lolspeaks.com

A little while ago, I made the following observation:

“Poker is a game of incomplete information.� People wager money, sometimes a whole lot of money,� that their ability to interpret incomplete information is better than the next person’s.� Nonetheless, collectively poker players (at least those who inhabit Poker World) do a miserable job of reading between the lines. ”

Well, now I have an excellent example of exactly such a miserable job.� Someone named Bernard Chapin (also known in Poker World as ChicagoY) has seen fit to publish a piece deriding my son and daughter-in-law on a website called mensnewsdaily.com http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/01/16/so-i-married-a-radical-feminist/.� He has taken� material derived from an interview with my son and gleaned from the archives of Poker World, interpreted his incomplete information–and gotten it all wrong.

Mr. Chapin writes:

“Before going any further, I must note that her name isn’t actually “Mrs. Miller.” Predictably, this former Woman’s Studies major refused to change her name after marriage, and even gloated in a post about her plans to name her kids something other than Miller. Those paragraphs were quite amusing and I’d love to quote from them, but I cannot as they were deleted over the summer after causing her husband considerable embarrassment.”

What makes Mr. Chapin think that anything Elaine wrote� embarrassed her husband?!� And it’s not HER plan to use an assortment of family surnames for my grandchildren-yet-to-be-born; it’s THEIR plan.� My take on that idea is whatever, but I have supplied them with possible surnames from Edward’s side of the family.� Personally I changed my name to Miller when I married, and I didn’t jettison it when I unmarried because I like the ease and anonymity and unethnicity of it, but, as I said, whatever….

But this interchange is what really motivated Mr. Chapin’s article:

“What really “got her goat” was that she found my query about Mr. Miller’s stint on the little screen to be homophobic. She also thought that it would have been unwise for her husband to turn down any type of free publicity. Homophobic? Let’s take a look at exactly what I said:

Allow me to ask you a final, non-poker related question. Your bio mentions that you appeared on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, where “the Fab Five transformed [you] into a hip, clean cut television personality with Buddy Holly glasses.” I cannot help but ask, why would you do that show? Who cares about fashion and being trendy? It seems to me that with your physics background, work at Microsoft, brilliance at poker, and voluminous publications you’d be a continent above that stuff.”

Let’s set the record straight on this.� The Queer Eye thing was MY idea.� I saw the call for� potential “straight guys” from Vegas, and I thought that Edward’s “story” would interest the producers–which it did.� My motivation in making the suggestion to Edward was strictly free publicity for the books, because the publisher depends solely on word of mouth through Poker World to do his marketing–and word of mouth is not appropriate for a beginner book like Getting Started in Hold’em. And, in my opinion at least, word of mouth alone does not generate the maximum sales� potential for the more advanced books.� Mr. Poker Publisher has repeatedly indicated that he feels that the quality of his books speaks for itself and no further speaking is necessary, but, hey, even Mercedes Benz advertises.� Interest in fashion or home decorating or fine wining and dining really had nothing much to do with it.� I must say, however, that judging from the large number of posts on Poker World about fashion, food (both cooking and restaurants), wine and spirits, and decorating bachelor pads, the answer as to who is interested in such things is young men who have made a lot of money playing poker and want access to the “finer things,” if only they could figure out exactly what the finer things are.� And since when is anyone above looking good, eating well, and living in attractive surroundings?� Having a physics degree, being a former employee of Microsoft, and playing poker do not condemn one to live forever like a hobo.

Throughout the remainder of the article, Mr. Chapin paints my son as the victim of a “dworkinite” wife.� Besides setting up Andrea Dworkin as a sort of straw woman (I think it is fair to say that her ideas are way out there even among radical feminists), Mr. Chapin’s argument seems to assume that Edward has had feminism rammed down his throat by his wife–to his everlasting detriment.� ‘T’ain’t so.� As a matter of fact, he and Elaine are in very close agreement on the majority of political issues.� As it happens, he is in much closer agreement with her than he is with me.

