The World Series Of Poker 001: Flush

So this was my World Series experience.

I made the Rio at about 10:30 PST, and two things became clear the moment I gave my name to the casino desk clerk. First, she definitely saw that I had a room reserved. Second, that room was definitely no longer available. She made a face that I would describe as "Yikes." I'm going to have to put you in a bigger suite, she said. "But it is maybe smoking and maybe not, so maybe it smells like smoke and maybe not. Is that OK?"

It was OK, and when I arrived I found that I was happily on the "maybe not" side of the smoke equation. It was (spoilers) also the only serious piece of luck I'd have. I didn't know that yet, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. My suite was in the Masquerade Tower, past an enormous Carnivale jester head suspended from the ceiling between the dancer rail and the Burger King bar, where you can apparently build your own burger. The suite was in the corner, and opened on a wraparound window with a full view of the strip at night. The living room opened on a bedroom, which opened on a bathroom, and each of these rooms by themselves represented the largest hotel room I've ever occupied.

I unpacked -- my possessions sat in the room like a shy boy in the corner of his first party -- and texted CMitch. Mitch was playing cash at the Amazon ballroom. Before you get to hall leading to the ballroom, though, you have to walk past 17 posters advertising Penn & Teller (a spectacular show that I'd seen two years before on my previous Vegas trip) and 230 blanging flashing slots and pokies making droid orgy noises, and the Penn & Teller theater itself. This November, this theater became the site of the biggest show in poker, the final table of the Main Event WSOP, but now it is simply the site of the big Rio magic show, whose performers have lent the theater its name. As it happened, I passed the theater just as the show was letting out, which means I caught a glimpse of Penn Jillette, hair down to his shoulders, posing for pictures with the tourists who had just watched him shoot himself in the neck with a nailgun. Pay your price, get your ticket, make sure you get your souvenir, a little chunk of reflected greatness.

You pass down the hall to the Amazon ballroom, past banners of giants. Daniel Negraneu. Allen Cunningham. Jeff Madsen. Tom Schneider. Erik Lindgren. Previous winners of the WSOP Player of the Year. Who will it be this year? Why...it might be you!! But it won't be me. I'm here for just one event, not nearly enough to rack up the points needed to get into Ben Lamb territory. That's as OK with me as if it were a larger suite of rooms at the casino. I started playing poker regularly in 2005 when I bought in for $50 at True Poker, and all I've really wanted was a shot at a WSOP tournament -- any WSOP tournament. A little chunk of reflected greatness? Maybe it's just that silly. Here's me, just another tourist.

True Poker led to Pacific Poker, which led to Poker Stars and Full Tilt poker, and that's where I stayed until a month ago. That was when both of those sites -- really the only sites left in the US market that mattered -- had been raided by the feds, their funds seized, their U.S.-facing players locked out. Poker was dead in the country that had seen its modern development and birthed it's boom. Poker, against the law in the USA? You may as well deport the Statue of Liberty, that French immigrant, while you're at it. But the death of poker had meant the forced cashout of my funds. I had money on those sites, grown slowly over the years from gradually increasing skill and good bankroll management. I hadn't been able to get my money off Tilt yet -- and, though it was concerning the way they were dragging their heels and not really getting information about the holdup out to players, surely that was a temporary situation. On the happy side I'd had enough on Stars to cover me for trip, hotel, and buyin in one of the smaller tournaments, and Stars paid off quickly and easily, and the check cleared with no problems.

And now, I was going to take my good bankroll management money and blow it all on one shot at glory. By the summer of 2011 I'd played in perhaps thousands of tournaments, so I had few illusions about my chances, even if the level of the play were as bad as I hoped. In order to win a tournament with thousands of runners, you first have to play very well, and then you have to get really really lucky, and you have to keep playing very very well while all the while hoping that you continue to get really really lucky. It's just a fact of tournament poker. I'll put it to you like this: Imagine you get a change to take a bet for all your chips getting a 90% chance to win. You'd take it, right? The answer is 'Yes.' This isn't a trick question. But think of this, now. To take that bet is to lose one time in ten. And to play a tournament with more than a thousand runners is to take that bet more than ten times. Oh and also? You're not going to be getting 90% every time. Not even if you're really good. Sometimes it will be correct to take 40%. 30%. Um...so, yeah, get lucky. That's tournament poker. Be really good, then get lucky. If you're not really good, you don't even get the chance to be lucky. Unless you're Darvin Moon.

Poker players are different than non-poker players in many ways, but in this way particularly: Poker players are far, far warier of the one-in-one-thousand chance at disaster. Us poker players, we've seen thousands of one-in-one-thousand disasters. They're more common than you'd imagine. I think medical professionals probably understand what I'm talking about. My point is that I was flushing my money. But more than that, I knew I was probably flushing the money. I'd explained this to my wife. She and I both decided to let me do something insane anyway.

I walked into what I thought at the time was the Amazon (it was actually the adjacent Convention Hall), and stopped for a second. In a bad novel, I'd inhale sharply at this point. This wasn't a bad novel, so I simply met a madness for which my senses were unprepared while attempting nonchalance. The Rio Convention Hall during the WSOP is full of an Escheresque tablescape of felt and chairs to what feels like the horizonline. If heaven (or hell) were a cardroom, it would be a cardroom with this sort of insane telescopic dreamscape scope. Thousands of tables? Maybe. Probably. Millions of them? Probably not, but with the proper medication you could convince me of it. The first thing I thought was, "This looks like an illusion." And here's the thing: I didn't even realize that this wasn't the only room. The tables are split into sections by color: Yellow, white, black, red, green, tan. Each color split into banks of poker tables, each with its own number suspended above it; 12, 127 289.  Thousands of tables? Yes.

One side of the room was devoted to an ongoing tournament, but the other was given to cash games, poor stuck bastards trying to win their lost buyin back and bored tournament jockeys whiling the time away until the next events. Somewhere in that sea of chittering chips and plastic squares sat a friend I'd never met. CMitch, poker blogger and BBT (RIP)regular, who would be playing in my event.

I'm here, I texted. Mitch texted back his coordinates, and I walked there.

"Red shirt, glasses. And I'm behind you." I texted Mitch, then waited for him to check his phone, which he shortly did, and then look behind him, which he did immediately thereafter.

It's spiritually vertiginous to me whenever I meet a blogger. You need to understand this, these are people I actually know. I've met their minds, the selves they've presented to the world, but I've never met them physically. Now here we are, in real life, and now we two, so accustomed to virtual interaction, must content with the physical actuality of one another. Already friends, but also meeting for the first time. This is what technology has made of us. If I ever make a WPBT, parts of my wiring will likely short-circuit permanently from the existential tango. Much like a first encounter with the vast pokeresquitude of the Amazon room, I try to approach this madness for which my senses are unprepared with seeming nonchalance. I have no idea to what extent I was successful. Mitch was the third blogger I've ever met (to answer the question you're likely asking, 1. Hoy and 2. Pauly), and it was odd, the oddness alleviated significantly by the fact that Mitch is about the most laid back and friendly sort of person you could ever hope to meet. Obviously a person comfortable in his own skin, obviously somebody who knew their way around The Poker. I was me. You'll have to ask Mitch what that's all about. Probably I'm not quite the same as the person I am on the page. Perhaps I'm not at all the same, I don't know. I try to act all cool and shit here on the page. In real life, I'm much more stammer-y and awkward.

Mitch bought me a beer from one of the stands out in the hallway, and showed me around. We went to the actual Amazon ballroom (where I saw my first real live Poker Pro Celebrity: Eskimo Clarke) and took me up into the stands of the main stage (colloquially known as the Mother Ship), the sort of neon fever dream that Regis Philbin must have had after eating unrefrigerated taquitos and pulling a 20 hr. shift on the set of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Who wants to be a millionare? Friggin everybody in this whole town. Specifically anybody in this particular room. We'd all come from around the country, around the world, from other dimensions (I'm thinking now primarly of Phil Laak) for precisely that purpose. Mitch and I watched part of the final table. I recognized Elky. He didn't recognize me. A row of studious sorts typed furiously at their laptops. I knew by the odds that at least one of them was probably a friend of mine, but I had no idea which ones. Pauly I'd have known, but I didn't see Pauly. If I had seen him, I would no more have approached him than I'd have tried to take a steak from a Laplander's food dish. These people were focused.

It was time to buy in. Event 48. We walked to the...what was it? Not the cage. Or at least, not a traditional cage. I laid down 13 crisp one hundred dollar bills and two that were kind of folded up and mangy-looking. I'd prepared myself for this moment. An act of insanity. A flushing of fifteen hundred. I could afford it -- but why would I afford it?

