Dave Barry, one of the funniest guys on the planet, gives us a hilarious look into the heart of America’s current love affair with Poker:

Be advised that a Poker Craze is sweeping the nation. Almost every night, there are poker tournaments on television. And if you think that would be boring, I have three words for you: Correct-O-Mundo.
The problem is that there’s not a lot of action in televised poker, where the most strenuous thing the players do is push plastic chips about 15 inches. (Granted, this is more action than you see in televised golf.)
To make matters worse, poker players do not betray any feelings, so what you have, visually, is a bunch of grim-faced guys looking like a hemorrhoid support group. Most of the emotion is supplied by the TV commentators, who, in hushed, dramatic tones, say things like: “He’s thinking about what to do here, Bob.” “You just know that, inside, he is churning with emotions, Bob.” “I’m sure glad I took powerful methamphetamines before this broadcast, Bob.”
The guys on TV are usually playing “Texas Hold ’em,” which is the hottest poker game at the moment, although there are many other popular variations of poker, including Seven Card Stud, Five Card Draw, Alabama Grope ’em, Iowa Bore ’em, Six Card High Low Medium Jacks Wild Stud Draw Go Fish, Cincinnati Lawn Flamingo, Florida Recount ’em, New Jersey Whack ’em, New York Kvetch ’em, Red Rover and Whist.
All of these games are essentially the same: A person (or, in poker slang, “dealer”) gives you some cards (“cards”), which you look at in a furtive manner (“sneaking a gander”) to see if you have a good hand (“bling bling”) after which you bet (“kiss the eel”) by placing money (“cheese”) into the pot (“marijuana”). This goes on until somebody (“not you”) wins, at which point the losers express heartfelt congratulations in colorful slang.

It just gets better from there. I was flipping between WPT and the Dodgers tonight, and wondering when I’ll have time to sit down and actually play again. Maybe I’ll get a chance to show Dave Barry what all the excitement is about!
(Big thanks to WWdN reader Troy, for the link!)

I’m getting ready to watch the Dodgers, and they just showed Tom Cruise carry the Olympic torch into the stadium, and take a lap with it . . . man, that’s so incredibly cool. I remember when I watched the torch go by in 1984. I was on a street corner in Glendale with my parents, brother, and sister when it went racing past us. I’ll never forget how excited my parents were for us to see it. I think I was more excited about their excitement than I was about the torch going by. And you know what? I bet they were even more excited that we were excited . . . which is something that I never would have understood before I became a parent.
We were really poor in 1984, but my folks wanted to make sure we got to experience the Olympics, so they took us to the only event they could affored: Rowing at Lake Casitas. I remember watching people trading pins, I remember the cool fog that hung inches about the surface of the lake . . . I remember how FAST those boats cut through the water . . . but my clearest memory is how happy my parents were that they’d been able to take us to an event where there was a medal ceremony.
If I got to run around the warning track with the torch, I’d throw the goat the whole way. And when they asked me, “Are you a big baseball fan?” I wouldn’t give the evasive answer he gave (he looked like he wouldn’t know an infield fly if it landed on his head, but that’s cool. Not everyone’s a baseball nerd.) I would say, “Yes. Yes I am. They should raise the mound back up, eliminate the DH, and get rid of Free Agency.”
They’d probably pan the camera off of me when I called Pedro Martinez a little bitch, and went off about what brilliant warriors Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax, and Bob Gibson were. By the time I launched into a rant about how much Ernie Banks ruled, they would have turned off the camera.
Oh! And I wouldn’t leave the field until someone gave me a baseball.
Heh. On second thought, maybe it’s better if I just stay in the stands.

Like any long term relationship, my relationship with Star Trek has its ups and its downs, and there are times when it’s easy to forget why I love it.
If you’ve read Dancing Barefoot, you may recall a scene where I remember all the things that made Star Trek wonderful.
This is one of the things that keeps it wonderful, and makes me feel proud to have been a part of it.