Judging from the comments appended to Mr. Chapin’s piece, the audience for Men’s News Daily is primarily men who are so insecure that they have imported wives from foreign cultures in which women are trained to be docile and obedient.� They are by their own admission unable to cope with the� educated and assertive women who grew up in the decades since the start of the women’s movement.� On the other hand, my son was reared by an educated and assertive woman, and he has no problem with a woman who has a mind and mouth of her own.� If Mr. Chapin had a pair, he wouldn’t be so threatened by “feminists,” and we would be spared his misogynistic rants. (Even some of the poker dudes found Mr. Chapin’s misogyny to be over the top: “this article would be a lot better if the author wasn’t an arrogant misogynist” and “I hate the mysoginy[sic] dripping from your article.”)

I am a devotee of Boston Legal for a number of reasons, including my obsessive interest in Candice Bergen’s aging process� (she was at Penn when I was, but she flunked out).� Since she is about a year younger than I am, I also appreciate the fact that her character is depicted as a sexually active and sexually attractive woman with a horde of younger admirers.

At any rate, last night’s episode had Alan Shore (James Spader) and Denny Crane (William Shatner)� take a road trip to New Orleans to defend a doctor on trial for allegedly euthanizing several patients during the terrible week following Katrina.� The plot was based on the case of Dr. Anna Pou of Memorial Medical Center who has been indicted on similar charges.

First of all, when will the makers of movies and tv shows ever learn that New Orleanians do not have “southern” accents?� I spent the whole hour cringing at the Mississippi syrup flowing out of the mouths of supposed native New Orleanians.� (BTW New Orleanians also do not have “Cajun” accents and do not pepper their conversations with “Cher” either.)

As one might expect, there were lots of scenes of the French Quarter, open for business as usual, the New Orleans� entertainment cliche.� One scene showed dirty-old-man Denny in his hotel bed, surrounded by a cluster of young ladies of the evening who just “followed him home.” (Poker Maven, eat your heart out!)� This scene, with the young ladies and Denny topsy-turvy on the bed, led to the episode’s chief insight:� in New Orleans up is down.� Whatever else the show got wrong, they got that right.

Inspired by that insight, Alan Shore’s closing argument referenced a recent NYTimes article (which I happened to have read) about the stress and trauma that African elephants are undergoing due to the negative impact� of poaching and loss of habitat� on traditional elephant social structures.� The elephants are reacting to this stress by raping and murdering rhinos, clearly an appropriate metaphor for those of us who are struggling to survive Katrina.� So now we know, a little rhino rape here and there is only to be expected from those who have endured the stress and trauma of Katrina.

Anyhow the doctor is acquitted, and my guess is that if ever Eddie Jordan brings Dr. Pou to trial (I think he would be a fool to do so), she will be, too.� She has had the outspoken support of much of New Orleans’s medical community, and, if the comments on the Times-Picayune website are any indication, of much of the community at large.� The only voices against her seem to be Charlie Foti, the once criminal sheriff of Orleans Parish and the incumbent attorney general of Louisiana, who is a whiz at generating self-aggrandizing publicity and who investigated the case (which wasn’t his business to do), and the families of the deceased who are under the delusion that their desperately ill relatives could have survived the horrible conditions if only they had been left alone.

The issue is whether it is murder to give� dying patients sedation to relieve terrible suffering, knowing that� it might hasten their deaths.� Is that the same thing as euthanesia which is not legal in Louisiana?� I personally don’t think so.� I know that when I was in the throes of my heart attack in the Netherlands, I was asked for permission to have an injection of a clot-dissolving drug which carried a risk of causing a brain hemorrhage and almost immediate death.� I was conscious and able to give informed consent, and I did.� Knowing what I know now–that the clot-dissolving stuff doesn’t work and the proper treatment is an immediate angioplasty rather than screwing around wasting precious time� with drugs–I would have said no.� But would it have been murder if I had been unconscious and unable to give consent, and a decision had been made to try to save me with� the drug anyway, and I had had the brain bleed and died?� I would also say no.� Dr. Pou had no illusions that the sedative injections� might have some� curative value.� She was only trying to relieve unendurable suffering, and if the relief of suffering turned out to be the permanent kind, well, so be it.

