Jews with Post-Cruise Blues and Other News

Well, we're back from the cruise, and as usual we find ourselves needing a vacation from the vacation. That is kind of a righteous suck for Tootsie, who has to find her feet at work tomorrow, but even though I have things to fill my day tomorrow, about which more later, I have the luxury of sleeping in.

First things first, I guess: not only did I not earn my cruise for next year at the tables, I actually came back down a little bit. I had a really good first day and a half; by 10:00 day 2 I was up almost $350 and  table captain. Then I kinda got hosed a little by the Poker Gods.  Well in fact I got an urgent telegram from them, it was my death certificate and could I just sign there please.

Basically I experienced exactly the kind of cooler hand that always seems to haunt my steps at times of greatest import. Holding KJo (yes, the dreaded KJ, who long-time readers know as being the single hand by which I've lost the most amount of money) and out-of-position I raised 3x and, since it's a cruise ship, actually - this is true - got called by more people than were playing.

The flop came KKJ.  Boy's night at the castle.  I flopped Kings full of Jacks - the stone cold joint.  I bet out about 1/2 the pot, call call, raise, fold, fold, back to me. No Hollywood, no dicking about, I shoved and leaned back in my chair, oozing power, unable to control myself but not really caring.

I got two callers.  One of them had me covered, the other was down to his last fifty bucks or so. The table flips our cards over and the idiot with no money had a pocket pair, something like 88 or 99, something that made me think that for the love of god, he puts his last dime in the pot thinking that with this kind of action he's really good. - The other player had KQ. There was almost $900 in the pot, as memory served.  I was actually planning next year's trip in my head.

Until, of course - what else could POSSIBLY happen - my opponent turned a Q and the bigger house.  GG Crafty.  Care to rebuy? Got the whole bit - flop sweat pouring down my face, ears buzzing, almost started getting tunnel vision even. I couldn't believe it - still can't, really.

Except this shit happens to me ALL THE FUCKING TIME. It's really discouraging.  And you know the worst thing about it?  It was destiny.  I certainly wasn't going to do anything but push my hand - remember, cruise poker is ABC, nothing fancy, subtlety is wasted on the stupid and the drunken - and my opponent wasn't going anywhere with her - yes, her - king.  She flops trips and with that kicker it's what, the third nuts at that point? So it's not like SHE was backing down.  It just happened like a god damned train wreck and there was nothing anyone was gonna do but watch it all happen.

As for me, I went on opposite-tilt, and clamped down like a 90-year old nit. I folded QQ pre-flop to a $50 all-in, convinced I was beat, forgetting this is cruise poker.  The guy said - yes, said - he had 99, not knowing what I held. I ended up down $37 for the week, and only got my shizzle back the last night when the table and the cards both started cooperating.  In only an hour and 10 minutes or so I made back a good bit of change but I had to be back in the cabin by midnight to do the luggage thing.

As for the rest of the cruise, let's just say that although everyone had a good time I think everyone agrees that it's good to be home.  Mom did her best to try to not be a millstone around our necks but toward the end of the trip she'd call us up dangerously early in the morning and ask us "what are we doing today?"

One of the most frustrating elements of dealing with my mother is that she tends not to believe anything I ever say about anything, regarding any subject whatsoever.  Not because she thinks I'm lying, but because she thinks that I am her youngest child and how can I possibly be worldly enough to know anything that she didn't herself teach me?

Since it happens all the time, it's become a button, and when she presses it, it really goes up my ass sideways. So this might seem trivial to you but to me it was a constant source of irritation.  Here is a partial list of the things that my mother heard from my lips but chose not to believe:

• That besides adhering to the rules of basic hygiene, there was no enforced dress code anywhere on the ship;
• That she would have a place to store her insulin in her cabin;
• That nobody was monitoring her food intake, and that she could indeed go to the deli and get a sandwich while subsequently hitting the buffet, while subsequently hitting the burrito place if she wanted to;
• That the ship would be designed generally to accommodate the overweight and the elderly, or indeed that there would be either of those types of people on board;
• (After hearing that they charged for booze and soda) That there would be anything to drink that didn't cost money;
• That thanks to gigantic stabilizers and generally calm seas she wouldn't need seasick remedies such as the 1,200 Dramamine pills she brought;
• That there was a state-of-the-art medical facility on board (she was so reluctant to believe this that she went down to deck 0 and asked for [and received] a tour, after which she was satisfied);
• That Customs coming back in to the US would have no objection to her bringing back in the little chocolates that were left on her pillow, and that she could still be in the "nothing to declare" line;
• That she did not have to go to the lobby to pick up her disembarkation paperwork, that it would be delivered to her stateroom; and 
• That there were enough lifeboats to accommodate everyone aboard.

Remember: these aren't just things my Mom didn't know.  These were facts that she was told by someone who's taken THIS VERY CRUISE twice before, and actually been on the very ship we were sailing on, and chosen not to believe.

Tootsie, who got a really good look at her behavior up close for the first time, came back to the cabin one day and said to me, wide-eyed, "Your mother's out of her mind!"  Yes, honey, she is.  Come here, darling, and tell daddy all about it.  No, dear, I didn't mean we should call your father, I just meant...no, I was just being romantic.  No, I'm sure your dad is fine.  Sweetie, it's $2.00 a minute to use the phone, I'm sure he's fine, really.  Well fucking pardon me for trying to be nice! I'll never make THAT mistake again.  No - you go fuck YOURself.  Yeah, right back atcha, ya douchebag.

The final straw came this morning, disembarkation day.  She knew that we needed to be out of our cabins by 8:30.  She knew, because we told her over dinner, that we were going to have a 7:30 wake-up call. And notwithstanding knowing both those things she called our cabin at 7:06, and when we did not answer, she called back at 7:12, and then again at 7:34. With nothing to say other than "did you see us coming in to the port?"  So needless to say I was fucking cranky (with a small "c," you weirdos) all morning. Add to the fact that the plans SHE made to get us back to where our car was got all pear-shaped and let's just say I was glad to be back home.

Was it worth it?  Well, karmically, I suppose so.  She really did have a good time, couldn't have done it by herself, and can now cross off a huge thing from her list of end-of-life regrets.  So in that respect I was glad to have done it.  That, however, was the only perspective from which I could make that claim.

So that was the cruise.  Elsewhere in the life of the Crafty Southpaw:

• The waiting period is over and I was able to pick up my new toy, my Mosin-Nagant 9130 rifle, discussed at length in a previous post. It's just gorgeous, in an ugly-duckling sort of way.  Now that it's in my hands I can really appreciate the power and the heft of the thing, as well as the simplicity of its manufacture.  It's funny; the guns that Americans buy are sporting firearms; they're designed to fire at targets, or clay pigeons, maybe a hunting trip a half-dozen times a year for the enthusiast.  But this weapon, this is a different thing altogether.  The 9130 was designed to kill the enemy, plainly and simply.  The metal isn't shined to a high gloss; that takes time and besides, you don't want your weapon to shine in the sun when someone is trying to kill you. It was meant to carry well, to stay clean under harsh conditions, and to destroy the Third Reich one Nazi prick at a time. That knowledge gives it a power, commands it a respect that is hard to describe. I'm glad I own one. I can't wait to put it through its paces.
• I have decided that it's time, more or less, to move on with this phase of my life.  I guess what that means is that it's time to bury my father, as it were; I have to be able to say goodbye in a way that I haven't yet been able to do.  It also means that it's time to blow the dust off the ol' resumé and seek employment. So (in all likelihood) off comes the ponytail and out goes Gary to hit the bricks and see what there is to see out in the wide world.
• Part of this process of moving on was going to be shutting down the blog. For good or bad I associate it with this phase of my life, even though I started it before Dad passed, and before my life got more complicated than it used to be. I strongly considered the notion that if I want behavior to change, and if I honestly felt that a new start was what was going to do that, then a new start was something I should endeavor to do as completely as possible.  But I'm keeping it going, at least for the present.  I've really come to value the connections I've made,  in some cases made some actual friends.  And really, even though every last one of you is an irredeemable idiot, you're non-judgmental, encouraging, warm, smart, funny idiots, and I'm glad you're all in my life to the extent that you are.  
• Speaking of the blog I've gotten some comments recently about the new look of the thing and wanted to say thanks.  It was really as simple as making a few choices, clicking here and there, and spending literally 25 minutes on a new logo, which seemed to be going around anyway (I think Grrouchie was the first one on that stage). Glad you all like it.

