Nice Try

Big Papi. Dustin Pedroia. Terry Francona. Theo Epstein. And now John Lester. The list just goes on and on of current and former Red Sox players and management being publicly quoted in the press as complaining that nobody mentioned the unbelievable stories of the team's players getting drunk and mentally and physically out of shape, back a couple of months ago when the team "had the best record in baseball."

Nice try.

The Phillies had the best record in baseball for just about the entire baseball season this year. The Phillies were MLB's first team to 30 wins, the first to 40 wins, to 50 wins, and then again to 70 wins, 80 wins, 90 wins, and the only team to win 100 games in the 2011 regular season.

Now don't get me wrong, none of this means diock anymore with the Cardinals set to represent the NL in the World Series once again. But I just can't sit quietly by while people associated with the Red Sox claim that their team was better than it was earlier in the season, in an unbelievably pathetic attempt to somehow claim that there is no story behind the total breakdown in control over the team that undoubtedly led directly to its downfall at the end of the season this year.

Phillies = best team in baseball, almost all season, including at this very moment.
Cardinals = NL pennant winner, without a doubt the franchise that historically makes the most out of its opportunities in the postseason, this year among the best examples of all.
Rangers = best team in the AL this year.
Red Sox = best record in baseball 20 games in to the season, and best record in the AL until around 120 games. Second best record in the AL through Game 161. Third best record in the AL come season's end. Ugh.

Tilt and the Poker Media

With the news today that full tilt has been shut down globally after losing its license to run its online gaming operations, I find myself thinking, as I have often as I've read the increasing number of anti full-tilt posts out in the blogiverse over the past month or so, about the free pass that a great many bloggers and other members of the poker media gave full tilt for the first several weeks following the U.S. online poker ban, and even in many cases that is still happening today. As the full tilt saga continues to take affirmative steps that seem headed for the site collapsing under its own weight and not ever being able to find sufficient funds to pay back the full deposits of at least its American players, I can't help but think how funny it is that basically everyone we know in the poker media, among our blogger crew and everybody else in between out there is now taking credit for having been right all along in their predictions regarding full tilt poker ever since the events shortly after April 15. When meanwhile, in actual reality, six weeks ago, it was just me, one or two other bloggers, and a small handful of posters on 2+2 decrying full tilt (they deserved it), stating that the site had commingled funds and did not have sufficient money on hand to pay out their players (they did not), and predicting that things would get a lot worse for our chances of ever seeing our money before they get better (they most certainly have).

Go check it out. Over the past few weeks, I have read no fewer than five poker writers, bloggers or other posters trying to take credit for having been right all along and seeing this coming with the full tilt situation, when in reality you can very easily look and verify that they were there back in late April, swimming right along with the masses of fish all proclaiming that hey, this is full tilt, owned by the poker pros themselves, they won't screw everyone over, especially not with the WSOP coming up. What a joke. Even when the shit is right there to be proven false, linked right there on these people's own blogs, just inches of screen space away from their lies, they all still want to take credit now for having seen this avalanche coming. Right.

Everybody has to claim to be an insider, in the poker media more than anywhere else. Where six weeks ago it was "I know the full tilt guys, full tilt will come through, full tilt would never commingle our funds with their own, of course full tilt has the money", now with the very same people it's all "I always knew something was up, I could smell a rat from the beginning." Nice try, but no. I smelled a rat right from the beginning. You blindly backed your "friends" in the industry, while day by day, chess move by chess move, your rosy expectations and over-trusting naivete showed themselves more and more clearly for just that. You put your faith in a collection of some of the least trustworthy, most shady people out there, and boy did you ever get burned.

It's one thing to be getting screwed by full tilt here. We're all getting screwed, every minute of every day while we do not get our funds back. I wrote here in black and white a good eight weeks ago now that we all already had been screwed, from the moment it became clear to the unbiased and open-eyed among us that full tilt had in fact commingled our poker funds with their own, to such an extent that they could not now come up with enough money to pay all the U.S. players back our own money. So it's one thing to recognize and admit that you've gotten screwed. But to try to take credit for being out in front of this whole full tilt mess now that your "friends" involved with the company have shown their true colors -- when it was so painfully few of us who actually got it early on -- really adds insult to injury. Just own the fact that you got duped like 99% of the country, and maybe try to learn to be a little more open-minded and objective next time.

It was tough for a while back in May, being one of the only people I could find out there suggesting that full tilt might never pay us back our poker funds from their coffers. That our funds might not even exist. People have a lot of money tied up on full tilt, and many make their very livelihood from the availability of full tilt, so I took quite a lot of shit a couple of months back from the bitterest among the blogging community. Many said I was being needlessly pessimistic. A few attacked my lack of knowledge, or my lack of written substantiation for any concerns I was voicing (as if anyone supporting full tilt back then had any such "evidence", obviously). And many simply insulted and attacked me, without any real reason, for having a view that did not jibe with what they desperately wanted to be the truth, even though their view of the truth never sat well with me or seemed all that likely to happen.

For what it's worth, I don't only chuckle at all those people now who should have seen the truth coming like I did a couple of months ago but whose own world view could not allow them to see the forest for the trees so they are now vainly trying to take credit for having seen this all along when in fact they were major contributors to the lack of seeing this problem for what it really was. I actually think the poker media, bloggers, etc. contributed in a small way to the current state of full tilt's business. Most of the major poker media sites, the bigger poker bloggers and other poker outlets on the Internets basically gave full tilt a pass for the entire first month or more after April 15 of this year, and that I think gave the powers that be at tilt the idea that they could maybe actually get away with screwing everyone and live to tell the tale. When you've got some of the biggest and most widely-read writers about poker, many of whom have written or otherwise worked for full tilt or their largest competitors over the past few years, either remaining more or less silent while one of the biggest heists in online poker history was playing out its first act, or outright coming out in blind support of full tilt with obviously no actual reason to do so, it sent a terrible message to the founders of the site, one that I think has stuck with those people right up to now, as we near the seeming bitter end for what was once everyone's favorite site to play at. Of course nobody out there will own up to having done that now, but that's exactly what mostly everyone out there in the poker media in fact did, and I'm telling you, that collective pass and the rush to trust for everything full tilt was doing for 4-6 weeks after Black Friday contributed to where we're at today.

Just imagine if all the same people who have, say, devoted countless hours, day and weeks of their lives to investigating, reporting on, and just generally telling the world the truth about the UltimateBet / Absolute scandal, had spent the first three or four weeks after Black Friday working just as hard to look into the financial situation at full tilt and to make the truth known to the world, with the same fervor and devotion that they accorded to the UB cheating matter. Or, remember when a couple chips went missing during the WSOP Main Event a few years back? We had two or three professional poker bloggers and writers out there covering almost nothing but that story for days and days on end. And you know what? The shit works! If enough people jump on an issue or a story early enough, if they dig deep enough, and if they stay at it long enough, we've seen cold, hard proof that they can really make a difference. Not just in uncovering the truth when they do, but in actually helping to frame the issues and ultimately contributing in some way to the eventual resolution of the problem.

With full tilt, the poker media in general dropped the ball in my view. Not to blame the media in any way for what ultimately is 100% full tilt's own doing here, but the poker media has done a better job in the past on other issues, and should have followed the lead of the very few such as myself who publicly never thought full tilt's story smelled exactly kosher, and done a similar job here right from the getgo in digging to the bottom of the issues and starting to suggest ways to influence full tilt management to do the right thing. Instead, while all your favorite bloggers publicly came to full tilt's defense and told you over and over again for several weeks that of course full tilt will return everyone's funds, attacking all the while those few voices out there suggesting that maybe all was not roses for the former second-largest U.S. online poker site, management at full tilt saw an opportunity to do things clearly against the U.S. players' interests like turning down Phil Ivey's "White Knight" deal and a few other deals that were offered that would have secured the return of player funds in exchange for giving up control of the full tilt asset, and they jumped on that opportunity with the understanding that the poker media was simply not out for bear from them like they clearly have been for AP/UB, the WSOP and others when other similar controversies have arisen in the past. And I can't help but notice the correlation between that unbelievable (to me) level of trust right off the bat for full tilt, and the fact that now it appears more and more almost daily that full tilt could have gotten us back our own money, but now they probably cannot.

This is one story where I can honestly say, it hurts to have been right all along.

Dear Wendy's

Dear Wendy's,

You don't know me, at least not specifically anyways, but let's just say that I've known my way around a fast food joint in my day and leave it at that. I could pretty much rate the burgers, the chicken, the fries, even specialty items like desserts and milkshakes at all the regular drive-through chains during most of my lifetime. When it comes to fast food, I've basically seen it all, and I've paid for it all through my driver side car window. And that's what makes me uniquely qualified to make this statement to you here today:

Your "natural cut" fries aren't fooling anyone.

Sure, you can keep running those radio commercials telling us about this desirable new feature of your top-selling side order item, and you can keep posting the corporate-approved signage in your parking lot and on your restaurants. You can even keep broadcasting those tv ads where the guy exclaims, after taking one bite of your new natural cut french fries, "Wow!! These are better than McDonalds!"

But I know McDonalds french fries. And you, ma'am, are no McDonalds.