One webcam, een grote pik, twee grote tieten, 6000 miles, two orgasms–lekker.

Poker is a game of incomplete information.� People wager money, sometimes a whole lot of money,� that their ability to interpret incomplete information is better than the next person’s.� Nonetheless, collectively poker players (at least those who inhabit Poker World) do a miserable job of reading between the lines.

Over the holidays, a friend and I hosted a reunion party at the Modern Language Association convention� for our colleagues, all tenured senior faculty at the University of New Orleans and all looking for jobs, any jobs,� elsewhere.� � All the job-seekers reported interviewers concentrating on why someone would want to give up� his/her tenured job and go elsewhere.� The reason seems to us to be screamingly obvious.� Why would anyone need to ask?

I think the whole issue of New Orleans is a touchy
one.� The city keeps saying that everything is OK and
open for business, which is� true as far as the Quarter
goes, but people then think the rest of the city is OK too.
And they don’t have a clue as to how thoroughly
the infrastructure has been destroyed and what it
means to live in a city without an infrastructure.
Also they seem to think that we, the displaced New Orleanians,� should spend the rest of our lives* without� reliable utilities� and other amenities of modern civilization enjoyed universally throughout the developed nations,� being heroic pioneers rebuilding the city, while the rest of the� country blithely experiences business as usual.�

I think the situation also arouses both guilt and
fear.� There was a recent� column in the NYTimes about
the cosmetic “maintenance” required by middleaged
women, and the point was made that without eight hours
a week of attention to appearance, a middle class,
middle aged woman would look like a bag lady:

“These days, I find I spend a fair amount of time thinking about who I am going to be as I get older.� The big picture is kind of scary. Saving for my
children’s college! Saving for retirement! Sometimes,
when I forget to take my preventive migraine meds
(low-dose Elavil; I highly recommend it), I wake up at
3 in the morning, convinced that I am going to become
a bag lady.

Other friends, I know, share the same fear. The terror
of falling off the rails, of failing utterly, of being
unable to care for yourself, not to mention your
family is, I suspect, relatively widespread. It’s
certainly present for [Nora]� Ephron.
‘I am only about eight hours a week away from looking
exactly like that woman,’ she wrote of her maintenance
regime, contemplating the sight of a local homeless
woman, ‘with frizzled flyaway gray hair I would
probably have if I stopped dyeing mine; with a
potbelly I would definitely develop if I ate just half
of what I think about eating every day; with the dirty
nails and chapped lips and mustache and bushy eyebrows
that would be my destiny if I ever spent two weeks on
a desert island.’ I believe her concern is not just
skin-deep. I think she’s afraid of losing control and
of becoming a throw-away person.

Our society is full of throwaway people of various sorts; all those people we don’t deem worthy of decent health care or education or housing or political
representation. When you hear stories about
middle-class people who fall into bankruptcy because
of, say, medical bills or the costs of caring for an
elderly relative or, often enough, divorce, you
realize that, unless you’re very, very wealthy or
very, very lucky, you are really only one or two bad
strokes of luck away from falling off the rails
yourself. I feel this quite acutely. Which is why, I think, many of us – even women like Ephron, who on the surface of things has no right to
such worries as she strides past the homeless on her
way to her biweekly blow-dry – have our own inner bag
ladies. They surface in the dead of night, when the
dog barks and there’s no Ambien.

The bag lady threatens. She’s a menace. And we need
whatever armor money can buy.”
� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � —-Judith Warner

That’s it.� We’re middleclass people who got thrown
off the rails (well, pushed off by the Army Corps of
Engineers) and have overnight become homeless,
throwaway bag people.� It is sooo much less
threatening to construe this mess solely in terms of
poor black people in the Lower Ninth, who, in Barbara
Bush’s estimation, didn’t have anything to lose
anyway, than to think of the comfortably middleclass
who overnight lost everything and are still homeless
after 17 months.� If it happened to US, it could
happen to THEM, and why would� THEY want to be reminded
of their vulnerability?� And they have watched the
federal government which was the source of our problem
simply throw us away.� There must be something very
wrong with us since we don’t have our lives back on
track after 17 months….

