Ikea Product Names I'd Like To See

Whenever I go to Ikea, I always wish I had some product cards that I could put on the displays. The trouble is, I always think of it when I'm there, never before I go.

FLIMSY
WOBBLY
RICKETY
SKEWED

FRUMPY
BOXY
FLOPPSY
WIDGET

DORK
SPUD
DOOFUS
LOCO

Randy and Burton and Candy and Liz

Slowly over the last decade, Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings evolved into the Sweeney Sisters.

It was like one of those 3-D illusion pictures where you look at it, look at it, look at it ... then Bang! It's the frickin Sweeney sisters!

The first time Bachman and Cummings did something together after years of estrangement, it was unexpected and great. We just couldn't believe they were performing together again.

Then they started doing the occasional special event as The Guess Who. We couldn't get enough of them.

Then they started telling stories about the old days and how songs came to be. We loved it.

Several years in, I got off the bandwagon and starting asking, Why do people still get excited that these guys continue to play together?

Then it happened. They became Bachman & Cummings. They released a CD. They did a concert for TV. Burton's youthful black hair was a stark contrast to his geriatric skin. Their stories about the good old days became lounge-act banter.

Then they showed up live in the studio at WNED, the Buffalo, N.Y. PBS station. They talked to the host and played live during fund raising intermissions of their TV special. They nattered about how much they enjoy PBS television while the camera panned between them and the volunteers taking pledges on phones.

I have nothing against PBS or fund raising. I like The Guess Who, BTO, and some of Cummings' solo material. It's just that their transition to elder entertainers has been more caricature than graceful.

Guitar Theory

One of the early guitar-like instrument makers or players really blew it. Why do we learn to play using our dominant hand to pick and strum? Fretwork requires much more dexterity and precision. Wouldn't we be better musicians if we learned to play other-handed?

I doubt we could relearn to play other-handed to any measure of success. Too much brain training would have to be undone. But, learning from scratch....

I can't think of any instrument, that doesn't have strings and a neck, where the dominant hand doesn't take the dominant role.

Brutal Structure, Delicious Action

I hadn't played poker in months, so I went to Fallsview last Friday. I love Friday nights at Fallsview. Gamblers come out to play and vacationers arrive for a weekend of fun.

I played in the 1/2 no-limit Texas Hold 'em game from 14:30-01:30. The buy-in for the game is $40 min. to $100 max. That's pretty small, 50 big blinds for a max. buy-in. The opening raise was usually to 10 or 12 with reraises going to 35, so a $100 stack isn't really enough to play a raised pot. The house takes a session fee in this game of $5 per half hour instead of raking the pot. At the ten player table, each player paying $10 per hour to play, a buy-in is taken off the table by the house every hour. That is hugely expensive! But the game has so many loose, bad players, that it's still profitable. And because players are there on vacation or just there to gamble, they usually don't mind losing and it ends up being fun to play.

I was card dead until about 21:00. I kept topping up to 100 so I could get a nice return if I got involved in a hand. A new guy who had been at the table for about ten hands made it 12 under the gun. A loose, but fairly solid player with a big stack called. A player to my left held his cards in a way that I knew meant he was going to play the hand, so I got great odds and called with QcJc. The flop came QQT giving me trip queens. It was checked to me. Now in this game, if you make three of a kind on the flop, it's pretty much written in stone that you check to hide the strength of your hand. Which is exactly why I bet 10. Poker is all about counter strategy. My opponents would reason that if I bet, I must be representing a queen and don't actually have one. And only betting 10 into a $51 pot, well that shows incredible weakness. The guy to my left folded. The original raiser called. The other guy folded. The turn made the board QQTK. My opponent bet out 35!