Face it, pigtails: No matter how much you try to tell us about the benefits of this great new style of french fry your restaurants are going out of their way to offer us, in the end you keep running into the same problem: Your "natural cut" fries are simply not close to better in taste, but rather they are actually just a way for Wendy's corporate to save much-needed dough by having your potato vendors not remove the skin before the potatoes are cut into fries and shipped out to the stores. The french fries that result are clearly worse tasting than your previous fry recipe -- this is probably why you and all your competitors have made them the old way for, oh, my entire lifetime up until just a few months ago, not un-coincidentally just shortly after Wendy's missed its quarterly earnings estimates on Wall Street and warned of a profit shortfall for the year to come, due largely to food cost increases -- but you've decided to go ahead with the skin-on french fries anyways, because -- let's face it -- Wendy's' need to save a few bucks is greater than your need to offer the most delicious, albeit more expensive, french fries available.

Wendy's, your whole marketing push around your new "natural cut" french fries is insulting to my intelligence as an occasional customer of your drive-through windows. Ultimately, your "natural cut" fries are nothing more than an exceedingly lame attempt to spin a cost-cutting measure -- one which you doubtless know results in a worse-tasting product for your customers -- as a favor being done for your customers. Unfortunately, anyone whose vote you really should be concerned about has already started adjusting their habits and frequenting the other drive-throughs invariably scattered in close proximity to most Wendy's outlets. Which, believe you me, is not really going to help your little profitability problem at all in the end.

In sum, Wendy's, you are not a seasonal shack on a boardwalk somewhere -- you're a national fast food chain. The American people don't want skin on our national fast food chain french fries today, any more than the American people have wanted skin on our national fast food chain french fries at any time in the past forty years. And if you're going to screw us and force us to eat the skinned-up fries anyways for your own corporate gain at our direct and intended expense, at least have the decency to admit it instead of running a great big marketing push suggesting that you're doing us some great favor. Until then, please consider this note my notice that I will opt to dine elsewhere. And not even the pull of your scrumptious chocolate coca-cola frosty float will lure me back to your establishment until this great wrong has been righted.

Pissed Offingly,
Miffed in Manhattan

The Best Survivor Tournament Yet

That's right -- tonight's Dank tournament at 10pm ET on full tilt (under the "private" tab, password is "vegas1" as always) will be easily the most exciting tournament to date in all of Survivor Poker. Sure, there have been some other fun ones, tourneys with fun immunity bounties, spots where one alliance's leader or the other was set to get voted out depending on who lasted longest, even ones that ended in ties and thus heads-up nlh matches to decide an elimination. But nothing is going to be as fun as tonight's Dank, where as I mentioned yesterday, any old shlub who shows up with $11 and signs up with the above password can make a big hand and cast a major impact on the eventual outcome of Julius Goat's brainchild, Survivor Poker.

As I mentioned yesterday, we are down to just the Final Three on Donkey Island: muchtim, veryjosie and smboatdrinks. Tonight in the Dank, whoever lasts the longest among those three will win immunity, and along with that, will win the right to decide which one of the two remaining competitors to bring along to the final two, which it has already been decided will come down to a heads-up vote among all of the Tribal Council as to who is most deserving of being the Champion of Donkey Island. So who finishes the highest of the three remaining Survivors tonight is going to play a huge role in what ends up happening in the end, and that's why any one of us mere spectators can exert a very significant influence on the overall outcome of the game. And with the way the game has been set up here, getting that immunity oneself is going to be the only way for anyone to be truly sure that they are safe heading into the final heads-up vote among all the Survivor participants.

I mentioned yesterday that I figured it was a safe bet that if either of josie or boat wins immunity, they will choose the other one to come along, perfecting an alliance that has seemingly existed right from the getgo of the tournament series. But as I have thought that over over the past 24 hours or so, I have realized how utterly unsure that conclusion really is. I mean, josie and boat have presumably been allied all along, and I bet if we went back and looked at the votes, those two might never have voted for a different person in any elimination vote all along the way through the series for all I know. Clearly, an alliance still in existence at this point would by necessity require that the alliance members are "supposed" to stick together here now and vote for each other to advance to the heads-up Survivor final. However, this is Survivor, and even our silly little bloggers version of it has been absolutely chock full of backstabbing and brazen dickovers in the name of self-advancement. So let's say Josie wins immunity tonight. Her agreement is I assume based on her last post about the game to stay with Boat and bring him to the finals with her. But what if Josie thinks Boat might have a decent chance of outvoting her among the Tribal Council members at the end? And what if Josie believes she can comfortably out-vote muchtim under the same situation? Then what is Josie to do? Keep the alliance, and face a possible second-place finish because she took the wrong guy with her to the final heads-up vote? Or end the alliance, choose muchtim to take to heads-up, and claim her spot as Queen of Donkey Island?

Similarly, what if Boat wins that immunity tonight. He has at least as tough a dilemma as Josie would. Bring Josie along as previously agreed to as part of their longstanding alliance, but then have to find a way to garner more Tribal Council votes than Josie in order to win the game? Or, alternatively, elect to bring Much along -- thereby stabbing Josie squarely in the vertebrae -- on the thinking that Boat has a better chance of winning that heads-up battle than he would against Josie.

And even Muchtim will face an interesting decision along similar lines if he manages to win immunity in tonight's Dank tournament, as I alluded to yesterday. Yes, josie and boat are allied, but one can only guess from Josie's recent posts that she and Much are not exactly on great terms at the moment. If Much wins immunity, does he pick Boat, continuing with what seems to be his recent history of voting against Josie over the last couple of elimination votes, and take his chances going heads-up against another blogger who is perhaps not as "out there" and well known of late as Josie? Or, does Much elect to make things up to Josie and take her over Boat down to heads-up if he wins the last-longer in tonight's Dank, on the thinking that maybe Josie has alienated enough Tribal Council members with her play of the game that Much might perhaps have a better shot heads-up against her than against Boat?

All of these things are very real considerations for the participants in tonight's Dank tournament on full tilt. And don't get me wrong -- of course Josie and Boat have told each other that they are allied and will vote for the other to survive if either of them wins tonight's crucial immunity bounty. That goes without saying. But what either or both of them does in reality when faced with the situation and the potential to alter their own ability to attain ultimate success in this game -- and how much they weigh that ultimate success against "doing the right thing" or "standing by your partner" -- is still very much up in the air the way I see it. I mean, sticking with your alliance partner is obviously a noble end to pursue, but this is Survivor folks, and we've seen time and time again that in the end people have been (and shoud be, really -- this is a contest, after all) choosing their own self-interest over perceived alliance ties over and over and over again. And tonight will have by far the most at stake of any immunity bounty, and of any elimination decision made by any individual in the entirety of the Survivor Poker series.

Who will win the all-important final immunity bounty on Donkey Island? Who will be the first of the big three to drop? How pissed will Josie be when I river her three times in the first hour tonight? Only one way to find out -- tune in and see for yourself.

Donkey Island and Merging Multiple Entries

Since last we got together like this, the dynamics on Donkey Island have changed significantly. The last time I posted about Survivor Poker, the Donkeys and the Fish had merged, but we were still looking at a 5-4 advantage for the former Donkeys and thus the likelihood that if the remaining Team Donkey members just stuck together tight, they could pick off whomever they wanted from Team Fish one by one by one. Instead, however, the exact opposite has happened. After coming into the merge with the Donkeys leading the Fish 6 members to 4, since then we have seen Goat, then Katitude, and now Jamyhawk this past Sunday night get voted off the island by a fairly solid majority, taking three more Donkeys out of the picture, and leaving us at this point with just three Donkeys left (heffmike, muchtim and brainmc) as compared to the four remaining Fish (xkm, iaatg, smboatdrinks and veryjosie).

What the Fish have done here in the past week of play is nothing short of astonishing. As I mentioned above, and frankly as people have been saying on an almost weekly basis since Survivor Poker took off a few weeks back, if the Donkeys had just voted together as a group -- as recently as this very Sunday night -- they could have at least forced a tie, and more likely simply picked who from the Fish to remove, and just gone and done it week after week after week. But just like I wonder why my teammates would have stabbed me in the back when I know I offered them an objectively better alliance then what they were left with once I was gone -- and we've heard the same refrain from many of the other eliminatees in the game thus far -- for some reason the Donkeys could just not keep it together, and the result has been that, amazingly, the Fish have instead been the ones to just pick off a different Donkey after every single tournament over the past couple of weeks.

And the Fish aren't just taking out any old random Donkey members. Noooo, far from it. Just look at the last four people eliminated from Team Donkey here: Jordan, then Goat, then Kat and now Jamy. Although I cannot specifically speak for each of these players, I can say for sure that each of those has been perceived to be one of the "leaders" of that side of the alliance, and probably in most cases has been the single biggest leader of that alliance, and each tournament over the past couple of weeks has ended with the current Donkey heavy being summarily voted off of Donkey Island. Goat helped work to have Jordan eliminated, and then the next week it was Goat being blindsided and removed from play, led largely by Jamy. Now it is Jamy who has taken the step down from surviving player to the tribal council, a week after he, too, thought he had been in control of things, at least on his side of the house. But with five votes coming in for Jamyhawk on Sunday night, it is clear that not only did the four Fish vote for Jamy, but at least one member of the old Donkey alliance has joined in as well.