So here we are,� a� very affluent colleague� permanently crippled and forced into early retirement (or so I gather) because of lack of health care after
Katrina,** almost all of us without a permanent address
(and now the government is� even taking away the miserable FEMA trailers), without political representation because we
are scattered all over the country–the Louisiana
delegation doesn’t give a damn about us in the
diaspora and certainly our interests do not matter to
the politicos in whose districts we have landed
(except of course for the mayor of Houston who is
blaming all of his city’s problems on Katrina people).
We can’t take care of ourselves, although the country
thinks we should be able to, because we are being
asked to repair an entire metropolitan area by our
individual unsupported and uncoordinated efforts, thwarted at every turn by bureaucratic red tape and profit-bloated insurance companies.� And
who in the rest of the country wants to think about
all that? So they have convinced themselves there is
no problem, and if there is, they don’t want to be
forced to acknowledge it.� And tenured faculty out
beating the bushes desperately looking for any job rub
their noses in it.� So they pretend that they can’t
imagine why we wouldn’t want to stay in New Orleans.

I was at synagogue the other day, and I was introduced
to some woman who wondered why I was here temporarily
and looking for a place to live.� Why didn’t I go back
to New Orleans?� I would think it’s obvious–it costs a fortune
to live there in third-world conditions with little medical
care and armed villains roaming the streets
unrestrained by a non-existent court system,
unprotected from normal afternoon rains, never mind
another hurricane.� How could a retiree not in best of
health–or even a healthy person in mid-career–contemplate going back for even a single moment?� But it clearly isn’t obvious…..

�

*For example, every single water and sewage pipe in the city is broken.� The estimate is that it will take at least 25 years to tear up every street, replace every pipe, and repave every street.� And that’s if sufficient� funds are available and work gets started at once.� Meantime I am told that on rainy days, geysers of raw sewage erupt from manholes in certain neighborhoods.� Electrical service, never entirely reliable, has become very iffy, and there is flood water in the natural gas pipes, interrupting the flow of gas and leaving people without heat and hot water–and our fabled restaurants without functioning burners and ovens.

�

**As I understand it, my colleague and her husband did not evacuate before the storm, and in the chaos afterward, she broke her ankle and was unable to get timely� medical attention.� She had to flee with her untreated injury.� Since then she has had several surgeries, but her ankle has not healed properly.� �

�

I spent the time between Christmas and New Year’s at the Embassy Suites in center city Philadelphia.� As it happened the Modern Language Association, which was scheduled to have this year’s meeting in New Orleans, canceled and rescheduled in Philadelphia.� And since I am now living in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, I decided to attend with the sole purpose of reuniting with my friends.� Indeed I managed to avoid every single session and symposium and cash bar and even the book exhibit, seeing as I no longer care what the latest freshman comp text looks like.� (For a sense of what the annual MLA convention is like, read David Lodge’s Small World.)

My closest friend and I had decided to have a party–hence our location in the Embassy Suites.� We invited all� our displaced colleagues (well, all the ones we like) as well as our fellow medievalist friends. A trip to the fabled Reading Terminal Market, which is just as wonderful as I remembered it from my childhood and from my long ago commute on the Reading Railroad, provided the cheese and crackers (and a hoagie–which I am not supposed to eat and which I couldn’t bear not to have), and my friend tromped to the nearest state store for the wine.� After years in New Orleans and Las Vegas where alcohol is sold (and given away) everywhere 24/7, it is a shock to return to the iron monopoly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and its strict liquor laws.

In any case the party went very well–everyone we wanted to see and no one we didn’t.� Of the people from New Orleans, after 16 months, exactly one of us has a permanent address and a secure position for next year.� All the rest of us are in limbo in temporary quarters with no clue as to where we will be and what we will be doing in the coming academic year.� If this is the case with people who have PhDs and tenured faculty positions, what can life be for the many poor and poorly educated displacees scattered all over the country?� The sad truth is that New Orleans is currently unlivable, and it will be decades before that changes, if it ever does.� Even the people currently squashed into the small inhabited areas are finding that daily life is unendurable and are seeking to leave, even if, like me, they have nowhere in particular to go.

