Thought for the day

From Wil Wheaton, on his birthday, which he asks us to recognize as "Don't Be a Dick" day:

"Live your life honestly, honorably, with kindness, compassion and generosity."

Whole thing here:

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2012/07/happy-dont-be-a-dick-day.html

Just for funz

I've liked Wil Wheaton for a long time. I was one of the few who actually liked Wesley Crusher early on in ST:TNG (even though he had a lot of dopey lines--"We're from Starfleet! We don't lie!"), largely because Wheaton played him with such a constant sense of wonder and excitement. But he also had some genuinely great scenes, such as the dramatic confrontation with Captain Picard in "The First Duty," where he takes a serious verbal drubbing from the captain in the process of realizing that he has been loyal to the wrong ideal, and has to endure the pain of admitting he screwed up. Jumping ahead to more recent stuff, his writing is funny and insightful, and his appearances on shows such as "The Big Bang Theory" and "Eureka" are enjoyable without fail.

Wheaton and I have several friends in common, and played poker at adjacent tables once, but I've still never actually met him. Wil is also worth knowing about if you do crossword puzzles, because puzzle makers apparently find the unusual spelling of his name very useful, and it shows up a lot.

I read his blog and tweets. Recently he and his wife watched on TV a movie that he was in: "Toy Soldiers," released in 1991, when Wheaton was 19. He sent a few Twitter messages about it, including a photo of him pointing in shame to the dumb-looking earring he wore. He later wrote a blog post about the experience, and said that he still liked the movie in spite of some of its silliness.

I had either never heard of this movie or had forgotten about it. I thought it would be fun to watch, so bumped it up to the top of my Netflix queue, and watched it today. I recognized from his post the scene in which Wil gets shot (kid can handle a phaser, but not a 9mm submachine gun!), and managed to pause the DVD on the same frame that he had used in the picture, and took a screen shot of the one superimposed on the other.

Which was way more fun than is strictly reasonable.

Blogger championship

Finished in 800th place out of 1337 in the PokerStars blogger freeroll. Hmmm. Maybe not my most impressive performance ever. But I did outlast Wil Wheaton!

Online freeroll tournament for poker bloggers

OK, I'm completely whoring myself with this post. In order to qualify for a free tournament for poker bloggers at PokerStars, I have to post the following. It's a small price to pay. Thanks to Wil Wheaton's blog--which should just plain be on your list of places to visit regularly--for the alert: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 6060986

It would be unspeakably cool to win that. It would be even cooler to win it if anybody in the poker blogging world had any friggin' idea that my blog even existed! But they don't--at least not yet--and I'm OK with that. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, the extraordinarily few people in the world who know me do appear to like me.

And ya never know. Maybe the table chat will result in other bloggers checking me out, posting links, etc. Then traffic builds, and before you know it, I'm a superstar!

Yeah, that's gonna happen....

Does your mother know you're wearing that shirt? (Minimal poker content)

Sometimes I just have to wonder what people are thinking when they select clothes to buy and wear.

The other day I saw a 30-something-year-old guy in the Venetian poker room wearing a t-shirt that said, on the front, "You have a nice ass," and, on the back, "What high school do you go to?"

I assume that people wear shirts with messages on them because they want to announce to the world something about their personality or their interests. Fine--I have no problem with that. I have my share of shirts commemorating an event I've been to or a product I like. I don't wear t-shirts much*, but if I did, I'd certainly consider ones that had stuff printed on them that I found funny or interesting.** I assume that people would either get and appreciate the joke--and thus think that they have at least a little something in common with me--or not like it, and thus probably not be my type.

But what on earth could one expect people to think of a guy who wears the nice ass/high school shirt? Did he buy it saying to himself, "Wow, people will think I'm so clever"? Does he laugh at it again every time he puts it on? When going through the drawer that morning to pick out a shirt, did he see this one and think, "Yep, that's the one that will convey just the right image of me today"?

Look, I'm not a prude, nor am I unrealistic about the sexual attractiveness of teenagers.*** It's just that I can't figure out what image of oneself one would be attempting to convey to the world by buying and wearing that particular shirt. Is it, "Wow, I really hope everybody sees that I enjoy fantasizing about sex with high school girls"?**** I mean, basically, what else can it be? Is there really anything that one can conclude about the wearer other than that? I suppose there's the possibility that he's being ironic, that he's actually the father of a teenage daughter, doesn't like the thought of her emerging sexual attractiveness, and wears this shirt in ironic defiance of his own true feelings. But that's quite a stretch.*****

Or maybe I just don't find the suggestion--however remote--of statutory rape to be as funny as this guy does.

Mostly, though, I suspect that I have thought about this guy's shirt, and what it says about him, a lot more than he ever has.******


*Not that anybody cares, but the pragmatic reason is that poker rooms tend to be really, really cold, so long-sleeved shirts tend to be a lot more comfortable. I also like to carry a pen and paper in my breast pocket for recording when and where I played, my results, things to look up when I get home, ideas for this blog, etc. So even long-sleeved t-shirts aren't my favorite garb, since they lack this crucial pocket.

**I just found this bunch of t-shirts (and posters, some of which should also be on shirts), which I would totally wear: http://xkcd.com/store/ (Thanks to Wil Wheaton's blog for the pointer: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2007/08/my-awesome-t-sh.html.)

***There's the old joke, "What do you call a man who finds 15-year-old girls sexually attractive?" Answer: "Heterosexual." The point, obviously, is that all straight guys do. For most of human history, girls of what we now consider high school age were expected to already be having children. Assuming that there is a strong genetic component to what kinds of people one finds to be sexually attractive, it appears to be nearly universal that it includes adolescents of one gender or the other.

****Nothing in the shirt's message specifically mentioned girls, so it's at least theoretically possible that the designer and/or purchaser had high-school boys in mind. But I'm pretty dubious of that.

*****I love irony, and I can appreciate irony even in t-shirts. (As opposed to appreciating ironing of t-shirts, which I don't.) At the same Venetian poker table was a woman who struck me as exceptionally bright, likely an engineer or professor of some sort, wearing a shirt that said "Math is hard!" I assume that this was derived from and/or in deliberate reference to the infamous talking Barbie. (See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002892.html for a nice summary of the history of that model, and how the "math is hard" expression emerged from it.) I further assume that this particular wearer loves math, and wears the shirt in proud irony--which I think is funny!

******This is now the most footnotes I've ever had in a blog post. Maybe I should start thinking of a better system, eh?

It's Geek Week at the Hilton (non-grumpy content)

Those are two "Star Fleet officers" just outside the Hilton poker room earlier this evening. Yes, the big Trek convention is here.

It's Geek Week in another way, too. Wil Wheaton was playing in a private game with a bunch of friends in the poker room this evening. He appeared to be having too much fun to interrupt to ask for a photo (besides which, I assume he had to pose for pictures all day, selling his new book at the convention), so I left him alone. And if you don't know who Wil Wheaton is, or why it's OK to call him a geek (hint: he wrote a book called "Just a Geek," and he was actually wearing a t-shirt that said "geek" on the back tonight), then you need to explore his blog (http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/). You don't need to be a fan of Star Trek or poker or computers to enjoy it--just being a fan of interesting writing is sufficient; the rest will follow.

Addendum, 8/13/07: Here's Wil's description of his geek weekend, including the Hilton poker game: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2007/08/briefly-recappi.html