From a team alliance standpoint, it is fair to say at this point that the Donkeys are decimated. Of the three remaining players who began Survivor Poker as Team Donkeys -- heff, brain and muchtim -- none of them was in the "core alliance" from the beginning, and at this point we are looking more at improvised desperation among those participants than anything resembling team leadership among those three survivors. The Fish alliance, however, is the much more interesting story, as after four consecutive Donkey eliminations, it is clear that the Fish have figured out how to ally and to work together to accomplish their objectives far better than the Donkeys ever did. And now, with just three of the weaker members of Team Donkey remaining, the question becomes: who is next?

Will the Fish look to take out the final three Team Donkey members in succession here going forward as they have done with the last four eliminations? This writer says No. Although the Donkey alliance is obviously completely broken down here, there are new alliances budding between groups on both teams, both large and small, with multiple Fish teammates entering into individual alliances with random Donkeys, as well as the broader teaming among the Fish that has flexed its muscles so powerfully over the past four Survivor Poker tournaments. And I can personally attest to the fact that there is even some talk of potential mutiny within the Fish, as at least one team member has begun plotting the takeout of their own perceived leader, sending out some feelers and looking for support to muster enough votes to shake things up once again.

One thing is clear at this point though, really for the first time in the entire run thus far on Donkey Island -- the next real intrigue among the eliminations is going to come from the Fish, and not the Donkeys. Getting Jordan out was big, and Goat's elimination was just as huge, with Jamy's not far behind as by all rights he was playing both sides almost from the getgo which eventually caught up with him. But at this point, it is where things will go from here on the Fish side that is the most intriguing question right now in Survivor Poker. When will the Fish start turning on themselves instead of devouring the remaining scraps of Team Donkey? And when they do, who will be the first to go? It's a good bet that there has been a pretty solid alliance all the way from the beginning among the Fish, so at some point sooner rather than later here, one of them is going to find themselves in the all-too-familiar position of listening to Buddy count down the votes on BDR and finding that they themselves are suddenly the odd man out. Most recently, it was Josie picking up two votes on Sunday night, and before that SmBoat had gotten a couple of votes on a couple of occasions, so that may be some indication of where there is at least some interest to ruffle some feathers on the Fish side. Personally I think it's high time to turn the attention back on the Fish after two solid weeks of Donkey drubbings in Survivor Poker.

Oh, I should also mention that I had an interesting occurrence happen to me last night, in Goat's $5 multi-entry nlh tournament. We had 73 runners, and I did the maximum four entries even though I didn't have close to enough room on my laptop screen to really keep up. Long story short, I got one nice big stack early, then another, and then another, while one of them remained short and near the bottom of the pack all the way as the players began to drop out. Right around the two hour mark of the tournament, we crossed the threshold below 30 players remaining, and I hadn't been paying that much attention but I still had all four of my entries remaining, even with well more than half of the field gone. Well, fast forward to a few minutes after the second break, and a couple guys got knocked out, and suddenly we were down to 27. And then one of my tables shut down, showing a note that read "Waiting for players to merge...", and before I knew it, two of my entries had combined into one, as I suddenly realized I had four entries left out of 27 entries remaining, and only three tables on which to play them at. So I merged, for the first time I've ever seen, and I can officially tell you it's real. I had often wondered how common that kind of merger would really ever be considering how deep you would have to run with multiple entries just to get to that point where it could even be possible, but here's your answer. In a smallish tournament, you just need a couple of good chip-ups and you can get there.

So I merged, and not even three hands later, I ran AA into JJ allin preflop who sucked out a Jack on the river to knock one of my entires out. About 15 minutes later, I ran KK into 66 on another table allin pre, and fell to a 6 on the flop to take out my second entry. My third entry failed to win a race with KJs vs. 55, and then I was down to just one entry remaining. That last entry did carry me all the way to the final table and a small cash in the tournament, but eventually he, too, succumbed with KK vs a lower pair, allin preflop. What more can you do, right? I was an 80% favorite to win probably about 80% of the chips in play last night between my four deep entry runs, but when you keep picking up AA and KK, playing them to perfection, getting allin dominating before the flop, and continually losing, nobody's gonna be able to overcome that kind of luck. But at least I got to live through the phenomenon of merging two of my multi-entry stacks, something I bet I won't personally experience again for a long, long time in any context.

High Intrigue on Donkey Island Tonight

And then there were nine. Nine players remain on Donkey Island in Survivor Poker, with Julius Goat joining the tribal council after another shocking elimination after Goat's own tournament ended late on Sunday night / early Monday morning. With still five players from the original Team Donkey remaining (heffmike, brainmc, muchtim, katitude and jamyhawk), and just four from Team Fish (xkm, iaatg, veryjosie and smboatdrinks), tonight could be an absolutely crucial vote, and that of course means that outlasting the rest of the surviving team members and winning tonight's individual immunity is of the utmost importance, and could have a huge impact on who is eliminated tonight and on the game in general, depending on who nabs tonight's immunity last-longer prize.

Some might argue that, with the two teams now merged into one giant team, the old demarcations of Fish vs Donkeys do not really apply any longer, and they might be right. But I don't quite see it that way. Sure, you can tell people that the old teams are now gone, and it matters directly in that there is no more team immunity for the longest-lasting surviving player on Donkey Island in the nightly tournaments, but in the end, those original alliances don't just die so easily in my view. You've still got a slight majority for the Donkeys, but that majority shrank to just 5-4 with Goat's ouster last Sunday night, and tonight could see us draw to even, with four members of each original team and each original alliance remaining. That would be a major inflection point in the challenge, because the Fish will have successfully found a way to eradicate what was a pretty significant 6-4 deficit heading in to merged play, and would have done so in a hurry. And, it would free the Fish for the first time since the second event on Donkey Island from having to worry about getting summarily voted out by a simple majority vote of the other team all sticking together and voting as a block, which is a pretty big hammer just sitting out there to be taken under the right circumstances.

Or, things could easily go the other way tonight, with the Donkeys managing to flip a Fish or two onto their side of the voting alliance, and taking out another of the Fish to bring things back down to a 5-3 majority for the former Donkeys over the former Fish, which, at a differential of two, would equal the Donkeys' largest surplus of votes at any point during Survivor Poker so far. The Donkeys regaining their 5-3 lead tonight could be devastating for whichever three Fish manage to survive tonight's vote, as it could leave them in a position where they could easily be picked off one by one by the Donkeys next week until it is nothing but the original alliance of Donkeys left on the island, and then we see who can pull it off under every-person-for-themself rules. Of course who knows if that would be the Donkeys' plan if they regained their 5-3 majority at tonight's Dank tournament, but it would again be possible, based solely on the numbers, if the vote goes their way this evening.

If there's one thing I've learned so far from the shock-a-minute eliminations we've seen so far on Donkey Island, it's that the people who seem to be totally in control of the entire game one week, often seem to end up on the outside looking in the very next. And one can only assume that that trend will continue tonight and on into the series. And with that in mind, I am beginning to see two distinct voting teams re-forming right now on Donkey Island, each of which I think is likely considering its options on how to take out the perceived leader of the other team. Do they think they can get the other alliance's perceived leader out tonight? If so, they will probably try it tonight. If not, how many and who among the other survivors need to be eliminated first, so that the other alliance's leader will not be able to survive a vote-off? Or, will a third faction spring up, a counter-culture push against one or both of those perceived to be "leading the pack" on the two respective sides breaking down roughly along the original team lines? We've seen that happen at least once before already over the past few weeks, so you certainly can't count that out tonight either as a possibility.

My guess? I'm thinking we will probably see a vote targeted at the perceived leaders of the teams tonight, and quite possibly the closest vote yet of all those we've seen on Donkey Island. Who ends up on the outside after tonight is still very much anyone's guess. And don't forget that immunity bounty, which will be basically huge from here on out, as it increases in value as the number of survivors continues to shrink with every passing tournament. If the right (or wrong) person lasts longest tonight, we could have a slew of votes needing to be changed sometime after midnight ET this evening, and again we've already seen from my own elimination how things can get turned totally on their heads in the bustle and rush that something like that can cause.

In any event, why don't you be there to enjoy, participate in, and even affect the outcome on Wednesday night? The Dank is tonight at 10pm ET under the "Tournament" -- "Private" tabs on full tilt, with a password as always of "vegas1". And at just an $11 buyin, why not stop by and make your first foray ever into the private blogger tournaments? All are welcome, and who among us doesn't love a good virgin from time to time?

Survivor Poker: And the Insanity Continues

The Goat held his weekly $1 rebuy this past Sunday night as the Survivor Poker challenge continues on Donkey Island, and -- this is getting kind of tiring saying the same thing over and over and over again every morning after one of these events -- but I simply cannot believe who got voted off. The latest victim? Julius Goat himself.

The Goat is Gone! The creator. The godfather. He is out, voted out by receiving 6 out of 9 votes, and something tells me that we were surely looking at yet another one of those disbelieving moments as Goat listened to the final tally counted out live by Buddy Dank on BDR. Goat will I am sure comment on things himself as he wishes, although I can say from personal experience my backstab-elimination did take several hours for me to be able to write about it in an appropriately objective manner, so I would expect the same from Goat today. But something tells me that Mr. Goat had no idea that this was coming, and if the recent pattern holds true, he probably had every reason to believe that a specific other person was set to be booted on the night.

