Too Stupid to be Believed

As a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan, Monday was a super fun day.

For starters, Mike Vick is hands down the best quarterback in the NFL. Nobody can even argue it, and even though the guy had six touchdowns yesterday and a passer rating of roughly infinity, he was already the league's best before yesterday's game. Vick came into the Eagles' Monday night romp over the Deadskins with a 125.4 passer rating, the highest in the league, and he's the closest thing to literally unstoppable of any player in the league today. And then he threw four touchdown passes in DC on Monday night. In like five minutes. And he ran for two more, in addition to countless first downs. Basically every time Vick touches the ball, he does whatever the hell he wants. And as I've written here before many times, Vick is for my money the single best feel-good story of the year in the NFL in 2010. Yes what he did to those dogs is truly sick and nothing will ever change that, but Mike Vick is the ultimate example of a guy who in my view more than paid his debt to society, he missed more games than anyone else has ever missed for committing lesser crimes than his, and ultimately the guy who never hurt another human being paid an incredible price compared to what other rich and famous dudes who actually hurt other actual people have paid. And now he's back, and the amazing thing is he is much better right now than he ever was even before being incarcerated for two years. Just incredible.

Secondly, I heard the Eagles just scored another touchdown this morning. I mean, 59 points? Really, Redskins? Really, Mike Shanahan? Any time we can beat the Mehskins, it's a good day, and when you do it in their house it is all the better. And when you run up a 28-0 lead in the first quarter, that's the best of all. For those not well-versed with the intricacies of the NFC East, over my lifetime, it's been the Redskins more than anyone else who have given the Eagles the most trouble. Even when the Eagles were so great under Buddy Ryan in the 1980s, and all through the '90s and the 2000s, we've had comparatively little trouble with the Giants, even as that franchise has had three superbowl winning teams in the past 20 years or so. Despite all that, we've fared well over time against the Giants, but the Redskins have always given us fits. I have more horrible memories of Skins games than any other team for sure, and to come out and roll this team that badly, there are no words to describe how good that feels as a longtime fan of the real Gang Green.

But lastly, by far the most highlarious and enjoyable for me part of Monday wasn't watching Mike Vick's coronation, and it wasn't seeing the Eagles destroy our hated franchise competitor. It was the news that came out just before the game that the Foreskins had signed former Eagles qb Donovan McNabb to a 5-year, $88 million extension, on the heels of far and away his worst season since his rookie year in 1999. I mean, Daniel Snyder, are you trying to embarrass yourself? Are you deliberately attempting to further your image of the spoiled rich kid who throws money at any old fool who somebody once thought might be good at this game? When I first saw this headline, I thought no big deal, this is the NFL, they can put whatever number they want on the contract like $88 million and in the end, as soon as McNabb continues sucking, they'll just cut him. I mean, it's not like they're guaranteeing him a lot of this money, obviously -- not literally less than one game after Mike Shanahan benched his ass heading into the 2-minute drill in a crucial game with his team down by 5 points and needing a touchdown to win, right? Right?

Wrong! $40 million is guaranteed to McNabb under this new contract. So let's see. Last year the team paid $100 million to sign Albert Haynesworth, who has started exactly zero games this season and who isn't even any longer in the team's starting defensive package since he "is just not good enough to play the 4-3 defense". Now this year, their division rivals obviously duped them in landing two draft picks in exchange for trading them an aged Donovan McNabb, while all along they had not one but two qb's on the staff who were already far and away better players at this point in their careers, including one who is hands down the best quarterback in the league, and McNabb is following through with the worst full season of his career, so bad that he needed to get benched for the crucial final drive of the game in the Skins' last outing. And then they guarantee McNabb $40 million over the next five years? This can't be serious, can it? I keep waiting for Daniel Snyder or Mike Shanahan to come out and yell "April Fools!" or something, and yet with every passing minute it just seems more and more likely that the Dreadskins are actually going to be paying this guy $40 million guaranteed, plus as much as another $43 million on top over the next five years, to keep throwing the ball into the ground, throwing more interceptions than touchdowns like this season, and giving his team no chance like he did on Monday after three more turnovers including two pick-6s to help the Eagles on their march towards 60 points on the night.

Could Monday have gone any better for Eagles fans, I ask you?

Too Early to Push? and a Little Non-Poker Rant

A blogger friend and I were chatting over the IM today and the following question was posed. As per usual I may get some of the details a bit wrong but the gist of the facts will be sufficiently accurate to make the point. I didn't have poker tracker set to record the hands I discuss in girly chat, so I'll have to go from memory here, and we all know how accurate that is about hand histories.

So, you're playing Midnight Madness on full tilt. For those of you who don't know, every night at midnight ET there is a $10 buyin mtt that often attracts well over 1000 players. I think of it as all the West Coast donks just logging on for the night at 9pm local time. Anyways, within the first 5 minutes you are dealt pocket 3s. You call an 8x preflop raise of several limpers and then have to fold to three overs on the flop. A few minutes later you pick up pocket Kings and raise, getting one caller, and an Ace flops. You go on to lose a small bet on the turn and another decent sized bet on the river to a guy holding a medium Ace. You are down to 860 chips from the starting stack of 1500, and the blinds have just increased to the 20-40 level about 12 minutes in to the Midnight Madness mtt.

