The 2009 WSOP is beginning to air on ESPN. Here’s Bloomberg:

Salient points:

• 2008 had $180 million in prizes (this year’s did turn out bigger).
• The WSOP has the largest purses for any event in “sports”.
• This year they didn’t televise the $50k HORSE — the event which determines the best all-around player in the world — because it’s too complicated for the n00bs viewing public.
• All of the people on Bloomberg’s money list are previous main event winners — if you win that one tournament you rocket to the top of lifetime earners lists, and that doesn’t include sponsorships. Supposedly if you’re wearing a Full Tilt hat when you take down the main event that’s good for another $10 million.

The final table of the $10k NLHE main event will be televised live in November. I’ll have to have a party or something…

I’m a slightly-winning player. At some point my bankroll will be strong enough to play WSOP events (probably starting with the cheapest [~$1,000] events — needs about a $20k roll).

Anyway, this year’s coverage starts with the $40,000 NLHE — should be an interesting event because higher buy-ins tend to attract a higher percentage of pros.

The very first CD I ever got was Hush by Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin. My parents got it for me because of the cellist but I liked it because of the acapellist.

Via BB, here’s McFerrin showing the universality of music:

Here he is doing a kind of Jazz beatbox:

Flight of the Bumblebiz*:

* For people reading this in the future a bumblebee was a kind of insect that pollinated flowers. We decided that suburbs were more convenient than automatic pollination, so we killed them all. You’re welcome.

Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image.

L’escalier de Броненосец Потёмкин est incluse sous le title “Odessa”.

Un critique cinématographique dit:

et [sic] dire qu’il y a des cons qui se branlent sur cette merde…

C’est le Nouvelle Vague! Il est comme cela! Godard a L’oeil Jeune (ou “Jaune”)

(500) Days of Summer drops Friday, Michel Gondry’s new Marc Webb’s first feature film. They’re selling it as a romcom with atypically creative mise en scène.

The plot looks like a reverse When Harry Met Sally, which itself borrowed heavily from Annie Hall. That pedigree brings you pretty close to the beginnings of the circa-now incarnation of the genre (but see also Diarmuid and Gráinne, etc — the Irish invented romcoms). That’s a lot of hype for any story. Here’s hoping it doesn’t suck.

“New”, relatively different directors are interesting, and music videos — Webb’s done lots, including MCR’s Teenagers — are clearly the proving ground of The Yolked Eye* (eg, Cunningham, Gondry, Jonze).

Plus: Zooey Deschanel. Cute, and she pulls off the trick of sounding ditzy, which is hot.

* You can’t Google this, it’s mine. “Yolk” is intentional, a play on “yoke” and broken eggs, in turn a reference to the artistic idea of “breaking open the eye” — thinking visually in new ways — “seeing differently” — “directors who harness (yoke) the broken-open eye (yolk)” — add a little poetry to grout over the linguistic compression artifacts — “The Yolked Eye”.

Via BB, buddy director shot a music video for his fiancee’s new album on his iPhone 3GS. You know, because HD minicams are for the honeymoon.

The lesson: iPhone video recording (plus mount) is almost good enough. It’d certainly work for location scouting and as a possible quick-and-dirty moving storyboard.

Anyway, it’s clearly good enough for hobbyist filmmaking: Exciting!

I’m grokking The Ecstatic, review possibly to follow. Here’s Google Current’s Mos-in-Japan video, wherein he busts sixteen from Casa Bey a cappella:

Via DX, Royce Da 5’9″, Bizzy Bone, The Cunninlynguists, Twista, and the late J Dilla all have albums out this month. Remember Royce Da 5’9″ from Em’s tracks Bad Meets Evil and Scary Movie from back in the day?

Remix culture FTW. That video rules.

I love rapid-fire rap and toasting like Twista, Busta, and Damian Marley. Here’s Twista’s classic Slow Jams:

The censored word at the start of Twista’s verses is “cannabis”.

• 2009 Vansterdam Ganja Games and Marijuana Bowl
• The Vancouver Medicinal Cannabis Dispensary

*drools*

This afternoon I rowed down the gorge to glo on Jutland (warning: the website makes awful noise).

The first thing that strikes me about a restaurant is the approach, the grounds, the exterior. glo is surrounded by great public walkways, great public sculpture, and overflowing public trash cans.

I anticipate the excuse, “picking up garbage is the city’s job!” Well, the government is ruining your restaurant: Stop making excuses and busk the cans into your dumpsters.

I love the space glo is in, and hate the hip hop blasting over the front door. I’m a giant hip hop fan, but when the music is so loud it’s fuzzing your speakers you are doing it wrong.