So NumbBono is out. Al is history. I am gone. Jordan is busto. And now Goat has vanished from Donkey Island as well. It certainly does seem that a lot of people who at least have played some role as Alpha Wolf have found themselves just one or two short events later the subject themselves of an elimination vote. Is that common on the tv show? It certainly does not seem like something that would be common. Guys one week contributing to the decision to vote someone else out en masse, and then the very next week they themselves are voted out? How does that happen anyways? What are the inner workings of a team that totally takes one person's vote one week, but then bands together in secret to vote that very same person out as a group just a few days later? Maybe it's because I have never even one time watched the show, but I simply do not understand the deep-down inner workings of the team members here. I guess there is a lesson right there in that, but I'm just not getting it.

Several of us have asked the same thing upon our eliminations: why didn't the alliance members just stick with the agreed-upon plan? Now, in my case I give a 10% reprieve to my teammates, because Dawn winning the individual immunity threw a huge monkey-wrench into our plans as we had basically already cast our votes for her before she even busted wolfshead to nab immunity for that night. But still, there was plenty of time and the team had standardized on another teammate to vote out. And although nothing exactly specific has been written to this effect, suffice it to say that, in addition to myself, Jordan and I imagine at least one other of the knockouts so far has believed they had a solid voting alliance heading into the actual reading of the votes. So what is it that makes someone on Survivor Poker deviate from a plan -- a plan that is pretty much guaranteed to carry them at least another few weeks without issue into the challenge -- in favor of a different plan, championed by another person who you just know is by definition ultimately trying to dick you over just as much as you are them? These are the things that just fly right over my head as things continue to play out in shocking fashion on Donkey Island.

But one thing that isn't going over my head is the likelihood of the various remaining players taking this thing down. Through a number of unnamed sources, I'm starting to develop a picture of what things are like on the inside right now on Donkey Island, and although I am sure that will change about ten more times between now and the time we crown a champion I guess in a little over a month or so, I think after this week's Dank tournament might be the right time to start posting my odds on who will survive Survivor Poker. After this week, a full half of the field will be eliminated, and if there's one thing I am happy for it is that my coverage so far of Survivor Poker has not included pre-game odds, which surely would have had guys like Goat and Jordan and probably Numb as well running pretty deep into the field before hitting any real resistance. So sometime after Wednesday night -- maybe as late as this weekend -- I will hopefully get up my first post about the eight remaining players and my thoughts on what they are exactly up to in the game, how they've survived so far, and just how far into the inner circle they may actually be, culminating in listing the odds in Hoy fashion for each survivor of taking this entire thing down.

That is, if the contestants don't do something so outlandish on Wednesday that I just have to write about that instead.

Treachery and Deceit In Survivor Poker

Donkey Island Event #5, the multi-entry nlh blonkament this past Sunday night, was a lot of fun as expected. Attendance was a bit lower than I had hoped it might be for one of the most fun and truly impactful poker tournaments in years, but with 81 total entries I guess it is hard to complain. I bought in for the maximum 4 entries, and I played fast and loose, freed from the need to play safe early in a push to win individual immunity thanks to my untimely ejection from Donkey Island last week. Although I got off to decent starts in three of my entries, they were ultimately destined for losing a race, losing a race, and getting sucked out on as a dominated favorite allin preflop, and I never had an impact on the outcome of the game as I pushed a lot of edges, deliberately took on a lot of big stacks and good players, and played highly aggressive poker start to finish. I think my deepest entry went out in 20-somethingth place, and I eliminated three players total among my four entries. Not a strong result from me, but then, I wasn't the story from that tournament -- the story was Survival.

Once again, Team Fish lost the team immunity challenge on the night. I've been saying it for weeks -- the blogger tournament skill level on the two teams simply does not balance out. Who has been kicked off from Team Fish so far probably isn't helping matters either in terms of guys who can survive in a last-longer format, but even from the getgo as I've been saying all along, the long-term blogger tournament success on Donkey Island is squarely focused on Team Donkey, and the Fish have been getting summarily wiped up, being outlasted by multiple entrants from Team Donkey each and every week of the series. Having already been forced to eliminate three members from its 8-person team, and with iaatg having won the individual bounty immunity already on the night, the Fish were faced with another crucial vote-off, having to choose between SmBoatDrinks, VeryJosie, xkm or Dawn Summers, and in the end it was Dawn who was voted off.

I suppose it gives me the slightest bit of gratification to see my grand plans generally continued on with Team Fish's elimination decisions even after my own elimination last week by the very same people who voted out Dawn on Sunday night. I'm not sure why that is. I mean, it's certainly not a vendetta I have against Dawn or anything. I like Dawn just fine -- I just think you make yourself an easy target if you skip out on the first three "challenges" we have in the form of team tournaments on Donkey Island, especially when your team goes down in flames hard in two of them as a result. But Dawn should have and would have gone instead of me on that night if she had not won herself personal immunity, so I guess that's why it just feels kind of "right" to me for Dawn to be out in the following tournament. In any event, the next event is the final event of team play during Survivor Poker, and that one should be interesting if the Fish manage to lose another one there and have to really start trimming the fat and drop it down to three players. I have a feeling I know who will be out if that happens, but obviously I wasn't really on the inside with my own team so what the hell do I know.

Speaking of which, I have gotten a lot of questions from people over the past few days asking about the specifics of my vote-out the other day. Although it is lame on some level to admit, I'll just go ahead and lay out generally exactly what happened last Wednesday night, but to be clear, yes I got straight-up double-crossed by my teammates in a very direct way. I guess I don't see the need to use actual names of anyone from the team, or to attribute any specific action to any one person, as that doesn't seem right to me in terms of their own ability to keep doing what they're doing in the game, but suffice it to say that a number of people on Team Fish had indicated their joint intention somewhere during the beginning of the tournament time that Dawn Summers would be voted out if it came to that, and I do believe (though clearly, I could be wrong) that would have happened if not for Dawn nabbing the individual immunity by knocking out Wolfshead early in that night's Dank tournament. Within literally seconds of Dawn's winning immunity, I received two notes from other members of Team Fish discussing who would be voted for instead of Dawn since a vote for Dawn would now equal a vote for oneself. I was asked my intention on a few occasions over the next hour or so, and I provided the same person as my intended vote to multiple members of Team Fish. At one point there was even a group communication -- one that included confirmation of a sufficient number of votes to ensure success -- including myself and the majority of the existing Team Fish roster at the time, indicating that the group would be voting in the manner agreed upon.

I went to bed around 11:30pm or so, having sent in my vote for the designated person to Buddy, fairly confident to be honest just based on how the events of the night had transpired. I mean, of course I would have been most confident if Dawn was eligible for elimination, as not showing up for three tournaments made her easy fodder in everyone's mind, which was borne out by her near-unanimous elimination this Sunday night. But the thing that really had me feeling confident I would survive another couple of tournaments (because I thought I was covered on that night, and then I figured -- correctly, it turned out -- that Dawn would go next) was that the team had contacted me -- not the other way around -- the very minute that BDR broadcasted about Dawn's winning immunity. Two different members of Team Fish, within literal seconds, asking what the new plan should be and here is what they thought, etc. So it wasn't even like I was initiating this stuff and might have come off as desperate or something. These people came to me with a plan, we had some mutual individual discussion and then some group discussion, and a plan was agreed to by a number of teammates. I have the emails to prove it -- there was literal agreement from again enough members of the team to ice the vote, to vote for the same specific person on the team.

And then I woke up in the morning, grabbed the iPad from next to the bed, and read I think on Heffmike's blog that I was voted out. And near-unanimously too. Apparently around the end of the Dank when Team Fish was offishially eliminated once again and knew it would have to vote, there was some dissension within the ranks that had initiated the discussions with me earlier in the night and had participated in the majority-group vote and decision. Ultimately it isn't important who specifically the dissension originated from, or whether it had been pre-planned or simply more of a spur-of-the-moment thing -- suffice it to say that the group of people I was in discussions with clearly included more than one person with whom I had had overt friction in the past. Be it on my or their blog, in someone else's blog's comments, or even in the chatbox of our weekly games going back way back when, I was essentially "forced" to ally with people who clearly have exhibited some Hoy Haterism in the not too distant past. There just wasn't any other choice. I tried to be as careful as I could about who I allied with as a result, but ultimately this is why I said all along that a guy like me has zero shot, no shot whatsoever in a format like this. It's fucking highlarious fun for almost any group of 3 or 4 or 5 bloggers to vote Hoy out in a snivelling, mutinous, back-room deal in the wee hours of the morning. Come on -- you know you would love to participate in that! So I did the best that I could, but I was fighting an uphill battle right from the getgo on Donkey Island, and every night I survived by hook or by crook was like a gift.

So yeah, that's how it happened, guys. To remove all rumor and conjecture, yes I was straight-up double crossed by my teammates. A majority of the team contacted me during the tournament and initiated a discussion on who to vote for, a decision was made and agreed to in writing by all, and then all of them but for me set up a late-night meeting after the fact where it was decided unanimously by the persons in attendance at this meeting that I would in fact be voted out instead.