A Love Letter To Star Trek
This is too soon to write this. I should wait a few months, maybe a year, take time and coffee and dreams and let it finish whirling around my neural net. But Star Trek is all about the temporal anomalies so here I sit.
One year and a couple months ago, on Star Date something-or-other, my sons and I started a family tradition by accident. We rented the first disk of what seemed like an endless set of Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs. When Star Trek played in real life I was busy trying to make a dead-end marriage work and my two young sons didn’t exist. I didn’t watch television then, but if I had, I wouldn’t have watched a sci-fi soap opera about humans and aliens chasing time.
[. . .]
I can’t explain the hold it had on my sons, and then on me. I don’t remember the episodes the way they do. I’m sitting here crying while I type this, searching for a way to tell you how it transformed them into something a little bit better, how they started recognizing the world news for the first time and asking me when would our people stop fighting, start working together as one planet – simple ideas, good ideas, too simple for people who crave power. One day, a bad bad day, when many soldiers lost lives in that distant senseless war, my middle son stood with barefeet on the cold tile floor of the kitchen, listening to NPR, and clenched his fists in frustration.
“Why don’t they stop fighting? We’re never going to join a Federation of Planets if this continues. Don’t they know that? Why don’t they want to help end starvation instead? I wish we lived in the future.”

Read the rest of the story here
(Thanks to WWdN reader Mathieu for sending me this story!)
I want to add something to this entry, mostly for myself, so I don’t miss out on a great lesson: I was talking with Anne about Weslsy Crusher few days ago. I told her that I’m really tired of feeling like I still have to defend Wesley (and myself) to people from time to time. Perfect example: when my column in Dungeon was announced, a lot of people started complaining about me writing for the magazine. Did they talk about the quality of my writing? Did they try to find out what my credentials as a gamer were? Of course not. They just bitched and complained that “Wesley” was writing anything.
How incredibly stupid is that? How incredibly stupid is it that it really upset me? I have — more or less — come to terms with Wesley Crusher and what he means to me . . . and I am so over dealing with jerks who are holding on to some stupid problem they had with a character I played eighteen years ago.
Even though I *intellectually* know that it’s not my problem, it’s a challenge to ignore the *emotional* response that comments like that elicit. It’s sort of Newton’s Third Emotional Law, I guess.
Anyway, because of that irrational emotional response, I’ve been feeling sort of “down” on Wesley, and that is a big part of that Fear I wrote about yesterday . . . then, I read this woman’s story this morning, and I had a wonderful “light bulb” moment: I didn’t make Star Trek for jerks who want to complain and nit-pick and project their own insecurities onto an actor they’ve never met. I made it for people like her, and her children.
I don’t know why I keep losing that perspective. Maybe it’s because, for so many years, the voice of jerks fed my personal Voice of Self Doubt. It was louder than any other voice, and it’s still the easiest voice to listen to.
I hope that I don’t ever forget how I felt when I read that blog this morning, and how incredibly OBVIOUS it was to me then that touching *one* person like this should outweigh a thousand jerks.
It’s all part of The Journey.

