The Cab is Parked

Heard the sad news of Tom Sexton’s passing this week. Brother of Poker Hall of Famer Mike, Tom was also a lover of poker and eagerly promoted the game in various ways. As the outpouring of responses this week have reminded us, he was an especially well liked member of the poker community and will be missed by many.

I pretty much entirely knew Tom only through his writings and occasional appearances on poker podcasts, his voice uncannily sounding like that of his brother. In a relatively small community of poker media types, we had tons of mutual acquaintances although our paths never quite crossed.

Back in the summer when the seriousness of his health problems was first discovered, former PokerNews Editor-in-Chief John Caldwell shared with the site the story of Tom becoming a contributor at PN where he would ultimately file 60 columns under the heading of “Sexton’s Corner.”

As Caldwell relates, back in 2007 (when PokerNews was first getting into the live reporting game), Sexton helped with the coverage of some of the stud and draw tourneys, and while doing so shared several “back in the day” tales that eventually inspired Caldwell to suggest he write them for the site.

In his first column for PN, Tom began with the story of the windfall his brother had received from PartyPoker back when he was signed on to represent them, noting how Mike had told him then he could quit his job as a cab driver, thereby inspiring what would become Tom’s signature line throughout the series, “the cab is parked.” He also started that first column with lots of praise for his brother, something he was able to offer again when introducing him at the 2009 Poker Hall of Fame induction ceremony (as pictured above by Casino City Times’ Vin Narayanan).

The Sexton’s Corner columns ultimately ran from July 2007 through September 2008 and cover a variety of topics including many stories involving his brother, other tales of pros like Puggy Pearson, Dewey Tomko, Stu Ungar, Jennifer Harman, and Johnny Chan, plus additional sketches of various poker people Tom had met and events he had witnessed.

A two-part treatment of Russ Hamilton's 1994 WSOP Main Event win and the shenanigans involved with the bonus prize (the winner's weight in silver) makes for an interesting read, especially in the light of Hamilton's later sad descent into the UltimateBet madness (Part 1, Part 2). And speaking of falls from grace, just a few days ago I had been dipping into Tom's 10-part series (starting here) about Archie Karas following the news of his being accused of marking cards in a blackjack game in a San Diego casino.

As first-hand storytelling with a decidedly personal point of view, some of the Sexton’s Corner columns are probably more valuable than others when it comes to historical veracity and/or objective reporting. But most are interesting and obviously bear witness to the author’s interest in the game and its promotion as well as a few of the characters associated with it.

Will leave to those who knew Tom the business of eulogizing him appropriately -- for example, this piece about him written by Nolan Dalla after his illness was disclosed gives a more detailed portrait of him and what he meant to others. I did, however, want to express condolences here to his family and the many folks I’ve come to know over the years whom I know this week are feeling his loss.

Big Money

Utterly fatigued today after sitting up until nearly dawn here on the east coast following the conclusion of the World Championship of Online Poker Main Event on PokerStars. Was a marathon final table lasting more than four hours and finally concluding with three German players -- PlayinWasted (who won), Daniel “Allanon85” Drescher, and SwissCantMis -- chopping at the end, all of whom took away more than a million dollars from the $5,200 buy-in event. Meawhile PokerStars Team Online member and blogger Shane “shaniac” Schleger took sixth in the event to earn a nifty $291K-plus payday.

The WCOOP Main Event has genuinely become one of the most significant poker tourneys during the calendar year, if one considers the attention it receives, the prestige given to those who do well in it, and, of course, the money. The big, big money.

This year 2,133 entered to create a prize pool of $10,665,000. The buy-in for the WCOOP ME has remained steady over the last few years, with the prize pool peaking back in the last pre-Black Friday year of 2010 at $12,215,000 when Tyson “POTTERPOKER” Marks won an incredible $2,278,097.50 first prize when there was no final table deal.

In 2011 the WCOOP ME prize pool dipped to $8,135,000, then increased to $9,125,000 in 2012. This year it again topped the $10 milly mark, and like most other online tournament series on PokerStars the overall numbers are edging back toward (or even surpassing) the pre-2011 totals when Americans could play on the site.

