Do you have any crazy superstitions?

It's bad luck to be superstitious.

I keep getting spammed here, and the reporting mechanism (cut and paste it to feedback) really sucks.  Blah.

Woman, 44, gives birth to her 18th child in Canada

Chalk one up for abstinence education.

This morning at 5:54 a.m. I was awakened to an obnoxious noise.  If you've ever been around me in the morning, you know that I'm not at my best, and that's the nicest way of putting it.

"Hmm.  That's not my alarm clock.  Is it?  It's making a weird noise."  I hit the snooze button.  The noise didn't stop.

I pulled a pillow over my head.  The noise didn't stop.

A few more neurons came online.  "Is that the fire alarm?"  A few years ago, shortly after I moved in, we had three or four false fire alarms.  I couldn't remember having a false alarm in the last five years, though.  I heard sirens outside.  Maybe I'd better take this seriously.  Or maybe I'll just go back to sleep.

The noise didn't stop.  Shit.  I grabbed my phone, rolled out of bed, pulled on some clothes, and headed out.  Remember in first grade when they taught you to feel the door to see if it was warm?  I did that.  I also looked out the window into the hallway for good measure, but it didn't look like evil fire monster was waiting for me.

I passed the elevator, since they also taught you in first grade not to use them in a fire, and went down the stairway.  As I descended to the second floor and then the first, I smelled something.  "Hey, is that smoke?"  That woke up a few more neurons, and they managed to do some complex logic.  "Holy shit, it's not a false alarm!"  They kicked the rest of the neurons pretty hard, and I was fully awake.

There were four fire trucks and an ambulance by the time  I made my way downstairs, and most of the building's residents were standing on the corner looking groggy.  Even the dogs were less than their usual exuberant selves.  I peered inside the restaurant, and saw that it was filled with smoke.  "Holy crap!"  I grabbed my phone and tried calling the restaurant's owner, but her phone was off.  One of the neighbors and I walked down to their building two blocks away and buzzed their front door, but to no avail.

By about 6:30 we were allowed back into the building.  I suspect and hope the damage was minor.

What criteria do you feel makes a good QotD?
Submitted by stueykins.

I find that grammatical correctness is an excellent start.  I'm a huge fan of subject-verb agreement.

As a teenager I spent countless hours in the arcade at the local shopping mall playing video games. I'd spend countless quarters too, blowing through my allowance and bumming money off of my mother so that I could play.   Before I was old enough to drive I'd spend one of my precious quarters on bus fare to get there, and later I'd hop in the car and go. 

I loved video games, and was moderately good at several, but what I was drawn to most of all was pinball.  There was something about the clank clank and the non-simulated physics that fascinated me and kept me coming back for more.  Over the years, the arcade had several classics-- Fireball, Eight Ball Deluxe, Comet and Cyclone, High Speed, Pinbot, and quite a few others.

My attention span for these games was far deeper than my pockets.l  I always swore that when I was an adult and had money I'd play as much pinball as I wanted to, whenever I wanted to.  Sadly, these sorts of childhood dreams rarely become the reality of our adulthood.

Today I had a free day in Las Vegas, so I wandered over to the Pinball Hall of Fame and Museum.  This is basically a pinball arcade on steroids, a couple hundred classic pinball machines tucked away in a low-slung nondescript strip mall in a low-slung nondescript neighborhood a few miles from the strip.  It's also a nonprofit-- proceeds go to upkeep of the games, and any excess funds get donated to charity.

Walk in and you find yourself in a long, dark room.  Grungy blue carpeting covers the concrete floor.  The air conditioning doesn't work as well as you wish it would, and a couple of fans on the ceiling don't really help that much.  In front of you is a bill changer with an old Iraqi dinar note and the caption "We No Longer Accept Old Saddam 20s."  Classic pinball machines are jam packed together for several yards in each direction.  Walk to one end of the shop and you find that there are a few more rows of machines.

Walk the aisles and you'll find most of your old favorites.The list of games is long and distinguished, including almost all of the classics.   The machines are well-loved, and they're all in excellent repair.

I walked the aisles spotting my favorites.  There was a Pinbot, and next to it a Bride of Pinbot.  A few machines down I found Comet and Cyclone.  Eight Ball Deluxe and Fireball were in the next aisle.  I recognized quite a few more, though they weren't as familiar to me.

Targets acquired, I broke a five dollar bill then settled in for a game of Eight Ball.  At five balls for a quarter it was a bargain-- cheaper than 25 years ago.  The machine felt incredibly familiar, but I quickly discovered that I sucked at it.  After about ten frustrating games I threw up my hands in dismay and wandered over to Pinbot, only to find that I sucked at that too.  Most of the shots were familiar to me, but I couldn't hit them with any degree of confidence. 

After the quarters were gone I grabbed a soft drink and broke another five. I played a few games of Fireball, but it didn't hold my interest.  I dabbled in Comet for a bit, and threw a few quarters in a couple of old mechanical machines, then went back to Eight Ball.

And then stubbornness set in.  By god, I was going to win a free game, and I didn't mean by matching.  I used to be good at this game, and dammit if I was going to let it get the best of me.  Nobody seemed to be waiting for the machine, so I played again and again and again.  I was getting better, but slowly.  I took a brief trip back to the bill changer, this time to break a ten, and got back to work.