I had wondered that to myself, in the months leading up to that moment, as it all came into focus and became real to me.

I've wondered it many times in the months thereafter.

The best answer I can devise is this:

Because.

Because I guess I am a poker player of some kind. And because if you're a poker player of any kind, eventually you come here, to this place. Hopefully with your eyes open. I think mine were. As I laid down the bills. I knew my chances, even if I were much more skilled than the field. Not good. And yet, for whatever reason, this is what I felt compelled to do. Even though I knew it was likely that the money was gone -- even though in fact I had already considered it gone in my financial thinking over a month prior -- I still felt good about it. I still do.

I am Julius_Goat. I've played in the World Series of Poker.

The Breaking Of The Fellowship

I'll stay a week or two/I'll stay the summer through/But I am telling you/I must be going
-Groucho Marx

_________

Andy Rooney outlived poker blogs.  Sad, but true.

"Don't worry. You can still follow me at
@OuchMyLungsggglllrrrrgghle.twitter.com"

I frequently survive on limited sleep. It's the way I'm wired. This comes in handy when you like to write but you have many daytime responsibilities, but it also opens you up to any number of interesting anthropological environments. By way of example, let me suggest to you a sight well-known to the collegiate amnesiac; the party after the party has fallen apart. Four AM after a rage reveals a grotesquery of detritus and incriminating evidence; floors sticky from cheap beer spillage, empty cases torn open and sodden in the corner, new stains on the carpeting, a half-passed out unfortunate on the couch with clown features and obscenities Sharpied onto his face. It'll be fun for him when he wakes up and runs to his scheduled meeting with his girlfriend's parents, failing to realize that he's been festively festooned.

That's us, now, poker bloggery poking around the leavings of the party, ever since the fuzz showed up on tax day, two thousand eleven, and cut the head right off of online poker in the United States. The fun was here, but now all that's left is carnage.  It's OK. Parties have to end. But it's always a shame when they end because the cops came to break it up. It's even worse when what the cops find is worse than what you'd thought.

What's become of us, anyway?  Remember blogging? Remember when everybody was writing long-form pieces and commenting and starting blogger drama and all the whatnot with the whadyacallit? Sure, I know that we still have Pai Gow and slots and pokies at the WPBT gatherings in winter, but come on. This was always a virtual group, especially for those of us who don't get over Vegas way that much. And sure, we're still out there in the tubes, in one form or another, but our linchpin was the ability to play cards together, and that's gone, baby, gone. We're all drifting our own ways, and one by one, many of us are slipping off unnoticed. Nowadays, on the increasingly infrequent times I fire up Blogger to make it happen I feel like the guy picking through the beer cans and taking the cap off the Sharpie.

"Um, yeeeah. I'd love to read your novel. Um, I just, um...hey,
what's that behind you?"

I'm writing a lot, these days. At this pace, I'll have a novel in a year or so, and I am quite happy with the quality of what I've pulled out of me so far. This is very exciting news to me, if to nobody else. It's easy to write in these morning hours after the party has passed, but I still miss the revel that preceded it. I think of some of the things that I posted in this space as the best I've yet done, and I think of the support and encouragement that I found here as the main reason that I continued on. And so, as I look forward to what this blog will become, I find that today I come to bury and praise Caesar, to remember what was.


Remember a whole week full of blogger tournaments? MATH followed by Skillz followed by the Mookie/Dank followed by something or other followed by the Donkament?  Remember? Remember when we could play online games in a reputable online casino? A whole night's fun for a lousy ten bucks and all the chat you could type? Remember Waffles, or Maniac35784 as he liked to be known? Remember tilting him and then jawing for hours about it? Remember calling all-in with the JackAce just in hopes that Hoy would expend 10,567 words on your idiocy the next morning?

Let's remember all of the blogs that have gone dark, or at least gray. If I forget you here, don't feel bad, which you won't. You don't read blogs anymore anyway. So few outside established media writers are left and still putting out regular posts. If I am still in touch with a blogger regularly these days, it is doubtless through Twitter or perhaps Facebook. Nothing against that platform, but man. What happened to the other one? Did we have to offshore everything to the social media circus?

