Oscar Night Number 77

Red Carpet at the 77th Academy Awards Cue the trumpets and Chris Rock, for it’s the evening of the 77th Annual Academy Awards, live(ish) from Kodak Theater in Los Angeles. I haven’t watched the Oscars for a couple of years, but most of the good shows were pre-empted tonight, so I figured I’d start tuning in again.

Travis in Boston is blogging a play-by-play of the Oscars, so I’m not even going to try and match him. I do recommend checking out his site for a good recap of everything, including the stupid commercials between the awards. (What, are these ads we’re watching – the Super Bowl ad rejects?)

I am impressed by a few parts, and we’re only sixty minutes into the 50-hour show: Morgan Freeman won an Oscar, and it’s about time. Cate Blanchett is incredibly versatile, and they’re really aiming for a lot of tear jerking montages during this show. I need a new box of tissues. And some popcorn.

Completely off topic: The creator of the Somerville Gates, “Hargo”, is now reaching Christo fame and is donating his work to museums around the country. Apparently he registered over 2 million hits on his site and was forced to take it down after only a couple of days. Absolutely hysterical, and congratulations on a great art installation!

And it Comes in a Shiny Aluminum Case

Stacked Poker Chips It’s on the Travel Channel almost every day.

You can practice it on TLC’s web site when you’re really, really bored.

The average jackpot in tournaments has grown tenfold in as many years, just due to the increase in popularity.

What is it? Well, it’s Texas Hold’em, of course. Perhaps the most fun of poker games (mainly because it’s more a community game than a looking-at-your-cards-and-weeping style game), Hold’em is pretty addictive when you’re actually playing. Like most games, it has its own lingo and the stats folks get a kick out of computing the odds of each hand, but it’s really not all that hard to learn.

Last weekend, Laura and I went to our friends Amanda and Jim’s house to play poker. (For background info, Jim is a numbers guy and loves to play for money, so we made him dumb it down for us and use fake cash, a.k.a. poker chips, instead!) It was such a blast and so addictive that I had to go out the next day and get a poker chip set of my own. And, in typical style, it’s not any ordinary poker chip set. Nay, this set comes in an aircraft-grade aluminum case lined with black padding and an eggshell lid. The chips are all 11.5g clay composite chips, which means absolutely nothing to me except that they feel cool and weigh 21 pounds in the case. Plus, I now have another excuse to have people over, which makes me happy.

Snowlar System

I happened across a great way for kids to get involved in the Homeland Security Advisory System.

I also wanted to share [what I think is] a creative and freakin’ hysterical comic strip from today’s paper by the talented Bill Amend. Enjoy!

FoxTrot: Snowlar System

Oops, I Broke It

I just upgraded to the newest version of WordPress (v1.5 – which is incredible, by the way), and my old template files seem to have gone kaput. While I work on fixing them, enjoy this temporary black template for my site. Any ideas what that photograph is at the top? I have no clue. And I’m apparently not the only one who has had fun with the upgrade!

Update: It’s all fixed now! But, I think I’m getting the itch to do a redesign…