Anne Applebaum on my hero, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. David Frum has a good anecdote about her recent AEI event.

My brother liveblogged the Oscar telecast.

I thought for sure I had Robert Altman as my closing In Memoriam montage in Fred's Oscar pool, but I see I erased it and wrote Jack Palance instead. Oops. A shame because I was so golden with the tiebreaker, guessing 3:42 for a running time, and got seven out of the eight major categories right and a better-than-random six-for-fifteen on the minor categories.

Ben Franklin High is looking for donors to fund its annual "Close Up" trip to Washington, DC.

Me: I'm going to walk to the Giant and get toilet paper.
Slim: Can you get veal shank?
Me: You really want Giant veal shank?
Slim: ...
Me: I can go to the Whole Foods and get you veal shank.
Slim: But then you can't get toilet paper.
Me: They gotta have toilet paper at the Whole Foods.
Slim: Yeah, but it's eight dollars and made out of recycled aluminum cans. "Its abrasiveness reminds me of how we're raping Mother Earth."
[We pass an elderly gay couple and I nod hello.]
Slim: You know those people?
Me: They live on our floor.
Slim: We don't know anyone in our building.
Me: I was in the elevator this morning and a woman on our floor got on the same time I did and asked if I just moved in, and I told her I'd been living here five years.
Slim: It's because you're anti-community. You don't go to any of the community meetings. You're an atomized individual.
Me: I bowl alone.
Slim: Or you would if you ever left the house.

(Related: Jenna Bush used to date someone four doors down from me, and I only learned about it years later because I never noticed all the Secret Service people buzzing around.)

Sound editors' inside joke.

"The exclusion of non-human players like Bunny is another shameful example of the long history of injustices done by baseball’s racist policies. That black and rabbit players could only play against white players in non-sanctioned exhibition matches deprived the game of some of the best talent to ever play, and from what we’ve seen, robbed scientists of a chance to better study phenonema with wide applicability to questions of physics that could have greatly benefited all residents of the earth, be they human or Leporidae." [USS Mariner via Throwing Things]

Slim: Wow. She's not very attractive. Ralph Fiennes could do so much better.
Me: Yeah, but not in the next three hours.

I got eight-for-eight on the Sunni-Shiite test.

Pew thinks that I, like Dan Drezner, am an "Enterpriser", but I, like Dan Drezner, found the survey rife with false dichotomies, and I suspect that the they had to hammer my square peg into some round holes; Slim's isolationism is about the only place where she differed from me, and that got her placed as a "Liberal" somehow.

I usually like Tyler Cowen's recommendations, but found Threshold to be unwatchable drek, and gave up two-thirds of the way through the two-hour pilot. The dramatic conflicts seemed forced (why outsource a super-top-secret government operation through involuntary abductions? why are critical military operations being staffed by untrained scientists instead of red-shirt equivalents? why is a potentially infected operative being sent home where she requires lots of surveillance instead of being quarantined on base?), and the shadowy off-the-books government agency is either all-powerful or understaffed as individual plot elements require. (I won't mention the government office skyscraper with the full-window view of the Capitol on one side with the Washington Monument behind it.) Perhaps better acting and dialogue would have worked, though I am favorably inclined to Peter Dinklage. (Slim tells me I missed the most ludicrous line of dialogue: "Arlington's never backed up this time of night.") Or perhaps I just have a higher threshold (hee!) for tolerating science fiction.

That's not to say that I never like cheesy skiffy. Slim and I watched "Slither" on the plane last month on the portable DVD player I got her for the winter solstice, and found it entertaining.

This UChi Law "Fashion Court" thing is amusing (PG doesn't seem to get the joke that the institution exists only by reference in the filed papers), but what freaked me out is that I was wearing a shirt with vertical stripes of "brown, dark gray, and powder blue" while I read it. Maybe I have the same shirt as Professor Strahilevitz, though my shirt also has stripes of white and royal blue.

I had a successful poker night last night at a game in Alexandria. I had to adjust strategy in a few ways:

• I've gotten so used to playing no-limit, I had to make the adjustment into limit; one needs to play different hands, and make different types of bets and calls.


• I'm used to Las Vegas rules of hi-lo split without declaration. In games with declaration, the extra round of betting has to be accounted for. Plus, one has to play different hands. In Omaha, one can normally make calls on the assumption that if one is beaten on the high, there are still outs on the low (or vice versa). But if there is a declaration required, one has to commit to a strategy, requiring a different mix of hands.


• One player kept calling a game of hi-lo split without a qualifier. This seems a huge design mistake: it means that one plays A2 or A23 (and even A3) really hard with an early near-lock low with a free-roll for the high, and destroys pot odds for chasing high hands. (Thanks to the declaration rule, I was saved in a big pot when I was the only one who went low with my pathetic A23J when the 2 and 3 bricked on the board. It was nice pulling A23J in that hand when I announced before the deal that there were no circumstances I was going to call or make a pre-flop bet unless I had A2.) The only danger is being quartered when two A2s get in the hand and both pump up the pot to the benefit of the high hand.