Remember Fuel? Iakaris? JJOK? Katitude? Jecmiid? SNGMachine? Kajagugu? Raisin' Cayne? GCox? Riggstad? Skiddoo? Miami Don? Bayne? Up For Poker? Al Can't Freaking Hang?

Hey, if you're on that list and you want me to link you, just hit me up in the chat and I'll oh yeah nobody really cares if they get linked to their blog anymore.

Hey guys, remember Uberposts? Come back to the five and dime, Blogfather, Blogfather.On second thought, don't. There's no poker to discuss, anyway.  Let's just chill on Twitter. I'll retweet your back if you'll retweet mine.

"Co-mingling player funds? That's as frightening
as one of Gimli's mutton farts."

Remember when Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer and Rafe Furst were unquestionably stand-up guys? Remember Full Tilt? I miss Full Tilt. I miss thinking it was what I thought it was. I bet I'm not alone on that. Now I don't even get to remember it the way I remembered it. Did that make sense? If not, no matter. I'm insane half the time now anyway.

So the question becomes, what happens next?  I am pretty sure I owe you months of awesome and crazy. I think it's probably time for Retroactive Oscars of the 80s. I even have some rather unusual ideas about this book I'm writing.  Look, I've been in this space for five years as of New Year's Day 2012. I've got no intention of stopping just because I've got nothing left to say about poker.

Nothing? Well, not entirely nothing. I guess I'd better start by belatedly telling you about my WSOP.  Stay tuned, and stick around.

Blink

For the first time ever, I have re-watched the footage.  I told myself that this would be the day I’d do it.  I think this was it for me.  I don’t need to see that again.

I was sitting at my desk, working in the same historical-district house I work in today; working on the beginnings of a project that still consumes chunks of my days, in fact.  The difference is that then I the new guy. I hadn’t been there for slightly more than a decade.  I’d been there for three whole weeks. 

The house is one of those old large-frame Victorian numbers that were built to hold a family back when a family was fourteen kids, and grandma, too.  We were scattered throughout it, and I was in what must once have been the living room.  People had lived their lives right where I sat, listening to music and editing a series of dry documents. Occasionally, the flash of an IM window from a co-worker in another part of the house.  The chatter of the day.  Blink. Blink. Blink.

Did you transfer the regs file?

Yeah.
Check this link out. Funny stuff.

People had lived their lives, right where I sat.  Gone now.  I wasn’t thinking of that.  I was thinking of deadlines.  The light blinked, an instant message.

Somebody flew a plane into the World Trade Center.

I typed back:

Drunk?

Of course I knew about the attempt on the towers back in 1993.  The one that failed; of course it had failed.  The idea, to take down the twin towers, was laughable.  I wasn’t even thinking of that. I was thinking a one-engine plane with a drunk or suicidal pilot.  I was thinking minor damage. 

I went back to work.

About a half hour, another blink.

The tower is on fire. It's spreading.

Out of control?

Yeah. They can’t get people out.  People are jumping.

How much damage can a little plane do? I thought.  Unnerved, but with nothing else to do, I went back to work.  Happy for the distraction.  Five minutes later, blink:

Another plane hit the other tower.

What?

My headphones were still on. At that moment, I heard the words that still make me feel cold:

Can’t stop what’s coming. Can’t stop what is already here.

That’s when I quit work for the day.  It was around 10:00 AM.

I watched the towers go down with my new co-workers, still strangers to me. We watched from a small television that my new boss had kept in an empty room we were using for storage.   We watched hundreds of firemen running in. A hundred times we saw the plane hitting the second tower. The towers lit up like candles, like torches. Any hope that this may have been some grotesque accident was lost as we heard that the Pentagon had been hit.  Everybody thought, but nobody said, Just how many commercial aircraft are in the air at any given time, anyway?  There was speculation that perhaps, probably not, but perhaps, the towers might collapse if the fires weren’t put out. It seemed silly. The damage was immense, but once the fire was put out…

Then, blink, blink, one and then the other of the towers came down in a waterfall of smoke, and everything shifted.  In that moment, we left one world and entered into the reality in which we now find ourselves.

In a previous life, my boss had been a Customs broker, hustling for business in those towers.  “There was literally nowhere in the world like it,” he’d tell me, later.  “You could go there for four hours and have twenty meetings. You could leave with your next year’s clients.”  When the first tower went down he made a sound unlike any I’ve heard anybody else make before.  The sort of sound you make, perhaps, when your father is shot in front of you, or when you see a child hit by a mortar shell.  The sound of atrocity beyond words.  The sound you make when something impossibly bad occurs, when the floorboards of reality turn to quicksand. 