Over on Wikipedia one can find a list ranking the largest ever poker tournaments (by prize pool). The list looks reasonably well maintained (although I haven’t tried to verify its accuracy).

Of the 30 tournaments listed, the last 10 World Series of Poker Main Events crowd the top part of the list. The 2003 WSOP ME won by Chris Moneymaker doesn’t make the list, as its total prize pool was “only” $7,802,700.

Meanwhile the 2008-2010 WCOOP Main Events sneak into the bottom part of the list. This 2013 WCOOP Main Event should earn a spot on there as well just behind those earlier WCOOP MEs. That’ll make six online events among the top 30 of all time.

How big can the WCOOP Main Event and/or other online tournaments get? It appears their potential for further growth is less limited than that of live events, although it doesn’t seem as though an online tourney could ever reach the heights of the biggest WSOP MEs with prize pools these days usually around $60 million. (The biggest ever in 2006 was $82,512,162.)

Was reading David Schwartz's article a couple of days ago in which he looked back five years to “The Day Wall Street Went Bust” and snuck in a subtle allusion to a Rush song along the way. And so with Rush on the brain -- and big money -- I much more lazily titled this post. Hey... I said I was tired.

Capitol Games

Last week I mentioned briefly that faux-filibuster perpetrated by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and made a passing reference to coverage of televised poker coverage by way of comparison. Over the weekend I read a piece about Cruz and his bit of political theater which noted how Cruz himself had used a poker analogy to describe his own strategy.

We’re seeing today how the crisis over passing a spending bill to fund the government for the upcoming fiscal year (scheduled to begin tomorrow) is reaching a kind of climax, with a government shutdown now appearing a distinct possibility. The issue goes back to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- a.k.a. “Obamacare” -- and the efforts of some Republicans to have the new spending bill include amendments to it, something the Dems aren’t willing to accept.

Seeing references to this issue as a “bargaining chip” (again, evoking poker vocabulary). Although it doesn’t actually sound much like anyone’s in the mood to bargain.

Cruz’s 21-plus hour speech last week was motivated by his wish to defund the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Responding to a question by his colleague Rand Paul (R-KY) about whether or not he could go along with any sort of middle-ground solution that didn’t involve defunding the new health care law, Cruz couched his negative response in the language of cards.

“In a game of poker,” explained Cruz, “if somebody makes a bet, and then says to you, ‘if you raise me, I’m going to fold,’ [he] will lose 100 percent of [his] poker games.”

In other words -- if I’m following correctly -- Cruz is choosing this way to express an unwillingness to compromise at all when it comes to Obamacare. Cruz (and the other non-negotiating Tea Partiers) is making a bet, he says, and is not going to give his opponent any indication that he might fold (give in) should his opponent respond with a raise, because to do so would be a losing strategy.

Brings to mind players who cannot bring themselves to fold after having put any chips at all in the middle. Of course, table talk can be misleading sometimes. A player could well say he’d fold to a raise, then do something else. That is to say, I’m not sure the analogy is as obvious as Cruz seems to think, and I can imagine several better ones to indicate more clearly an intention not to fold.

Anyhow, watching the news today and the deepening impasse on Capitol Hill, the only poker analogy that comes to mind would be one involving players stalling on the bubble. Or maybe something having to do with not playing with a full deck.

Who Would You Select Among the 2013 Poker Hall of Fame Nominees?

In a rush today and so just thought I’d post a quick one noting the announcement of the 10 finalists for this year’s Poker Hall of Fame. I’ve had the honor in the past of being one of those called upon to vote in this process, and as I look at the finalists for this year I’m again thinking about how difficult a task it will be when it comes to deciding between them.

As you’ve probably read elsewhere, the following players all made this year's list of finalists: Chris Björin, Humberto Brenes, David Chiu, Thor Hansen, Jennifer Harman, Mike Matusow, Tom McEvoy, Carlos Mortensen, Scotty Nguyen, and Huck Seed.