I’d add something in the long entrance hallway as well, video screens or similar. The corridor is perfectly designed for busy waiting — don’t bore the people lining up to give you money. That said, my party was immediately seated on the patio on a sunny, beautiful, busy day.

The interior was almost empty, except for delivered cases of kitchen supplies which hadn’t been properly received littering the tables.

We were seated outside under pleasant shade, which is a neat trick. I’ve been red for a few days, first from the beach, second from a patio with poor brolly shades. Worse, however, are those patios that are over-shaded and get no sun. glo achieved a nice balance.

Then we got our menus.

Laminated, dilapidated menus with no graphic design didn’t fit the quality the rest of the establishment was aiming for. This is basic stuff: Use heavy paper with a standard design, possibly a cover, and reprint and recycle as needed.

Edifice: 2 of 5.

Our server introduced herself and recorded our drinks. My new trick has been to ask for an Arnold Palmer, which seems beyond most Victoria bartenders. She repeated the order and I could tell she had no idea what I wanted.

The server returned with an iced tea, coffee, and a question for me: “Okay, we’ve had a discussion. Some of us think an Arnold Palmer is a light beer with a shot, some of us think it’s iced tea with a shot. Which is it?”

Fail.

I changed my order — they didn’t have lemonade — and ended up waiting an unreasonable amount of time. The tea eventually showed up with a round of waters, nicely sweetened. Lots of iced tea in Victoria is over-sweet, which is confusing because Americans, our main tourist demographic, drink the stuff sugar-free.

The drink service foreshadowed the food: slow, and not quite right. The medium-rare steak in my party came medium, and our eggs benny had clearly spent some time under a hot lamp. Not only that but the English muffin — which the server called an “English McMuffin” — was burnt.

I had a chorizo goat cheese omelet with spinach, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, and disgustingly overcooked eggs: scorched rubber. The flavors and textures would have worked had the dish been properly cooked — one side effect of the excessive heat was to string out the spinach.

These cooking problems were all a symptoms of an overly-busy kitchen. Obviously a steak order takes time, and when you’re busy it might go out a touch over-done (and should then be sent back). Omelets and poached eggs take minutes, or seconds, to cook and should be done last. Even a busy person has enough time to send omelets back until they’re right.

The egg dishes tasted like they’d been started with the steak and then kept warm — unacceptable. Here’s how to properly scramble eggs, imagine your way to a properly cooked omelet from here:

None of the tables around us got food in a timely fashion. glo’s kitchen is either under-staffed, under-experienced, under-motivated, or under-skilled. Or maybe some combination thereof.

The food was served without an eye to presentation, which is disappointing because most of the dishes I saw on other tables were presented with a pseduo-haute flair.

Service: 1 of 5.

glo feels more than informal — it feels too relaxed, like the difference between a sweater and a sweatshirt.

The patio’s bamboo shades had been trimmed into uselessness and then left in place. The planters blocked isles and bottlenecked traffic. They’d been useless long enough that waiters were stepping over the boxes — so why even have them?

Combined with the trash cans, the tatty menus, the entryway speaker-fuzz, and the unstowed cooking supplies, the unthinking arrangement of the bamboo planters gave the place the feel of a restaurant without a manager. Or maybe with a tasteless one. In either case, that lack of care was reflected in the food.

That said, the space is great and the “hard” aspects of the design — those that are more resistant to a lack of care, like the building and internal fixtures — work well. And being in Victoria on a sunny day is pleasurable by default.

Ambiance: 2 of 5.

Overall, glo is fine for a relaxed time out. I feel as though I’ve panned it more than it deserves, like a nice-but-stupid dog you keep having to choke. Let’s put this review in the context of the reviews I haven’t written yet: glo is above-average for its class in Victoria.

But with a little discipline it could be so much more. It just feels unmanaged — no consistent vision, no steady hand.

Final: 2 of 5.

More clips praising enlightened ego gratification. First, from Rand herself, who wrote the screenplay adaptation of The Fountainhead:

Second, Gecko. Note that this speech is a perfect application of the laws of power. Gecko frames his corporate raid in terms of toppling corrupt management and helping the little guy. This speech skirts Rand so closely that I’m tempted to say it only differs by synonym:

Rand in her own words. Her insistence on the objective nature of reality is interesting, because her ideas apply equally well, or better, if you assume (as I do) that reality is totally subjective:

Ed Snider, the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers, the Philadelphia 76ers, the Wachovia Center, the Wachovia Spectrum, Comcast SportsNet, and some other teams and companies, on the effect Atlas Shrugged had on him. He starts with a good joke about employment:

Here’s part two, and here’s what he means by “the mystics of spirit and muscle”.

I agree that capitalism needs to be taught in school: High school though, in addition to university.