CARDRUNNERS

I'd like to start off by saying I just saw a kid in the airport who was probably about 8 or 9 years old and had a mushroom hair cut. WTF? I haven't seen that haircut in 10 years and there's good reason for that. it's got to be one of the dumbest haircuts in the history of the world. I feel bad for any kid who's parents would give that haircut. I should have taken a picture of the kid with his mom and put it up as a fail pic.
 

I've always been a big fan of live music. There's no better way to spend a summer day than getting together with a bunch of friends, tailgating and then going to a show.  I took that mindset to an extreme this weekend and went on a mini-tour of the midwest to follow around Phish. I was a big Phish fan in high school and managed to see them 3 different times. Unfortunately, as soon as I was entering my prime years as a concertgoer (college), Phish decided to call it quits. I may never forgive them for that. That decision by them robbed me of many great summer nights. Luckily though, they weren't done for good. My friends and I were able to secure tickets for 4 shows by them this summer and 3 came this weekend (next one is just outside Chicago in August)
 

We kicked off the weekend on Friday. The first show was in Indianapolis at a venue called Deer Creek. I had long heard good things about Deer Creek, but I had never actually gone. I was excited to check it out. The day didn't start off great. I woke up to torrential downpour outside.  To make matters worse, the weather called for severe storms to hit Indianapolis that night. There isn't much you can do about that except wear shoes instead of sandals. I'm not one to wear shoes in the summertime, but I made the sacrifice on this rainy Friday.
 

Our next problem occurred when highway 90 out of Chicago turned into a parking lot. I was literally able to get out of my car and chill outside for 5 minutes at a time. We decided to take an alternate route. We didn't realize it at the time, but this route took us directly through downtown Gary, IN. Gary is one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the US. In the past, I've been in the vicinity to go to Casinos in the area, but I had never actually driven through Gary. It looked like a scene out of the Wire. There were many houses and business boarded up or in great decay. We were about the only white people in the area. There were also kids slinging drugs on the corners. At one stop light there were 3 kids about 10 feet from us that were clearly selling. I felt like I was about to hear "Yo, got yo WMD right here." We were able to safely navigate through Gary, past the traffic jam and back onto the highway.
 

Regrettably, we ended up hitting traffic a few other times. We made it to the concert with time to spare, but our delays had significantly reduced our time to tailgate. To be honest, I didn't care too much because I was the DD that night. I volunteered to drive us there and home that day so that I wouldn't have to worry about driving to the next two concerts. The weather was nice in Indy at this point and after waiting for my friends to slam a few beers, we headed in.
 

Being around hippies is always an experience. They are very much unlike the people I typically interact with. I have mixed feelings about them. On one hand, they are typically very nice and outgoing. On the other hand, they dress like idiots, don't shower very often and overuse "Dude, man, bro" to such an outrageous extreme that I don't even know how to describe it. Keep in mind, I'm one to use those phrases on the regular. They also take the task of getting fucked up before a show to an extreme. Again, I'm all for getting fucked up before a show. Literally within 5 minutes of the show starting, 2 people within 5 feet of us collapsed. The first guy fell to the ground and landed on my foot. I looked down to see a guy using my foot as a pillow. His eyes were rolled back in his head and he looked very white. He looked like shit. Luckily, his friends helped him to his feet, got him some water and he was fine. I don't need anyone dying on my foot. The next guy hit the deck right in front of us. His friends seemed to be ok with him staying down. He stuck his finger in his mouth like a baby and just went to sleep. Seems like a bad way to enjoy a concert.
 

The concert was a great show. One of my favorite parts about it was the storm I mentioned earlier. As soon as it got dark out, we could see the storm starting to roll in from behind the stage. It was far off at that point, but we could tell that it was going to be very severe. The lightning was very persistent and very big. As it got closer it seemed to be coming from all angles. I've never seen a lightning storm like this. The lightning would shoot out parallel to the ground and go for miles and just keep branching out. It was truly amazing. I couldn't get my Doppler radar to work on my phone, but I assumed there was a lot of red coming at us. I had a sinking feeling that we were only going to get to see 1 set that night.
 

This is kind of what it looked like. It was more extreme though.

The first set ended with one the best songs I've ever seen performed. They did a 20 minute rendition of Fluffhead, a song that they rarely play. It was a great way to end the set. In fact, it was so good that I was ok with the concert ending on that note. When the set ended the storm was very close and it was all around us. It wasn't raining yet, but I knew it was coming any second. As expected, they came out and announced the concert would be delayed and asked us to go back to our cars. While in our cars, we got rained on pretty hard, but the lightning and really severe stuff was content with circling us rather than on dropping on top of us. I couldn't believe our luck. An hour later, we were back watching the 2nd set. It started to rain pretty hard towards the end of the set. It downpoured through the break and through the encore. It was only water though. In the end, we got completely soaked by rain, but the show was great and I didn't mind getting wet at that point.  

That night I had to drop my friend off in South Bend so that he could attend a family wedding. I needed a pickmeup after the show, so we stopped in at a Steak N Shake and got a feast. I think Steak N Shake is my favorite fast food restaurant. It's so damn good, so cheap and has a huge menu. If you have never eaten there and ever get the chance, go in and get a steakburger with a shake.
 

