Air and Space Museum

Yesterday Cardgrrl drove me out to Chantilly, Virginia, to tour the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. (I find the "Udvar-Hazy" name completely too obscure to remember, so in my mind it has become the "Uber-Nazi" center. I find this much more amusing than Cardgrrl does. However, it turned out to have at least a touch of accuracy, as some of the warplanes in the accompanying photos represent the first time that swastikas have appeared in this blog.)

It's a very cool and interesting place to visit--a fact which I can best support not by describing stuff, but by showing you a ton of photos that I took while there. See here.

Most surprising fact learned at the museum: The U.S. had flying aircraft carriers in the 1930s. Who knew?! Second most surprising fact: The SR-71 Blackbird housed here flew coast to coast on its last run (20 years ago) in 64 minutes. Third most surprising fact (tie): The urine collecting devices on Skylab were yellow, and they shot their urine out into space after collecting it. In space, no one can hear you pee.

Go see this museum next time you're in the D.C. area.

Online mystery

I'm back in Vegas after a delightful week with Cardgrrl.

While I was visiting in her apartment one evening, we tried playing a sit-and-go tournament on PokerStars. I had my laptop with me and tapped into the wireless network that she has set up so that she can use both her desktop and laptop from the same DSL line. But as soon as one of us was registered for a tournament (single-table or multi-table), the other couldn't register for it. Instead, the second one to register would get a message saying that security wouldn't allow it while the first person was in the tournament.

OK, I can understand that--a little extra protection against two people sitting next to each other and sharing information in order to collude.

However, I've heard stories before of many, many people who live in the same residence and share a common internet connection and who are yet able to play simultaneously in tournaments while using different computers--husbands and wives, roommates, brothers, etc.

How is it that some people can do it and others not? Cardgrrl thought it had to do with the router settings, specifically whether the local network assigns the computers the same IP address or different ones. Is that it? If not, what makes this work? Inquiring minds want to know.

Guess the casino, #610

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Answer: Suncoast

Things I've seen

In the morning, I'll be flying back to Vegas. It has been a lovely and delightful week with Cardgrrl, as always, but life must go on. All play and no work makes Grump a broke boy. Or something like that.

My first day here (Wednesday last week) I went for a walk while Cardgrrl was on an extended work-related conference call. Here's some of what I saw.

Some very pretty flowers (pansies? I'm not sure):



A big, old tree with wrinkled skin:



A sculpture that I kind of liked, for reasons I can't exactly articulate. It is identified as "Divine Nature" by Chris Tousimis, 2006:



This is part of the outside of a Jewish center. I just like the assemblage of interesting lines--two peaks, one of them under a gentle arch, some vertical lines, some horizontal lines, some criss-crossy lines:



A lovely, simple, red door at St. Albans parish:




Many years ago, my brother told me about having seen a bunch of ants paired up two by two, heads together, mostly not moving, but occasionally the dyads would break apart and they'd each find new partners. He was at the time somehow in contact with E.O. Wilson, the world's pre-eminent ant researcher, so asked him what that was about. Wilson apparently told him that it was a territorial battle between adjacent colonies, and the pairs were soldier ants that had their jaws locked on each other. I thought that sounded pretty cool, and for a long, long time I have hoped that someday I would get to see such a thing for myself. (You might think photos would be on the web. Maybe they are, but do a Google image search for "ant wars" and you get all sorts of things, but not that.)

I stopped to look at a bunch of ants on the sidewalk, wondering what bit of food had attracted them. I was surprised to find that there was none. They were also mostly stationary, not milling about. When I looked more closely, I noticed that they were in pairs, head to head. I had found it! My own little ant war! And now you can see it, too. Look at the big version, and it's easier to see what's going on.

(The macro setting on my camera seems to have some aberration in the lens toward the right side. Never noticed it before, and don't know what it's about. More exploration needed when I get home. Sorry for the partially blurred image.)



Here's a shot from the basement of Cardgrrl's apartment building. Kind of a Hitchcock "Vertigo" thing going on, though it feels a lot safer on the bottom looking up than the other way 'round:




Finally, while on a trip out to the burbs for some errands, we passed by this sign, which is one of the finest examples of oxymoronity I have come across:





(Yes, I know that it's referring to Bush 41, not 43, and not to his own personal intelligence but to the gathering of security information about other nations. Still funny.)

Guess the casino, #609

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Answer: Sahara

Guess the casino, #608

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Answer: Orleans

An experiment in variance

Worth reading: "Poker's Inconvenient Truth." (Hat tip: Pokerati.)

Guess the casino, #607

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Answer: Imperial Palace (Where else are there cookies in the poker room?!)

Guess the casino, #606

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Answer: Fitzgerald's

Guess the casino, #605

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Answer: Caesars Palace

Random thought

Long-time political blogger Mickey Kaus, in interview with Reason magazine, August/September issue, p. 57, available online here.


I have no friends. I'm a blogger.

Guess the casino, #604

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Answer: Aria

Birthday grrl

Today is my dear friend Cardgrrl's birthday. I'm actually writing this on August 1, but if all goes as planned, I will be in D.C. for a visit as you're reading this. It's hard to imagine, I know, but she seems to like having this old grump around once in a while. I may never understand why, but I'm pleased and humbled that it is so.

The photo above is one I snapped casually, mostly out of boredom, while waiting for our food to be delivered at the Harrah's cafe in March. When I looked at it on the computer later, it quickly became one of my favorites. She doesn't think much of the shot, but I think she looks beautiful. I love how it captures her mysterious little smile and askance look (which I have been on the receiving end of countless times). There is both kindness and intelligence in those eyes, don't you think?

Please go visit her blogs, Raise or Fold and Something Beautiful, and leave a note either there or here joining me in wishing her much joy on this day.

Happy birthday, my sweet.

Guess the casino, #603

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Answer: Venetian

Off

In about an hour I'm leaving for the swampland which our Founding Fathers saw fit to designate as the nation's armpit capitol. The lovely Cardgrrl asked me to pay her a visit for her birthday, and it seemed like a good idea. After all, a girl turns 29 only once. I'll be there through next Wednesday.

Last night I finished reading Pauly's Lost Vegas. It's a great read, but for personal reasons it has left me with a bunch of very weird feelings that I think will take some time and rumination to sort out, put labels on, and figure out how to describe. I smell a long, rambling post to come out of that process around the time I return home.

Guess the casino, #602

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Answer: South Point

I can be really, really stupid

Yesterday while I was playing at Binion's, there was a guy across the table from me reading a book when he wasn't in a hand. The book was Check-Raising the Devil, nominally by Mike Matusow, but with more than a little help from Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli.

I have not read this book and do not own a copy. But I have, naturally, seen plenty of reviews of it in my poker reading, in blogs and in magazines. The reviews almost always include a picture of the front cover, so I was familiar with what it looks like:




I was, therefore, surprised when I saw the book yesterday, because it was plain black, with the title in simple lettering across the front. No photo of Matusow with a satanic 6-6-6 flop in front of him.

At first I thought maybe this was a translation into another language and, hence, with a different cover for some foreign market, because the guy reading it was clearly not a native speaker of English. But no, when he tipped it down to watch a hand, I determined that it was in English. Could it be some sort of special book-club edition? I've had book club memberships, and sometimes the covers differ from the publisher's usual output of a title. I doubted it, though, because I recognized the logo of Cardoza, the publisher, on the spine.

I finally decided that what I was looking at was most likely some sort of pirated, black-market copy, probably produced dirt-cheap in a sleazy third-world country back alley and sold at a price to undercut the legitimate publisher. Even as I settled on that as the most likely explanation, however, I was aware that it did seem a little weird. After all, the book sells to a niche market of poker enthusiasts--not exactly the kind of runaway bestseller that you'd tend to think would attract rogue printers itching to cash in on the frenzy of some girly fictional romance that Oprah had gushed about. I dismissed it as a minor mystery that I would probably never get the answer to, turned my attention back to the poker game, and had forgotten about it by the time I got home.

Today I was reading Lavalli's most recent blog post, and the question of the strangely undecorated book came to mind again, because there's a little ad for it in the margin of the page. It occurred to me that I could pretty easily contact Lavalli and ask him if he knew of any pirating of his work, since I know that he at least periodically stops by here for a read, and has left at least one comment that I remember.

I started composing a note to him. Then, fortunately, I was saved from the embarrassment that would have resulted. I don't know how it happened, but in some sort of weird deus ex machina moment, the answer to the riddle just dawned on me from out of nowhere. In retrospect, it is so blindingly obvious that I am now seriously questioning my sanity:

The man was simply reading a copy of the book with the dust jacket removed.

Guess the casino, #601

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Answer: Monte Carlo

Wild car

Walking back home from Binion's this afternoon, I noticed this crazy Jeep in the parking lot at Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard.

Guess the casino, #600

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Answer: Hooters