The MLA convention is the major job market for academic positions in English and foreign languages.� � My (all-suites) hotel was a favored site for interviews.� Typically the interviews are held in someone’s hotel bedroom, and everyone (including me) who went through the hiring process before sexual harassment became an issue has stories to tell about inappropriate behavior induced by the bedroom setting.� So suites are better.� I have a lot of experience stretching over a couple of decades� in the MLA meat market, many years looking for a job and many years searching for candidates to hire.� � So� I spent a fair amount of time hanging around the hotel lobby people-watching as the candidates, eager and anxious, made their way to their interviews and returned to collapse into the arms of their support groups.� One thing is for sure–the faculties of American universities are on track to be more diverse than they are currently.� In one hour I chatted at random with six candidates, only one of whom was born in the US.� The others were from Senegal, Germany, Argentina, and two different Asian countries, which, judging from the names of the candidates, were not China, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, any place in the Indian sub-continent, Vietnam, or Thailand.� However, ethnic diversity notwithstanding, 95% of the candidates were wearing black suits and white shirts/blouses.� Long ago everyone wore tweed, and in the more recent past it was de rigeur to appear dressed to hike the Appalachian trail.� I know from my years on the search committee that after several days of interviewing, all the candidates mush together, so if I were a candidate I would at least wear a red blouse in hopes of standing out amongst the penguins.� I would also wear something that fit.� Fellows on the chubby side, forget the pants with double pleats that break over your tummies.� Ladies, avoid jackets that hit just at the broadest part of your butts and draw a horizontal line that says, “Look how fat my ass is.”� Well, I hope all the eager young things get what their hearts desire, and if their hearts are smart, they will desire something other than an academic career.

The highlight of my holiday was dinner at Lacroix which is every bit as good (or better) than Le Bec-Fin (at least as I remember it from thirty-odd years ago) at about half the price.� Lacroix is one of those places that serves tiny bits of amazing food artfully arranged on enormous square plates with a lot of “drizzles” filling up the space.� You have your choice of any three, four or five plates, served in any order, each plate holding about four ounces of food.�

The meal started with an amuse bouche of about a teaspoon of fish paste with a tiny crispy waffle.� The first plate I chose was beets.� This consisted of a plop of pureed beets, a tiny cylinder of roasted red beet, three little triangles of roasted golden beets, three circles of raw� candy cane beets which would have been better cooked, and some walnuts scattered in the drizzle.� All of the cooked beets were very good if you like beets, which I do, but the raw beets were, well, adorable to look at, but….My second course was a seafood soup which was incredible and unlike anything I have ever tasted before.� Now, I spent 25 years in New Orleans, and I am accustomed to excellent seafood soups, seafood gumbo, corn and crab soup, oyster and artichoke, lobster bisque, but this was something else.� First, it was served foamed like a latte.� It came with a little piece of salty toffee candy, and the idea was to stir in the candy until it melted.� Whoever had the idea to season a seafood broth with salty toffee was a genius. Amazing!� The soup was accompanied by about half a tablespoon of lobster ceviche.� My final plate was a small slice of spiced duck breast and a piece of squash the size of a postage stamp.� It’s a good thing that there was plenty of excellent bread.� I had two half slices of olive bread.� Finally the dessert was included whether you had three, four, or five plates.� There was a� dessert that featured beets, but since I had already had beets, I let that go, even though I was very curious. � I chose the ice cream selection which was five scoops the size and shape of pullet eggs served in a dish the size and shape of Noah’s ark.� The flavors were bitter chocolate, vanilla bean, Earl Grey, chestnut, and I don’t remember the fifth.� (Miller’s Law: in any series n, I will remember n minus 1.) Finally there was a tiny chocolate filled with hazelnut, a butter cookie the size of my pinkie fingernail, and half-postage stamp size lime gelatin candy dusted with sugar (on the order of aplets and cotlets if you have ever had those).� Plenty of alcohol was consumed, but not by me.� I stuck to ice water and decaf coffee.� Not surprisingly I did not feel bloated or overfull after dinner, but I also didn’t get hungry in the middle of the night.