After we dropped my buddy off in South Bend, I was on the lookout for a McDonald's so that I could get a coffee. About 90 minutes from Chicago, I saw a sign for a McDonald's open 24 hours. It was one of the blue signs right before an exit with all of the food listed, so I assumed it was the next exit. I was wrong. As soon as I got off there was a big toll booth that somehow had a big line at 4 in the morning. I immediately flipped a U-turn to get back on the highway. I wasn't too pleased by this scenario, because I wanted a damn coffee. As I was making the giant turn to get back on the highway, I looked over my shoulder trying to find those beautiful golden arches. The next thing I heard was "Holy fucking shit Wiggins, what are you doing?" I looked up to see that I was heading straight for the guardrail and was about 2 feet from hitting it. Due to my amazing driving skills, I was able to swerve at the last second and remain in control of my car. I have to give credit to the Neon for responding like a BMW in the face of crisis. That's what Neons do though. They step it up when they need to. I ended up getting home at about 5am.  It was a long, but great night. I was ready to get up and do it all over again the next day.  

Vegas has been Vegas so far. There isn't really a ton to note. We've all been playing a lot of poker. I took a venture into the 2/4nlhe games and ran pretty poorly. I was rusty too. I dropped about 10 buyins over 5000 hands. I've been running pretty poorly in SNGs as well. Luckily, I've been running really hot in PLO. PLO is saving my trip pokerwise so far.

I haven't played any events yet.

I haven't really gone out a ton and when I have gone out, there hasn't been a ton to note. I did realize this year that there is no reason to ever book bottle service through a 3rd party. We were always led to believe that we couldn't get good tables with out the help of a VIP Host. They are full of shit. Every table we've had this year has been great and we've contacted the hosts ourselves. It's actually a really easy process. You can use JackColton.com to get the phone numbers for the club hosts.

I met Jermaine O'neal at a club.



Dell Rant

I've had the biggest nightmare scenario with Dell over the past few weeks. I'm going to post this story with the hope that potential Dell buyers won't buy from them and to explain a complicated monitor situation that may come up for other poker players. Before I came to Vegas I purchased a new Dell Studio XPS 16. When I was thinking about making the purchase, I talked to not one, but two dell technical support people. I needed to confirm that this laptop would support a 30" monitor at 2560x1600 resolution. Unfortunately, FTP and Stars only give out monitors that only have DVI ports. It's not a big deal if you have a desktop, but it can get dicey if you are trying to attach it to a laptop. I knew the laptop didn't have a DVI port, so I needed to make sure that I could convert from the HDMI or Displayport. They both assured me it would not be a problem. They both lied.

It took me about 4 other several hour long conversations with Dell support  and the purchase of 3 different converters to realize I would not be able to support my monitor. I should note that these were special converters that I had to find online. I overnight them each time, because I was assured they would work. They never did. I blew close to $100 on shipping and now I have to go and return all of these converters. Good times.

To make matters worse, I have two of the same monitors. I was going to keep one at work and one and home and take the laptop back and forth. Basically, the dell technical support is the most clueless group of people I have ever come across. At this point I know far more about monitor resolutions than anyone on their team. This is because I had to spend hours on google figuring shit out on my own. I'm not particularly computer savvy overall.

I tried to talk to managers to get a clear answer on the converting issue and to also voice my displeasure. They don't really seem to have managers at Dell. I could never talk to anyone with any authority. They also didn't seem to care that I wouldn't have bought the computer in the first place if they had given me accurate information. I considered returning the laptop, but I actually like it a lot and there doesn't seem to be a ton of options on the market at a reasonable price for what I need (I'm mostly looking for a high powered graphics card in a portable laptop). Most of the laptops with great graphics cards are huge and very heavy. That's not good for me.

The bottom line was that I would need to get a monitor that supported displayport technology. I should mention that Dell invented this technology to seemingly fuck wth people like me. What is wrong with HDMI or DVI is beyond me. Guess what? Only Dell makes monitors right now that can support Displayport. So, as much as I'd never like to purchase from Dell again, I went online and ordered a 30" monitor for $1700. I overnighted it for $100 so that I could finally get my grind on. I was supposed to get the monitor on Monday and was excited to finally be done with this saga. 

I got an email over the weekend saying that my order would be delayed a week. Fucking great. Luckily, a day later I got another email saying that it would actually come on Tuesday. I woke up today again excited to get the monitor. When I checked it's status on line it was flagged with a delivery exception note. They had called me the day before to confirm that my vegas address was where the monitor should go and to make sure there wasn't any fraud going on. At the end of that discussion, they assured me everything was good to go. This morning I thought back on that conversation and shook my head. Fedex confirmed that Dell had ask them to hold the package because there was a fraud concern. I called Dell and they said they needed an email from AMEX. I then called AMEX and they said they had not flagged the transaction like Dell claimed, but they would email Dell anyway. I then called Dell back and they confirmed the receipt of the email. I called back later in the day to make sure we wouldn't run into any issues and they told me that we wouldn't. Well I just called Fedex to confirm that I would get the package tomorrow and they told me it's already in Nashville on it's way back to Dell. 

Fuck Dell. I don't even know what to say at this point. It's so ridiculous. Ok, end rant.

I'm going to 3 Phish shows this weekend. I'm really excited for that. Hopefully I survive.

Recently I was informed of a new shot sweeping the nation - the LeBomb James. I'm a huge LeBron fan, so I was instantly intrigued when I heard about it. It requires 3 ingredients - Redbull, Crown Royal and sugar (or splenda or whatever). The crown is because Lebron is the King. What would the King drink but Crown? To execute the shot, you fill a hand with sugar, then drop a shot of crown into redbull just like you would with a jager bomb. After you take down the shot you throw the sugar up in the air in the same fashion LeBron does with his powder.

