a well-known pro taking an angle shot by playing with the All-In button during the Main Event of the LA Poker Classic this weekend;
the return of "Poker After Dark" to late-night television
recent comments by a lawyer for the Bernard Tapie Group regarding its purchase of Full Tilt Poker, in response to a blog by Matt Glantz, who doubts it will ever happen;
which of the presidential candidates would be most likely to sign online poker legislation;
some big upcoming promotions in the Harrah's St. Louis poker room during March.
In our guest segment, we talked with Will Failla, who you may have seen the last couple of Sundays on the World Poker Tour's coverage of the Legends Of Poker tournament, which he won. He talked about that event and others he's run deep in recently, and explained his strategy in a couple of big hands along the way. He also revealed how he gets other players to loosen up and give him free information at the table -- let's just say Will's not exactly shy and reserved, as you'll hear.
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Brian Williams is easily the most personable news anchor on TV, partly because he has the ability to change gears from hard news stories to softer human interest items. He also has the perfect timing required for late night shows, whether it's as a guest or as part of a comedy bit. Here he is Slow Jamming The News with Jimmy Fallon last night. Keep your eyes on Williams, even when he's slightly out of focus, and you'll see him doing some facial expressions right out of the the Jon Stewart Handbook...
The NY Times reports that the Dutch airline KLM has begun testing a program called Meet And Seat, which allows you to choose the person you sit next to based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.
This program will no doubt lead to single male passengers desperately scouring the airplane seating plan for an attractive young woman to sit next to (might as well rename it Meat And Market), which in turn should keep most women from sharing their online profiles with the airline. If I traveled on KLM, I'd search for people who say they don't like to engage in conversation, are very thin, won't climb over me to use the bathroom during the flight, and never bring smelly sandwiches to eat in flight.
I prefer to leave things like this to chance. Sure, I've ended up sitting next to a guy who smelled so much like an ashtray that I thought he'd just burned down his house for the insurance money. Or the old woman who kept talking to me so loudly I could still hear her through my headphones. Or the parent with the screaming child who won't even make an effort to calm the kid down.
But I also remember a very happy seating coincidence I experienced 30+ years ago. I was on my way to a radio convention in San Diego when I found myself sitting next to an absolutely stunning brunette who was about my age (I'm guessing we were both 22). She was a model, on her way home from a fashion shoot in New York -- the kind of woman who under any circumstance wouldn't even give me the time of day. But seeing as how we had several hours to kill, she was more than happy to make conversation with me, even showing me her portfolio, full of beautiful pictures, including a couple of (tastefully done) nude shots.
Enraptured by this beauty but always horrible at picking up women, I didn't do what any other guy might have done in that situation -- asked her to join me when we landed for a drink, or for dinner, or a swim in the hotel pool. Instead, we just had a good time talking and laughing as we crossed the country at 35,000 feet, and I think she may have appreciated the fact that I wasn't hitting on her.
Good thing, too, because not long before we landed, she showed me a picture of her boyfriend, who just happened to be a sumo wrestler. That's when I paused to realize that this entire experience could easily have been a lot worse.
It has long been true that somewhere, there's always someone who's offended by something. It might be something totally outrageous, or it might be something so mild that you wonder how anyone could become upset. But until recently, to voice an objection, you'd have to write a letter or make a phone call. Now, with omnipresent social media and the nature of digital communication, those complaints come almost instantly and in much greater volume, and the threshold for whining has been lowered considerably.
Case in point: a recent episode of NPR's "Fresh Air," in which TV critic David Bianculli was reviewing some DVD releases of 1970s talk shows. In his segment, Bianculli included a 1970 clip of "The David Susskind Show."
