Tunes, Talk, and a Place to Raise My Lonely Dental Floss

Been listening to some cool stuff on the iPod these days. A few new things, including the latest Tortoise album, called Beacons of Ancestorship. Released over the summer, but I’m just now getting to it. Awesome grooves, soundscapes. The instrumental outfit’s 1996 album Millions Now Living Will Never Die is probably one of my all-time-top-ten-most-listened-to records -- a “desert island” disc, for sure -- and this one might be their best since that one.

Also have Metric’s latest (from the spring, I think), called Fantasies, which is pretty hard not to dial up again and again, especially thanks to the start of that gripping opening track “Help I’m Alive” (“I tremble... tremble... tremble... tremble...”). Not as stunningly satisfying as Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, their 2003 debut, which I go back to repeatedly, but a nifty collection of idiosyncratic pop, nonetheless. (Can you tell I’ve been thinking of starting a music blog?)

Mixed in there, too, as usual, has been Frank Zappa, for whom I noticed the other day I have exactly 600 songs loaded on the little music player. Some might think that obsessive, but FZ fans understand the requirements for uncovering conceptual continuity. Have been once more working through the You Can’t Do This On Stage Anymore discs here lately. Up to the start of Volume 4 and that cool sequence at the start that moves from “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” to “Willie the Pimp” to “Montana.”

Have also worked in a few poker podcasts of late, and had a few shows to recommend to you.

The latest installment of The Poker Beat (10/8/09) featured an interesting discussion of the marketing of the November Nine, now less than a month away. Had a lot of good comments on my post on the subject earlier in the week, and the discussion on the show added still further insight. Definitely appears as though we’re going to see more “mainstream” attention this time around. The show also featured a visit with Amy Calistri to talk about the demise of PokerPages (for which she once wrote/edited).

Daniel Negreanu was the guest on this week’s Hardcore Poker Show (10/7/09). Interesting as always, was Kid Poker, as he discussed his near miss at the World Series of Poker Europe Main Event. He was additionally asked about Phil Hellmuth’s speculations -- first aired on the 9/23/09 episode of the Hardcore Poker Show -- concerning Harrah’s new online site and the possibility of the other sites teaming up to compete with Harrah’s. Negreanu roundly dismissed the Poker Brat’s idea as wayward fantasy, particularly the notion that a site like PokerStars, which he represents, would ever enter an alliance with Hellmuth’s site, UltimateBet. “I want nothing to do with that company,” says Negreanu, adding that “personally, I don’t think they should exist anymore... we don’t owe them any favors.” Run over to Pokerati to hear the UB-related stuff, which Kevmath excerpted out for your listening convenience.

During the middle portion of this week’s Two Plus Two Pokercast (10/6/09) there’s lengthy interview with Neil Channing in which the British poker pro talks about the current state of poker in the U.K. as well as his own interesting path through sports betting, backing, and poker. As always, hosts Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz do a great job with the interview, and the result is both compelling and at times laugh out loud funny.

Going back a little bit... they’ve been successively interviewing the various members of the November Nine over on Phil Gordon and Andrew Feldman’s podcast The Poker Edge. I think they’ve had six of the nine on thus far. For more on your favorite logger Darvin Moon, check out the 9/25/09 episode. (Moon should really start a blog and thus become the first poker-logger blogger.) Finally, a while back Howard Schwartz had poker author Arnold Snyder on his Gamblers Book Club Podcast (the 9/3/09 episode). I’m a big fan of Snyder’s Poker Tournament Formula books, and he made for a great guest on Schwartz’s show.

Speaking of podcasts, I do have a new episode of The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show in the works (I know it has been a while). Hopefully it will not be too long before Episode 19 of that makes it onto your iPod or iPod-like device.

Meanwhile, I think it’s gonna be more Zappa this morning for me. Actually received a spammy e-mail today with the subject line “Montana Investment Property” that included this picture. No shinola! Looks like a nice place to raise a crop of dental floss, yes? Yippie-Yi-O-Ti-Yay!