We tried out the shot at a bar recently. After ordering the shot, I asked for some splenda. The bartender didn't have splenda, but she had sugar. "Sure," I said, "No problem. We'll take sugar." She then proceeded to give me 3 packets. There were 4 of us, so 3 wasn't going to do. I informed her that I would need a lot more. She came back with 9 more packets. As soon as she handed them to me, she realized that she had probably just made a mistake. She asked what I needed them for. I responded, "LeBomb James." After that, I walked away. I didn't need to give her more info. She kept an eye on us and sent a bouncer our way when she saw us filling our hands with sugar. He told us that if we threw that in the air, we would get kicked out. We said ok and did it anyway. I don't think anyone around us appreciated it, but it was a lot of fun. We were promptly kicked out of the bar. On the way out, he gave us a lecture on growing up. He told us that's not how you act at a grown up bar. This, of course, was coming from a 35 year old bouncer working at a Depaul college bar. So to summarize, if you don't mind getting kicked out of the bar, it's a great shot.

I made a pretty huge mistake a few weeks ago. I thought it was brilliant at the time, but I have since learned otherwise. I literally didn't play at all in April. I was traveling a ton and when I wasn't traveling I had a lot of work to do. I had always operated under the assumption that spending FTP points counted against rakeback, but that it didn't carry over to the next month. In April I had $0 coming back to me and I had 500k points I wanted to spend. I managed to spend it all. It was mostly spent on stupid stuff that I definitely didn't need. I bought glasses of several different sizes, fold up chairs, a humidor, golf balls, a football, a new 30" monitor and other random stuff I'm not remembering.

I got my rakeback report in early May. I had earned $17 in rakeback, but I spent $2500 in points. haha, wow. Late last week I had a conversation with a guy high up in the affiliate business. He informed me that the -2500 would absolutely carry over to May. It would have been smart to ask him this before I spent the points. Time to hit the tables and grind away that debt!

I've had a number of people ask me if I'm still in Asia. I've been back for about 2 weeks now. I don't blame them. I'm so far behind on my blogging. This post is meant to get me back into real time.

Two Sundays ago I attended probably the most entertaining sporting event I've ever been to. I was in attendance for the Bulls double OT victory against the Celtics. It was Game 4 and must win for the Bulls. They were down in the series 2-1. It looked like it was over at the end of regulation, but Ben Gordon nailed a deep 3 to tie the game. I dislike Ben Gordon a lot. The guy has no basketball IQ. He is only out for himself. I think he fits in terribly with the Bulls given the addition of Derrick "the fucking man" Rose. You mix Ben Gordon's selfishness with Vinny Del Negro's lack of coaching skills and you will see some downright disgusting basketball plays. Nothing pisses me off more than the patented Ben Gordon dribble around and hawk up a deep contested 3 at the end of a game. That being said, the guy can hit shots when he's on. He hit this shot and it was clutch as hell. The Bulls were finally able to pull it off at the end of the second OT. Rose put up a near triple double (missed by 1 rebound I believe) to match Rondo's triple double. Rondo absolutely sliced and diced the Bulls. I'm not too surprised because the Bulls as a whole don't play D and Rose definitely doesn't play D. Although, Rondo put up a triple double against Orlando last night so you gotta give the kid credit. I digress. If you didn't watch the Bulls - Celtics series you really missed out. It was one of the best playoff series in the history of the NBA.

The Bulls have a deal that when they score 100 points in a home game that you attended, you get a free big mac. I've been at a few games where this applied, but I had never cashed in on it. Well, thanks to double OT, the Bulls easily scored over 100. We decided this was our day to take advantage of the deal. Maybe we shouldn't have. We went to the McDonald's right next to Wrigley still decked out in Bulls gear. We ordered a few Big Macs along with some fries and drinks. When we presented the coupons, we ran into trouble. We explained the situation, but the man at the window was still very confused. He went to get his manager who was no less confused. We explained that we just arrived home from the Bulls game and the Bulls had scored over 100 in a thrilling double OT victory. He wasn't buying it. We presented our tickets. The problem was the tickets were bought before the date and time that the game was announced, so they said Game 4, date and time TBA. He insisted that the Big Mac coupon we presented was from Game 2. We explained that Game 2 was in Boston. "Noooo" he replied, "Game 1 was in Boston. Game 2 was in Chicago." We literally went back and forth on this point for about 5 minutes. He wouldn't give in. Eventually we started to get pissed and the conversation got heated. He could tell we were getting angry and that we weren't going to give up, so he finally gave in. He tore our Bulls tickets in half too. Why? I don't know. What if I had wanted it for a souvenir? This guy spent over 5 minutes trying to stop us from getting a $2 sandwich that we rightfully deserved. Not to mention that McDonald's has been running this promo for at least a few years. Gotta love McDonald's.

Julia and I went to the derby last weekend. I decided to do it up and go the fancy route. We stayed at the Brown hotel which is a pretty famous hotel that is old as hell - like 1900 or so. I'd say we were the youngest people there by about 20 years. It was a fun experience though. I also got to try their famous "hot brown" sandwich. Not only does it sound like something you'd do to degrade a woman in bed, but it tastes amazing. It consists of turkey, bacon, tomatoes and some kind of sauce on top of a few pieces of bread. Simple, but brilliant. It was great for my hangover. See below.



I promise you it tastes much better than it looks.

There were a ton of people who clearly had a ton of money staying at the Brown. It was funny because everyone at the hotel was so dressed up the entire weekend. Besides when we went to the race I was wearing jeans. I definitely looked out of place. We saw a bunch of Bentley's and Rolls parked outside. We got a picture in front of one of them.