Nowadays I always check restaurant menus to see what is available for vegetarians.� Alas there were only two suitable dishes–the beets and a wild mushroom salad.� Since it takes three plates to make a minimum meal, what was a vegetarian supposed to do? Eat one of the plates twice? Have the cheese service at a considerable extra charge?� Eat two desserts?� I didn’t ask, so I don’t know.� Too bad a restaurant of that caliber has little to offer the many veggie folk out there.

So that was my holiday.� Hope you enjoyed yours….�

�

To return to the story of� Poker Maven and his chest-thumping pride in being able to gain sexual access to very young and very vulnerable females by employing the simple� stratagem of� paying their bills and giving them a roof over their heads….

In response to Poker Maven’s expressed predilection� for waifs, someone raised the question of why he� wouldn’t want to� consort with more intellectual women.

His answer, and I am quoting:

“Alphabetically:

Albert Einstein

Ed Miller

Arnold Snyder”*

The presumed intent of this response was to give examples of men who have been brought low by being foolish enough to involve themselves with “intellectual” women.� (I used the scare quotes because the thread was rife with perplexed little emoticons, apparently expressing disbelief that there is such a thing as a female intellectual.)� Another thread contributor appended his own list: Adam, Samson, and David (with the Bathsheba incident in mind).� This second list was� of particular interest to me because it is exactly the same list that Sir Gawain adduces in his misogynistic rant after he learns that he has been set up by Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Castle.� Someone in Poker World has been doing his reading.

I will leave Arnold Snyder out of� this because I know zip about him and his wife and his ostensible “brought-lowedness,” but what about the others?� Albert Einstein’s first wife was herself well educated in science, to the point that there is controversy as to whether she did or did not contribute to his scientific work, and if she did, to what extent.� Now, they were ultimately divorced, so we can assume that their marriage was not unalloyed bliss, but did Mileva bring Albert low?� I would say not, because his paradigm-shifting papers were written and published during his marriage.� It is not as if he did great things before taking up with Mileva, and then she suddenly turned him into a stumblebum.

As for Edward, I gather that in Poker Maven’s mind, the severing of Edward’s ties with Poker World is (a) a matter of professional ruination and (b) all the fault of the intellectual woman he married.� Both of these propositions are simply untrue, and Poker Maven finally� had� to resort to “Just kidding!”� As for the other list that goes back to Gawain’s rant, it could be argued that Adam and Samson were indeed brought low by the machinations of intellectual women (Eve,� for example,� was specifically tempted by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil), but all Bathsheba did was take a bath in the privacy of her own home, unaware that she was seen by a Peeping David who was doing what he wasn’t supposed to do where he wasn’t supposed to be doing it.

So much for Poker Maven’s� contention that brilliant men are brought down by intellectual women, an idea that, despite its lack of supporting evidence and indeed its� inherent foolishness, nonetheless resonated with � a significant percentage of the denizens of� Poker World.�

When I first became involved with Poker World,� I was sure that� its members’� constant characterization of women as hos and bitches and skanks and sloots, totally lacking in reason and intellect, was merely the lockerroom bravado of immature male adolescents, endlessly striving to become skilled PUAs (Pick Up Artists),� whose sexual experience was nonetheless primarily confined to� jerking off to internet porn.� They couldn’t REALLY believe their misogynistic drivel, could they?

But the more I read of what the poker dudes have to say, the more I am convinced that misogyny is a cherished part of their core beliefs, not that this is anything new under the sun (see Jankyn and his Boke of Wikked Wyves).� How else to account for the venom and vitriol they are still spewing� all over� my daughter-in-law a good half year, an eternity in internet time,� after she left Poker World?� According to the poker dudes, she was a loud, confrontational troll, illogical and always running off at the mouth before she got her facts straight, in short, to use a favorite phrase, “bat-shit crazy.”� Even if she were all of those things (and I am not saying she is), Poker World is full of poker dudes who run their mouths without having a clue, who are loud and confrontational, who troll and are generally obnoxious.� If Poker World purged itself of all such poker dudes as it purged itself of Elaine, Poker World would be a mighty quiet place.

