Quiznos has always been trying to force me to stop eating there. As tasty as the food is, I had a hard time dealing with their commercials. But the turkey bacon guacamole sandwich always won. Today when I went to get the ol’ TBG I realized that Quiznos got rid of the “regular size” and now go with 6″ and 12″ for $6 and $10, respectively. 6″ isn’t enough food. $10 is waaaay the fuck too much to pay for a sandwich at Quiznos. Assclowns.

I walked out and went to Subway instead. Now Subway completely fucked me when they went from the top triangle cut to the traditional pacman cut, but half the morons at Subway were incapable of cutting the triangle properly anyway. They made up for it by adding the itailan herb and cheese bread and by offering to microwave any sandwich for you. And much to my surprise, Subway is running a $5 for a 12″ sub special (in Manhattan at least). That’s a 50% discount (take note, asshats at Quiznos).

So Quiznos, enjoy not having my business indefinitely (or at least until I get really fucking sick of not eating guacamole every day and come crawling back). Fuck you, we’re not friends.

Note: Posts like this are going to have to fill the time until I can get the novel I wrote on my phone out (email connectivity issues from my phone). Seriously I didn’t forget about SXSW, I wrote about a million top three lists for it so I hope I don’t lose this email.

sxsw2008: over the top, originally uploaded by jacklevy.

Random girl laughs while I explain to her that Brian is about to kick my ass at arm wrestling.

…but I am ready to switch web providers.  For the second time in the four years I’ve been hosted here, they’ve managed to lose two weeks of updates. Now, I don’t update all the time, so it’s not a horrible problem, but if they would at least fucking admit that they lost my data it would be a different story.  Instead I’ve been arguing with them for over a week and I’ve gotten nowhere.

Fuck.  Still.  Fuck.

Now that that’s out of my system, I’ll start thinking about re-posting my SXSW updates, SXSW trip reports, Jesus Day AC trip, and other miscellaneous information no one wants to read.

South by Southwest is a music festival that is explicitly designed for people like me. It’s a marathon. Four solid days of drinking and watching music, but not in a smelly outdoor camping kind of way, in small clubs that are within walking distance of each other starting from whenever you wake up and going until 2am bar close.

Last year we really took advantage of the free drinks. This year I don’t think I had more than 3 free drinks and I want to say they were all Dewar’s and ginger at Red Eye Fly. Generally speaking with the day shows, if you have good food/drinks/giveaways then the shows are going to be terrible. That way it’s a no-lose situation. Either you see good music like I did this year, or you eat and drink all day for free.

Once again this year we continued the now established tradition of hitting Mugshots during the siesta time between the day and night shows for some good cheap drinking. This year involved no shots though, which probably a good thing because it meant that I made it all the way through the weekend without throwing up.

Write ups when I get home.

First Lonestar tallboy at Emo’s

Biggest asshole move of the weekend? Jumping the line at Burbon Rocks to see the Helio Sequence. TOTALLY FUCKING WORTH IT. And to my credit, I had no intention of jumping the line, I was just drunk and asking where I was supposed to stand when she scanned us in.

Nerd out celebrity sighting:

Aziz Ansari of Human Giant.

ROCK.

Once upon a time I used to play poker constantly. Somehow while playing 5-6 games of soccer per week and holding down a full-time job I could still find the time to play 15-20 hours of poker per week. Moving to NY definitely changed how much I could play, but UIGEA is what really fucked it up for me. I pulled out almost every dollar I had in an online site, which was a good thing as I didn’t get my entire bankroll stuck in the Neteller mess.

A month ago, I decided to make an effort to start actively playing again. I randomly hit a limit blogger tournament and while I can’t dig up any hand histories, I do have this gem from the chat:

MiamiDon: thats limit with idiots
MiamiDon: most horrible play I’ve seen in weeks, KQ

I’m the idiot. If I remember correctly I spiked a jack to hit an inside straight and crack his aces. It actually got much uglier than that as I pulled a number of suckouts to stay alive for a while. Eventually I lost an all-in when I was ahead as the universe does have a sense of humor.

Today I decided to go back to the drawing board. Back to where I made money in poker to begin with. Limit poker. Low stakes. Today’s results were ridiculously good averaging somewhere around 20BB/hr. I don’t expect that to hold up, but it feels good to kinda get into the swing of things again. We’ll see where this goes.

I realized that I hadn’t updated about the knee recently. Basically, the story is that it started hurting again last week. Like on the level that it was hurting at the beginning of the year. Not a good sign. I’m still doing the therapy and I have another appointment with the doctor in a couple weeks. We’ll see what he has to say about it then.