We were running kind of late on race day. We had been out drinking the night before and got a slow start to the day. It didn't help that I had to go pick up the tickets. I burned about 45 minutes doing that. We also had to eat. That's when the hot brown entered into my life. When we were finally ready to leave there weren't any cabs hanging around anymore. There were, however, unmarked police cars. Apparently some huge baller had the police on retainer. They would escort his Bentley stretch limo with a police car in front and one behind. After they dropped him off, they were hanging around the hotel and taking people for $50 a trip. I figure a cab would have cost about $40, so it was a very good deal. We obviously jumped at the opportunity. Our police officer driver turned on his lights and hit the gas. We knew we'd be in for a fun ride when on the first corner a car didn't slow down to let him out and he yelled out a few curses and honked his horn. He probably averaged about 70 mph on the way there. The speed limits on the streets we were on probably averaged about 35 mph. We blew through numerous red lights. When we got to the long line of traffic at Churchill downs, he just drove up the wrong side of the street. He then drove in through the gates and dropped us off literally 5 feet from where you walk in. It was great. Julia had never been in a cop car before. For me, it was much more enjoyable than the last time I was in the back of a cop car.

I got seats that were on the second deck but front row. I had been inquiring about seats for a few months, but I decided I'd wait unto the last minute to buy them because of the economy. I figured I could get a good deal. I paid about 1/3 of what I would have paid a few months earlier. Not bad. I had never been to a race before so I wasn't really sure what to expect with the seats. To be honest, I expected them to be like seats at any normal stadium. The way they actually worked was there was a "box" area that had room for 6 folding chairs. I liked that because we got to meet 4 other people that were in the box with us. They were all really nice people.

Here are a few pictures of our view and some zoomed in horse pictures.











If you aren't familiar with the Derby, they run a new race every 45 minutes or so. It provides you with a lot of gambling opportunities. I don't know shit about horse racing, so I naturally lost everything I took with me to gamble, but I half expected that to happen. It was a blast anyway. Everyone is there to put down some drinks as well. We started drinking as soon as we got there and hit it pretty hard. Mint Julips are terrible by the way. After our first Julip, we stuck to beer.

The main race was pretty amazing to watch. I said that I don't know shit about horse racing, but I've watched a decent amount of horse races in my day. I've never seen anything like what happened in the derby. The horse that won just took off. It cut across like 4 horses and then just put a burst on. Call it an old school Iverson crossover if you will. It was like the horse had a rocket attached to it's back or something. It made everyone else look slow as hell. The craziest part was that he was a 50-1 shot to win. Here is a shot of him burning the others down the stretch.



I would bet good money that my neon was the only neon to ever have been parked in the Brown hotel parking lot. I thought it looked pretty funny sitting out front. I'm somewhat pissed that there were average cars parked around it. This picture would have been amazing if it was sandwiched between a Rolls and a Bentley. Long live the neon!

It's time to wrap up my Asia blog. I've had some interesting things happen since I got back that include a double OT Bulls playoff game and the Kentucky Derby. I want to blog about those early this week, so let's get the Asia part out of the way.

When I left you, we were just recovering from a massive powdering. Thailand was a blast, but we were ready to move on and check out Hong Kong. We were supposed to travel to Bangkok for a day and then fly out of Bangkok. If you were following the news at all a few weeks ago, you probably heard about the massive political riots that occurred there. They were peaking in intensity right when we were supposed to go there. We had kept an eye on the news to see what the situation was like. When we started seeing soldiers fire into crowds, tanks getting tipped over and just a general presence of bloodied up people, we decided it would be best to skip. This screwed up our flights, but we were able to get a flight back through Kuala Lampor for a good price. The only downside was a 6 hour layover. At this point, I was already pretty numb to spending time in airports. I also figured it would give me a chance to get caught up on email and everything else that was going on in the world that I had neglected so I wasn't too concerned. The main downside to me was having to endure two more landings courtesy of Malaysian Airlines. They didn't disappoints either.

The first landing into Kuala Lampor wasn't too bad. We took two skips and then stayed on the ground. I was already used to skip landings. The second landing, however, was different. As we approached the ground, I was clutching the seats and looking out the window. I was looking for a sign that we would get our first standard landing. As we approached the ground, I knew it wasn't going to happen. The plane was not stabilizes. We were rocking back and forth. It reminded me of when I was 10 and trying to land on flight simulator. I was never very good at it and often had trouble stabilizing the plane as I approached the ground. When we finally touched down we landed on our left side. I can't say for sure, but it definitely seemed like the right side wheels were up in the air. We were really on a tilt. I was anticipating the plane overcorrecting and then just starting to barrel role. Thankfully, that didn't happen. We were able to get back on the ground with some bouncing back and forth, but no barrel roles.

We got to our hotel at about midnight and we were all starving. We decided to wander the streets to find somewhere to eat. There was a diner not too far from our hotel that was still open. They had an English menu too. I opted for chicken roman noodles. I was very surprised when they arrived along with a ham omelet. I'll never understand why my roman noodles came with an omelet, but I'm not complaining. Scott ordered a steak for some reason. His came along with a soup which was much more reasonable. However, our waiter didn't speak English and we thought the soup was the steak at first. It made for a humorous few minutes. In the end, his meal was pretty standard. Here is a picture of Scott with his soup. Notice the massive pile of silverware and the tiny water glasses (they love tiny glasses in Asia).



The first thing on our list of sights to see was the Big Buddha. We grabbed some lunch and headed out. We had one major problem. Scott's feet stank. I don't mean typical smelly feet. I'm talking the worst smelling feet I've ever smelled. That's saying a lot, because I was born with a smelly feet problem. Scott apparently has that problem too, but he mixed it with some old, nasty sandals that had taken a daylong assault from Thai water. It was a combination that I don't think can be rivaled. Luckily, in Hong Kong, there are American outlet stores everywhere. At the base of the mountain that Big Buddha was on, we found a ton of shops. Both Nike and Adidas failed to seal sandals. WTF? I guess sandals aren't popular in Asia. We were able to find some at a quicksilver shop. The weird thing there was they only had one pair of men's sandals and they were bright pink. Here is a pick of Scott wearing the new pink sandals and holding up the worst smelling sandals in the history of earth.



