Trumpster Fire

There’s something kind of unusual going on around here. I smell smoke.

No, nothing in the house is burning. Nor is anyone burning leaves or anything nearby, at least not today. But the smoky smell is lingering. Everyone is starting to notice.

It comes and goes. I’ve smelled it more often in the mornings when feeding the horses, while in the afternoons it seems to die down. Then it’ll come back later as the sky darkens and night falls.

We’ve been aware of the smell for several days, perhaps a week. The longer it lasts, the more worrisome it becomes. In the last day or two I’ve started to think of it as symbolic, too, representing a similar kind of vague threat that recently started to hang over us.

Our farm is located in the western part of North Carolina, a couple of hours away from the mountains. It’s up there that around 15 different forest fires have been burning up something close to 50,000 acres over recent days, forcing more than 1,000 people from their homes.

Firefighters have had difficulty controlling the fires thanks to the drought conditions we’ve been experiencing in this part of the state. And there’s no rain at all in the current 10-day forecast, which doesn’t bode well.

I’ve been staying inside mostly. Yesterday I noticed our county had been colored in “red” on the map, designating the air quality as “unhealthy.” There’s a worse color -- “purple” for “very unhealthy” -- although none of the counties have been shaded thusly just yet, I don’t think.

I mentioned the symbolism suggested by the smoky smell and the vague feeling of anxiety it inspires. I refer of course to the flashpoint of last week’s election, and the gradually building apprehension caused by the president-elect’s quizzical movements and proclamations, stress-causing tweets, and hazy plans to make over the country in ways even his ardent supporters have to regard as troubling.

And there were plenty of supporters, including around here. I mean if you look at a different map of the state, around three-fourths of the counties were red on that one, too.

I won’t recount all of the many whiffs of trouble we’ve been noticing. For that you can read Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker who provides a catalogue of items in a new article titled “Donald Trump’s First, Alarming Week as President Elect” -- kind of like hand histories, you might say, from a series of inexpertly played hands.

Recounting much from the election winner’s two interviews, the half-dozen press releases from his transition team, his “several important personnel and policy decisions,” and his 23 tweets, Lizza concludes the “first week was marked by seeming chaos,” suggesting that “what we’ve learned so far about the least-experienced President-elect in history is as troubling and ominous as his critics have feared.”

We don’t know what’s coming next. Most of us like to think whatever changes the future might bring won’t be destructive or hurtful or otherwise for the worse. But we don’t really know. Depends on a lot of things, including things we can’t control. Not unlike the wind, or the rain (or lack thereof).

The smell persists in a threatening way. Sometimes, after being exposed to it for a while, we become less aware of it. But then it hits us again -- bitter, a little pungent, even stinging.

And we wonder how close or real the danger really is.

Photo: Citizen-Times.

On Being “In Play”

Happy Election Day, all.

I voted this morning. I would have tried voting early, but I was on the road -- to Malta, then to New Jersey -- for pretty much the entire time early voting was available for me.

I arrived at the nearby church that functions as my polling station right at 6:30 a.m. so as to avoid any long lines later today. The place was already packed, and in fact it was hard finding a place to park. But the whole process only took about a half-hour to get through, and now I’m back on the farm where I’ll be tuning in tonight with everyone else to see how it all goes.

North Carolina is a “battleground state” this year, with enough electoral votes to matter and genuine uncertainty over whether it’ll be tipping toward Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. I noticed yesterday Nate Silver had placed NC on a “Tier 1” line with Florida as a key indicator of how things are ultimately going to go.

Eight years ago the state barely chose Obama, while Romney won by a wider margin in the last election. The polls having been suggesting Hillary wins NC by a smidgen this time, but it’s truly up in the air at the moment. (Bill Clinton lost NC by small margins in both ’92 and ’96.)

It’s curious to be voting in a state that is “in play” like this, given how most elections that hasn’t really been the case. It reminds me a little of the Pigskin Pick’em game that has been increasingly distracting me every week since I’ve been out front in the sucker since Week 2.

Every week’s slate of NFL games contains many games that essentially aren’t significant since practically the entire pool picks the same way. Such was true, for instance, with last night’s Buffalo-Seattle game in which almost everyone took the Seahawks (and won, although it was a close one).

Meanwhile other games last weekend were most definitely “in play” -- e.g., Philadelphia-NY Giants, Carolina-Los Angeles, and Denver-Oakland, which in each case saw about half the pool go one way and half the other. Those outcomes therefore meant something, affecting the pool standings, while the unanimous (or near-unanimous) games did not.