In way, I feel as though he groaned for us all in that moment, as something foundational happened to the collective ‘us’. I felt a quiet numbness go over me. Nobody knew anything, and I knew even less than they did.  If this could happen, then anything could happen.  This could be it, I remember thinking.  This could actually be it. If this happened today, what might happen tomorrow?

Before, we couldn’t conceive of such a thing happening, and that was our weakness. Sometimes you can’t stop what is coming. 

Now, we can conceive of little else, and that is our weakness. All we want, quite understandably, is Not That Again, and at times it appears that no price will be too high for even a hint of a promise of a chance at Not That Again. Sometimes, you can’t stop what is already here.

I don’t remember driving home, but since I eventually found myself home, I suppose I must have.  I sat on the couch and waited for my wife to wake up.  A nurse, she worked the night shift.

She woke up and came out of our room into the living room.  Me, sitting on the couch, in a different universe. 

“Hey,” she said. “How was your day?”

The Greatest Movie Character of 1990-1999 004: Round 1, Heat 4

Clarice Starling Division - Round 1, Heat 4

Vote At FilmChaw

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Eric Draven, The Crow

You're killed by a group of thugs after watching them rape and murder the love of your life the night before your wedding. What does one do? They come back from the dead with preternatural powers and one of the most iconic makeup jobs of moviedom and take revenge, obviously.

The Crow was an instant cult hit. It hurled "goth" into the mainstream (again), launched a hit for the Stone Temple Pilots, and made Brandon Lee a legend. Yes, his tragic death on-set contributed largely to both his status and the film's success, but Eric Draven could have well launched him out of bad B-movie action and into the mainstream. The character was SO successful that it was brought back for 3 sequels and an upcoming remake, even though the actor who portrayed the protagonist was long gone.

Crow masks were everywhere, t-shirts were sold like mad, WCW ripped the character right off when it remade Sting in his image. The black-and-white harlequin that was a reborn Eric Draven was inescapable. Here was the ultimate anti-hero on a mission of righteous vengeance - unstoppable, superpowered, and tortured.

Let's face it, if Micky Knox had killed Shelly, Draven would have made short of work of him. 17 years later, that face is still cool, and people still know what it means - sometimes, good people come back to get the justice denied them in life.

- Astin


Mickey Knox, Natural Born Killers

(Note: Riggstad is busy campaigning for Barack Obama 2012. . If  he gets a spare moment, he'll give us his take on Mickey Knox.  In the meantime, we'll just point out that Mickey Knox is a well-acted character in an iconic movie, not some drippy emo Robert Smith from The Cure wannabe who can't even take a single bullet. Vote accordingly.)

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Tommy DeVito, Goodfellas

"Are you kidding me?  Are you f***ng kidding me? Who is this crewcut retard they're sending out here to whack me? To whack me?  With his little f***ng golf clubs and his little f***ng opera man voice, listen to him, sounds like he's gonna cry, get outta here ya little f***ng ****kn***gler*** of a gl****blerch**** before I wrap that mothercr***ng golf club around your ugly little Caddyshack pl***unking head for you, you f***ng cry***ler****gle. I'll show you a hole in one, you fu*k*ng larchbl****ck, call ya mother and I'll show her a hole in one and my f**king hat trick, too. Now go home to Bob Barker and cry into your pillow for a week."

- Julius_Goat

Happy Gilmore, Happy Gilmore

"The price is WRONG bitch!"

I LOVE this matchup. Tommy DeVito, the foul-mouthed nutjob gangster of Goodfellas vs Happy Gilmore, the foul-mouthed nutjob golfer of, well, Happy Gilmore. Two psychos facing off, only one victor. Let's do this.

Happy Gilmore quotes:

Shooter McGavin: Just stay out of my way... or you'll pay! LISTEN to what I say!
Happy Gilmore: Hey, why don't I just go eat some hay, make things out of clay, lay by the bay? I just may! What'd ya say?

Shooter McGavin: You're in big trouble though, pal. I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast!
Happy Gilmore: You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?
Shooter McGavin: ... No!