Now, to be clear, and very much unlike the first two guys who got voted out of the game, I hold absolutely no grudge whatsoever against my teammates who voted me out. I suspect that ultimately has a lot to do with my expectations level for myself coming in to this tournament -- I imagine that both Numb and Al thought they had the tournament skill and the popular vote to avoid eliminations for some time, probably throughout all of team play for that matter, whereas I literally lost money on a prop bet that I would be voted out in the very first event where Team Fish had to vote someone out. But whatever the reason, I'm not going to sit here and repeat what's been said multiple times already by eliminatees, that I won't forget what these fuckers did to me, that you can be sure I will vote against those aholes when it comes time for the final vote at the end, etc. In reality, I never thought I would last even for three tournaments, and I had fun goofing around and chatting with some guys I haven't really chatted with before, which I know I never would have done if not for Survivor Poker, so that's another plus. But the truth is, I harbor no ill will at all towards anyone on my team, I knew that the exact kind of backstabbery that did happen to me last week was going to happen much sooner than later to me no matter what I did, and I actually find myself still rooting for my former teammates on the Fishies as we move each day deeper into the Survivor Poker series. And to be clear, I would love to vote for one of them if they manage to last down to the bitter end on Donkey Island -- I definitely plan to vote for the person who I think deserves it the most, and I know there's gonna be a whole lot of shenanigans to happen between now and then so it's not worth speculating on that just yet, but I certainly will not hold against any of my teammates the fact that they calculatedly contacted me, cold-bloodedly lied to my face, and then mutinously plotted against me behind my back after I was fast asleep, awash in a veil of false confidence.

I'm already looking forward to Wednesday's Dank tournament, the final tournament of the "team play" portion of Survivor Poker. If the Fish can just win that one, they can stem the bleeding and enter the merge with 4 players versus Team Donkey's 6. Somehow, going in to the merge down 6-4 seems a heck of a lot better than heading in down 7-3. In the former, the ex-Fish people might have some chance of weaseling their way in to the larger group's consensus. But just like it was easy to find a consensus along the earlygoing for those who had not been showing up on time or at all for all the games, I expect it will not be difficult for the ex-Donkeys to come together to vote out those last 3 surviving Fishies if they head in with more than a 2-to-1 disadvantage in people after the merge.

NCAA Football Wrap-Up

So about the national championship game last night...Wait, was there even a national championship game last night? And if so, Who cares?!

Yes, that's right, the fools in charge of the NCAA had the brilliant brainstorm to wait until one day after the wildcard round of the playoffs in the NFL to hold their title game this season. Did you know anyone who was really looking forward to seeing this game last night? Me neither. I'm much more interested in football, college basketball, hot stove baseball or basically almost anything else more than the national BCS championship game, and it seems that millions of others out there are just like me. Nowadays, it feels like every sport is just pushing its championship later and later and later, extending their season longer and longer and longer, all ultimately in the chase for the almighty dollar, and I have to admit it's nice to see these decisions backfire on the sports once in a while. Concluding the NBA Finals when everyone is away at the beach for the Independence Day holiday? Check. Playing the World Series in a November snowstorm in the Northeast? Awesome. And now delaying the NCAA national championship game so long this year that everybody even forgets that college football is still going on anymore? You betcha!

And I would be remiss if I did not mention here the other big story with the 2010-2011 college football season. Just a couple of months after embarrassingly having to vacate the Heisman Trophy award won some years ago by Reggie Bush after he violated every rule in the book back in his USC days, the league recently awarded its Heisman Trophy for this year to Auburn quarterback Cam Newton, who not only likely did accept money to attend Auburn over another NCAA school, but whose father publicly broadcasted before the fact that his son would be attending school at whichever institution paid him the most money. Sure, sure, nothing has been proven. Yet. But of course it will be. You think something like this, an explicit and public violation of every rule in the NCAA recruiting rulebook, won't have someone come out and talk about it once the furor from this season has died down? Don't be naive. The NCAA and the Heisman people might have been able to buy that silence for a couple of months here just long enough to award the trophy to the cheating dickhead and then watch him win the national title -- which is exactly what the Heisman people would love to see happen every single year if they could choose it -- but to think that the truth won't come out about just how guilty the Newtons are in all of this is the silliest thing I've ever heard.

The Heisman Trophy is officially dead. The voters, the committee, they had their chance this year to do the right thing. But instead, they decided to chase the money and the glory of crowning the kid who is obviously the best player in the country, the kid who was obviously on his way to winning Auburn its first national title in 53 years -- a feat which he completed on Monday night -- and the kid who pretty clearly has the skills and the raw materials go on to great things an an NFL quarterback. And even worse, the NCAA allowing Cam Newton to retain his eligibility a couple of months back on the excuse that it was allegedly his father who trumpeted this "play-for-pay" scheme before Newton opted to enroll at Auburn, and not the player himself? Congratulations, NCAA, you just created the widest, most obvious and totally foreseeable loophole in the history of collegiate sports, and it's one that you're now going to be struggling with for many, many years to come.

"I didn't do it! It was my mom who sent that solicitation for illegal benefits!"

"Hey, don't blame me. My agent's the one who demanded that money. I had no idea!"

"Well, I'm not the one who tried to throw that game. It was that booster who offered me the money."

Sheer brilliance. I give it less than a year, and Cam Newton's Heisman Trophy will be vacated just like Reggie Bush's was earlier in 2010.

Dixter

I've made no bones here about the fact that Showtime's Dexter is pretty much hands-down the best show on television today, and in fact has been for several years. Once The Sopranos was nearing the end of its run, and Lost turned into Heroes for Seasons 5 and 6, I'm not sure anything else has even put up a fight. Dexter is the most suspenseful, well-executed and just downright exciting thing to watch on what is otherwise a badly slumping selection of programs available on tv today.

But this past Sunday, Dexter made a major faux pas. Basically, it "pulled a Lost". And I don't mean that in a Seasons 1 through 3 of Lost kind of way.

I railed against Season 6 of Lost hardcore at the end of the show, because I am nothing if not objective at all times, and the way the writers ended that show was perhaps the most extreme example of a total lack of narrative integrity of any television show in history. What I mean by that is, the guys who write the show have full, 100% and sole control over what they present to us, the viewers, and the way they go about it. As a former fan of Lost, I don't have any possible power to affect what they do with the plot, nor can I affect the order in which it is presented to us, how much they use narrative devices like flashbacks / flash-forwards, etc. All of this is by definition completely and solely up to the writers of the show, and we viewers are simply at those writers' whim in watching the program the way they have chosen to present the facts to us.

In Season 6 of Lost, the writers chose to spend about 15 out of 18 hours of the final season describing what they willingly called "Sideways World" in interviews and columns outside of the show itself. They showed us all the characters from the rest of the five seasons of Lost that had come and gone, and they spent considerable time detailing those people's stories in Sideways World, their relationships -- with their spouses, ex-lovers, the children we never knew they had in the universe we had come to know for five years on Lost. They spent something like 80% of the total airtime of the final season presenting this detailed and painstakingly-constructed new world of interpersonal relationships and plot lines to us, in a way that made it more or less obvious that this world was "real" in some traditional sense. No, they didn't come right out and tell us that, but they didn't have to. The writers of course are in 100% control of the way things are presented to the viewers, and they went out of their way to make it clear that this world -- while we were never told what its exact nature was -- was "real". I mean, why else take multiple episodes detailing Kate's new and different problems with the law, delving into Jack's burgeoning relationship with his formerly estranged son, Miles and Sawyer's trials and tribulations as police officers, yadda yadda yadda. The writers even had the temerity to sprinkle in some direct dialogue from Daniel Faraday around the middle of the season espousing his theory -- this, from the scientist who was basically right about everything else he posited about the island for the past couple of years he was on the show -- that Sideways World was, in fact, exactly what all of us viewers thought it was -- an alternative reality created somehow by the simultaneous creation and avoidance of "the event" at the Swan station on the island back in the 1970s Dharma days. Short of straight-out coming out and saying that's what it was, there was literally nothing more that the Lost writers could have done to tell us that's what we were looking at in Sideways World.

And then, in the final minutes of the final episode of the series, they sprung on us that it was all a lie. Not that we were wrong, mind you, because we were all but told this by the writers -- again, the only people with any control whatsoever over what information is presented to the audience and in what way -- but rather, that they had been lying all along. Deliberately abusing the power that they controlled 100% all by themselves to tell us one thing, wasting 80% of the final season of what had formerly been one of the great suspense / sci fi serials in television history, and then telling us it all meant nothing all along. Nothing at all.

Although with a little time to absorb how badly those writers fucked their loyal audience, it is difficult nowadays to find anyone anymore who still argues that Lost ended well, I still have to laugh whenever I do read or hear someone try to make that argument nowadays, clearly trying to hold on to something that was already long ago taken away from them whether they like it or wish it or not. Because what the writers of Lost did -- factually speaking, now -- does not take any talent. It doesn't take intelligence. And it certainly doesn't take any foresight whatsoever. Any monkey in charge of writing a plot-driven show could tell us a lie, continue telling the lie, refining it, making it seem more and more and more true over five months of episodes, and then at the end spring on us that they were lying all along. A bunch of children could get together and pull that off -- in fact, it's pretty much the easiest, least skilled, and just generally cheapest and lowest-quality move any plot-driven show could ever do, which pretty much explains why almost nobody else ever tries to get away with such silliness in their shows, and why the ones who do (Dallas, for example), are roundly villified for it for literally generations into the future. Trying to give a show's writers credit for outright lying to you and then exposing their lie, that's like rewarding a child for telling you a good lie and then later admitting it. Try as I might, I just can't play that game.

OK enough rehashing of the past, sad and disappointing though it may be. Dexter this past Sunday pulled a trick straight out of Lost's playbook, and I am still really disappointed about it here three full days after the fact, because, like I had thought about Lost up until Season 4, I used to think Dexter's writers were above this sort of puerile shenanigans. But I guess everyone runs out of ways to make their show interesting without some sort of chicanery and serious misleading of the audience eventually if its run lasts long enough.

I'm not really looking to spoil things for anyone who hasn't watched the episode yet but plans to, so I'm not planning to go into extreme detail about the entire episode here, but I think it's fair to say that if you are one of those people still waiting to watch this past weekend's episode, you will want to click away from this page.






Right.






Now.






OK, now that those clowns who are actually able to wait this long to watch the latest episode of this kind of a show are gone, I'll explain what has me so beefed about this weekend's episode. In the scenes from this week that they showed us a week ago, the writers clearly teased that Jordan Chase (the main bad guy this season has ended up focusing on) sets up Dexter, calling and alerting Dexter's police officer sister right when Jordan knows Dexter is about to commit a murder that Jordan Chase has set up all along.

This plot line actually played itself out in this week's episode, and here's how. First they show Dexter and his partner in crime breaking into the house of the guy they plan to kill, scoping the place out, and choosing an exercise room in the back of his house to be their "kill room" where they are going to actually waste this guy later that day. Then they come back that night as soon as the intended victim comes to his house, sneak in, and needle him in the neck as is Dexter's typical MO. Then they show them in the kill room, with the victim all strapped down as per usual, and long story short, they proceed to kill his sick, twisted, rapey ass. Meanwhile, as soon as they sneak in to the guy's house, we in fact see Jordan Chase watch Dexter enter the victim's house to make his kill, and then Jordan calls Dexter's cop sister and gives her information that he knows will lead to her immediately rushing out to the victim's house. We see Dexter's policewoman sister Deb get the call from Jordan Chase, and just as planned, she immediately jumps into the car and speeds out to the house with her partner. We see her and her partner arrive right away at the victim's house, and all the while we're seeing interspersed the scenes of Dexter and his partner killing this guy in their kill room in the back of the very same house where Dexter's cop sister and her partner are now inside and searching for anything out of the ordinary.

I should take a minute and mention that Dexter's sister catching him being a killer is basically the ultimate denouement that this show could ever do, the thing that, frankly, they've been setting up for since the show first began five seasons ago. I mean, this is the single biggest thing that could ever possibly happen on this show. Dexter getting caught in general is always a looming possibility that could happen and that he is always fighting against, but his own sister being the one to catch him in the act, that's the single most ultimate mindfucky thing that could ever possibly happen, given the way they've set this show up for five years. I have long since assumed that that is eventually where they're going to take the show when they're ready to officially jump the shark or just end the series for good, but to have it suddenly be actually happening here near the end of Season 5, take it from me if you don't watch the show -- it was just mind-boggling. And there was no way Dexter was realistically going to get out of this one -- they way he kills his victims, there is always some good screaming, and it takes a long time to clean up the mess, as it's not meant or designed to be a quiet or neat process, and it never is. His sister and another cop are searching in the very house where Dexter is behind a closed door in the back, committing the ultimate crime in cold blood with no provocation and with the very definition of malice aforethought. He can't possibly get out of it no matter what this time, and believe me when I say that every single Dexter viewer in the world's heart was absolutely racing as Deb moved from room to room in the victim's house, eventually came to the very door where Dexter and his partner were inside committing cold-blooded murder, and they can see the light shining out from under the door -- someone is inside.

Holy shit.

Deb gets her partner for backup, and she leans out and opens the door...

And it's just an exercise room. An empty, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary exercise room.

The next scene, we see Dexter and his partner return to his apartment for a little romp between the sheets, talking about how great the kill was. No mention of almost getting caught, no mention of clearing out of there faster than usual, and, glaringly, no mention whatsoever of apparently having decided to move the kill room to some other place at the last minute. I mean, they didn't even give us the courtesy (as ghey as this would have still been) of having Dexter remark to his partner something like how glad he is that they decided not to kill the guy right in his own house after all because the cops could be watching, etc. Something. Anything. But, nope. Nothing at all, no explanation, nothing. Leaving us viewers -- I suppose -- to just intuit that Dexter changed his mind somewhere between the scene five minutes earlier where they showed him choosing the exercise room at the back of the victim's house to make the kill, and the time that they actually made the kill (and we were deliberately not shown him leaving or dragging the body anywhere, nor could we have any clue where this kill actually took place, since he cannot for obvious reasons if you watch the show use either of his apartments and he no longer has his storage unit where he's killed so many of his past victims).

Look, it's one thing to present a few suggestive scenes and allow the viewer to make his or her own inferences from among a number of possible choices or jump to conclusions about what's going to happen, making the viewer work for it a bit, and then showing us later that our conclusions -- our guesses, ultimately -- were wrong. Frankly, that is generally a formula for great tv, and it's something that many of the great suspense and mystery stories of all time have in spades. But it's a whole other thing to straight-up tell us -- from the position where the writers have 100% total and complete control over what we see and how we see it -- that one thing is the case, and then at the end of it all just tell us "whoops, we lied to you! Muhahahahahahah isn't this a great show or what?"

No. It's not a great show. As mostly everyone realizes by now about Lost as well, any moron can show us Dexter going to the victim's house, choosing the guy's exercise room to be the kill room, then show him going back to the house and needling the victim, and then in the next scene show him in the kill room doing the actual kill, and then show Dexter's cop sister going to the same house at the same time Dexter is in there committing cold-blooded serial killer murder, show her opening the door to the very room where they've told you and shown you he is doing a kill right then. And then have the room be empty. Any monkey with a camera and some film could do that. The thing is, it's only something a monkey, or a child, would actually do. Any child could do that, when they're the one who writes the show. It's just misleading in a deliberate and ultimately stupid way. Anyone with half a brain can just lie to us directly, showing us one thing and then later surprising us by telling us that they lied. But shows don't do that in general, because it's stupid, it's unfair, it's a weakass move to do to your loyal fans, and ultimately it just shows a total lack of narrative integrity when you can't even trust the things that the narration of the show all but tells you are true.

For my money, that scene in this week's episode of Dexter pretty much represents the low point over five years of the entire series so far. When the writers of a successful show feel the need to resort to outright lying to the viewers in order to manufacture a suspenseful situation at the end of a season where there is in fact none at all, it is just about the cheapest, most lame and ultimately most disrespectful-to-the-viewers television move imaginable. It is just sinking to the level of Lost, which believe you me is not where you want to be.

Wait....There's No Lying in Baseball!

Being in New York and being obsessed with sports, I have been forced over the past two weeks to listen to Alex Rodriguez point out at least three or four dozen times that he is "clean now" and that "his years with the Yankees have been drug-free". A-Roid keeps talking about how history, and major league baseball writers, historians and hall of fame voters will have ample opportunity by the end of his career to judge his performance sans performance-enhancing drugs.

Which, of course, is a load of horseshit.

At least from 2001-2003, A-Roid admits that he took Primabolin combined with testosterone in a calculated attempt to gain lean muscle mass without the usual bulk that comes along with ingestion of just anabolic steroids. His muscles changed. His body changed. Over three years, A-Roid found muscles he didn't know he had, and bulked up others that he would never have been able to build up without the use of performance enhancers. And this is just the stuff he has admitted to taking so far.

I sat and listened to caller after caller after caller into New York sports radio over the past week, telling of either their own stories or those of acquaintances of theirs who have used steroids. The general theme of the calls was that these people took steroids for a few years like ten years ago, then they were off the juice for several years, and yet to this day when they go the gym they still can automatically bench press 450 pounds or otherwise still feel the effects of the steroids they took many years ago. That once you bulk up certain muscles in the ways that many steroids can help you to do, you just don't "lose" them when you stop taking those substances in the future. That is not to say that it would be impossible to lose those bulked-up muscles through overuse or other abuse of one's body, but rather that it is simply a pure falsehood for anyone to suggest, "Hey, I took steroids years ago, but I haven't now for several years, so I'm clean and my numbers are all legit now."

So, A-Roid, I'm gonna have to call bullshit again on you today, you lousy turd. Number one, I don't believe you only took banned substances between 2001-2003 anyways; I would bet money that you used HGH while with the Yankees and Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens and Jason Giambi in 2007. And number two, I don't care if it's true anyways -- your numbers, at least since when you admitted you started taking steroids in 2001, are forever tainted, and they mean nothing to me. I would guess that you will probably hit 250-300 home runs more with your steroided-up body than you ever would have in your career if you had never taken the "bolee" and the testosterone in the first place.

So, A-Roid, talk to me when you hit 1000 home runs for your career, then maybe you are getting close to Babe Ruth's real 715 career home runs.