"The David Susskind Show" was in its 12th season as a rather dry panel interview show, mostly focused on current affairs -- the Charlie Rose show of its day -- when someone on his staff suggested doing an episode about Dan Greenburg's new book, "How To Be A Jewish Mother." Greenburg was invited, as were actor George Segal (then starring in "Where's Poppa?"), rising young comedian David Steinberg, pizza chain owner Larry Goldberg, and fashion designer Stan Herman. So was a filmmaker named Mel Brooks (whose "The 12 Chairs" had just opened), who quickly dominated the conversation. Susskind tried to maintain control, steering the discussion from the difficulties of assimilation to being "too Jewish" in America in that era to how success was measured in their families, but his questions only slowed down the comedy and plugs for the guests' various projects, and Brooks rarely let a lull pass before he started riffing on one thing or another.
It became Susskind's most popular show ever, despite a few complaints from people who objected to the comedic Jewish stereotypes. They were probably the same people who complained in 1983 when I did a parody on my WHCN/Hartford morning show of the second "Star Wars" movie in a five-part series we called "Return Of The Rabbi," complete with the Death Star Of David and Jewish-American Princess Leia. As with the guests on Susskind's show, everyone involved in my parody (Martha Cohen, Gary Horn, Irv Goldberg) was Jewish, which helped defuse some of the objection. As for the rest of it, with full support from management, we let it roll off our backs and it dissipated quickly.
NPR, on the other hand, felt it had to issue a public statement, so they had their ombudsman (a journalism professor), look into Bianculli's segment, investigate why he did it, explain the history of the Susskind show, and on and on. Here's his rather lengthy summary of all that, which somehow drags "All In The Family" and Stephen Colbert into the discussion for context.
Better yet, how about just going back and watching the original (with modern commercials inserted by Hulu)?
And with that, Jean Dujardin joins Roberto Benigni in the category of European Oscar winners who were never heard from again in America.
Adam Sandler, star of "Jack & Jill," talking about what makes a movie great is like Newt Gingrich explaining how monogamy works.
The Cirque du Soleil performance is supposed to be "what it's like to go to the movies." If the theater is in Guy Laliberte's house. And the projector's broken.
Good thing they got the emotional Octavia Spencer off screen quickly so we had time for that brilliant speech by the film editing winners.
What Siri should say in new Apple's commercial: "You seem to be in the Grand Canyon, where there's no cell service or wifi & I'm useless now!"
JLo hasn't done a movie in years, so it's odd for her to be on the Oscars -- but once, she was great in "Out Of Sight." Then what happened?
How is it possible that Tom Hanks has never hosted The Oscars?
Yesterday, my wife and I finally went to see "The Artist," just before it picked up four Independent Spirit Awards (and tonight will probably add a few Oscars). We enjoyed the story of a silent film star whose career is jeopardized by the advent of talkies, but I liked it more when it was in color, had songs, and was called "Singing In The Rain."
If you're not reading comedian Will Durst's commentary on the presidential race, you're missing some of the sharpest political satire around. Will's been doing it for years, but this year's GOP contenders have given him a mountain of material to strip-mine for laughs. His latest, "The Ayatollah of Pennsylvania," cuts Rick Santorum to shreds.
My friend Jon Macks is working on this Sunday's Oscars show, too, as he has for the 15 years. When he wasn't busy with that, or writing other awards shows, or in his fulltime job writing jokes for Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" monologue, Jon used to do a regular weekly segment on my radio shows. Most of the time, he just joked about whatever topical stuff came to his mind. But each year, on the day after the Oscars, I'd have him come on to reveal a little bit of what he witnessed from his vantage point backstage, working with the various movie stars, publicists, and others. Here's an example of what those segments were like, from the afternoon after the 2007 Academy Awards, which were hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, and included Jon's run-ins with Peter O'Toole, Tom Cruise, and Robert Downey Jr.
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Although we're doing more and more online, there's still too much printed material in my life. I just cleaned out my file cabinet, throwing out several thousand pieces of paper that accumulated over the last year alone. Many of them were invoices from various companies I do business with. Even those that I pay online still insist on sending me a paper bill. Others mail me a notice reminding me that I don't have to send them a check because they're going to deduct it directly from my bank account. You have my e-mail address on file -- use it!