Well, I guess that's it for now.  Didn't bring any herb on board; missed it. With that said: excuse me, got stuff to do ;)

Meant what I said about you guys.  Not so much the idiot thing.  The other things. Good to be back.

Postcard From the Road

Quick update - at 75 cents a minute it has to be quick.  Day 1, the table is exactly the way i thought it was, I played perfect cruise poker, which admittedly is not difficult against bad players who are also half drunk.  Day 1 I only played for about 2 hours, started with $100, ended with $300. Yay me! Just play ABC poker, don't get cute, hit your strong hands hard, fold down your crap (though if you want to let yourself be caught bluffing early that REALLY helps if you're willing to play tight thereafter) and you'll win. At this rate I should be able to pay for my next cruise before I leave this one, and Tootsie has indicated that if I win that amount of moola she'd be down with another trip. Wheee!

The seas are calm and picturesque as hell, my mother is trying her best not to force herself down our throats (results are mixed) but all in all not too awfully bad.

Anyway, I'll be home Friday or so.  Stay cool till then.  I think you're all just grand.

The Sign Said "Gone Fishin'..."

Sorry, no History Friday this weekend, had to get all my poop in a group for the big cruise departure.  As I sit here it's almost 2AM Sunday, so we'll be leaving for Ma's house in about 9 hours, so we can be FIVE HOURS EARLY just in case we needed to, I dunno, grow some aloe in case we burn ourselves on board or some goddamn thing or other.

Ma wants to suck up every single experience, what with this being one of her bucket list things, so I figure that it would be better if she got on board as early as she can, so I'm not going to begrudge that.  I got her convinced (with the help of the guy giving us a ride to the port) that since it's such a tight squeeze into the pier that they have a bunch of rowers who hand-row the vessel into and out of its berth! Oh the fun we'll have.

Well it's getting late, cats and kittens: it's time to shut down Radio Free Crafty for a while. Should be back in time for next week's HF. Wish me luck at my twin goals of winning enough money to book next year's cruise and not killing my mother. If there's any news regarding a cruise ship gone to the briny deep, just make sure it's not the Carnival Glory. And if it is, keep your mitts off my fucking stuff. I have a will.

Stay well one and all,
Gary

PS the final chapter of my quest to obtain the proper paperwork to legally purchase a handgun in Rhode Island has been written, but that would be like talking about dessert and not mentioning the entrée.  I'll tell you all about it when we get back.

Like Guns? Jewish? Oy, Have I Got a Deal for You...

The worst part about being a gun enthusiast is that it is an expensive hobby to maintain.  A firearm with sufficient horsepower to be considered a legitimate hunting weapon can cost $800 or more - there are a few exceptions, of course, but your average .308 in an AR-15 configuration is over a grand. Worse yet, the ammo is expensive - the cheapest stuff you can find will run you $.50 per round.

But knowledgeable folks know that there is an alternative to spending all your money to get a deer rifle. You can get a great gun - and a legitimate piece of history - for next to no money.

Is cool, da?  Da!

This rifle here is the Mosin Nagant model 9130. It was the standard rifle issued by Russia from 1892 until the end of World War II in 1945. The troops loved it, based on its reliability under just about any operating condition, its relative ease of operation, its ability to be field-stripped and cleaned quickly, and its otherworldly durability. Even if one ran out of ammo, it was still a dangerous weapon; at over eight pounds you could crack the enemy's ribs or skull by hitting him with the steel-coated stock-end of the rifle, called the butt-plate. You could run him through with a bayonet that fit on the end of the barrel - and in fact the rifle could be accurately fired with the bayonet permanently fixed.

The Russkies made over 17 million of these puppies.  The sheer number of Nazi scumbags that were killed by this weapon staggers the mind.