• I hate the rule that a wheel (or other straight or flush) isn't a low. I almost cost myself a scoop one Omaha hand when it my 65 low turned out not to be a low, but fortunately it held up because of a 7 in my hand.


• I learned a new game, "Kenya," a weird combination of draw and five-card stud with three common cards. One starts with a five-card hand, keeps two to five cards, with all face down. The third card is dealt face up or revealed by players who kept more than two cards; then a round of betting; then a common card; then a fourth card; then a second common card; then a fifth card; then a final common card; then a declaration for a seventh round of betting, and players make the best five-card hand. It took me a while to develop a strategy for this game (and I cost myself a lot of money one hand by paying for several rounds of betting to see if my 65 low could compete against two made 64s).

Puzzle-loop: makes Sudoku look easy.

Mourn for our future: Ivy-League writing.

Slim: When you find my cold dead corpse in the morning, it's because of the corn fungus.
Me: Oh, come on. You liked the huitlacoche.
Slim: Are you kidding? Corn fungus. I could start hallucinating and my tongue can roll into the back of my throat any minute now.

...

Me: I saw your clerkship W-2. I thought the government had done more double-dipping on your social security taxes. You're not going to get that much back in tax refunds.
Slim: Are you kidding? What about the $1000 I gave to IJ?
Me: You get like $250 back for that.
Slim: Only $250?
Me: What did you expect? Dollar-for-dollar government reimbursement of charitable contributions?
Slim: That's not a very good return. Like negative 75%.

Crustacean without the crust; that Whole Foods methodology doesn't seem quite as humane as first advertised. But I'm not a big lobster fan to begin with, so perhaps I'm just biased.

(Update: Pure coincidence. I honestly hadn't seen that post when I wrote this one. But, hey, it's cool that we're impressed by the same stuff.)

Las Vegas monorail seeks to double down on 12.

Emily Yoffe tries the OCD calorie-restriction diet, and isn't impressed. Lisa Walford's face as a 50-year-old isn't an effective advocate for the diet.

Situation: about a third of a way through a three-table free on-line tournament; most of the maniacs have already been knocked out, and people are playing surprisingly seriously for a free tournament. I have an average stack of about 25 BB, and am in the BB, blinds 50-100.

Folded to loose cutoff with average stack, who calls. Button is chip leader, playing a lot of hands, and raises to 600. I have AKo. The last time I went all in I had AKs.

Do I raise all-in or just call?

I used TurboTax online for my 2005 taxes, and was told that I could transfer information to the hard-copy software for my 2006 taxes. You can, but there the instructions on how to do so are not in one place. Here's how, after an hour of trial an error:

1) Log into TurboTax Online.
2) Select "Start A New Return" to create a 2006 tax return.
3) "Continue" through the "What's New" propaganda.
3) Select "Tranfer from Last Year" to transfer your 2005 online information into your 2006 online tax return.
4) On the left-side menu, select "Other Options" and then "Download my tax data."
5) Press the "Download my tax data" button to download your tax data.
6) Select "Save to disk."
7) Log out of TurboTax Online.
8) Open TurboTax software.
9) In the "File" menu, select "Open Tax Return" and open the file you just saved.

Ta-da. A two-step process in only nine steps. At least, for the first time in the Bush Administration, the software fixed the bug that didn't give you the option of deducting investment expenses against dividend income. They also seem to have fixed the gap in their software that didn't account for the tax code deductions for hybrid vehicles, a few years too late for my benefit.

I have a host of deadlines and speeches and events over the next five weeks (including this one), plus have already laid out money to attend a poker tournament in Las Vegas later this month that compresses my schedule further; blogging on this site will be light to non-existent for a few weeks.

And I don't care what the NFL says, my party Sunday is a Super Bowl party.

Genpets.

	January 2007	2007 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	4.3%	4.3%	14.4%	16.5%
S&P 500	1.5%	1.5%	14.5%	13.6%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	0.4%	5.3%

Buy: AES @ $21.59; ATU @ $47.26

Sell: half of KMX @ $55.15

A good chunk of this month's profit came from KMX; I should offer a newsletter service that lets people know when I sell stock, so that they can get in on it. (BBI is up a painful 70% since I sold it.) KMX went up another 5% after I rebalanced my portfolio. AES got immediately hit by Venezuelan confiscations, which I mistakenly thought were already priced into the stock. PIR had a good month, as did FLWS; CBH, not so much.

In Slate, Kim Masters makes a point similar to the one I made when Slim and I saw LKoS. (Many spoilers.)