Now you are dealt pocket 7s in the cutoff. The first few players fold, and someone in middle position bumps the 40-chip big blind up to 120, a standard open-raise for this table. Action folds to you in the cutoff with the pocket 7s. What do you do here? Call, Raise or Fold? Why? Is 120 out of your 860 stack so much that you might as well just push now? Or is it too early for a push yet, given stack size and time into the tournament? Can you just call and wait to see if you flop a set, overcards, or rather if an Ace or King flops and you can be pretty sure you're beat? Anybody consider folding in this spot? What's the best play here?

OK that's all for poker today, because I have been itching to say some things since I heard this disgusting bullshit on the radio about Michael Vick and the dog fighting business. Now let me begin by saying I am no kind of animal lover. I don't own a dog, I've never even had a pet in my entire life at any time, not even a hamster or a turtle or something when I was a kid. My daughter M has already made Hammer Wife and I promise that we will give her either a dog or a cat for her 9th birthday (she is 3), but I just wanted to get that out there, as of right now I've never had any pets in my entire life, I've never loved an animal in my life, so I'm not one of these PETA or ASPCA geeks or anything like that.

But that said, I do have respect for life. For life. I don't even know if I believe in God, but that right there is God's greatest miracle if such a thing exists. Life. And what Mike Vick and friends have allegedly been involved with down in Virginia is beyond low class. It's a complete disregard for life itself. Not human life, no, and that fact clearly should be weighed in the case against Vick resulting from the indictment handed down yesterday against him on dog-fighting charges. But it's flagrant disregard for life itself nonetheless. Seriously, for those of you who believe in heaven-if-you're-good-and-hell-if-you're-bad, wouldn't you just have to think that how much respect for life you showed has got to be a big part of that decision of where your soul will spend the rest of eternity? Now that's something I definitely do not believe in, but if you do and you're one of these guys Vick was engaged with on the dog-fighting thing, then I would be seriously preparing for a long eternity. And I mean a looooooooooooong one.

I'm listening to the details of the indictment on the radio on Wednesday night, and I could not believe what I was hearing, the actual stuff that actually goes on with these dog-fighting rings. Of course a lot of these dogs are killed during the dogfights themselves. More than that, even some of the winners end up having to be put down, just from the beating that they take in the ring. And meanwhile, Vick and crew are allegedly training them, breeding and raising them to be fighting dogs, and standing around screaming and cheering and betting largeish sums of money on the outcome of these fights. To the death. I mean, is this ancient Rome, or are we more fucking civilized than that today?

The worst part is what the indictment claims Vick and crew did to the dogs who lost fights or did not perform well but lived. Vick's crew allegedly killed them. Brutally. Coldly. But more than that. They killed these dogs sickly. One of the methods cited for killing off the "worthless" (non-fighting) dogs was death by electrocution. Electrocution? Who the fuck electrocutes a dog? A dog! How do you even electrocute a dog? What do you strap to it, where do you strap it? Is this for real? I mean, these guys must have had to really sit down and plan out how to electrocute a dog, how to build whatever contraption they must've used to get that thing pulled off. Am I wrong or is that fucking sick?

But that's only the first method of killing cited in the indictment. Other dogs were allegedly killed by Vick's crew by hanging. Hanging! A dog! Again I ask, who the fuck even thinks of shit like this? They hung and electrocuted fucking dogs that didn't kill other dogs as well as Vick and crew allegedly trained them to be. These guys lost money betting on these animals to maim and destroy their opponents, and when they lost the money, they took it out on the losing animals with sick torture that you just don't see every year. Forget every day. This shit it sick, once-annually style.

These guys also allegedly killed some of the losing dogs by drowning them. You can just imagine them throwing these animals in water somewhere and holding them down while they thrash around after unknowingly taking their last breaths. That is some sick shit. And the kicker to it all, a number of dogs were also killed by, and this is the way the indictment describes it, "slamming the dogs on the ground". Wow. I don't know the details but you just know they're gonna be throwing the dogs from windows n shit. Un fucking real. An NFL quarterback with all of life set up for him, doing this kind of sickass shit. It's honestly one of the most disgusting and despicable things I've ever heard coming out of a professional athlete, and the NFL has got to be just fucking sick about it.

What a man you are, Michael Vick. If you are truly guilty of being the ringleader of this dog fighting thing, I hope you go to fucking jail and I hope those people there take advantage of you like you have to these dogs you've bred for your sick, demented fucked up ways.

Thank you and goodnight. I fucked up the Mookie last night running overpair 99 into overpair KK on a ragflop, but Mike Maloney did not, taking it all down while last week's winner crazdgamer came up with another impressive 5th place finish. Tonight I hope to be back in the 50-50 and probably some more FTOPS satellites. And sorry to this chica whom I logged in this morning and saw ended up finishing 2nd out of 40-some players in last night's O8 FTOPS satellite, which sadly is winner take all as far as the FTOPS event seat goes. And oh yeah, to those of you in last night's Dookie, I think I made my point. I made the final table in the razz turbo event with what I think was a massive chiplead. And then I fell asleep. I woke up like 25 minutes later or whatever to about 5 IMs asking if I was asleep, and to find that I had just blinded out in 6th place. So thanks to everyone for pilfering those blinds, I hope you enjoyed them. Bastages, all of you.