's insulting all the people that voted for her when she was on the show, and all the people that bought her first album when they had no idea if she's be any good doing commercial music. They did it because they loved following her on the show. And now she's taken a big fat dump all over them.

American Idol, however, got its revenge! Idol went head to head with the Grammys this week and absolutely destroyed the Awards, doubling the ratings. I wonder if Ms. Clarkson and the rest of the industry noticed that people would rather watch amatuers than their self-indulgent pat ourselves on the back bore-fest.

Did you know that when people quote statistics about how the average family's real wage income has gone down or remained the same over the past several decades, they are not including the ever rising benefits also included in most paychecks? Add in all the healh care and retirement plan stuff, and also add back in the extra entitlement money the government steals from every paycheck to give to "poor people" and suddenly incomes have gone up considerably.

Add to that stats like only 37% of homes had color TVs in the 70's, and now 98% do. Most homes have both heat and A/C now. Most have computers and internet access. Even the poorest of homes have more "stuff" than they did a few decades ago, and far more than homes in most other countries in the world. When someone says the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, they are wrong. The rich ARE getting richer, and the poor are, too. Just not as fast, but since the rich have been the economiic drivers in capitalism for over a century, this trend benefits everyone.

You remember learning about the robber barons from the late 1800's? Super rich captains of industry, who at the time were reviled for their greed. Now we know that while they may have done some things that weren't so great (factory towns with company stores, for instance, made virtual slaves of employees), they amde more money for more people than possibly anyone in history up to that point.

Did you watch any of the Coretta Scott King funeral? Jimmy Carter and Joseph Lowery decided to use their speaking time to bash Bush. I think that's incredibly rude and disrespectful of Mrs. King. Talk about her, not politics. Carter mentioned the NSA wiretapping. He didn't mention that the wiretapping is on people who are talking to terrorists, nor did he mention that a Democratic regime wiretapped Mrs. King's husband and sent her tapes of his infidelity. I guess that was ok, since it wasn't Bush. Just seems an inappropriate subject considering the event.

In response to the Danish cartoons that were used as an excuse to cause death and destruction the world over, some Iranian newspapers are running a "The Holocaust was a fraud" contest. Somehow I don't see Jews rioting over this. Maybe because they aren't savages.

Read this. It's an examination of the differences in working hours between the U.S. and Germany. What it comes down to is that people in the U.S. have more paid working hours, but also have more leisure time. How is this possible? Mr. Smith works 50 hours a week at his job, and stops by the grocery store every Monday on his way home to buy food for the week. Mr. Dooshenboggen in Germany, however, only works 35 hours a week, and saves money by not going to the grocery store and instead spending 2-3 hours a day making sauerkraut when he gets home. When you add paid work to unpaid work, the American guy gets more slack-off time, and makes more money, and also helps other make more money by frequenting that grocery store.

One very interesting finding is that leisure time in the U.S. has gone up more for low-income households than for more educated households. That's the entitlement effect. Why work 60 hours a week to make ends meet when you can work 30 hours and apply for government assistance and spend that other 30 slacking off?

I turned on the Superbowl tonight. I even had some people over to watch it. Maybe five minutes in, I realized I could have turned off the TV, and no one would have cared. Personally, I had another reason to be distracted, but only a select few know why :)

I presume that you have heard by now about the cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper that have sparked worldwide Muslim protests. According to many Muslims, it's a blasphemy to depict Muhammed in any way, whereas others just found the cartoons to be mocking of Islam. Anyway, riots and protests and flag burnings and boycotts, and, as with everything related to Islam the last few years, deaths have occurred due to these cartoons. Muslim leaders are saying the Dutch need to do something to appease the Muslim world, and even Jack Straw, British foreign minister, thinks the cartoons were beyond the pale. Having seen some myself, they are certainly no worse than commens made about Christianity everyday by Democrats in congress.

This isn't really about the cartoons, and anyone who thinks it is is a moron. Muslims around the world (again, not all, maybe not even most, but a bunch everywhere there are Muslims) were just looking for an excuse. Just like what happened in France a month or two ago, all that was needed was an excuse to riot and pillage and destroy and hate. We can't shape our actions based on whether it might give Muslims an excuse to riot and kill, so either they are going to have to get over it, or they will destroy themselves eventually, either through pissing off the wrong country (the U.S.) or tearing their civilization apart from the inside.