Okay. So the guy raised preflop UTG which meant that if he was a half decent player, he had a quality starting hand. Because of the way I played my hand and the level of thinking that was going on in this game, he probably thought I had a T. This meant he thought he could either beat a pair of tens or could make me fold a pair of tens. Therefore his likely starting hands were AA, KK, JJ, TT, AK, or AQ. I didn't think he had TT because if he did, he would have checked to me to let me bet again. He probably didn't have AQ because people hadn't been playing that hand aggressively in this game. If he had KK, I expect he would have made a probe bet on the flop instead of check/calling. I could beat the rest of his likely hands. My estimate was that I was about 70/30 or better to have the best hand. There was $106 in the pot. I had about $80 in front of me. I clearly had a +EV situation. I raised all-in. He confidently called and turned over AA. I turned over my QJ and he sighed. He didn't hit his two outer and I finally had some chips to play with.

Bluffing wasn't really an option at that table because it was difficult to get players to fold. I continued to wait for +EV situations, maximized my return when I had a winning hand, and kept the pot small when I wasn't sure. I continued to be card dead.

My best starting hand was AsKs. My best pocket pair was JJ. A solid player with $30 in front of him raised to 15. It was folded around to me in late position so I raised to put him all-in. He turned over QQ to beat my JJ. Oh, well. I managed to bob and weave and stay ahead of the session fees and go home +$58, plus a day out, plus a whole lot of fun, plus a lot of energy drink abuse. Oh, yeah, and I also got to use my murse. It worked great!

Glossary

+EV: Positive expected value.
A: Ace
K: King
Q: Queen
J: Jack
T: Ten
Trip, Trips: Three of a kind.
UTG: Under the gun. The player who is first to act.

Also see Wikipedia for their Poker Glossary and more about Texas Hold 'em.

I've Got Stuff to Carry

I've gone and bought a murse. No, not a male nurse. A man purse.

Sometimes I just need to carry more stuff than will fit in my pockets. Not often. Just those times when I'm out on an urban day trip or out for a day at the poker room. Then I need to carry my meds, Altoids, glasses, sunglasses, pen, notebook, maybe a book if I have time to kill, maybe a bottle of water, maybe a snack. (I have blood sugar issues.)

I got it at Eddie Bauer. It's about 9x6x4 inches. It's close in size and design to the canvas kit bag my dad was issued in WWII. I wish he still had it. It would be so cool to use it.

I looked online to see what was out there and this one from Eddie Bauer fit the bill. I went to the store to check it out and while I was looking in the compartments and convincing myself it was a very manly bag a nice older woman came over to help me. I told her I wanted something to carry stuff that wouldn't fit in my pockets like a paperback and my glasses.

She said, "You need a murse."

Well, that comment told me that the bag I was holding was definitely not a murse and was therefore very manly indeed.

I said, "I'll take this one."

The tag calls it a Small Guide Bag. That sounds about right. The Web site calls it the Expedition Small Bag. Yep, you bet. I will make an expedition to the Fallsview poker room on Friday to try it out.

Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t

Back in this post, I mentioned my friend Teeb who collects words and phrases that sound dirty but aren't. The list has been kept in our heads for decades and our failing mental capacities have jeopardized the completeness and integrity of the data. In order to record the list and protect it from further deterioration, I'm going to keep it here and add to it as needed.

• Bonafide
• Back end processes
• Insertion order
• June Cleaver: "Ward, weren't you a little hard on the Beaver?"
• Stimulus Package (Courtesy of George W. Bush, 2008)
• Hard six (A type of bet in craps.)
• Entry-level position
• Philatelist
• Executrix
• Polishing my Oscar
• Pictorial
• Live Circus Acts
• Full frontal
• Big pink eyesore
• Flopping the nuts (Poker jargon from Teeb.)
• Live straddle (Poker jargon from Teeb.)
• Munchkin (Thanks Sass!)
• Balzac
• Goblin

Pariah Dogs and Wandering Madmen

I saw Rush at the ACC on September 19th and 22nd. I went with S, another man's wife. It's okay. He knows. Neither of our spouses are Rush fans, so we have a standing date for dinner and a show every time the tour comes to Toronto.