The health insurance industry is responsible for more than its share. First we get the bill from the doctor, which tells us how much is pending with the insurance company. Then we get the Explanation Of Benefits form from the insurer, telling us how much they covered and how much we still owe the doctor. Then we get another bill from the doctor, telling us that we now have to pay that amount. These three can't be condensed into one? Or posted online?
We refinanced our house a few months ago. That meant spending an hour signing (in duplicate!) the deed, the note, the proof of homeowners insurance, the proof of title insurance, and dozens of other legal forms -- including the ones we signed to acknowledge that our names are our names and our signatures are our signatures. And after we signed it, we had to initial our signatures! There was even a form that said they have a right to have us sign more forms in case they made any mistakes or left anything out.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against paper. While I constantly consume news and information via various electronic and digital forms, I still enjoy sitting down with the two print newspapers delivered to my house every morning. My wife and I are voracious readers who take full advantage of our public library's book collection.
However, I thought that by the year 2012, the only file cabinet I'd own would be the virtual one in my hard drive. But then where would we keep the receipt?
While browsing through TV channels this morning, I came upon something I hadn't seen in a long time -- color bars. Oh, they occasionally pop up on newscasts when a satellite feed drops out, or when a switcher hits the wrong button in master control, but these color bars were onscreen for quite a while.
I went to the on-screen guide to see what was scheduled for that time and was surprised to read "Off The Air." Off the air? A television network? We haven't had TV stations go off the air since cable became a fixture of the media landscape. It's been a long time since any outlet "ended the broadcast day" with the national anthem and those color bars. Everyone's on the air 24/7, even the local stations. When they're not running network shows or their own newscasts, there's always a syndicated show or infomercial to kill time with.
What makes it odder is that the channel I came across this morning was the west coast feed of one of Cinemax's networks (More Max HD West, to be specific). It's hard to fathom that they don't have enough programming to fill every available half-hour -- particularly since, unlike their competitors, premium cable networks can start a new show at any point in the hour. They don't have to wait for the big hand to point to 6 or 12.
It's even harder to believe they lack the programming if you look through some of the movies that make up the schedules of the various premium networks. Though I have seen a lot of movies in my life, it's stunning how many titles they air that I've never even heard of. You'd think that Cinemax's nightly roster of soft-core porn (has any network ever aired more movies with the word "bikini" in the title?) alone would ensure they'd never go off the air.
Somewhere inside Cinemax, there's probably someone working on ensuring that this hole in their schedule doesn't recur. They could fool those lonely late-night viewers by changing the title in the on-screen guide from "Off The Air" to "We Have Nothing On."
This week on The Final Table, we had a real Dog and Pony show, with stories from a WSOP Circuit Event at a Florida dog track and a HORSE champion as guest.
I started by Paul recapping my weekend at the Palm Beach Kennel Club, where they had a huge sellout of Event 1 (and a near-riot of players trying to enter) which created the largest prize pool for a WSOPC preliminary event ever, and history was also made in another tournament when women took the top three spots for the first time. We also analyzed a hand I witnessed in one of the pot-limit Omaha cash games on Sunday.
In our guest segment, we talked to mixed-games specialist David Bach, who just won his second Aussie Millions ring in a $2500 HORSE event to go with the bracelet he won in the $50,000 HORSE championship at the 2009 World Series Of Poker. He explained the difference in strategies between those limit games and no-limit hold'em. We also discussed his recent blog post about how TV coverage can have a negative impact on tournament play, a famous hand he played against Vanessa Rousso in the 2011 WSOP Main Event, and his reaction to Daniel Negreanu's comments about Full Tilt board members Ray Bitar, Howard Lederer, and Chris Ferguson.
In our news segment, we discussed Jason Somerville's coming out announcement, the return of Jonathan Duhamel's 2010 Main Event bracelet, and why an Illinois prosecutor decided not to file charges against the players in a small-stakes home tournament.
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