PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

vegas jan 2011 trip report part 1: a small tumbled stone takes vegas 2011-01-13 - 12:13 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011 -- The Prison Break A wheel-spinning day at 2/5 NL here in Vegas. I really won only one significant hand, but it came at a good time. I held 9 ♦ 9 ♥ on the button. A couple of limpers, I raise to $30, self-annointed pro (call him SAP) calls, big blind folds, first limper folds, moody old reg (Moody) calls. So $100 in the pot already. My starting stack was around $415. Flop: K ♠ K ♦ 9 ♣ As always in these pots, the problem is how to make any money without scaring off your victims. They check to me, and they expect the C-bet, so I see no reason to disappoint them. I mean to fire half-pot at it, but I bet $45 (which is a tad less), and they both call. $235 in the pot. Turn: A ♦ I am not very happy to see this card, because Moody often slow-plays/soft-plays AK against me. However, would he do that three-handed? I would hope not. Even though I've seen him play AK passively, many, many times, both in hands against me and against others, I'm definitely pot-committed here, and I'm going all the way. I don't worry about SAP. They check to me and I fumble a bit and generally look like I'm concerned about either the Ace or the diamond draw that just appeared. I'm really trying to figure how to get it all in without scaring them off. I finally pull back the two bills and start to push out the $115. Then I make it look like, wait, if I lose this hand, I won't have any playing chips, so I pull back the stack of reds and then make the bet with one Benjamin and the odd red chips. Whether all of this Hollywooding was necessary or not, I'll never know, but you can't argue with the results. Again, they both call. No one raises. I'll push any river. $580 pot. River: 2 ♠ This card helps no one. Check, check, I shove my remaining $200. SAP agonizes but he finally folds. Moody pays me off. My guess is KQ for a very powerful second-best hand. He was extremely upset and instead of re-buying, as he could perfectly well afford to do, he loses his last bit of cash on the very next hand and stomps off in a huff. The Rumor Mill: I heard that the 30/60 and 15/30 Limit games are now dead, so we were wise to go ahead and start learning No Limit. They dropped the limits, or so I've heard, to 20/40 and 10/20, but I figure it's just a matter of time. With the expenses of playing at the B, where every floor person has their hand out, and where it's pulling teeth to get a comp, it's a significant drop in pay grade to have to pay out the same rake, to tip out all that dead weight on the floor, and now be playing a much smaller game. Sigh. But we all knew it had to come one day. As part of the Make Room! Make Room! project back at the house, I'd done a pretty decent closet clean. I brought a few items on the trip that I'd never worn in Vegas. Today's costume was stovepipe low-rider jeans, a white button-down blouse, with a hippie-style fringed vest worn over it. The blouse was a Freecycle thing I got after Katrina, when people were trying to give away clothes so that they could pile up stuff in a corner and have the contractors in to fix up their homes, but the usual donation sites were overloaded and wouldn't accept clothing. So I picked up the size 6 clothing, for free, from three or four people. This blouse looked unworn -- I've certainly never worn it -- but in any case, IMOM immediately asked, "Hey, is that new?" It might be the last new item of clothing left in my closet now, so enjoy it. I accessorized with the Kenneth Cole "landbridge" granny boots and a huge American turquoise set in silver. My watch has started to lose time, annoyingly on the very first day of the trip, so I shall have to find the Movado dealer and get the battery changed. I must have had some leftover comps from last trip, because I had enough comps to treat IMOM to dinner at Noodle Asia. Our usual Crab Rangoon and Won Ton Soup. We dared to try something new for our entree, Pineapple Seafood Fried Rice. Delicious! Many long, bizarre dreams last night. The first was the most striking. I wasn't in the dream. The first person protagonist was a black guy from Mississippi, maybe early thirties. The setting was at first quite gothic, rather like a Greg Iles novel, but it got increasingly crowded and industrial as the story went on. I can't remember quite why, but for whatever reason, the government had confiscated this young white child of toddling age and disappeared him away to some unknown prison. There was some link to royalty or perhaps religious hysteria here? Don't know. Can't remember. Anyway, after the usual adventures that one has in these movies -- the running, the car chases, the airplanes, the mysterious messages -- then the movement grows from this isolated black guy trying to rescue the child to a pretty big cult. He preaches a bit, to growing crowds, and there's a couple of grazing contacts from an Indian man, I mean from East India, not an American Indian. The setting is no longer believable as Mississippi. It is large, crowded, industrial, and crammed with all variety of nationalities. Los Angeles, I think. Or some less-touristed part of London. It's quite hot, quite humid. I suppose it can't ever be humid in Los Angeles? Anyhoo, at some point, at a key point in the drama, the East Indian man emerges as some sort of conduit for information and aid from...where? Tibet? Nepal? Some place with tall mountains. Shangri-La! Now our hero has formed a truly large cult, and after a bit of speeches and preaching to the growing masses, he joins in the final assault on the prison. I can't say "leads." He doesn't lead. It's like one moment, we see him on a platform preaching, and the East Indian man down in the crowd passing out old-fashioned handbills and copies of the Constitution (!), and then suddenly en masse the people are rushing the walls. So here's the final scene...imagine it if you can. The last great gathering of the crowd had been outside the prison complex itself. This prison, or at least the outer rings of it, had been hastily assembled, with the women's dorms placed in the outer rings, a cowardly way for the authorities to make the women prisoners a sort of human shield around the men and then, at the center, the child. In the event, though, when the crowd surges and begins to break through the prison, then the police/guards melt into the crowd and put up no further resistance. The first order of business is to release the women, most of them who can now get out on their own feet, including a young white woman (maybe the child's mother) who is special to our hero in an unclear way. However, the heat is over-whelming, and, in a sad moment, he finds a middle-aged white woman, who was also crucial to the resistance before her capture, who is dying now of heatstroke. In fact, she dies right there. It all came too late for her. And then the crowd continues to sweep forward, but whether they rescue the men and the child, I'll never know. I woke up. I'd been asleep for 5-1/2 hours and felt as if I'd been fighting this war for every bit of it. I immediately fell right back to sleep for another 3-1/2 hours and had at least three other dreams almost as complicated. Whew. Maybe it was the Pineapple Seafood Fried Rice. Although now that I'm typing it out, there's a bit of political metaphor here if you like. Obama and the human world against the Black Iron Prison of the Nixons, the Reagans, the Bushes. Philip K. Dick would be proud. Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011 -- A Bold Aventurine Seeks Adventure Today's fashion statement was an above-the-knee cable knit dress, black tights, black "like crockwork" Kenneth Cole boots, black and gold metallic zigzag long knit sweater, carved amber flowers pendant set in sterling silver from Franklin, North Carolina. I've actually worn the knit dress before, but not for awhile. The outfit must have looked good, because IMOM threatened to take a cell photo photograph. Fortunately, he couldn't figure out how. Ha. I had a small win for the day, but I consider it another day of wheel spinning. On my first table, I was seated in Seat 1. Seat 2 held a maniac/LAG who was running just a few too many obvious bluffs. Seat 3 held a pathetic calling station who kept walking off and coming back with thousand dollar buy-ins. Both 2 & 3 appeared to believe that they were pros or semi-pros -- semi-pros, I guess, considering the quantity of beer they consumed. When I first sat down, seat 2 raised every single hand. Therefore, when I picked up A ♣ K ♦ the game went something like this: limp, limp, I limp, he raises, calling station calls, the limpers called because maniac and station probably don't have much, and I put in a raise and they all fold. I pick up A ♣ A ♠ a few minutes later, and it's an instant replay of the first hand. The problem is, when I finally do try to run a bluff, the calling station wakes up and calls, and/or the guy across the way wakes up with a real hand. So I had a go nowhere situation at that table. On the second table, I had a softer game, but I had a pitiful calling station who acted after me and who, again, severely retarded my ability to run any bluffs, because he called any pre-flop raise and peeled almost every flop. Needless to say, he donated thousands -- just not to me, because I'm the only person at the table he would catch against. Most infuriating, every time I built up a nice win, he took it away. Then he called it off to the guy who, literally, showed down four hands -- twice it was pocket Aces, and twice it was AK. He even (rudely) told the station he came to the table to play him, because he knew he would call him down every time. And still the guy couldn't catch a clue that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't give ALL your money to the guy who will only enter with Aces. I beat the table -- and came away with a small win for the day anyway -- mostly because I did hit a set with pocket Jacks. I had J ♣ J ♦ in an early-ish position, somebody limps, I limp, Bad-Tempered Deformed Lady (BTDL) raises to $20, and I can't remember now if anyone else calls in between, but I think the station put in his $20. It folds around to me, and I make it $80 to go. BTDL calls, the other guy folds, and it's heads-up to the KJ8 rainbow flop. I don't barrel this lady, because she can't resist taking a stab, and anyway I have plenty of time to get her remaining $220 in the pot, so I check. She bets $80, and now I go all-in. If she has nothing, that $80 bluff-bet is all I can get, but there are plenty of draws out there that she might be willing to pay to chase. She calls, and the turn and river are dealt, and my set holds up. Not a Rumor: Today, Venetian announced that they would host a 30/60 LHE game for a $4 time charge per half hour and a $2.50 per hour food comp for the rest of the month. If that doesn't save the game, nothing will -- of course, it's possible that nothing will, that the recession has officially killed it. But hearing that announcement sure made me wish we'd brought a 30/60 bankroll. I'd love to play some of these maniac/LAGs in a big limit game. Cute Stone Story of the Day: Is it a sign? I have sold my first stone of the year without even trying. The minute I sat down at my first table, the LAGgy guy asked me about my aventurine tumbled stone with the flat side on it. This particular "card protector" has proven to be a sort of "rough and tumble" stone that isn't a bit sensitive about the aggressive play or the random attitudes of poker table hustlers. It really has a "bring it on" energy about it. We're not talking one of your sensitive New Age sweetness and love crystals that gets all teary-eyed if some lout sticks his dirty fingers in its highly evolved aura. This stone is a pit bull. It might not win every street fight, but it's not afraid of the battle. "Can I touch it?" he asks. "Sure, it isn't one of these stones that is bothered by people touching on it." "It isn't bothered by people touching on it?" He picks it up and starts rubbing it on his face. "What if I lick it?" "Well, I'd rather you didn't, because it has been touching dirty chips and cards, but it doesn't mind." He refrained from licking it but continued to stroke it. "Say, are you one of those people who think if a tree falls in the woods, and no one's around, there's a noise?" "Of course, there's a noise. There's always someone around. The tree is around." Much drunken table discussion now about what "noise" is, and whether all sounds are noise or all noise is sound. Finally, the LAG brings the discussion back to the stone. "Can I buy it? Is it Jade? What's it worth?" "It's Aventurine. It's only worth about fifty cents." "I'll give you five dollars for it." "Sold." When I came back from dinner and was re-seated at the second table, just behind my first table, the guy was still there. And, after awhile, I could hear him working his magic. The stone had received a social promotion. "This is Jade. Very powerful Feng Shui." If stones could talk, I bet this little guy will be collecting some wild stories over the next few years. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford