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.)