Terry: All you ever talk about is becoming a pro hockey player, but there's a problem: you're not any good.
Happy Gilmore: I am good. You know what, you're a lousy kindergarten teacher. I've seen those finger-paintings you bring home and they SUCK.

"You little son of a bitch ball! Why you don't you just go HOME? That's your HOME! Are you too good for your HOME? ANSWER ME! SUCK MY WHITE ASS, BALL!"

"Golf requires goofy pants and a fat ass."

"Hey, if I saw myself in clothes like that, I'd have to kick my own ass."

And of course the one at the top, spoken to one Bob Barker.


Tommy DeVito Quotes:

"Fuck you in the fucking fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck. Clown."

"I am somehow amusing like a painted-face harlequin one would find in a circus or carnival environment? I commend you on your pointed compliment sir."

Or something like that.

Both are loose cannons, ready to explode at any provocation, real or imagined. But Happy IS funny and turns what seems like a truly idiotic movie into a classic piece of comedy. This is the movie that made Adam Sandler's post-SNL career. Pesci was already known by the time Goodfellas came around, and let's face it - Pesci, De Niro, Liotta in a gangster movie directed by Scorsese? That's hard to screw up.

It's not easy to knock Tommy, so I'll go for the one area that he lacks - growth. Happy Gilmore goes from hockey playing thug who has no direction and beats up everyone into a zen master of golfing. He endures personal tragedy and comes out the other side with an acceptance and maturity that seemed unachievable at first. What? This was the template for every Sandler character? Yah, but Happy did it early, and better than his predecessor, Billy Madison. By the end of the film, Happy is still Happy, but the rough edges have smoothed a bit.

Tommy? By the end of the movie he's *SPOILER ALERT* dead. Why? Because he refused to change. He showed no capacity for growth as a person and paid the price for his hubris. This isn't a tragic death, nor a hero's death. This is the inevitable end for a violent psychopath in an environment of violence. If only he'd discovered golf.

- Astin

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Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story

Malcolm X was one of the most fascinating figures in the last century of U.S. history.  As a movie character . . . eh, not so much.

Buzz Lightyear, on the other hand, is the sparkplug that juices one of the most successful and influential movie franchises of all times. Buzz is the heart. Buzz is the soul.  Buzz is the nutball who doesn't know he's a toy, until he embraces his destiny entirely.  He's the perfect toy, because he's so totally committed to the game, he doesn't always even know it is a game.  Also, on Spanish setting, he's a hell of a flamenco dancer.

Vote for Buzz over Malcom, citizen.  No one man should have all that power.

- Julius_Goat


Malcolm X, Malcolm X

(Note: Riggstad is on assignment with the Peace Corp, helping to save the baby seals from corporate interests. Don't judge him; he can kill you with a magazine. If  he gets a spare moment, he'll give us his take on Brother Malcolm.  In the meantime, we'll just say that if you can't vote for one of the most electrifying performances of the decade and one of the most amazing and uniquely American individuals of all time, instead of a cartoon toy, well, brother, you can't see the clear glass of water in front of you.)

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Phil Connors, Groundhog Day

My favorite movie of all time, with my favorite character of all time. 

The "process of living" often gets in the way of the actual living of life.  The alarm clock rings, we shovel some food in our mouth and rush off to work for 8 hours a day.  Drive home, eat again, clean up.  Take a shower. Maybe you squeeze a workout in there or a tv show.  Head on the pillow, and the alarm clocks rings again.  Shovel some more food in, off to work again.

Life can become an infinite loop of the same boring activities if you let it.

Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? 

Ralph: That about sums it up for me. 

Like Phil Connors, we're all stuck in the same place every day.  Most of us have to wake up at the same time every day, go to the same job, see the same people, and sit in the same meetings.  So how do we escape this sameness?  How do we embrace the routine and make our life worth living?  

Like Phil, we fight.  We fight against the sameness, we fight against accepting that our life consists of a routine that can imprison us.  We fight for freedom and for dignity.  We fight against death.

Phil Connors is a fighter, and Groundhog Day takes us through the 5 stages of accepting his own mortality.

Stage 1: Denial — "I feel fine."; "This can't be happening, not to me."

Denial is usually only a temporary defense for the individual. This feeling is generally replaced with heightened awareness of possessions and individuals that will be left behind after death.

Yeah, Sport,I know there's a blizzard. 

                   

When are the long-distance lines gonna be repaired?

                   

What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today.

                   

Hello?