Now at some point shortly after the war ended, and they stopped making new 9130's, someone somewhere had the idea that instead of taking hundreds of thousands of crates full of guns and dumping them in the ocean, that instead they should store them away and sell them sixty years later. And that's exactly what they did. They took millions of rifles, coated every part with a lubricant/rust preventer called cosmoline, and put them away.

Cosmoline is messy, it's difficult to remove, and it stinks like a combination of crayons and feet. It gets in the wood stocks and you need to steam it out of the wood with one of those portable clothes steamers for about three days. But I'll tell you what: it kept these rifles in perfect shape for the seventy-ish years they've been in storage. I haven't seen a single one that had any rust or pitting on any metal part.

So if you want a good, reliable rifle that can take down a deer from 300 yards, and that started off its life killing Nazis, and don't mind spending three days wiping cosmoline off of it, you can get yourself a Mosin Nagant 9130 for under a hundred bucks.

Or you could do what I did.  I had an opportunity to take my pick out of a batch of ten, all of which had the cosmoline cleaned off, all of which were in perfect shooting condition and all of which had matching serial numbers. The one I chose had a near-pristine stock, a 1938 model made in the USSR's Izhevsk factory, for $130. Just a staggeringly small amount of money for a firearm in near-perfect condition.  I count myself lucky.

Oh, and one more thing:  the ammo that the 9130 uses is unique to that weapon: 7.62mm caliber and 54mm long.  There's also millions of rounds of THAT that have been preserved as well.  You can get a sealed can of 440 rounds for $65 or so.  That's about eighteen cents a round.  Remember, its nearest equivalent, the .308, is fifty cents a round for the cheap stuff.

So, to sum up: it's cheap to buy, cheap to shoot, and it's almost a guarantee that this very rifle killed actual Nazis. There's literally no downside to this transaction. I can't wait for the waiting period to be over and to get this puppy in my hands.

In Defense of Doctors

Has the world turned completely upside-down?

I never thought I'd be writing a post that rallies to the defense of doctors, for the love of Benji. I fucking hate doctors and hospitals; always have.  My mom is a nurse and if you ever want to find an honest appraisal of doctors, all you ever have to do is find a nurse willing to tell the truth.

There are always exceptions but usually, doctors are prideful, arrogant little shitstains with God complexes and small dicks. They accommodate their God complexes by protecting and cultivating a giant ego; and they compensate for being small-dicked by buying Porsches.  Yes, they do an important job but so do many other men and women in the world and don't expect to be worshiped in return.

As a matter of fact, a friend of a friend, who also blogs, got some bad news recently, and that's a shame.  She mentioned how the doctor went past clinical and was downright cold with the news he had to deliver.  Typical doctors - doing what they do best, which is apparently not giving a shit about anyone else's emotions.

But...

Well, let me give you an example from a recent interaction with a doctor, when one of them had to tell my family that the old man had given up the ghost. This guy had to walk into a room where my family sat, chewing our nails, expecting the worst possible news. He walked in, told us that after a solid 1/2 hour of trying to resuscitate him, they finally had to pronounce him dead. The news devastated us, paralyzed us, stunned us into oblivion.

But that doctor had to excuse himself after less than five minutes, and go back to work. He didn't have the luxury of being upset, or sad, knowing that someone died and left a family to uncomprehending grief. He had to get himself together and be ready to fix the next problem that walked through the door.

They're cold, unfeeling bastards, yes.  But they have to be. So although I hated them before, and I hate them still, I'm prepared to give them a pass on how emotionally unavailable they are.  They really do kind of have to be that way.

History Friday: The Man Who Destroyed the World

When it comes to such concepts as "good" and "bad," there are few opportunities to use superlatives to describe human beings - people are rarely pure good or pure evil.  For example, even Mother Theresa was said to care more about publicity than the succor of the sick.  And even Hitler, that fucking douchebag asswipe, loved dogs and treated his non-military staff well.

When in comes to the environment, though, we have the ability to speak in terms of both best and worst.

