The Ink-Stained Wretch

Deja Vu all over again

Thanks to Brad for hosting his New Year's Eve Eve poker tourney.

I managed to win the July 4th Weekend tournament during the summer as a newcomer to the group, so I was surprised to hear they wanted me back.

Well, they wanted my money back, actually. And with four more people in the tournament and many more re-buys, the purse was much bigger.

Inexplicably, I won again. The picture's misleading--that's Brad's hand, apparently about to rake the dough on the final hand, but the A-Q (pair of Queens) are mine, against his 2-4 (pair of fours).

The heads-up action was a lot of fun, with some pretty tight play on both sides. We each doubled up once against the other, and then we finally reached this hand with Brad pretty short-stacked, so he went for it.

Brad, thanks for letting me come back, and I promise a better bottle of wine if I get a return invite for the 4th of July.

Because Peter is watching me, and Peter likes music...a post for Peter

Now this is cool. An applescript which maps your musical taste (or at least the songs in your iTunes library) using Omnigraffle, created by somebody named Jesper and courtesy of drunkenblog.com.

It runs on Mac, requires OmniGraffle (bundled with recent Macs), but I make no apologies. I will point out that the "Kidz Bop Kidz" are only there because Nate digs them. I need to do a bit of tweaking to the script so that boxes don't sit on top of one another, but the mess is kind of purty...

Get the script here.

Wine Blogging Wednesday Wrap Up

The full wrap up of WBW 16 is up over at Derrick Schneider's Obsession with Food. Some very cool labels.

Nice to see that someone I've actually met got his wine included. Nice job, Sasha.

Wine Blogging Wednesday 16

My entry for Wine Blogging Wednesday 16 is The Prisoner by Orin Swift. A wine I originally bought for its wonderful, Francis Bacon-esque label. The image--so far removed from the aesthetic of the typical wine label--promises a wine that is so powerful, it must be restrained like King Kong lest it destroy all it surveys.

Letting the wine out of the bottle is indeed a little like releasing a monster--the wine is highly extracted, betraying the heavy does of zinfindel that went into it, but there is some subtlety as well, a hint of a floral note like a rose growing just outside the prison walls, barely visible from within. Okay, I'm getting a little carried away, I'll admit.

It's delicious juice, but for me the wine would really succeed if there were a little more acidic backbone, an adamantium skeleton to bolster the iron fist inside the velvet glove. Aw, never mind. Buy the damn label and get the wine for free.

There's also a flickr group for some of the beautiful labels being blogged about.

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