We took a cable car up to Buddha. The ride took us by a bunch of mountains. Somehow we got on the discussion of whether one of them was climbable. It was a fairly gentle slope, but a pretty big mountain (hill might be a better word). Taylor was convinced that it was not scalable. He was ready to offer 4:1 on a 10k bet. This created a heated debate, because I was completely confident I could climb it. We were in the middle of this debate when the cable car camera went off. I liked the picture because it captured the argument, so I bought it. They decided to add Easter decorations to it. Nice touch.



Here is the mountain that we were debating about. Looks pretty harmless doesn't it? In the end, the bet never happened. This was for a few reasons. I didn't want to take 40k from Taylor. That's a huge number. I also didn't want to risk getting arrested in a foreign country. I'm not sure they'd appreciate me climbing it. I also didn't want to waste the entire day in Hong Kong climbing a mountain for a dumb bet. Yea, I know, I'm a pussy. oh well.



Here is the Buddha. It was pretty cool.



Taylor snapped this picture when we were all standing around. I didn't realize it until I saw the picture, but we all had our arms crossed looking like badasses. I thought it was pretty funny since we didn't stage it at all.



Scott's dad works for Dick's Sporting goods and Dick's has an office in Hong Kong. His dad put us in touch with a girl who works in the office that is close to our age. She was nice enough to show us around town. We hit up a bunch of bars. Not a ton to note other than we had a good time and got pretty wasted.



There is a cool market in Hong Kong called Stanley's market. I'm not much of a souvenir guy, but I knew I had to get a few things for people back home. We hit up Stanley's and basically cleaned up. They had a lot of cool things for cheap. Here's a pick of me checking out some stuff.



The second night we headed over to the country of Macau to see "Vegas of the East." I gotta admit that it was disappointing. After all the hype, I expected something comparable to Vegas. It wasn't nearly as cool as Vegas. There was no real strip. There was an area that had about 3 or 4 casinos including the Wynn. The Venetian was a 15 minute cab ride away from everything. It was HUGE. I really wish I had taken a picture of it. It was much bigger than the Venetian in Vegas. I know that's hard to believe, but it's true. I think they really screwed up by making it so big. There was just a ton of dead space inside the casino. It just felt way too wide open. I felt like I was in a warehouse rather than an action packed casino. The only thing good about the Venetian was the meal we had. We ate at a restaurant called Caton and it was excellent. It was one of the best meals we had in Asia.

The Wynn was smaller than the one in Vegas and didn't have the size problem that the Venetian had. We did all of our gambling at the Wynn. It just wasn't as fun as Vegas. Asians tend to not get into the gambling like Americans do in Vegas. We were trying to pump up the table to get some added excitement, but it just didn't happen. They do some crazy things too. I saw a guy split tens, he got dealt a few more tens and had to keep splitting. The dealer made a decent hand and he lost pretty big. I had never seen that before. I also saw things like hitting on 13 against a 5. I think they knew it was incorrect, but just wanted to gamble. I ended up breaking even and everyone else lost. I lost CC roulette at dinner so we all lost money that night. Standard night of gambling.

One interesting story is that when we were at dinner we noticed the price was in Macau dollars and not Hong Kong dollars. We had no idea what the conversion rate was. We debated if we should find out. I was in the camp for not finding out. I figured it would make CC roulette that much better. In the end, we decided to hold off. I ended up losing roulette. I was legitimately concerned, because the dinner was very nice and could have easily been very expensive. We also bought a bottle of wine that seemed expensive. However, I lucked out and the meal ended up being one of the best bargains of the trip. It came in at about $250.

The only picture I got was of the Wynn ceiling when you walk it. It was pretty awesome.



The last thing we did was a trip up to Victoria's peak. It has the best views of the city. Hong Kong has a ton of skyscrapers and we wanted to take them all in.



The last night we hit up the bars again. We went to a cool rooftop bar that had great views. Again, there wasn't a ton to mention. The only funny thing was at the end of the night we got into a heated argument about Pujols. Taylor and Anthony apparently thinks he juices. I don't. Anthony is a huge Barry fan, so the discussion headed there for awhile. The night ended with me and Anthony making a $500 bet about bonds making the hall of fame. I think he absolutely deserves to be in the hall, but I don't think he'll get in. It will be interesting to see how many votes he gets when hes nominated in a few years.





Oh and here is a picture of me dropping a box of empty glasses.



I didn't really drop the box, but I thought it'd make a good picture. Everyone around gave me weird looks. They didn't think it was as funny as I did.

Here is a picture of us ordering some Chinese food. I had been told prior to the trip that the authentic food we would eat would be different than what you find in America. After eating real Asian food, I've come to the conclusion that you can get very authentic Asian food in the US. Most of what I had was very similar to what you would get here.



So that pretty much wraps up the trip. Admittedly, we didn't do a ton in Hong Kong. We were so drained at that point. We slept in everyday and just hit up a few key things. I was fine with that. 2 weeks is probably a little too long to be on a trip. We were all ready to get home at the end. I'm very glad we did the trip though.

Thailand was easily my favorite part of the trip. If I was going to endure the extremely long plane ride back out to Asia, it would be to go to Thailand. I really enjoyed Hong Kong and Tokyo, but I don't think I'd go back anytime soon. The culture was just so different, that it wasn't really my kind of place.

Our trip to Thailand began with some surprise. Soon after our flight took off, our captain came over the loud speaker and announced that we would land in Kuala Lumper in 7 1/2 hours. What!!! Over 7 hours? We expected the flight to be about 4 hours or so to Malaysia and then a quick hour to Phuckett. Not the case. To be honest, we did very little planning for this trip. We winged a ton of it. I'm fine with that, but it leads to surprises like this little gem. Oh well.