Of those, McEvoy and Nguyen have both been nominees for each of the past five years -- indeed for every year since they instituted this new process by which fans were able to nominate candidates over at WSOP.com and then the panel of living Hall of Famers and poker media then vote on finalists culled from those who were nominated. Harman has also been nominated each of the last four years.

Meanwhile four of this year’s nominees are back for a second go-round, with Björin, Chiu, and Hansen on the ballot for a second consecutive year while Seed is on for a second time after being a finalist once before in 2011. The other three candidates this year are all first-time nominees -- Brenes, Matusow, and Mortensen.

Matusow won his fourth WSOP bracelet this past summer and has the unique distinction of also having made a couple of WSOP Main Event final tables (in 2001 and 2005). Mortensen of course won the WSOP ME back in 2001 and very nearly made another final table this year before being ousted in 10th.

Brenes, meanwhile, might surprise some as a nominee, but I knew his nomination was a distinct possibility after learning about a groundswell of support for him when at LAPT Peru a couple of months ago, something I noted in one of my reports from Lima for the PokerStars blog. Brenes’s standing in that part of the world as an important ambassador of the game is not unlike that of Hansen in Norway where Hansen is viewed as the “Norwegian Godfather of Poker.”

Interestingly, six of the 10 nominees were born outside of the U.S. (Björin, Brenes, Chiu, Hansen, Mortensen, and Nguyen). Four won WSOP Main Event titles (McEvoy, Seed, Nguyen, Mortensen). And all 10 have won at least two WSOP bracelets.

Gotta think McEvoy, Nguyen, and Harman will have an edge when it comes to the voting, given their having been on ballots for several years running by this point, but like I say those voting will have a tough decision to make. Only two at most will be voted in to join the other 44 already inducted in the Poker Hall of Fame.

Say you could only pick two of these candidates... how would you cast your vote?

It Goes On and On and On

Was reading about this 21-plus hour “filibuster” by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) this week, with much of the commentary focused on reducing it to a peculiar kind of political performing with little practical consequence beyond the already controversial freshman senator alienating colleagues in both parties. And perhaps promoting his own star among a certain, small segment of the American voting public.

Some of the articles noted how “filibuster” was not really an accurate way of describing the performance, since Cruz knew even before starting that he had no way of achieving his ostensible goal of preventing the Senate from voting on a budget plan to keep the government open through a deadline coming up next Monday and thus maintain funding for the new “Obamacare” law. Thus was the speech and its inordinate length even more strange.

Like I say, Cruz began making enemies shortly after joining Congress this year -- even the iPhone-poker playing John McCain called him a “wacko bird” (along with a couple of others) back in the spring. And his speech contained a lot that appeared pretty wacko, especially out of context, including references to Duck Dynasty, White Castle burgers, the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street film franchises, The Little Engine That Could, Ashton Kutcher, Darth Vader, Toby Keith, and Green Eggs and Ham.

Setting aside the specific political context for Cruz’s marathon play, there’s something curious about the wildly out-of-proportion step of speaking for 21-plus hours in such a forum.

Cruz came a bit shy of the longest ever filibuster speech by Strom Thurmond lasting 24 hours and 18 minutes in which he spoke against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, one of many actions in the South Carolinian’s long career in which he established his lamentable opposition to racial equality. Like Cruz, Thurmond also peppered his speech with a lot of obscure, irrelevant matters, most famously a digression on his grandmother’s biscuit recipe.

I’m thinking yet again about the debates this week about televised poker, and how the long, uninterrupted and unedited broadcasts may be better for demonstrating the game’s skill component, but are much less likely to retain an audience. Thus is TV poker necessarily reduced to highlights and other unusual moments that in real time disrupted the monotony but in an edited package are made to seem representative.

Much as commentators on the crazy-long senatorial speeches focus on irrelevant or tangential biscuit recipes and Dr. Seuss readings, so, too, does an hour-long program condensing a day’s worth of poker focus on the unusual.