The best, in terms of the environment, has to be Norman Borlaug.  He observed a problem endemic to wheat - that when it grew too tall, it would bend over from its own weight. This kept yields low, which meant that entire countries, like India, could not grow enough food to feed its people, resulting in widespread famine. He developed two strains of wheat that grew shorter - he called it "dwarf wheat" - and which did not droop.

This one innovation increased yield per acre by a factor of four.  Yep - he QUADRUPLED the amount of food that came from an acre of wheat. And countries that had been marked by chronic famine, like India and Mexico, could feed themselves with relative ease.

Norman Borlaug fed billions of people.  So he qualifies as best.

The man who might very well be the worst person in the entire world, at least as it pertains to the environment, was Thomas Midgely, Jr.

We pick up the story in 1921, as Midgely is a young scientist working for General Motors.  He and his team were charged with finding a solution to engine knock - which reduced engine efficency and caused increased wear and metal fatigue on motors.

He discovered that the addition of alcohol to gasoline would solve the problem. Unfortunately, since GM could not patent or regulate the use of alcohol, they stood to make very little money off the discovery.

No problem, Midgely said.  You can do the exact same thing if you add something else to gasoline, a compound called...

...Tetra-Ethyl Lead. And you can patent that. And boy, did they ever. Not wanting to call it "lead," they decided instead to call it "Ethyl." Mechanics of the day would joke that when they filled a car up they'd be "pumping Ethyl."

They set up factories to create the additive, only to have to close them down within months as employees would succumb to lead poisoning, a demon's brew of hallucinations, dementia, and ultimately, death. Midgely himself fell victim to lead poisoning a first time in 1923 and had to take a whole year off.

When he returned to work, he found that TEL had gotten a bad reputation, what with its killing people by the dozen and all.  Midgely went on a campaign to try and convince the world to un-learn what it had already come to know, namely that lead was a deadly poison, and that it was going to be ok if GM poured millions of pounds of it into the environment.

The funny thing was, it almost worked.  He held a press conference October 30, 1924, during which he "demonstrated" the safety of TEL by pouring the additive on his hands over and over, then taking a bottle of it and inhaling its contents for a full minute.  However the main goal of the press conference - to stop the state of New Jersey from shutting down a factory for being dangerous - was not met, as the state continued with its plans to shut the factory down.

And Midgely required eleven months to recover from a second bout of lead poisoning that his dimwitted demonstration caused.

During his convalescence, he was relieved of his Vice-Presidency of GM's subsidiary GMCC, the General Motors Chemical Company, and his work with lead was finally through.  However lead remained a gasoline additive in the United States until 1995.

So: Midgely is now out of the lead business.  What did he do for an encore?

He invented CFC's.  Yep, that's right. In 1937 or so, he discovered that adding fluorine to a hydrocarbon molecule had the necessary properties to act as a refrigerant. He invented with his own hands the chemical that we've known all these years as Freon, or R21.

 Characteristically he brushed aside any suggestions that unleashing fluorine into the atmosphere could in any possible way be harmful.  And in fairness he was not alone in this view; he received the highest honor the US Chemical industry can bestow, the Perkin Medal. Of course now we know that CFC's never actually go away, and that they slowly rise up in the atmosphere and react with ozone in the upper  reaches of the atmosphere and destroy it.

So one human being was responsible for the single most harmful atmospheric pollution in the planet's history and, for an encore, destroyed the ozone layer.  It's not for nothing that J. R. MacNeill, an environmental historian, said that Midgely "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."

EPILOGUE: In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgely contracted polio and was confined to his bed.  He developed an intricate system of ropes and pulleys so that his healthcare providers could get him into and out of bed with a minimum of hassle.  He died when he got tangled in his ropes and slowly strangled himself to death.

Some people, I guess, actually do pay for their actions.

Overheard at the Grocery Store

Me (after reading the checkout guy's name tag): Hello, Zach.
Zach: Hello, sir.
Me: How you livin'?
Zach: Doin' all right, I guess.
Me: Are they still saying that nowadays?
Zach: What, "doin' all right?"
Me: No (you idiot), I meant "how you livin'?"
Zach: Oh, oh.  Yeah, sometimes.  My dad says that a lot.
Me (long pause): I don't like you, Zach.