I had two different auditions for games last week, where I got to do wildly different characters and voices. One is for a project that had **CONFIDENTIAL** stamped all over it, so I probably shouldn’t reveal its name, and the other was for a 3rd person Shooter from the Predator universe.
Around 2000 or 2001, when I was constantly failing in on camera auditions, I had this sense of “do or die” about them. I desperately wanted to book jobs so I could work and Prove To Everyone That Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Mistake (that’ll make sense when you read Just A Geek), not so I could be part of something cool. It’s completely different now.
I’ve had a few of these game auditions recently, and I always wonder if I’m the only actor who is also a Gamer, and if I’m the only person who’s looking at it as more than just a job. I mean, when I read for Twisted Metal, and when I read for this Project That Must Not Be Named, Precious, I had to take a moment, breathe deeply, and calm myself down so I could focus and do a good job.
Speaking of focusing and doing a good job . . . I haven’t been all that inspired lately. I haven’t been able to find that . . . thing . . . that makes me feel good and satisfied wen I write in my weblog. I thought I was focused on training for the marathon, then I thought I was burnt out from the Just A Geek rewrite, then I thought maybe I was just sort of burnt out in general, or lazy . . . but I spent some time soul-searching late last night, and I think I know what’s going on.
Everyone else in the family had gone to sleep, and it was past midnight. I just wasn’t able to sleep, so I sat on the couch and tried to read . . . but I couldn’t focus. In the back of my mind, I knew that I was avoiding the real reason that I haven’t been interested in weblogging, so I put down my book, and faced it. I turned off the light, opened the window over my head, and sat there, in the green glow of my ambient orb, and listened to the crickets in my back yard. I let my mind drift, and the answer came to me.
Why am I sort of creatively paralyzed right now?
I’m scared.
There it was. I’m scared.
Just A Geek has been completely out of my hands for a few weeks. I don’t have any more control over it, and I just have to wait for it to come out. It’s very much like watching your child walk into their first day of Kindergarten, and hoping that he doesn’t hurt himself on the playground, or disrupt the class, or get hurt by another kid . . . you spend the entire day worrying about all the things that can go wrong, because you can’t protect or guide your baby any more.
I remember this with Nolan, and how worried Anne and I were on his first day. We were fully prepared to walk him to the class room, but as soon as we pulled up in front of the school, he grabbed his backpack (I think it was Power Rangers), unbuckled his seatbelt, and jumped out of the car.
“I love you, Mom,” he said, and started to walk down the sidewalk.
Anne and I looked at each other.
“Let him go,” I said.
“I love you too, Pookie,” she said. “See you after school.”
“Okay. Bye.”
And that was it. He was so confident, and so ready to go . . . it took us both completely by surprise. We went out to breakfast together, and hardly touched our food. We were both worried about everything that could go wrong, and even though Anne had already done this with Ryan, it was the first time for me . . . I was a wreck.
When we picked Nolan up, we talked to his teacher, and found out that he had behaved himself pretty well during the day. He didn’t like sitting in one place on the rug, but that was it. (I couldn’t blame him, but I kept that to myself.)
I wish I could just have faith that my book will handle its first days in school as well as Nolan did . . . but I haven’t been able to just let it walk down the sidewalk, and hope for the best. Maybe now that I’ve faced it, its power over me will evaporate, and I’ll be able to find the same excitement that I felt with Dancing Barefoot.
Yeah. That’s what I need to do, because to focus on the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (heh) is to ignore the Hope, Excitement, and Joy. It’s like being so afraid of crashing, I forget to enjoy the ride.

I’m was going to write about some auditions and crap . . . but I think I’m going to brag about my stepkids instead.
So there. :p
Ryan had this very complicated geometry project that was due last week. He had to take a set of shapes, solids, and whatnot, draw blueprints using them, and turn them into something “architectural.”
All year long, he’s worked with various groups on different projects for different classes, and he’s always ended up getting screwed by lazy kids who don’t pull their weight, so he asked his teacher if he could do this project on his own. The teacher told him that it was a very complicated and difficult project, but Ryan assured him that he knew, and it wouldn’t be a problem.
Over a few weeks, Ryan worked his ass off on this project, and he ended up with this amazing, functional, Art Deco lamp. My brother-in-law helped him use nifty tools that I don’t have to build it. (I’m not one of those “toolbench” dads . . . which is sad, I know, but I’m a “gamer” dad instead. Some dads have bags of nails, I have bags of dice.) It’s so cool, we’re actually using it in our house.
He got the highest grade in his class, and the highest grade across all the classes this teacher teaches. The group he pulled out of got the absolute lowest grade . . . pretty much the inverse of Ryan’s.
Rock.
Nolan had a creative writing workshop for his Humanities class (the same class I spoke to a few weeks ago) that accounted for a HUGE part of his grade. Normally, Nolan isn’t all that interested in writing, but he got very excited about this project. He worked on it before and after school, and read me his daily progress. It’s funny, and it’s got a fantastic narrataive thread that is very impressive, even if he wasn’t in 7th grade. I know that I’m not the most objective person in the world on this particular story, but I think it’s really awesome.
Apparently, his teacher thought it was awesome too, because he got 50/50 on the project, and his story was selected to be included in a “Best of” collection of work from the workshop.
Rock again.
My guys RULE!