Speaking of long-winded politicians, I’ve been continuing my Nixon studies and am now in the middle of his 1,100-plus page post-presidency opus, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon.

I have to read it at home, as it’s too big to take anywhere. I mean, really, I’d need an extra suitcase to carry it on a tourney trip.

I could filibust open somebody’s head with this sucker.

A Slowrolling Spot

Sounding a theme not too distant from the one contemplated in yesterday’s post, this week has come a teaser reel from that Poker Night in America show shot back in August.

You might remember some cash games were played at the Turning Stone Resort Casino involving a somewhat eclectic cast of poker players flown there from all over the country to participate.

They streamed some of the action online, although as I recall technical issues tended to mute the impact of the presentation somewhat. However, some edited programs were made from the games, and it’s from those that this short video showing a couple of hands was compiled.

Take a look:

I say the clip kind of highlights a theme explored yesterday. I say that not so much because the hands featured are of that same all-in-and-let’s-see-what-the-cards-bring variety that Salon contributor Argun M. Ulgen fretted over as having dominated a lot of ESPN’s coverage of the World Series of Poker over the years, especially during those formative “boom” years starting with the 2003 Main Event and after.

Rather, I’m referring to the latter hand in the clip in which Shaun Deeb flops quad fives and then delivers a wicked slowroll to Mike “The Mouth” Matusow. Deeb and the other players at the table enjoy a great laugh, but Matusow responds with mood-killing venom.

The clip has already generated a lot of debate, with some responding to Deeb’s play in much the same way Ulgen was lamenting ESPN’s WSOP coverage, namely, by complaining that it misrepresents poker in some fashion, or perhaps portrays the game in way that is unfavorable (according to some).

Whereas Ulgen complained that ESPN’s version of poker minimized the game’s skill component and thus made it out to be more of a gambling game than deserved, some critics of this clip have suggested it advances a notion that poker is a game that somehow encourages the abandonment of sportsmanship, also thought by some to be a non-representative portrayal.

There have been a lot of other responses, too -- to Deeb, to Matusow, and to perceived ideas about what Poker Night in America is going to be all about. Rather than toss out my own, I thought I’d just share the clip, point out how it has gotten poker people talking, and invite you to consider what you think of it.

Poker Among the Ruins

There’s an interesting piece over on the Salon site today provocatively titled “Has ESPN ruined poker?” The article is by a freelancer named Argun M. Ulgen who provides a fairly well informed judgment on ESPN’s coverage of the World Series of Poker over the last decade. As the title suggests, Ulgen is mostly censorious with regard to the network’s presentation of the game, and in fact he seems ready to blame the network for online poker’s legal woes in the U.S. (even if he doesn’t pursue that idea much beyond just suggesting it).

Going back to Chris Moneymaker’s big win and the much-repeated, seven-episode presentation of it by ESPN that many point to as having been a necessary component in the “boom” that followed, Ulgen recalls those early days of the hole card camera and what for many was a kind of revelation that it could actually be interesting -- even riveting -- to watch a bunch of people sitting around playing cards.

The article severely takes ESPN to task for what was always a somewhat obvious inner contradiction in the coverage of the WSOP during those first few post-Moneymaker years, really right up until the brink of Black Friday -- namely, the jarring juxtaposition of the “skill game” argument either explicitly made in the broadcasts or implied by the whole idea of showing poker on a sports network and programming seemingly highlighted by lucky hand after lucky hand with players constantly all in and powerless to affect their fate.

The coverage “routinely failed to provide by way of non-intrusive info graphics or quick commentary fundamental, skill-based pieces of information,” argues Ulgen. Noting a general lack of context surrounding the showing of all of those key preflop all-ins (not enough about stack sizes, blind levels, and so on), Ulgen laments how viewers were “mostly treated to showdown results, which, whether it is poker, basketball, or finance, is always heavily flavored with luck.”