While in DFW visiting Jim and Adrienne, we had the unfortunate luck of running into a youth group at a restaurant on Sunday afternoon. They were the most obnoxious bunch I’ve ever seen, but I knew exactly what to expect from them. Adrienne was not so lucky, I guess she had never experienced them on the level that I have. So I thought I should write down the personality types for her future reference.

The “Cool” Guy - He is the guy that can play guitar. He wears the trendy clothes like the real cool kids at school, but sings songs about how much he loves God. The housewives at church secretly want their daughters to fuck him so they can live vicariously through them.

The Alpha Male - Easy to spot with wardrobe of I love Jesus t-stirts, he is generally short in stature but makes up for it with his obnoxiously loud voice and spastic antics. In terms of sheer annoyance, he is only matched by the Alpha Female.

The Quiet Boyfriend - He’s been dating the Church Lovin’ Girl since like first grade and just continues to show up because he thinks he will eventually graduate from hand-holding to sex. He’ll likely marry her when they turn 18 because he wants it so bad. He’s going to be sorely disappointed.

The Gay Guy - Easy to spot because he’s the one with a girl on each arm. He’s super-gay but continues to believe that church can fix him. The church girls love him because he’s so easy to talk to and will revel in the fact that they used to hang out with “one of those gays”, but will totally turn their backs on him when he comes out of the closet his sophomore year of college.

The Rebel Girl - She dresses like the cool kids and hates church but continues to show up to events for one of the following reasons: her best friend is super into church, her parents would give her a ton of hell if she stopped going, or she has managed to corrupt one of the church boys and they have sex/do drugs in church on a regular basis.

The Quiet Girl - Already dressing the part of the non-sexy librarian, she is difficult to spot because most the time you won’t even notice her since she almost never speaks. She’ll develop an uncomfortable relationship with her 15 cats when she’s 50 and still single.

The Alpha Female - She’s the most religious of all and has no qualms about telling you so at any moment. She is impossible to miss because her voice is piercing even when she speaks in a normal tone. You can never have a conversation because she won’t let you get a word in and if you do happen to you can rest assured she isn’t listening to you.

The Church Lovin’ Girl - She loves God, plain and simple. she’s easy to spot with her homemade WWJD bracelet and tons of other Jesus paraphernalia. If she is abnormally hot for the church crowd, she surely has a long-term boyfriend that she’s been dating since first grade, but she wants to save herself until marriage. She’ll either marry her high school sweetheart or turn into a crack whore by the time she’s 19.

Youth Minister Guy - You can’t miss the “adult” in the group. Most of the time, he’s going to be the mid-30s guy using hip slang from 5 years ago. He has a myspace page so he can “keep an eye” on the kids in the youth group and will likely be featured on an episode of “To Catch a Predator”. He lives by Wooderson’s quote from Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” He’ll be the Church Lovin’ Girl’s first customer when she breaks up with her boyfriend.

Yeah, yeah. I’m going to hell. Whatever.

Or alternatively titled, “AC by way of Philadelphia”.
For my Chinese New Year AC trip I hooked up with some friends from work who happened to be going as well, which was awesome because they let me stay in their room on Saturday night so I didn’t have to suffer the late night Saturday bus ride back. To make it even better, we all chipped in and got a rental car, so I didn’t have to ride the bus at all.

Unfortunately, we didn’t do so well in the directions department (obviously not my fault) and we ended up missing the garden state parkway and took the nj turnpike the whole way. Our driver was a fucking maniac though so even with a stop for coffee we still made it in record time. Gold. I headed over to the Borgata and played craps, blackjack and poker until I couldn’t see anymore. Aahhhh home.

Saturday I decided it was time to get some value out of these comps and splurged on the massage/spa. Totally worth it. Not the best massage I’ve ever received, but good nonetheless. It probably would have been better if I weren’t already 6 drinks in. I do have to air a complaint about the spa though. The spa would be awesome if it weren’t for all the full frontal nudity. Seriously guy-getting-out-of-the-shower, I don’t need you to tell me how awesome the spa is while you are drying off your balls. In fact, I don’t need to talk to you at all. Save the conversation for a time when you’re wearing clothes.

I actually played poker with no success this trip. I really need to get my shit together and start playing more poker. And better poker too, this is getting ridiculous. I’m not even winning online anymore. Spanish 21 did me well this trip though, so I managed to squeeze out a winning trip for once.

I was actually disappointed at the Asian turnout at the Borgata this year. Last year I spent Chinese New Year at Caesars, which draws a much bigger Asian crowd. The Borgata didn’t even run any specials for it, likely because their customer-base generally consists of a bunch of kids pretending to be guidos. I love the Borgata, but I think I’m going to have to go back to Caesar’s for CNY next year.