One of favorite, lesser-known movies is a small 1998 film starring Matt Damon, Edward Norton and John Malkovitch. It’s called Rounders and its about the underground poker scene in NYC. It does a better job of explaining the allure of poker and specifically the culture of Texas Hold’em than any other movie I know. What 21, the MIT card-counting team movie with Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess, did for Blackjack, Rounders did for Hold’em. There…
Long before we moved out here to this hilltop, we recognized that wildfires were a way of life out in this area and that we would have to do everything we could to be vigilant and aware of how to protect ourseelves and our hilltop from them. We had our two and half acres largely cleared of non-succulent brush and while I have allowed portions of the property to revegetate, its been mostly with succulents,…
I’m going to head over to Oasis Nursery this morning and buy a few plants to spruce up a few of the stragglers in my garden. We have guests coming to stay for a few days from Las Vegas. This is my nephew Jason and his partner and most recent baby mama, Nicky, with their new baby, Carson and Jason’s grown daughter Katie. We don’t see our Las Vegas kin very often, but are very…
We have all come to a point in our evolution as members of our modern lifestyles where we all tend to use e-commerce for almost everything. I do most of my purchases, whether clothing or pharmaceuticals or gardening supplies, online. The other thing we all do online these days is purchase travel and entertainment. Thanks to Amazon Prime and other vehicles like Shop, PayPal and various other enabling payment and fulfillment providers, the process seems…
Last night I went to go see the summer blockbuster film The Odyssey for the second time. It seems that Spiderman may be overtaking Odysseus for the top spot, but the Escondido IMAX was still pretty crowded after a few weeks since the release of The Odyssey, so I think it’s holding up at the box office. As you may recall, I saw the movie the first time from the second row of the Hollywood…
This morning I got an email from JetBlue, literally out of the blue. It informed me that I had a flight credit of some $4,000 that would expire in two weeks unless used. The flight does not have to occur in that timeframe, but I must book the flight by then or lose the credit. If this was a few hundred dollars, I might ignore this and consider it a come-on to get me to…
“Kidding a kidder” (or “you can’t kid a kidder”) means you can’t fool someone who is themselves skilled at deception or joking. A trickster sees through another trickster’s tricks. “Kid” as a verb meaning “to tease or deceive playfully” and it emerged in English slang in the mid-1800s, likely from the noun “kid” (young goat), by analogy, with the idea of playfully “kidding around” the way a young goat frisks about, or possibly from the…
My Oura biofeedback ring is telling me a lot about my sleep patterns. Having used a CPAP for many years, I am used to being told in the morning about how many hours I “slept” the previous night and a few statistics about my breathing and heart action during the night. Generally, since I’ve never had a formal diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), it’s not surprising that the follow-on statistics have always been pretty…
The granddaughters are on their way home and the hilltop has gotten quiet. I’m never sure these days what is normal and what is not. Currently the weather feels pretty normal for early August. North County San Diego (including this hilltop) in August typically runs with highs around 82–87°F, lows near 60–63°F. In the slightly higher elevation/mesa areas like Hidden Meadows (~1,175–1,500 ft with this hilltop at 1,630) typically runs a few degrees cooler than…
Kabuki is a traditional form of Japanese theater that dates back to the early 1600s, known for its highly stylized performances, elaborate costumes and makeup, and dramatic staging. To begin with, there is an all-male cast where even female roles are played by men (onnagata), a tradition that emerged after women were banned from performing in the early 1600s. There is striking makeup (kumadori) with bold, colorful face paint that conveys a character’s nature (red…