Most of us deep within our little niche -- or “cultish game,” as Ulgen calls it -- recognized early on the wide divide between reality and romanticism in ESPN’s WSOP coverage, noting to each other at length how all of those “Degree All-In Moments” (remember those?) weren’t really poker, but added up to a kind of glorified, exaggerated version of the game that seemed to entertain not just us, but the masses, too.

From there Ulgen moves into a discussion of ESPN’s 2011 WSOP coverage from the first post-Black Friday Series, in particular its showing of uninterrupted play on a couple of Main Event tables for hours on end for several days in July, accompanied by fairly high level commentary by Olivier Busquet and Antonio Esfandiari. I remember writing a little here at the time about ESPN’s coverage that summer, including the weird feeling once of covering the tournament then going back to the hotel room early one night to watch the tourney continue on television.

Ulgen laments the rapid shift away from that type of coverage -- i.e., the sort that lended itself well to making a much more convincing and coherent “skill game” argument for poker -- that has taken place over the last two years. (He doesn’t mention or draw any conclusions from the fact that 2011 was the year Poker PROductions took over the WSOP coverage for ESPN, taking over from 411 Productions.)

He points out how the current coverage again fails to provide adequate context when showing hands. He’s a little harsh and not entirely accurate about ESPN not currently providing information about position, blind levels, and stack sizes (they usually do give all three, in fact, although not always). But he still makes a valid point about how the shows often tend to race around from highlight to highlight, having gotten far away (again) from the studied presentation of the game that briefly popped up a couple of years ago.

Ulgen’s title employs some obvious hyperbole as an attention grab. In truth, many might say that far from “ruining” poker, ESPN on the whole done has a lot more to revive poker, bringing in new players and expanding the game considerably, even if it has done so in a way that has corrupted (perhaps permanently) the mainstream’s understanding of the game in its failure to present a convincing case for poker’s skill component.

Ulgen’s article is worth a read, but for those of us who’ve been involved with poker over the last decade, the point he’s making is very familiar to us as something we all argued among ourselves at length all through those “boom” years and after. Of course, back then -- pre-UIGEA, pre-Black Friday -- we were so distracted with our multi-tabling most of us probably weren’t as invested in the argument as we might be today, as the fate of the game hardly then seemed threatened.

We were all like the guy who gets his chips in bad and then draws out anyway. Skill... luck... who cared? We were winning.

Pool Update: Drowning

Haven’t been talking much here so far this year about the NFL football pool, the one I enter each year that involves picking each and every NFL game. We just pick winners -- no spreads -- and over the last few years playing the pool has added a lot of enjoyment to watching football as I always have a rooting interest in every single game.

There’s a fairly obvious reason why I haven’t said much about pool so far this year, namely, my less-than-stellar results picking games thus far. Picked 10 of 16 correctly each of the first two weeks, but only managed eight of 15 winners here so far in Week 3 with the Monday Night tilt still to go. That might sound okay, but I’m already a full eight games behind the leaders.

In other words, it isn’t even October I’m already in what amounts to desperation mode going forward.

As a kind of emblem of how my season has gone so far, I took my team, the Carolina Panthers, in each of their first two games, while almost everyone else in the pool picked against them those first two weeks. The Panthers lost two heartbreakers -- both games they could easily have won -- and as a I result I fell two games behind the field.

Then yesterday I gave up on Carolina and like nearly everyone else took the New York Giants. The Panthers then smoked New York 38-0, a game I couldn’t even enjoy because (1) I’d picked incorrectly, and (2) the Giants were so godawful it was hard to feel like the win signified all that much for Carolina going forward (although it’s always good to remember how to win a game, even against an outmatched opponent).

Missing the pick on yesterday’s game reminded me of how last year Carolina and the Giants also played a game during Week 3. I picked Carolina in that game, and the Giants won 36-7. I feel like I completely mangled a poker hand, was given a second opportunity to play the exact same hand in a similar spot, and messed it up once again.