Now Elaine is in fact� an outspoken woman who likes to stir the pot and is more than capable of being deliberately provocative.� And so am I.� (That’s Edward in the background whistling, “I wanna a girl just like the girl….”) But Elaine pushed all the poker dudes’ buttons, and I, saying many of the same things and explicitly expressing contempt for the misogynistic ravings of so many of the poker dudes, didn’t.� Why the difference?� I can only guess it’s because I am a crone, and we crones finally� get to say whatever we want because no one takes anything we say seriously anyway.� But Elaine is in her prime childbearing years, and that’s a different story.

My conclusion is that the poker dudes (representative perhaps� of the majority of� men?) are simultaneously� absolutely convinced that the mere possession of penis and testicles renders them automatically superior to all who lack those anatomical features and desperately afraid that it doesn’t.� Any woman who threatens this precarious balance of fear and loathing cannot be tolerated.� � Thus Elaine must be burned at the stake.� � Thus Poker Maven, a 58-year-old man who is fixated on the SAT score he earned when he was 18, does not dare to allow a grown, intelligent, educated woman into his life–God (or rather There-Is-No-God), what if she had better SATs than he did?–and focuses his sexual desires on very young, very vulnerable women who cannot possibly give him a run for his money.

Happily for intellectual women, there are self-confident� men who enjoy women with brains, but that’s a topic for another day.

�

*For those not familiar with Poker World, Arnold Snyder is a writer on gambling topics who had the chutzpah to challenge something Poker Maven wrote, and his wife had the temerity to chime in.

I have been quiet the last number of days.� I’ve been doing some holiday stuff like writing notes on Christmas/New Year’s� cards to all my New Orleans friends now scattered throughout the country.� All the notewriting aggravated the repetitive motion problem in my hand (ouch!), and I have limited my keyboarding/mousing as a result.� I am also feeling the effects of the short days leading up to the solstice.� After so many years in the deep South, I find that I� am really bothered by the dark afternoons.

Next week should be better.� I’ll be alone until the day after Christmas (which is not my holiday anyway), but the rest of the week I will have reunions with almost all my old friends (the ones on this side of the Atlantic anyway), and I am looking forward to that.� My daughter-in-law sent me an e-card today, wishing me a “Happy Challahday” to the tune of “Superstition.”� LMAO

Since I don’t give a damn what Bill O’Reilly says, I will wish everyone joy on� his/her preferred� seasonal holiday and a good civil new year.

While to some extent the impetus for this blog derived from posting I had done (and no longer do) on a major poker site, I am doing, at my son’s suggestion, what many many friends have asked me to do over the years–write about my adventures.� It is merely a coincidence that something was going on in Poker World that I wanted to comment on and relate to some of the aspects of my own life.� And truth be told, I was not pleased with the crack Poker Maven took at my son, although my son can certainly take care of himself, both in words and pictures.� And, yes, Majorkong at AdvantageGamblers is really my son.

While I may from time to time (or even often) respond here� to subjects brought up in Poker World threads, that is not the main purpose of my blogging, nor are poker young’uns my main perceived audience.� Y’all are welcome to read and comment, even toolishly as someone put it, but it’s not all about you.� You are not “supposed” to read it (your professor didn’t assign it and it won’t be on the test), your sensibilities–such as they are–are not being catered for, and if you are squicked by the content, please go elsewhere.� OTOH if you read it and find it of interest, feel free to chime in.� I am doing this because it pleases me to write on this topic (I am famous among my acquaintance� for telling these stories orally).� I am indeed a verbal exhibitionist and I do get off on words–mine and other people’s.�

There is also an underlying philosophy.� To my mind exercise of one’s sexuality (in a responsible way,� of course) is one of the (few) bright spots in human existence.� I do not think sex should be something hole-in-a-corner, I do not think women who enjoy an active and varied sex life are sluts and hos, and I think that everyone, the old, the fat, the ugly, the disabled, the gay, the straight, the male, the female, the bi and transgendered, etc., etc., has a right to enjoy his/her life as a sexual being.� If that philosophy offends you, this isn’t the place for you to hang out.