Of course, what I’m describing is all a matter of perception. It’s like when we talk about a poker hand and after fourth street brings an apparent “blank” we cheerfully say “the turn changed nothing.”

But almost always the turn is not wholly insignificant (except in those relatively rare instances when a player is already drawing dead after the flop). It moves the game forward another betting round, having meaning even if it doesn’t change who is ahead in the hand.

So, too, do these games (or states) that aren’t “in play” still significant to the overall contest. (In fact, who’s to say, really, which states are and are not, until later tonight?)

In any event, regardless how the election turns out, things have certainly changed here in the U.S. and will continue to do so going forward. After the last year-and-a-half, it feels like practically everything is “in play” now.

The Time I Saw Springsteen in Greensboro

You might have heard about this “transgender bill” the governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, signed into law about three weeks ago. The part of the legislation getting the most attention prohibits transgender individuals from using public bathrooms for the sex they identify as. The other less regarded part gives the state power to override cities’ attempts to pass their own nondiscrimination laws (as Charlotte had done, thereby prompting the legislation’s last push).

At the time, McCrory -- who as governor so far has made his mark by cutting education spending and joining other governors in taking an abhorrent (and impotent) stand against the state accepting Syrian refugees -- described the bill as “bipartisan,” although it was mostly Republicans voting for it in the House and, in fact, the Senate Democrats (a minority) walked out on the vote entirely, a highly unusual move.

You might’ve also heard about certain businesses either threatening to avoid NC going forward or having already made such moves. For example, PayPal announced it has halted its plans to create a global operations center in NC in response to the new law. A handful of other events have been canceled, and the NBA is starting to talk about moving the 2017 All-Star Game somewhere other than Charlotte.

There’s also a lot of negative vitriol being directed the state’s way. For example, in a humorous short piece yesterday, Charles P. Pierce of Esquire reported how a porn site is now blocking IP addresses from NC, a development he jokingly suggested would be the final straw to force NC to change the new law. Coincidentally or no, McCrory did, in fact, announce yesterday an intention to try to modify the law.

I normally enjoy Pierce’s political musings, although I have to say I’m getting a little tired of blanket statements about the state being mostly populated with crazed bigots such as the one he uses to begin his porn piece: “We all know that Bruce Springsteen has declined to play in the now almost entirely insane state of North Carolina due to the enactment of its Urinal Cooties Protection Act of 2016,” Pierce begins.

Okay, it’s a funny line. But the state is not “now almost entirely insane,” okay? I’m reminded of some of the response three years ago to Greg Raymer’s bust for soliciting a prostitute in Wake Forest, when support for the 2004 WSOP Main Event champion quickly bled over into damning acid-spewing aimed at the entire state.

Pierce mentions Springsteen skipping NC, deciding to cancel with just a couple days’ notice his Greensboro show that had been scheduled on this past Sunday. I don’t begrudge the Boss in the least, and in fact I’d suggest his decision likely had a lot to do with McCrory’s attempt to start backtracking a bit yesterday.

The news of Springsteen’s canceling his show caused me to think back to the one time I saw him and the E Street Band perform -- in Greensboro, in fact, way back during the Born in the U.S.A. tour (no shinola). I admit I wasn’t a big fan of his then. I was in high school and had a friend who went to Elon who had an extra ticket, and I tagged along. Over the ensuing decades I have remained only a casual fan, having just a couple of titles on my iPod that I only occasionally dial up.

I was curious to remember details of the show I’d seen, though, and so did some searching online. With only a few clicks was able to pinpoint the performance -- January 19, 1985. It was a typically monstrous show, lasting three-and-a-half or four hours, I recalled, and the setlist confirmed for me how it had gone on for 28 songs.

Clicked around a little bit more and was surprised to find audio of the actual performance on a site full of Springsteen shows. I downloaded and listened, and was kind of floored by how fantastic the show was. There’s just something about Springsteen playing live. I suppose it has to do with the stories he tells between songs and how they draw the listener’s attention more specifically to the songs’ messages. Or maybe there’s something else there that energizes the performances, something less simple to describe. In any case, hearing Springsteen live is always much more affecting (to me, anyway) than happens with the studio versions of the same tunes.

