Tuesday, September 19, 2006

just leave it blank

I see that I haven't posted anything here in some 6 months. I suppose that means no one will actually ever be checking here again. Ah well.
Latest happenings. I'm over 50 casinos visited in the last 4 months. Very kewl.
Got kicked out of two more casinos just this last week, including receiving my first ever official barring notice.
Have driven or been the passenger in over 13,000 road miles since June 26, including 33 states and Mexico.
Got my official "Husky Card" as an entering freshman student at University of Washington "Go Dawgs".
Good news this week. It appears that perhaps the Lord's Resistance Army is actually going to disband, release all the kidnapped child soldiers, and stop all the atrocities.
Bad news this week. It appears that the government of Thailand is undergoing a military coup.
My beautiful gracious wife very kindly asked me to please attend a sunday morning church service with her. It was actually on a Sunday evening, but you have to realize that I mentally put "Sunday morning church" in quotes whenever I use it, and by it I mean, to put it very simply, a church service that is more like a "typical" "American" "mainstream" Sunday worship service (i.e., boring and irrelevant) and less like a 12 step meeting or an emergent church meeting etc. So I went to Union Church, a church plant of University Presbyterian Church Seattle, part of the PC USA but "We'll, yes, we are officially PCUSA, but we're ... sort of like not really like that" or something along those lines--this in response to my ribbing. I was looking around and thinking "Ok, I'm here because my wife begged me to come, but why are all these other people here?" So I asked a couple of them, but I came to realize later that they were all answering a different question than the one I was asking. So I realized what I really wanted to ask was "What strange series of circumstances, people, and events in your life led you to spend a perfectly good Sunday evenening at a "Sunday morning church" service (within which I would of course have to explain about the quote marks). If I go again, I'll try that question.
Other bits and pieces. I learned how to unethically (although technically not, perhaps, illegally) download complete movies from the internet this week using a technology called "bittorrent" (all one word). first you download and install a bittorrent client, then you use a bittorrent search engine to download a file with mystically point out into the ether somewhere to bits and pieces of the file you want on multiple persons' computers. Then you download and upload that file. All a bit complicated but it works and so tonite my wife and I are watching "My Big Fat Greek Wedding".
What I'm reading. This week I read an article by Dr. Allender with the provocative title "Raping Eve, reflections on war rape, the political process, and Grace" which you can read here http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=19 and Volume 2, appendix F of the "The Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster" entitled "Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle" by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (a genius!) which you can read here http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm and I'm also reading "Mountains beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder about Dr. Paul Farmer (another genius--see his organization's web site here: http://www.pih.org/index.html ) which is making me want to be more engaged with poverty.

6 comments:

Benjamin Ady said...

i love you bens!
i know this says it IS bens posting, but it actually is me(gs)!

Justin said...

Watchin' and Readin'.

:)

baker st jones said...

why exactly to they kick you out/barr you?

anita

Benjamin Ady said...

They kick me out/bar me because they realize or believe that I am a card counter, and they know that that means I am playing at an advantage (whereas 99.9% of the people in the casino are playing at a disadvantage) and they don't like that, so out with me. I think this is really a bit cruel of them, since I am playing at a very very tiny advantage, whereas they are playing with a huge advantage against the 99.9% of the people.

sam becca zach and martha said...

what's a card counter? isn't everyone counting cards?

becca

Benjamin Ady said...

Put very simply, a card counter is someone who, in the game of blackjack, uses one of various systems to keep track at some level of which cards have already been dealt, which thus gives them information about the compostion of the cards still waiting to be dealt. Based on this information, they know when the advantage passes back and forth between the house and them, and to what degree, and can change their betting accordingly. It's not nearly as complicated as it sounds. I could teach you the basics in about two hours, and you could become fully qualified to count cards professionally with about 80 hours of practice. Read more here Card Counting