Looking back I’m seeing that I actually did worse during the first three weeks last year, hitting only 27 of the first 48 games. I ended up finishing tied for 10th in the pool (out of 50-ish), five games behind the two who tied for first. However, last year no one else was doing much better during the early part of the season, and I think I was only a couple of games out of first going into Week 4. I’m remembering we were all blaming replacement refs (in place for the first three weeks) for a lot of weird results to start off last year.

I did win this sucker once. But the memory of that is about as dim as the Panthers’ lone Super Bowl appearance a decade ago.

I was joking on Twitter yesterday that I blamed my poor start in the pool this year on having begun the season picking games in Spain as I was there for EPT Barcelona as Week 1 got underway.

A more honest assessment would involve confessing that I haven’t been too studious about my picks at all during these first three weeks, and have pretty consciously made some very gambly selections. Sort of like a player who has lost half his stack might start making some loose calls and chancy bluffs to get back even more quickly.

Will have to get back to fundamentals here for Week 4, I think. Thankfully Carolina has a bye.

Two Players at the Online Table (WSOP.com Takes a Seat)

There were eyes on WSOP.com yesterday with the official launch of the site for real money games. Not as much fanfare, it seemed, than was the case back in the spring when Ultimate Poker beat everyone to the table to deal the first hand of online poker 2.0, but still a notable moment.

Just peeking over at PokerScout, they’re reporting a 24-hour peak of 113 real money ring game players during the first day of operation at WSOP.com, with 46 on there on a Friday afternoon.

Will be curious to see where that WSOP.com graph settles once it rises over the near term, and how it will compare to the numbers over at Ultimate Poker. Over on UP it appears there are generally around 200 players at any given time, an average the site reached early on and at which it has remained for several months.

Unlike over at Ultimate Poker where it’s possible to rail all the games from outside of Nevada, there’s no looking in over at the real money games at WSOP.com (as far as I can tell). I have an account on the site and the play money client downloaded on my desktop, but that appears to be separate from the new real money games. I believe the software is similar, though, with hold’em, Omaha, and stud games available at a variety of stakes.

Over on Two Plus Two, a News, Views, and Gossip thread begun yesterday devoted to the launch is getting scant attention, with only three dozen posts thus far and a few thousand views although it is gamely keeping a spot on the front page.

As the WSOP.com player pool grows and the promotions get going in earnest, the site will gain more attention. There's already some WSOPE satellite stuff on there as well as some freerolls and guaranteed tourneys, and there will be this WSOP.com Online Championships starting in October that should get a lot of press -- nine tourneys comprising a first tourney series on the site. The press release that accompanied yesterday’s launch also outlines other marketing strategies in place including Total Rewards tie-ins and lots of television and other forms of advertising planned.

I’m curious about the site and kind of vaguely hopeful about it, and indeed I have more hope for WSOP.com growing into something relatively significant with its ready-made brand than I’ve had for start-from-scratch Ultimate Poker. Can’t help but think the latter’s prospects have dimmed just a tad with another player finally having taken a seat at the U.S. online poker table.

That said, the broader effect at the moment -- and for the near future -- is not unlike a new live poker room opening up in Vegas, one that those of us living elsewhere might perhaps visit one day, but which otherwise doesn’t mean a heck of a lot to us just yet.

A Broadcast Signal Intrusion

Got caught in a weird sequence of click-throughs yesterday and ended up losing about a half-hour learning of this obscure story from 1987 from Chicago about a couple of television signal hijackings occurring one Sunday evening in late November.

That evening someone managed to interrupt broadcasts on two different Chicago television stations (WGN and WTTW) with brief, unsettling signal intrusions, causing a lot of consternation and in fact ultimately never being discovered or caught.

The first interruption came over on WGN during The Nine O’Clock News and lasted just a half-minute or so. The second came a couple of hours later during WTTW’s showing of a Dr. Who rerun. That one lasted a couple of minutes. In the first case, WGN was able to retake control of its signal and cut things off quickly, but WTTW couldn’t do anything when they were hacked and thus had to wait for the pirates to sign off themselves before getting their signal back.