Stage 2: Anger — "Why me? It's not fair!"; "How can this happen to me?"; '"Who is to blame?"

Once in the second stage, the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue. Because of anger, the person is very difficult to care for due to misplaced feelings of rage and envy.

I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters.

*That* was a pretty good day. Why couldn't I get *that* day over, and over, and over... 

Stage 3: Bargaining — "Just let me live to see my children graduate."; "I'll do anything for a few more years."; "I will give my life savings if..."

The third stage involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay death. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher power in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual is saying, "I understand I will die, but if I could just have more time..."

What I wanted to say was...
              
I think you're the kindest, sweetest, prettiest person...

I've ever met in my life.

I've never seen anyone... that's nicer to people than you are.

The first time I saw you... something happened to me.
                   
I never told you, but... I knew that I wanted to hold you as hard as I could.

I don't deserve someone like you.

But if I ever could...

I swear I would love you...

for the rest of my life.

Stage 4: Depression — "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"; "I'm going to die... What's the point?"; "I miss my loved one, why go on?"

During the fourth stage, the dying person begins to understand the certainty of death. Because of this, the individual may become silent, refuse visitors and spend much of the time crying and grieving. This process allows the dying person to disconnect from things of love and affection. It is not recommended to attempt to cheer up an individual who is in this stage. It is an important time for grieving that must be processed.

This is pitiful.          

A thousand people freezing their butts off, waiting to worship a rat.           

What a hype. Groundhog Day used to mean something in this town.               

They used to pull the hog out and eat it!

You're hypocrites, all of you!

You got a problem with what I'm saying?

Untie your tongue, and you come out here and talk.

Am I upsetting you, Princess?

You want a prediction about the weather, you're asking the wrong Phil. 

I'll give you a winter prediction.

It's gonna be cold...

it's gonna be gray...

and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

Stage 5: Acceptance — "It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it, I may as well prepare for it."

In this last stage, the individual begins to come to terms with her/his mortality or that of a loved one.

When Chekhov saw the long winter...he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope.         

Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life.          

But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney... and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts...

I couldn't imagine a better fate...than a long and lustrous winter.

From Punxsutawney, it's Phil Connors.       

So long.

***

The fact that Bill Murray can take us through the five stages of grief, while making us laugh really hard, is what makes his character so memorable.

-HDouble


Donald "Sully" Sullivan, Nobody's Fool

This is Paul Newman in his last great role, and it's one of his very best.  More believable than Cool Hand Luke, more relateable than Fast Eddie Felson, more likable than Hud, Newman settles into the skin of perennial loser and hereditary bad father Sully like a pair of broken-in work boots, and, because he's Paul Newman, he's also the coolest guy in town (and Bruce Willis is in town).  Sully lives in an old town in upstate New York that's just like him -- hard working, but everybody knows nothing will ever come of it.

Sully walked out on his wife and kids. He's got a bum knee. He doesn't have more than a couple of twenties to rub together. He let the family house rot to pieces out of spite for his old man.  He'll punch a policeman rather than stop driving on the sidewalk. But he's the only guy who can coax the demented old lady off the snowy road, and he does it by charming her. He'll even help the old lady's daughter by taking over at the local diner while she tends to her mother's feet.

Here's the thing about Sully. He's a total screwup. He's about the best guy you'll ever meet.

I expect that Phil will beat Sully in this matchup.  Groundhog Day is by far the more popular movie, and Murray is admittedly great in it. But if you're one of the lucky handful that has seen Nobody's Fool, I bet you are voting for Sully.

- Julius_Goat

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So here's a supposedly insane thing that I'll never do in the first place.



This is perfectly safe except for literally everything.

Doodle 008

This is Plato. Plato is a superhero. He can make any part of his body whatever size he wants it. He uses this innate skill to fight the forces of evil, whenever he can find it. It's not easy to find the forces of evil.  You try it, sometime, and see how you like it.

Still, he's got real powers. Mass control. The only problem with this is the Law of Conservation of Mass, which Plato must follow. This means that, if he wants to make one part of his body big, he needs to make other parts of his body correspondingly small, and vice versa.

So, as you can see here, he's sporting some big ol' arms. But he had to shrink his legs down to get them.

That's how it goes when you are a superhero bound by the basic laws of physics.

I'm still pretty bad at hands. That's how it goes.