There’s a theme that runs through just about all of Springsteen’s songs -- call it a chase, a search, a journey, what have you. The songs’ protagonists are often on the move, trying to figure out where they’ve been, make sense of where they are, or get some idea of where they’re going. They’re all looking for something -- meaning, love, self-identity, self-worth -- with the thread connecting them being the quest. And, it goes without saying, “Born to Run” stands as the wholly appropriate anthem for the whole cast of characters Springsteen creates.

Kind of a weird, nostalgic trip listening to the show. During a long, funny intro to “Glory Days” he mentions getting a note from the assistant manager of the Greensboro Hornets (then the minor league baseball team), which then leads into a story about his failed baseball career (abandoned as a teen in order to “devote my life to rock and roll!”).

Then comes the song, which is, of course, all about being nostalgic. I couldn’t help but think back to being a teen myself, there at the show, with a whole life ahead of me and every possibility still open. It goes on and on and on, with the whole track (including the intro) lasting nearly 12 minutes, prompting this surprising feeling in me that I never wanted it to end.

There are many other great moments. Perhaps the one bringing me most quickly back to the present was the intro to “My Hometown” in which he delivers a short soliloquy about how tangled things like patriotism or pride in one’s state or place can be. He describes how as a teen he often wanted to leave his home and never go back, not wanting to be identified with the small town and its many seemingly “narrow-minded” folks populating it.

But as he got older, he realized just taking off and running away wasn’t such a simple matter.

“I guess one of the things when I was a kid that I was afraid of was... belonging somewhere,” he explains. “When you belong somewhere, that means you have some responsibility to that place, whether it’s your family, or your town, or your country. You know, if you stand up and say ‘I’m an American,’ that means you got some responsibility to America.”

Predictably, they (we?) cheered at that line. But just as “Born in the U.S.A.” is hardly the patriotic paean some occasionally mistake it to be, Springsteen wasn’t delivering an uncomplicated invitation to dance a jingoistic jig.

“Here in this country, you know we’ve got so many things to be proud of, and we’ve got a lot of things to be ashamed of. And it’s the things that we ought to be ashamed of that need some taking care of by all of us.”

Listening to that three decades later -- reliving it, in a way -- it’s no great surprise that Springsteen would skip Greensboro this time around. Obviously he viewed the decision as a way perhaps to help take care of something that needed taking care of.

North Carolina is where I’m from, and no matter how far I travel away from NC it’ll always be where I belong. I want others -- all others -- to feel like they can belong here, too.

It sounds like a simple desire, but in truth it’s pretty complicated.

Photo: “Bruce Springsteen,” Thomas Uhlemann. CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.

Raymer (and Media) Caught in a Sting

Well, Friday was certainly a disappointing day in our little poker world. I suppose for me the disappointment was threefold.

It was just after midday when the news broke that Greg Raymer, the 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event champion, had been arrested along with five other men following a “prostitution sting” operation conducted by undercover law enforcement in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

NC news stations initially reported the operation to have been a “male prostitution sting,” then after about 45 minutes a correction was made to clarify that Raymer and five others had been arrested at a hotel after having been duped into thinking they had arranged liaisons with female prostitutes. Raymer’s arrest actually happened back on Wednesday, with the story breaking two days later.

Thinking initially of poker’s image and the always uncertain place the game occupies in the culture, it was a bummer to consider how the news might play among the general public moving forward. Such thoughts were compounded by the fact that Raymer has for many years served as a good representative of the game to the larger public -- a guy who most would agree has been “good for poker.” It’s hard to estimate, really, whether such a story will have any significant, tangible influence on people’s opinions about poker or about poker players going forward. But it seemed pretty certain whatever effect it had would not be positive.

So that was one cause for dismay.

A second arose for me thanks to the fact that as a North Carolina resident, I’ve been getting to read over the last few days lots of commentators enthusiastically characterize my state according to standard stereotypes associated with the South. You know, the usual stuff about everyone here being hopelessly backwards, uneducated, “Bible-thumping hillbillies” and so forth.

I’m hardly sensitive about such generalizations. (In fact, in some cases, they can be difficult to refute.) That is to say, I don’t blindly support my state or the region and like most rational, thinking adults don’t always agree with everything my neighbors believe or support.

But that doesn’t prevent me from getting a little weary sometimes at the dismissive way people look at “North Carolina” or “the South” as representing something unspeakably dreadful, a cultural wasteland where not only is poker (mostly) illegal but all of the worst kinds of intolerance is unequivocally supported. Which just ain’t so.