My wife, V, is obsessive about accumulating Jack points. It paid off. The morning of the Wednesday show, I learned that she won tickets to the Saturday show. She was very happy for me and very proud of her radio contest prowess and that her obsessive compulsiveness had a positive outcome. The seats were in section 108, about centre ice and fifteen rows up. My seats on Wednesday were in section 101 at the back of the arena, nine rows up with a direct stage view. On Wednesday I watched the video screens a lot. On Saturday I was close enough to watch the band. S joined me for the second show. She wore her Presto tour shirt. My Farewell To Kings shirt hasn't fit since the Presto tour, so I was out of luck, vintage-shirt-wise. We had a blast.

On stage behind Geddy Lee were three ovens the size of large vending machines. They had glass paneled fronts and were filled with rotisserie chickens. I love their humour and inner-weirdness. They are three guys who would surely be misfits in any other situation.

Sometime in the '90s I stopped paying attention to lyrics. If a song had tragic or idiotic lyrics and a beat, I would bop to it. I just got tired of bothering with lyrics because most of them were fluff. In the last year I started paying attention again, at least enough to notice which were worth it. I think Alanis making fun of Fergie might have been the trigger.

I looked through Rush lyrics to find a title for this post. My god, most of them are depressing. They're very well crafted, but most deal with struggle, conflict, and oppression. Neil has issues. I don't remember that from when I was an obsessive fan in the '70's and '80's. I remember finding the lyrics intelligent and insightful. But I was at an age then when struggling, conflict, and being oppressed were standard issue and were badges of honour. Even a song like The Spirit of Radio that is upbeat and energetic, lyrics included for the most part, concludes with:

One likes to believe in the freedom of music
But glittering prizes and endless compromises
Shatter the illusion of integrity

And yet I still feel good, get a rush (sorry) and bop to it whenever I hear it. How do they do that?

I noticed an interesting thing while reading dozens of Rush lyrics: the music of their songs gets much of its complexity from the way the lyrics are written. The rhyme, the meter, the length of lines and stanzas. The music has to be written to accommodate all that.

The show was three hours long with a twenty minute break. Not bad for a bunch of old guys, much of the audience included. They had plenty of lights, lasers, pyrotechnics, and videos. It was a great show. They kind of have to have all of that going on because the three of them are so busy creating all that sound with their hands and feet that sometimes they don't have the freedom to be animated on stage.

A Bob & Doug McKenzie video introduced The Larger Bowl. A South Park video introduced Tom Sawyer. Other videos featuring band members were shown to open the concert, return from the intermission, and close the show after the encore.

The people with floor seats stood for the whole show. The people in the stands stood for the first three songs, for favourite songs, and for the three-song encore.

Once during each set, a crew member came on stage in a chef's hat and apron to baste the chickens. When this happened at the show on Saturday, eight guys in row 1, centre floor, put on chef's hats. It cracked Alex and Geddy up!

Big Al's Babes are a bunch of Barbie doll groupies around the gear at the base of Alex's mic stand. A search landed me at 2112.net which explained that roadies set up the babes so they hold Post-It signs that say things like: My Mom Thinks Your Hot!, I'm Only Doing This To Pay For College, Freebird!, and I Thought ZZ Top Had Beards.

Rush has always attracted fans who are musicians. Their music is usually complex, requiring precision and technique. They also attract individualists and independent thinkers. Their lyrics are smart and thought provoking and generally deal with protagonists who go against the grain. They have occasionally had songs make the charts, but they have never set out to write commercial songs. A lot of their appeal comes from the fact that they have completely disregarded music industry axioms. The rebellion and nonconformity are part of the attraction for their huge core following.

The excitement of the shows re-sparked my enthusiasm, so I started poking around the Internet to see what was out there about the band. There are a lot of fan sites and picture galleries. Wikipedia has a lot of information and it was there that I found a link to Durrell Scott Bowman's PhD. dissertation Permanent Change: Rush, Musicians’ Rock, and the Progressive Post-Counterculture. How cool is that? I'm only 25 pages into the 331 page document, but so far, it's a great read. Thanks Durrell!