This flight was the first of several Malaysian Airlines flights we took while in Europe. Their service is amazing. They are constantly serving you food and drinks (alcoholic drinks are free). Even on the 1 hour flight to Phuckett we got served a full meal. On top of that, they have beautiful flight attendants. Pretty much every attendant that served me on my several flights was banging hot. Gotta love hot flight attendants. It's the only thing better than getting seated next to a good looking girl. There is one slight problem with Malaysian airlines though. The pilots weren't taught how to land a plane. I never get nervous about flying in general, taking off or landing, but by the end of this trip I was sweating balls whenever we had to land. This first landing in Kuala Lumper consisted of a couple of big bounces. Eventually we settled down on the runway and were able to slowdown. Bouncing during the landing is not fun. This was not the worst landing we would experience on our Asia trip.

We got to our hotel pretty late. I believe it was around 11pm. None of us were tired since we slept a lot of the day away on the planes, so we decided to check the area out. Here is a pic of us in the back of a "cab." The "cabs" there consist of basically mini pickup trucks with a roof over the back. In the back there is room for 4 total people.





As you can see, I decided to really dress up for this night out. The truth was that I thought we were just going to walk around, grab a drink or two and head home. We ended up having a late night. The nice thing is that in Thailand it doesn't matter what you wear. All of the women still think you are Brad Pitt. More on that to come.

We weren't actually in Phuckett. We spent most of our time in a small area called Patong. Patong is just outside of Phuckett. Here is a picture of the main drag at night.



Our hotel was really nice. Thailand is super cheap. We had easily the best hotel room in Thailand and it was considerably cheaper than anywhere else we went. We opted to get the cabana room at our hotel. That meant that our room had a jacuzzi in the back that led out to the main pool. Not bad, eh?





While we were in Tokyo, we went pretty nonstop with the sight seeing. We did some cool things in Thailand, but this leg of the trip was a lot more laid back than the previous one. The second night we were there, we decided to go check out a Muay Thai boxing match. This was something that had been recommended to us and I was really looking forward to checking it out. Since Thailand is cheap, we were able to get front row VIP seats pretty easily and cheaply. Here is a picture of us in our seats.



There were 10 fights in total. A lot of the fights turned out to be between two kids. It's hard to say how old they were, but I would guess they were typically in the range of 13-16 years old. Interestingly enough there were two fights that involved non Asian people. Believe it or not, they had a pretty big size advantage. Those two fights were the biggest blowouts of the night. There was blood. Below is a pic of some of the kids.



There was one guy that we all enjoyed very much. He was a guy that was just destroying cobs of corn. Destroying them. The funny thing was that he had brought them with him. As soon as he'd finish one cob, he'd be on to the next.



We went out after the fight and checked out some of the clubs in the area. Now's probably a good time to explain my Brad Pitt comment above. I'm basically convinced that every Thai girl in the area was a hooker. I'm not sure if they were hookers in the sense that we use the word in America, but I think they were looking to get money for having sex. I almost think it's just part of their culture or something. It's not like they would come up to you and say, "hey baby $500 for a BJ." The way it played out is they would come up to you and just start talking to you and hit on you constantly. Every girl in the entire country would hit on you! I'm pretty sure their end game was to get paid for sex, but I can't say for sure. It's possible I'm just a pimp. That's very doubtful though. I can understand why Thailand is known for illicit sex.

The next day we went to check out the beach that the filmed the movie The Beach at. It was a classic starring Leo DiCaprio. Actually, if I remember correctly, it was pretty horrible. It did include sex with a fine looking woman and some nice beach shots. It was off on a small island that we had to take a boat to.





We decided to head into the jungle in search of giant fields of marijuana (only makes sense if you saw movie). Alas, we did not find any. Here is us on our journey.



We got to do some snorkeling on this trip as well. I hadn't gone snorkeling in a long time, so I was looking forward to that. There were a ton of fish. Below is the area that we snorkeled in.





That night we headed out to the streets to get some drinks and have a good time. We knew it was the night before the new year, but we didn't realize what that entailed. When we got out, things quickly got wet. See, in Thailand, they celebrate their new year with water fights. I'm talking massive water fights. Everyone in the country arms themselves with knock off super soakers and buckets of water and just goes at it. We had been told that occurred on new years day, but no one told us it started the night before. You can see we went out very unprepared.



We convinced ourselves if we did certain things that we wouldn't feel the wrath of the water. For example, we said, if we go sit down at a bar and order drinks, they won't get us wet. What are you are about to see next is what happened immediately after we sat down at a bar.



Another dumb thing we convinced ourselves was that if we went near the bucket where people were filling up, we would be considered one of them and be ok. Immediately after entering the vicinity, both Taylor and myself got an entire bucket dumped over our heads. I'm not sure why we thought we'd be safe right next to a giant bucket of ammo.

Getting wet was unexpected, but not nearly as unexpected as what was about to happen next. Locals came up to us and started powdering our face. We got powdered! That was a phrase I had never uttered until that day. I said it many times in the next 24 hours. There was even a woman walking around and randomly washing people's hair. Make any sense to you? It didn't to me. I turned to Scott and said, "I think there's a legit change that a stranger is going to shampoo our hair right now." That was also a phrase I had never mentioned in my life. Luckily, our hair ended up being safe.









The next day we went out much more prepared. We purchased giant guns and wore proper clothing. The streets were full of battles. The key was to find the buckets that had ice in them. Warm water wasn't a big deal since everyone was wet already. If you got them with cold water though, it was another story. You could make people very uncomfortable if you soaked them in ice cold water. We were pretty good at having cold water on us.







The next morning we were not quick to get up. It lead to us almost missing our flight. We made it on at the last minute and headed off towards Hong Kong.