The Death of Baseball

Quick! What's the current single-season home run record in Major League Baseball? Barry Bonds holds it, but what's the number? Seriously. Do you know it?











It's 73, set in 2001, not coincidentally the same year that A-Rod claims to have begun doping. And while we're at it, do you know the career home run record? Once again it's held by Barry Bonds, but do you know how many dingers he hit over his 22-year career in the majors? Think it over, and let's see if you know the answer.












The correct answer is 762 home runs. I will admit that I got both of these numbers wrong when I first tried to remember them. And that right there is the crime of all the steroided-up players over the past 15 years or so in Major League Baseball. These guys have literally ruined the tradition of the game, the game with far and away the best tradition of all four major sports in this country. Baseball has always been the most traditional, the most historic and the most statistic-laden of the sports in America, and now these cheating a-holes have ruined that. Forever.

Try in your mind to go back 15 years or so, to the early 1990s. Did you know then what the single-season home run record was? Of course you did. Everyone did. 61 homers by Roger Maris, besting Babe Ruth's previous record of 60 homers. And let's see...did you know the career home run record? Of course! 755, Hank Aaron. 715, Babe Ruth. 660, Willie Mays. Everybody knew these hallowed numbers, the stuff of legends, literally. How could you not know these things, growing up as a baseball fan in this country? Those records were real, and they were everything. The fact that you know the best average in the past 80 years is Ted Williams' .406 in 1941, or the 61 homers hit by Roger Maris, or the 755 home runs hit by Hank Aaron in his career, that's precisely what has made baseball America's pasttime, and exactly what set it apart from all other sports in this country.

Now, all that is gone. If I don't even know Barry Bonds' 762 home run total, then lord knows that kids today won't be growing up knowing it either. Shit, when it's time I will be teaching my girls that Hank Aaron is the home run king, with 755 home runs, before a bunch of cheating losers came along and defiled the game and the richest history of any sport widely played in America. So the days of growing up with these numbers etched into our minds are dead and gone forever. All because of a bunch of tiny-dicks (literally) and their unstoppable need to cheat and to push things further into excess than they ever needed to go.

It's sad, really, how similar this all sounds to what led us to the massive financial crisis we are facing right now as a country as well, isn't it? People's greed, their insatiable appetite for excess, has led us to do innumerable stupid things in countless aspects of our existence over the past generation, from our Presidents chasing blowies from fat Jewish chicks instead of Osama Bin Laden, right down to the average joe who takes out the $350,000 "liar loan" adjustable-rate mortgage that he can't possibly afford in realistic terms. The people of this country, and the world at large, have been treated over the past 10-20 years to an absolute clinic on what unbridled, unregulated greed and excess leads to if left unchecked for long enough. One can only hope that this is a lesson that we as a people will figure out how to stop repeating in the future.

Before I go for the day, is there anybody in America (outside of Raleigh-Durham) who does not flat-out love watching Duke lose a college basketball game, any game at all? I've got plenty of people who I wouldn't talk to if we were on a plane together that was going down, but I'll be damned if Duke losing for the fourth straight time to UNC at home doesn't bring warmth to the heart and shared smiles to even the bitterest of enemies. My college basketball team may suck balls this year, but the NCAAs will always be fun and interesting for me when there are the hated Dookies and their dorkass coach to root against.

More on A-Fraud

Yesterday, I noted that I did not expect to talk much further about the A-Rod topic, since the news was related to a drug test which he would never have agreed to take if there was any chance that the results could ever become public. But now, A-Rod has opened the whole mess up himself to the public by doing what I think was definitely the right thing on Monday afternoon, sitting down with ESPN's Peter Gammons and giving the following interview where among other things he admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs from 2001-2003:



It's worth watching the entire clip I think, if you have the time and the inclination. And now that A-Rod has decided to go public about this story, I feel a little better in talking some more about my opinion on this whole thing.

My reaction to this interview is mixed at best. I mean, for starters, A-Rod is clearly very broken up about this whole issue. At one point in the middle of this interview, you can see the pink splotches form under his eyes, and it actually looks like Rodriguez might cry. He pulls himself together and recovers, and by the end of the interview those prominent pink areas are gone from his face, but he almost loses it there in the middle. But, try as I might, I simply do not believe that A-Rod is broken up about the poor role model he is for children, or for cheating the game that he loves, or for the fact that he simply did something he knew was wrong. No. I think A-Rod is all upset because he got caught, and he knows that now all of the great records he will amass in his career will and should be asterisked just like those of fellow cheater Barry Bonds, and that his entire legacy is tarnished beyond repair, among current fans and in the record books over time.

There were a lot of things about this interview that rubbed me the wrong way. First and foremost, the first few minutes of A-Rod's answers sound like a speech that has been written by someone with experience deflecting scandals, and like A-Rod is just going through the motions repeating what he's been told to say. In fact, I'm sure that's exactly what it was, as his agent furiously worked with him over the weekend to plan a response, and this is what they came up with. Just tell 'em it was many years ago, and keep saying how sorry you are. No matter what happens, keep emphasizing how sorry you feel for the whole thing.

But is he really sorry?

"Back then, it was a different culture. It was very loose. I was young. I was stupid. I was naive. And I wanted to prove to everyone that I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time."

"Back then". I love it. Rodriguez makes it sound like this is the 1880s we're talking about here, or at least the 1980s. "I was young, I was stupid, I was naive." You were young, Alex? We're talking about five years ago here. Not 15, or 25, and not when A-Rod was a young boy of 7 years old or something. It's not exactly accurate or fair to talk about how young he was when he made this decision. It was this decade. Well into this decade in fact. The guy hasn't aged all that much since then. I just don't buy it.

"I did take a banned substance. And for that, I am very sorry and deeply regretful."

Wow! Very sorry and deeply regretful! That's like saying I'm a pompous ass and an arrogant prick. I mean, doesn't it just sound like these are his talking points, and he is trying to focus on how sorry he is over and over and over again, saying it as many different ways as he possibly can? I just really get the feeling that A-Rod thinks he can just come out and apologize for what he did, and that it will go away.

"Again, it was such a loosey-goosey era. I'm guilty for a lot of things. I'm guilty for being negligent, naive, not asking all the right questions. And to be quite honest, I don't know exactly what substance I was guilty of using."

To me this one really strains all credibility. I get the feeling that A-Rod and his people somehow think it makes him seem less guilty if he claims not to even know what substance he was taking. I don't buy that for even half a second. This guy had just signed a $250 million contract, he works out hard every day, he feels all this pressure to perform as he admits himself in the interview, and yet he ingests things that he doesn't even know what they are? You know what, I don't believe that for a second, and more than that, I simply don't think it makes him look any better even if it were true.

"I am sorry for my Texas years. I apologize to the fans of Texas."

Again, it's just not that simple. I really think A-Rod thinks he can just say over and over again how sorry he is, and that's all he needs to do.

Gammons then went on to ask about A-Rod's years as a Yankee (since 2004), and A-Rod assured Gammons that those years "have been clean."

"I've played the best baseball of my career since. I've won two MVPs since and I've never felt better in my career. Of that I'm very proud of."

Is that so? A-Rod has played the best baseball of his career since 2004, huh? Let's take a look at some of the numbers on that one, because living in New York and having to live with the puss that is A-Rod for these past few years, I can only say that most of us baseball fans in New York don't think he's been all that in his time here. So let's take a look at A-Rod's career numbers, by season, keeping in mind that he admits to having used performance enhancing drugs just during the three years from 2001-2003:

Yr Team G  AB  HR RBI AVG
1994 Sea 17 54     0  2    .204
1995 Sea 48 142  5  19  .232
1996 Sea 146 601 36 123 .358
1997 Sea 141 587 23 84 .300
1998 Sea 161 686 42 124 .310
1999 Sea 129 502 42 111 .285
2000 Sea 148 554 41 132 .316
2001 Tex 162 632 52 135 .318
2002 Tex 162 624 57 142 .300
2003 Tex 161 607 47 118 .298
2004 NYY 155 601 36 106 .286
2005 NYY 162 605 48 130 .321
2006 NYY 154 572 35 121 .290
2007 NYY 158 583 54 156 .314
2008 NYY 138 510 35 103 .302
Total -- 2042 7860 553 1606 .306

OK so you can see it for yourself -- I don't see how there is any conclusion other than that the peak of A-Rod's statistical career was 2001-2002, smack in the middle of the period when A-Rod admits to using steroids. I mean, yes, 2007 was a great year with the Yankees for sure, but he hit more homers and had a higher average in 2002 with the Rangers, and 2001 also saw him hit more than 50 home runs for the only other time in his career.

It seems pretty obvious to me what went on with this guy and the steroids. He started taking them in 2001, and watched himself break his previous personal best for home runs by a full 10 dingers when he hit 52 in 2001. He loaded up again on the roids in 2002, and hit 57 home runs for the best season of his career. Then in 2003, the rumors about the steroid testing started, and at some point during the season I would bet that A-Rod either lightened up on the performance-enhancing drugs, or possibly stopped entirely in an attempt not to test positive during the coming diagnostic tests, and it hurt his results, with him hitting 47 homers -- his lowest output since 2000 -- and 118 RBIs, his lowest run production since 1999. So I can't really explain how or why 2007 was such a great statistical year for Rodriguez -- for all we know, maybe he got in to HGH for a while then, who knows -- but what I do know from those numbers is that "the best baseball of his career" was surely 2001-2002, again right smack in the middle of his anabolic steroid days. So nice try Alex, but I'm gonna have to call bullshit on that one. The best years of the man's career were surely right while he was taking the performance-enhancing drugs, end of story,right there in black and white.