It took a million points to get a free game, and I was barely breaking 500K, but I was getting better.  To my left I heard the loud bang that tells you someone has won a free game, and glanced over to see a tall slender black woman playing aggressively, a small smile playing across her lips.

Finally I did it.  CLICK.  1,180,230.  That wasn't the end of it, though-- I wasn't through. I still had quarters in my pocket and the game still had my attention.  I won another free game, then a third-- 1.6M.  The high score on the machine was 4.4M, and I really wanted to get it, but I was pretty sure that the day didn't have enough hours for that.

When the last quarter was in the machine and the game over, I decided I'd had enough.  I'd been there two hours, maybe two and a half, and then I looked at my watch-- four and a half hours of intense, nonstop pinball.  I stumbled out into the desert heat and the sun was low in the sky.  Unlike my teenage years, I still had money in my pocket-- my bankroll now exceeds my attention span.

If you're in Las Vegas and you like pinball, go there.  It is the single best use of a pocketful of quarters in the whole city.

Court overturns 12-year-old girl's grounding

I took BART to and from the city today.  Since it was a spare-the-air day, and transit was free for all or part of the day, lots of people did the same thing.  The train into the city wasn't too bad, but on the way home, all eight cars were standing room only.

For the ride home I stood against a pole by a door, and occupied the time by reading a Mark Stantz trip report on my phone.  (If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it; it's not really relevant.)  As we were passing under the bay, an older Hispanic gentleman with tanned skin and a head of wavy white hair motioned to me.  I walked over.

"Your hair, it is very beautiful."

"Thank you!"

"Very lovely.  Did you do it because you wanted to be different?"

"Actually, yes, I did."

"It's very beautiful.  You must be a wild woman."

"It's been said."  I smiled.

He asked my name, and told me that his was Rodolfo.  He reached his hand out as if to offer a high five, but instead he grasped my hand in his and smiled up at me.  The conversation seemed to come to and end, and so I reached for my phone to start reading again.

A few seconds later, he started singing to me in a melodic but untrained voice.  The song was in Spanish, but it was clearly a love song.  The other patrons on the crowded train seemed completely unfazed by this-- in fact, none of them seemed to be paying even the tiniest bit of attention.  I briefly considered enlisting one of them to help me out of the situation by pretending to be a friend, but Rodolfo seemed more sweet than creepy.

When he finished his song, he reached for my hand and kissed it.

The West Oakland stop came and went.

He touched my hand and smiled at me again.  "You are the most beautiful..."  He lifted his hands wide above his head, and looked heavenward.  "Thank you god!"

The next stop was mine.  He kissed my hand again as I turned toward the door, and smiled up at me one last time.  "Thank you.  You have made my day."

For most people, Vegas is a vacation-- a wild getaway to a weekend of gambling and drinking and strippers and things that happen and stay in Vegas.  It's bright lights and partying, bachelor parties and free drinks.  It's the real city that never sleeps, the one where you can bet as much money as you have any time of the day or night, while cocktail waitresses in skimpy outfits bring you and endless river of booze.

For me, Vegas is annoying strip traffic, stupid tourists, obnoxious drunks, ugly strip malls, bad mass-market food, bad plasticized entertainment, horrible weather, and crowded airports-- Disney for grownups, with a shiny corporate-built facade carefully calculated to appeal to the masses, and no character or substance.  The whole thing is paid for by people who are bad at math.  It's also poker and video poker and lots of my friends and free hotels (last weekend a comped suite at the Palazzo, much nicer than the comped room I had the weekend before) but even with the good stuff it gets tiring pretty quickly.

Two weekends ago I went to Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker ladies' event.  After three money finishes in a row, this year I was in the car and driving away from the Rio 45 minutes after the tournament started.  It's poker, c'est la vie.  I played well, and some hoser got lucky. At this point I've done this so often that paying $25/minute to enter a poker tournament doesn't really faze me, and I could barely muster the tiniest bit of emotion for losing all my chips sso quickly after the tournament started.  Most of it was regret at not having an opportunity to vacuum up chips from the horrible players at my table.  I just couldn't feel the crushing defeat that the hometown heroes do when they take their big shot and miss... it's just another poker tournament.

Last weekend I played a private satellite to the WSOP, and made the mistake of winning.  Normally I would have used the entry to play Saturday's nolimit event, but I had a date in town with me and there was no way I was going to abandon him for the weekend after dragging him all the way to Vegas.  Knowing that I couldn't play on Saturday and would have to come back, I even made a valiant effort to not win the seat.  The cards wouldn't cooperate.

Friday night, for the third weekend in a row, I head to Vegas.  I'll rent yet another car (probably a PT Cruiser identical to the last two I've had), stay in yet another free hotel room, and play more poker.  Going to Las Vegas is starting to feel like a multi-hour commute rather than a trip.  I'm sick of it, and I really want to just stay home for a weekend.  Unless something really unusual happens, though, this will be my last Vegas trip until... sigh, the end of July.

(If by some strange miracle I manage to cream 3000 opponents and win this weekend, I'll probably feel obligated to play the main event in a couple of weeks.  If that happens, I'll be willing to suck it up and go back.)

That's a lot of alcohol for someone who rarely drinks.  The top shelf is all scotch, and basically all "the good stuff".  the bottom right is the overflow scotch, the stuff that's more mass-market and less interesting.  The bottom left is a few random bottles of non-scotch-- absinthe, tequila, gin, and a couple of other things.