connecting*the*dots

I can’t tell you how much I love playing Spades.

52 cards, split up between four players in teams of two. Your partner is your pahtnah; you know his tendencies, he knows yours. If you’re really tuned in during the bidding process and through the first two books, counting count cards and deductive reasoning takes over without much effort. After some practice, especially with the same partner, you can look forward to setting your opponents with amazing regularity.

Spades is about sharing that moment of victory with your pahtnah; it’s a game for bravado and talking smack. It’s Love & Hate on Radio Rahim’s knuckles. It has a pulse of its own.

Poker is so different.

1. No matter what game of poker you’re playing, you’re on your own.
2. Only cards dealt face up and player movement will give you a hint in counting cards.
3. You have to play your hand, the cards on the table, more than one deck at a time and the tendencies of your opponents. Patterns have to be established from the way your opposition reacts to various situations, but unless you play with the same people for an extended period of time even that strategy doesn’t help too much, as tendencies based on a stereotype aren’t too reliable.

Poker forces you to execute at a precise moment in time based on a plethora of variables; a majority of which are unknown.

A player folding twice in a row, with face cards in the second hand just to throw the table is a perfectly, rational strategy. Being conservative with three aces to raise the stakes, after raising on a bluff to gain a stake of the pot is SOP. Playing a straight game 85% of the time–in the midst of the madness — creates even more of a competitive advantage.

Poker is cold and calculating; poker is schizophrenic.

A poker player doesn’t strive for that moment of Quan; he plays to take all the chips for himself.

So which of these two games would you guess to be more popular in institutionalized environments, such as a federal prison? Which would you guess is more popular with Wall Street types on a Wednesday night after raking in $10k of commisions on speculative stock trades?

Let the gamble of our non-sustainable future continue.

I came across an extremely well written article in Newsweek which eloquently supports my stance on US foreign policy (i.e. we’re now bullies and have thrown diplomacy to the wind).

On so many levels, Fareed Zakaria illuminates the wrong turns America has made under the present administration, which has practically ostracized us from both the majority of citizens and governments of the world. Our “go it alone” attitude can be justified simply through our standing as the lone superpower in the world, but in flexing such an option, Zakaria argues that not only do we create a poor perception of ourselves, but our actions contradict the positions of the democratic states we are supposedly attempting to support.

An example: Need an air-base in Turkey? Just bribe the government with billions of dollars of support to make it happen, but as a “democracy,” the Turkish government is actually trying to represent the will of it’s people — an overwhelming 90% of which are against the war in Iraq.

It’s schizophrenic at best.

I’m not doing Zakaria justice, read the article. We’re in a very tenuous position in world history.

society breeds the open wounds
digging in to conquer tunes
of nature and beauty
but somehow you must move me
with those classic ads
cyclical campaigns
now i’m all caught up in your brain
a participant in the game

what am i to do?
when my existance become more than one, but two?

one is who i am in my heart
allowing me to stand tall and part my hair if i need to see
all that surrounds the essence of me.
but the second is profoundly another
like a long lost distant brother
a slave to this society
a direct contradiction to me

contempt comes from where we stand
and how we fall
the nature of moving forward
the gift of standing tall

standing tall…
for what?
have we just overlooked the gluttony of our american history?
oh, wait, i’m sorry that would be "society"
where everything is hyped and nothing is for free