Another element of the Gammons interview that I thought was interesting and telling was when A-Rod was asked what he thought the steroids did for his performance. All A-Rod could say was "I can't say, I don't know, it's so hard to tell." Yeah right. So let's see. 1998? 42 homers and 124 RBIs. 1999? 42 homers and 111 RBIs. 2000? 41 homers and 132 RBIs. Then cue the steroids. Now in 2001? 52 homers, 135 RBIs, both career highs at that point in time. 2002? 57 homers, 142 RBIs, again both career highs. But he can't say what the steroids did for his performance, huh? Nice try, Alex.

Taking this a step further, let's look at what happened in 2004, the year after Rodriguez stopped taking the steroids as the league implemented its performance-enhancing drugs policy. 36 home runs and 106 RBIs -- both his lowest since 1997. In fact, both of those numbers sound relatively average among strong hitters. Phillies fans out there will recognize them basically as Pat Burrell stats. Certainly not where A-Rod wants to be, and not even close to his output at the plate in his previous two steroid-fueled seasons. Over the following two seasons in 2005-2006, A-Rod would average 41 homers and 125 RBIs; better numbers than in 2004, but still not close to his 2001-2002 form. Not even close. I mean, over the three seasons when A-Rod admits to having used steroids, he averaged 50 home runs a year. Since 2003 when he got off the juice, he has hit under 40 home runs three out of five times.

And again, who knows what A-Rod might have been taking in 2007 when he busted out with that 54-homer, 156-RBI season for the Yankees in nabbing his third MVP. One of the most interesting answers given in his interview with Gammons is something you barely see written about anywhere. This was when Gammons asked A-Rod if his performance-enhancing drugs use took place only from 2001 through 2003. Rodriguez responded, "That's pretty accurate, yes." Now, no one made him use the word "pretty" there. That was solely by A-Rod's own choice, and I would say it belies the fact that he knows -- beyond a shadow of a doubt -- that he has used other performance-enhancers at other times in his career. I mean, if the guy felt all that pressure coming to Texas in 2000 and that's the reason he turned to roids back then, lord knows he felt immense pressure coming to New York and playing for the Yankees in the mid 2000s. And you have to admit, those numbers in 2007 kinda came out of nowhere, yknow? And he's playing there in the Bronx with Jason Giambi, a known, admitted steroid user, and Roger Clemens, who we all basically know used PEDs, and Andy Pettitte who has since admitted to using "the clear" and "the cream" to rehab from injuries. So to suggest that anyone is sure that A-Rod was clean in 2007, or in 2004 or 1999 for that matter, is absurd.

When Gammons asked A-Rod for the best evidence that he's been clean since 2004, Rodriguez kind of dodged the question in a way, and responded instead by pointing out that he has gained only 15 pounds from when he came in the league in 1994 until now, from 210 pounds then to 225 today. Now, for starters, I have no actual idea what he actually weighs today, nor do I know what he actually weighed then. And more than that, I believe him that he did not use any PEDs in 2008, a year that saw him play the fewest games, hit the fewest home runs and by far knock in the fewest runs in any season since he became an everyday player. So what's to say that he didn't lose 10 or 20 pounds of bulk since a couple of years ago? I just find that answer to really miss the point of how we know he's been clean since 2004. We don't know that, we don't know it at all, and there is no good evidence to demonstrate something that may very well not be true in the least.

To me, A-Rod does sound in the Peter Gammons interview like he is truly sorry. Sorry that this whole story came out, angry at the reporter who worked hard to get the scoop, sorry that his union effed him so hard to let these results become public. Sorry that he got busted and now has to sit on national tv with Peter Gammons and talk about the performance-enhancing drugs he used. Sorry about what he's going to face from the fans even in Yankee stadium and certainly on the road for the foreseeable future. Sorry at the thought of what the Philadelphia fans will do to him when he dares show his face in that park during inter-league play. But is A-Rod actually sorry about taking the performance-enhancing drugs to begin with, for what he did to the game, and what he did to his fans? I just don't see it.

A-Fraud

Wow. Big news in the world of sports over the weekend, huge news here in New York, is of course word that Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez tested positive in 2003 for two anabolic steroids, as part of the Major League's "survey" drug test where they performed an anonymous, random screening across 1198 players in the league in an attempt to determine if the steroid problem were prominent and widespread enough to merit further intervention by the league. The names of the players whose samples were being tested were not kept with the results, and the only way the union would ever acquiesce to allow this survey test was with explicit agreement from the league that there would be no penalties or punishments as a result of this purely "diagnostic" test, and the names or individual results could never become public. The actual samples of the 1198 players tested were kept in the testing lab in Las Vegas of all places, with the samples tied to numerical codes without the player names included. The list of the names of all the tested players and their corresponding codes was in an office nearly 300 miles away in Long Beach, California. The two were never supposed to be united, and never would have until BALCO got raided in 2004 and then suddenly the federal government found itself seizing all sorts of information and documents, among which included the list of names and the corresponding results. And as the folks on ESPN have been putting it all weekend long, it was only a matter of time until this stuff came out, once the two lists had been put together.

This is a huge story for a couple of reasons. First, of course, is that A-Rod is the premier offensive player of the past whatever many years in the Major Leagues. Having this guy now tainted as badly as Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro along with most of the other offensive stars of the Steroid Era is probably the very worst thing that could have happened right now for the sport, or something close to it. But I think there's a larger reason why this story is hitting so many of us so hard at the moment, and that has to do with bullshit. See, I recently heard this theory that I really subscribe to that given what has transpired in this country over the past several months, the American people at this exact point in time have, in historical terms, seriously low tolerance for bullshit. Not from our presidents, not from our legislators, not from CEOs, not from investment advisors, brokers, bankers, lawyers or anyone. Right now, bullshit is trading at an all-time low compared to mostly all of our lives. And in a nutshell what we just learned is that Alex Rodriguez is a Class A bullshitter.

Seriously. It turns out, A-Rod really is A-Fraud. Not just because he did steroids, but because, like Bonds and Palmeiro and Sosa and so many others before him, he openly and brazenly lied about it. Here is A-Fraud with Katie Couric on December 7, 2007, talking about the steroid controversy:



In a scoop that has every network and media outlet scrambling for all the random video they can find of A-Rod chatting it up with Rafael Palmeiro there in the Rangers' dugout in 2003, it turns out that I guess A-Fraud actually did feel overmatched on the baseball field, enough in his MVP year of 2003 to take both testosterone and Primobolan, an illegal anabolic steroid that can be injected or taken orally to improve strength without significant side effects. So A-Rod is a liar, and as I said above, liars are never a great thing, but ten years ago when our president was the king of all liars the whole dishonesty thing was much more accepted. Nowadays, after a year of everyone in government, everyone on Wall Street and basically anybody in any position of authority lying through their effing teeth to us and costing millions of jobs and literally trillions of dollars in the process, A-Fraud is gonna get as little slack as you can imagine for this stuff.

Perhaps surprisingly, I am really of two minds about this whole thing. I mean, clearly this changes the way I view A-Rod, and the entire game of baseball, forever. I have made no bones here for years about my lack of respect for anything even remotely related to cheating, and to have to add a guy to the list who I've always held out in my own head at least as the best example there is of a clean superstar in this sport is devastating for my view of the game as a whole. But you know what? I don't think I'm going to have much more to say about this. Because A-Rod got effed with this whole thing. Hard. Those test results were required to be private and confidential forever. Originally, even the players who were tested were not given the results of their own screenings (though ESPN has since confirmed that A-Rod was in fact aware of his positive tests), and as I mentioned, the results and the player list were kept a long distance apart, very much by design. I understand that the government seized what they could related to the BALCO case and of course I defend their right to do that, but I have to wonder, why on earth were those test results and that list of names and testing ID numbers even retained in the first place so that they would be seizable by the government a year later? More than anything else, Alex Rodriguez's union threw his ass under the bus in a huge, huge way, by allowing those test results to exist for long enough that they could be discovered as part of an investigation, matched up with the right identities of the test subjects and then released to the public.

The bottom line is, this information was supposed to never be disclosed, to anyone, for any purpose whatsoever, and then through a series of events that were completely and totally unknown and pretty much unforeseeable to everyone involved at the time, the fact that A-Rod used steroids ended up being leaked anyways. I simply don't feel like using my blog to crush a guy based on information, though credibly true, that was never supposed to be made public. The players' union would never in two trillion (i.e., one bank bailout's worth) years have sanctioned these "diagnostic" tests if they thought there was even the slightest possible chance of the results coming public six years in the future. Not a chance. So I'm going to at least give that the slightest modicum of respect and not kill A-Fraud any more than I already have here, even though I could say a lot more about him under different circumstances.

Suffice it to say, it seems that over the past eight years or so, the world really has become an increasingly worse place to try to explain to my kids. And I find that to be very, very sad.