Recently a poker maven and self-labeled mathematical genius in his late 50s� has created a bit of a stir by publicly crowing about his prowess in attracting the sexual attentions of very young but (barely) legal women (including a 16 year old runaway).� This stir has spilled over into numerous threads, blog entries, cartoons and song parodies on several different websites.

I must admit I find myself perplexed.� What is there to crow about� when an older man with a very substantial income decides, by his own admission,� to devote a portion of that income to supporting a down on her luck young runaway in exchange for sexual access?� Truly,� guys, does this constitute some kind of trophy? Are you impressed?

Why would a middle-aged man want a 16 year old sexual partner anyway?� It is a well-known fact that while men’s sexual potency and performance reach� their pinnacles around the age of 19 and then decline fairly steeply, typically women do not reach the peak of their sexual response until the mid-thirties and remain at or near that peak for many years.� So why would a man in his 50s want a partner who is many years away from her sexual ripening?� A 16 year old girl can appeal to a 16 year old boy, but what does she have to offer a man in his 50s?� The typical 16 year old girl is simply just plain not all that good in bed.� I never met the 16 year old runaway, but I have met Poker Maven’s current (very) young lady, and while she struck me as a perfectly decent young woman, she is not centerfold-level eye candy, just an ordinary, average,� everyday kinda� gal.�

So Poker Maven opens his wallet, some more or less average young ladies open their legs, what’s there to beat chests about?

In the interest of full disclosure now that I have ragged on Poker Maven, I have to admit that my preference runs to younger men, but not THAT young.� I have a rule that any man that I have sex with has to be at least several years older than my son, and in the last decade or so since I have been alone, I have actually had to enforce that rule a couple of times.� Right now that would put the “young” limit at about 30-35.� More usually my preferred age range is about 5-10 years younger than I am–which would put the prime age about 50-55.� Now the reason for my preference is plain.� Alas, the older the man the more likely he is to be a candidate for Viagra.� That’s just nature.

It’s not that I discriminate� completely against men my age or older.� I do have one dear friend with benefits who is four and a half years older than I am.� But our “beneficial” friendship goes all the way back to when I was in my� freshman year� and he was in his early twenties and it was way cool to be seeing an “older” man–and I am still seeing him to this very day (or at least month).�

As much as I favor younger men now, so I preferred the older ones when I was young.� When I was 13, I started a year and a half long relationship with a guy who was 22 (note: he was in his 20s, not his 50s). Yeah, we both knew I was jailbait, but today’s concern with pedophilia didn’t exist in the same way� back then.� Looking back, I consider this a positive aspect of my life, but then I was lucky and didn’t get pregnant or contract some loathesome disease.� Being an adolescent, while I knew these problems could occur, I didn’t really believe that they would occur–and they didn’t.� If they had, it would have been a disaster, but they didn’t so, oh, well.� Years later when I was home from Penn� for the winter holidays, I had a reunion with this fellow.� We were sitting up on the mountain in the snow, and I asked him what he, a grown man, saw in a 13 year old girl.� He replied, “Mimi, you were never 13″–whatever that means.�

I should add that my positive feelings about this relationship kept me from stroking out when my 16 year old son took a “woman” ten years his senior to his high school prom.� I figured it wouldn’t take him long to figure out that she was the poster child for immaturity–she wanted him to buy her acreage for a llama ranch–and it didn’t.

BTW if you have read this far and� are wondering how a little old lady, more than plump and with gray hair, who never had a hot moment in her life (my beneficial friend says I was cute, but I think he’s being kind), manages to attract men 25 years her junior, well, I am not entirely sure myself, but I do have some thoughts� on that topic� which I will write about in my next entry in which I will� also consider what it is that Poker Maven has against intellectual women.

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