The incidents came to be known as the “Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion” since both featured someone wearing a Max Headroom mask.

Some of us are old enough to remember the ubiquitous Max Headroom character pitching Coca-Cola products during the ’80s, in particular the doomed “New Coke.” Was kind of a goofy hybrid of an actual actor (Matt Frewer) and computer animation that was supposed to simulate an example of artificial intelligence. Started with a British TV movie, I believe, and there were other tie-ins all around involving the character who seemed to fit in well with the jittery MTV-influenced pop culture of the day.

The first signal interruption only featured distorted noise as a soundtrack as the person in the mask bobbed his head around before a rotating backdrop. By the time of the second, longer interruption the pirates had figured out how to include audio, too, and you can hear the dude uttering a lot of disconnected phrases (including Max Headroom’s “catch the wave” tagline), then eventually dropping his pants to receive a flyswatter spanking.

All of it reminded me a lot of the group Negativland who back in the 1980s pulled similar stunts that often were designed to satirize corporate culture and/or the media, sometimes engaging in hacking-type shenanigans (or “jamming”) as part of their modus operandi. In fact, the San Francisco-based outfit once made an entire CD full of tracks spoofing and commenting on the “Cola wars,” attacking Coke and Pepsi from just about every angle imaginable. That disc was called Dispepsi and necessarily included some Max Headroom samples, too.

There’s another weird connection between the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion and Negativland. At one point during the second break-in on WTTV when the fellow is tossing out all sorts of unconnected phrases and references, he hums the theme song to the short-lived syndicated cartoon show Clutch Cargo (1959-60), then says “I still see the X,” a line referring to one of the episodes of the show. Negativland had a track on an early disc (Points) titled “Clutch Cargo ’81,” an avant-garde mish-mash of piano, synth effects, and kitchen noises.

Although I don’t remember ever hearing anything about it, at the time the story of the twin signal intrusions earned a lot of attention, with even the CBS Evening News talking about it the next day. I guess it endures as a kind of touchstone moment among “culture jammers” and others interested in the history of hacking. As I mentioned, the pirates were never identified or caught, although the internet is now full of theories about the identity of the culprit(s).

I realized after reading through some of the stories and watching a couple of videos about it that I, too, had had my routine unexpectedly interrupted. In other words, some 25 years later the pirates had successfully knocked me “off the air” (so to speak) for a short while.

Thinking further, though, I realized that these days such interruptions are in fact the norm, not the exception. How many of us experience even a couple of hours’ worth of focused attention on anything anymore? How many of you even made it through the 2-3 minutes it took to get this far in this post without something popping up or clicking away at least once? (I know I didn’t write it without being interrupted several times, that’s for sure.)

How did I get to the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion? Let’s see. I’m pretty sure it started with my class, “Poker in American Film and Culture,” for which I have compiled a number of clips of poker scenes from movies. One is the short, funny scene from Stripes in which John Candy’s character delivers an expensive poker lesson to “Cruiser.” (“Dare me! Go on, bluff me!”)

Looking up the actor’s name who played Cruiser (John Diehl), I saw Bill Paxton listed in the credits. He apparently is in there somewhere in a non-speaking role as a soldier. Clicking through and reading about Paxton revealed that as an eight-year-old he was at the hotel in Fort Worth to wave at JFK as he left on November 22, 1963. (Coincidentally, the “Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion” occurred on November 22, 1987.)

Somehow avoiding the JFK assassination rabbit hole -- which like most of us I have gone down plenty of times before -- I instead noted how in 1979 Paxton had directed the short film made to accompany the Barnes and Barnes novelty hit “Fish Heads” which I soon was watching on YouTube.

I can’t recreate the sequence from there, but I believe it was a sidebar click or three from there that eventually got me to the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion story. One of the commentors on the “Fish Heads” video succinctly describes my experience: “I’m in that weird part of YouTube.”

And for some of you I’ve probably now led you to what seems a weird part of the internet, too. But really, it’s all weird, full of distractions and interruptions that tend to fill up our days.