Finally, a third disappointment arose from the bungled way the story of Raymer’s arrest was reported (and re-reported). I followed it all closely Friday afternoon, including constantly checking the NC television stations’ websites as well as the gleeful, excited repetitions of the news that quickly circulated through several national outlets as well as on poker news sites and forums.

The initial mistake about “male prostitution” was of course repeated everywhere. When the correction was made, WTVD and WRAL silently edited their reports without making any reference whatsoever to the earlier mistake. Most of the cut-and-pasters on the other sites did the same, with some letting several hours pass before making the fix.

It was appalling.

This is a personal blog and not a news site. I don’t really report news here, but will sometimes reflect on what gets reported elsewhere. Even so, I do try to maintain a standard when it comes to how I communicate with my audience. When I publish a post then later decide to add or correct something, I indicate my having done so with a big, bold reference to an “EDIT” being made.

Now if I’m fixing a typo or making some other less substantive, surface-level alteration, I won’t bother cluttering the post with such disclaimers. But say I make a mistake about something, or overlook an important detail and feel the need to comment on it later. I feel it is only fair in such cases to let my readers know about such additions or revisions.

Meanwhile, actual news outlets have to recognize such an obligation, otherwise their credibility is reduced to zero. If a site can fundamentally change its reporting on the fly in substantial ways with a few keystrokes and mouse-clicks, how are we to accept anything they report as accurate?

I know others are today thinking about and wanting to discuss Raymer’s family life, engage in debates about prostitution, or even discuss sexual preferences (the latter topic triggered by that misreporting), with a few in the poker world also wanting to focus on that initial point I brought up about poker’s image perhaps having taken a hit here.

But as someone who writes about poker for a living and who has found it necessary to accept certain restrictions that come with writing for an audience, it’s the way this story brought out into the open all sorts of fundamental problems with today’s media that occupies my thoughts most prominently three days later.

The arrests resulted from a so-called “sting” in which Raymer and the others were provided with a story. They then responded in ways that gave authorities cause to make arrests and thus expose them.

I almost feel like the incident itself has functioned kind of like a “sting” insofar as it provided an occasion for media outlets to respond, and in doing so the way they did, they too were exposed.

Tar Heel Poker

I began this blog by identifying myself as an online poker player, something I continue to do in that header up top even though my online play has been reduced dramatically over the last 15 months since Black Friday.

One reason why I identified as an online player was because, well, live poker was not really an option here in North Carolina. Not legally, anyhow.

The only casino in the state is Harrah’s Cherokee, located way the hell over in the mountains near the Tennessee border. It opened in 1997, although the only poker offered for many years was of the video poker variety.

A few years back PokerTek, makers of electronic poker tables, struck a deal with Harrah’s Cherokee to place a few of its tables on the casino floor. PokerTek just happens to be located here in North Carolina as well, in Matthews (close to Charlotte).

Just last month five more PokerTek tables were added at Cherokee, bringing the overall number to 15. While I have never played them, my understanding is most of the tables are of the NLHE variety ($1/$2 and $2/$5). There’s also an LHE one ($3/$6, I think), and they sometimes have Omaha, too.

In other Cherokee news, the governor, Bev Purdue, signed a compact with the tribe back in November 2011 to allow for live table games. At the time I was a bit cynical about it all, knowing that legislators would still have to agree to allow for live poker to be spread. But in May such legislation was passed, and on June 13 the governor signed into law permission for live table games.

Immediately came reports of a plan to start offering games by the Fourth of July weekend, although that didn’t happen. I called over this morning and learned that as of right now they are targeting next month (August) as a start date for offering live poker.

Also of note, yesterday the new WSOP Circuit schedule was announced, with Cherokee included among the 20 stops -- the most ever for the tour. The WSOP-C Cherokee event will happen in April 2013.

Have to say this is all very interesting to follow, and I imagine if I don’t get there beforehand, I may have to get out to Cherokee next spring to get a look at what’s happening.

I’m also intrigued about PokerTek, mainly because it is located so close to me. There was an article in the paper just the other day about the company, which apparently has struggled since its founding in 2003 but currently is doing okay supplying tables to cruise ships and casinos, including in the U.S. and France. Last year they started making blackjack tables, and have plans for baccarat.

In other words, while for a long time I’ve mostly thought of poker as something that essentially happens elsewhere, I might just have to start paying more attention to Tar Heel poker.

Meanwhile, I wonder if I could swing a field trip to Cherokee for my Poker in American Film and Culture class...?