I was planning on updating my blog regularly when I was in Asia. Two things came into play, I think it's my purpose in life to not blog after I say I have updates coming. The other major problem was I forgot my usb cord for my camera. I didn't want to write a bunch of text and not have pictures. With that in mind, I decided I'd wait until I got home and then write up a few entries and post them a few days apart. I'll start with Tokyo.

Apparently Tokyo decided they liked the Eiffel Tower. They have one of their own. It may be called the Tokyo Tower or I may have just made that up in my mind. I tend to come up with ideas that I quickly convince myself are fact. Not sure if this is one of those instances. This is the view out our hotel.



Not a bad view, eh? I ran into trouble early when I realized not a single person in the city spoke English. I wasn't quite planning for that. Our first day we attempted to buy subway fare cards from a machine. The machine ate my Amex card and a small man popped a head out at me from a tiny hole. See below.



You can see my card is back in my hand. He was nice enough to return it to me. We ended up buying cards from a teller. They did not accept credit cards. That became a major theme in Tokyo. It was very strange for me, because I never use cash in the US.

I quickly established my massive height dominance. I enjoyed being at least a foot taller than everyone in the country. It made me feel like a badass. Here is a pic of me Anthony (Spud) and Scott (IRock). You can see that we look very much out of place.



BAM!



Sub zero or simply a nice Japanese man? You tell me.



For comparisons sake.



We went out to a nice sushi dinner our second night there. They served "sets" of food which meant that it was a set menu with a ton of different stuff on it. We got the biggest set which was probably a mistake. I'm not sure I've ever been as full as I was after we finished that meal. It didn't make much sense to me because we all eat a lot of food. If we can't take it down, who can? 

They brought out the fish and cut it up in front of us. At one point they brought out live prawns, killed them, and then served them up about 1 min later. They were delicious. A cool thing about this restaurant was that the owner was there to great us and he talked us up for awhile. When we took the picture we have with him, we didn't know he was behind us. He kind of just snuck up on us. I was very pleased to see him there. I think the picture came out really well. One thing to note is that they don't really eat sushi rolls there. It's almost all sashimi. I didn't really expect that.







The next day we spent our morning trying to find somewhere to watch the NCAA championship game. No dice. It wasn't easy when no one understood what we were talking about. Imagine trying to find a college basketball game in a foreign country where they don't speak english or watch basketball. Not good. We ended up having a beer in a seedy 24 hour bar. There were nothing but completely wasted people in there, which was funny because it was 1130 in the morning. As we were leaving we saw a group of businessmen looking to get nasty.



We were lucky and ended up being in Tokyo for their Cherry Blossom bloom. It only lasts for one week each year. The locals use the bloom as an excuse to get rowdy. They all head out to park and drink all day. It made for a great time with some fantastic views. The trees looked awesome.



Showing off my height dominance again. Love it.







We ended up going out that night and hit the town pretty hard. There wasn't a whole lot to note. The next morning we were all feeling it. We were also pretty damn tired of eating nothing but fish. We had seen a Wendy's the day before and decided we wanted to seek it out. It took us about 20 min of going the wrong way on the subway to get to it, but it was well worth it. America, Fuck yeah!



That night we met up with Lawrence (a CR member) and his gf to catch a Japanese baseball game. The Giants were out of town so we saw the Fighters play the Marines. The first thing I noticed was the field was pretty small. I don't know the exact dimensions but it was definitely smaller than an American field. It led to a ton of home runs in the game. There were hits that looked like a routine line drive to the outfield that would just carry and be a home run. I was fine with that, because the game was very interesting. I think the final score was 9-8.

One thing that drove me crazy about the Tokyodome was they didn't accept credit cards anywhere in the building. Ok, not the biggest deal. What was crazy was that on top of not taking CC's, they didn't have any ATM machines. We went in low on cash on were unable to eat dinner or buy any beer. Brutal!







The next day we packed it up and head out to Phuckett, Thailand. Updates to come.

I've had a hectic past few weeks and that's lead to me getting way behind on my blog. Let me go back two weeks to basically get you up to speed.

The last few years I've traveled a lot, but often times it's been to the same few places over and over (ie. Aruba and Vegas). I told myself this year that I would make a point to travel to some new places. Two opportunities came up recently that I felt I needed to take advantage of. First, Julia's parents have a timeshare in Mexico and she wanted to use it during her spring break (she's in grad school). The only time I had been to Mexico in the past was when I went to Acapulco in college. Acapulco was a piece of shit. I had a great time, but I wasn't really itching to get back to Mexico. I decided it would be a good idea to give the classier side of Mexico a chance.

We ended going to Playa del Carmen. Let's just say, it was quite a bit different than Acapulco. It ended up being a really nice area and I enjoyed myself a lot. We didn't do a whole lot besides just relaxing at the pool/beach. The one day we ventured off the resort, we hit up Chichen Itza. I'm very glad we did that, because it was amazing. If you aren't familiar with this site, it's a huge area of Mayan ruins. It also has a massive Pryamid. The pyramind is what it's best known for. It's basically a huge/crazy calander. Depending on the time of year, it will project different things with the sun. On the equinox it will use shadows to make it look like a giant snake is crawling down the side of the pyramid. Tens of thousands of people go each equinox to watch this. If you ever get the chance to go see this, I'd highly recommend it. My only complaint is that up until 3 years ago, you could walk to the top. They don't let you do that anymore. To be honest though, I completely understand and can't believe they ever let tourists climb it in the first place.



Here is the temple. You can see that on one side it has been reconstructed. The other is somwhat ruined.



Here is me in front of some random ruins.



