...better to be silent than remove all doubt.

I'm in the middle of finals so my posts will continue to be short and mindless - but not as mindless as this. This weekend Dana Perino, White House Press Secretary, appeared on NPR's "Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me" and admitted that last October a reporter referenced the Cuban Missile Crisis in a question and..... she didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was! C'mon! Really?!?!

I mean, I've always rooted for her. She seems like a genuinely nice person stuck in the worst job in the world. She's cute too, but I'm just going to pretend that doesn't factor in. But seriously, how does this happen?

I guess stuff like this shouldn't surprise me so much. I've been baffled a lot recently. I keep saying things like, "Don't they remember Watergate?" "Have they forgotten about Vietnam?" etc. Cheney and Bush were alive back then, after all. But then again, maybe they prefer to just forget and surround themselves with people who never knew.

At any rate, a quick shout-out to Marty, who for some misguided reason thinks girls with "long hair = good / short hair = not as good as long hair." I think this is a shallow oversimplification of the wonderfully nuanced subject of female beauty. Some women look better (great even!) with short hair. Take a look at this old picture of Dana Perino for an example.

Who's Watching You at the Table?

[My, how time flies when I'm consumed by my studies! Here's a quick post on a topic near to my heart (poker) to help get me back into the swing of things. However, I recently attended a thought provoking (er, and disturbing) speech by the founder of the pro-life group Operation Rescue, so a post on that topic is in the works. But first, let there be poker!]

My mother (Hi Mom!) will be pleased to know that I haven't been playing much poker lately due to time constraints and such. However, three weeks ago I did take a jaunt out to Atlantic City with my close, personal friend Megas Janis, and there I managed to log some table time.

It got me thinking about the differences between online and live poker, and why I prefer the latter. The most obvious difference, of course, is the fact that you can't see your opponents when you play online. For people who put a lot of stock in detecting 'tells' which betray the strength of their opponents' hands, this is a pretty big issue. However, for me tells aren't a big part of my game - I don't spend a lot of time looking for them, and I think I'm good about keeping mine concealed (unless Marty would like to inform me otherwise).

Thus, it has always puzzled me why I seem to do better live. If the difference isn't in the tells, then where is it? Well, let's just say, if I handn't figured out the answer, then this would be a very short post.

In the live game, I can tell who is paying attention to the hands I play and how I play them. It turns out, this is kind of a big deal. See, the practice of establishing an expectation in the minds of your opponents and then strategically violating that expectation in the most profitable way possible is a critical component of a winning poker game. You create the expectation through your play of past hands, but you can't know whether you've succeeded unless you know whether your opponent was paying attention.

Online an opponent could be focusing intently on every move you make; he could be playing 8 tables at once; or he could be drunk, half-asleep, and watching football while he plays. You would never know.

But in a casino, I can see who is watching the table and who is watching TV. I can even engage people in conversations about the action to see what they have noticed. Heck, often, players will come out an tell you how they have assessed you. For example, in AC one guy said to the table, "[Mark] is just trying to sucker us into a big pot." At the WSOP, another guy announced, "You sure like hands like 9-7 offsuit, don't you?" These guys are doing me a favor! Not only are they telling me what they think, their educating the whole table. Once I know what everyone thinks of me, it is easy to act accordingly.

As a result of this revelation, I think I will focus more on playing in a manner that will make me the center of attention at a table - drive the action a little more. If I can make people notice, I will know what they have noticed - plus, its lots of fun.

Now, I just need to find the time to actually play poker.

BONUS for Mom: This Wall Street Journal Law Blog post is about two distinguished Harvard Law professors and their personal and professional interests in poker. Here's a great quote from Prof. Charles Nesson:

It's really the poker way of thinking that is the most deeply intriguing thing to me. The essence of poker is this business of seeing from the other person's point of view... If [law students] want to do something useful in their outside time, they should play poker.

Inaugural Address

Today I begin blogging.

Unlike most folks, I'm not necessarily blogging to express myself here - I'm blogging for exercise.

Allow me to explain: I'm in the beginning of my second year of law school, and one thing I've noticed about the life of a law student is there is a hell of a lot more reading to do than writing. Yet when we are finally called upon to put fingers to keys (final exams, occasional major writing projects) each course grade depends entirely on our ability to clearly, comprehensively, and convincingly express ourselves as quickly as humanly possible. Not to mention that a practicing lawyer's life is spent expressing himself in memos and letters to clients, partners, and even boring old files.

So, noticing that I was getting rusty, and recognizing that all the time I spend with my nose in a book and thinking deeply about the material is for naught if I can't get it on the page efficiently, I thought: "Why not start a blog!?"

One consequence of my "exercise" mission is that I don't have any particular subject I plan to blog about. Instead, I have only two requirements: (1) each post needs to be in the form of an argument, and (2) I need to post every day.

So here we... er... I am. I'm sure you're not here yet. But if you do decide to join me, you should know a few things. First, Requirement 1 supra is going to make it difficult to talk much about myself, which is perfectly fine with me and probably you too (whoever you are). But if you had your heart set on reading about my cat, then you're out of luck (1) because there aren't a lot of arguments to be made about my cat (see Requirement 1), and (2) because, despite the name of the blog, I don't own a cat. (For cat stuff, go here. Marty has two of them. Sorry Marty.)

That brings us to Requirement 2. Because I will be posting every day, there will be plenty of opportunities for me to tell you exactly what "The Martian Cat Problem" means, though I might have to look into it myself first. In the meantime, you can expect a healthy dose of science, philosophy, political ranting, religious discourse, and yes law-stuff.

So, welcome! Feel free to comment if/when I say something absurd. It's bound to happen soon, and I don't mind being raked over the proverbial coals.