Here is the view out of our hotel. I had to spend one day out there doing work. While I was working, this is what I was looking at. Not bad. Makes me want to move to San Diego or somewhere similar to have a view like this in my office. Right now I look out my windo at the rooftop of a McDonalds.



Here is me getting a tan. Actually, here is me getting a terrible burn. I burn like a motherfucker. It's a constant battle when I'm at the beach. I'm always layering on the sunscreen. I ALWAYS miss places though. It never fails that I have at least 2 streaks of read somewhere on my body. This trip it was a nice strip on my foot and my lower belly.

After Mexico, I spent the next week at home getting caught up and then ahead on CR work (except posting a blog of course, haha). This was in preparation for my current trip in Asia. We are here for two weeks and were hitting up Tokyo, Phucket, Bangkok, and Hong Kong.

The hardest thing so far has been adjusting to the time differenence. It's 14 hours ahead here. Basically, were in the future. It's pretty weird being half a day ahead of everyone back home. The night before we left, I stayed up as late as I could and only slept for about 3 hours. That allowed me to sleep a lot on the 15 hour plane ride over.

We landed at like 2pm. We got to our hotel at like 5 and then went out to get some sushi. I didn't realize it, but sushi seems to be more of an American thing. They mostly eat sashimi here. I like sashimi a lot, so that's not a problem. I pounded a shitload of sashimi that first night. We didn't have much energy after that so we walked around for awhile and ended up going to bed at like 11:30.

This blog is getting a bit long. It's our third day here. I'll update you on yesterday and today tomorrow.

Thanks to my readers for both giving me good advice on Asia and also joining the NCAA bracket (as far as I can tell, nobody did either). I take that back, nomo4life was nice enough to IM me with some great suggestions, but other than him, you guys suck.  I guess you guys just want to hear about dumb purchases and beautiful cars being destroyed. I'll be honest, I don't blame you.

Goddamn my car is looking fine now. All clean and shiny on the inside. It's so bright, I need to wear sunglasses just to look at the interior. I'm getting my defunct bumper fixed today. After that, that puppy will look brand new. I think the next step to improving my car is getting a sound system. At the moment a couple of the speakers are blown out and the neon has also decided it doesn't like loud music. If I turn the music up too loud, and I'm not talking very loud, the neon turns the music all the way down to silent. That means if I'm trying to bump a good DMX song, I have to continually keep turning the music back up. It's possible that a skinny white kid wanting to bump DMX in a red neon (with a sunroof!) isn't the best idea, but I don't care. It needs to happen.

Last night I "placed" a bunch of march madness bets. True to form, they didn't go too well. I lost 3 and tied the other bet. I logged on to Bodog at the end of the night to see the damage. I was shocked and pleased to see my account had not changed. Like a true dumbass, I must have not clicked the final submit button and that meant none of the bets were placed. I'll do my best to lose that money today.

One of my best friends is moving in two weeks. He's lived in the area for the past 15 years. He's also our first close friend to move far away from Chicago - he's going to Rhode Island. That means we probably won't be seeing much of him for awhile. With all this in mind, we decided to have a roast of him tonight. We're basically gonna get fucked up, make fun of him and all of our friends. It's not something I've done before and I'm really looking forward to it.

I don't know if it's my lack of blogging or just that I haven't been paying attention, but this ad in the corner is killing me today. Every 3 seconds I gotta see that shit eating grin on my face. I don't like it.

edit: I forgot one of the main things I wanted to blog about. I am a fucking moron and didn't fill out my bracket completely. I was looking it over last night and had the horrible realization that I had only picked one of the teams in the final game. I had chosen Memphis to make it and win, but I didn't say who they were playing. I don't have much chance to win now. Unbelievable. I can't believe I did that.

Once I got over the willies from the mold and got my head straight, I decided not to burn the car. Ok, I was never really going to burn the car. I did like the idea of driving it to the south side, leaving the keys in the car and running away as fast as possible. It would probably take all of 2 minutes to have it get stolen. That's if I didn't get killed for being the most gringo mother fucker around.

I've spent a lot of time in the last week working to remedy this problem. It turned out that there was a leak in a back taillight that was allowing water to get in at an alarming rate. What really sucks is I spent an entire afternoon shamwowing the shit out of my car and demolding it. The next day was when I took it into the shop. They had to use a hose to determine where the leak was. It was pretty logical really, but I hadn't thought that far ahead. My car was again filled with water. That meant I had to shamwow the shit out of it again. I did learn a lot about ripping up the interior of a car. It was easier than I thought it would be. Today is basically the end of the saga. The car is dry again and the leak is fixed. I took my car in to get detailed today. It should be really damn clean now. I'm pretty pumped to see it.

We have a Cardrunners NCAA bracket that we have setup. It's free if you want to join it. You can also join the sidebet pool if you want to get some money on the line. If you win, you get a free lesson from nutte or citizenwind. Pretty cool stuff. We're also giving away some gear and random other stuff.

I have a ton of traveling coming up and the preparation has been keeping me really busy. Next week I'm going to Mexico for a week. It's Julia's spring break so it was a good time to travel. We are going to Maya Riviera. It's the area with all of the Mayan ruins. I've always wanted to see those, so I'm pretty excited about that. 

In two weeks I'm going to Asia with Spud, Irockhoes, and Mr. Plastic. Checking out Asia is something I've been trying to do for a couple of years. It takes a lot of work to organize. We are mostly done with the legwork now, so that feels good. We're going to check out Tokyo, Hong Kong and Thailand (Phuket and Bangkok). Any suggestions on things to do is appreciated. We're going to be in each place for 4 or 5 nights so we should have plenty of time to do things. One question I have is about Sushi. Is it safe to eat sushi in Tokyo? I was advised not to, but fuck that. I love sushi and want to eat a lot of it while I'm there.