Casual Friday A Consumerist Con

Who invented dress-down Fridays? And why? My theory is that the clothing industry was desperately looking for ways in which men could be forced to spend more on clothes. After all, "casual Friday" isn't what it pretends to be. I suspect that if half the men in offices turned up on Friday the way that they dressed on Saturday, well, they'd be towed away to the funny farm. Sitting down at the desk in dressing gown and flip-flops is not yet permissible, even in these latter fashion-days of "anything goes".

The "casual" (we have no letter or dipthong to express the soft "j" as in "Anjou" or "caj" -- why is that?) look is, of course, a uniform all of its own, and one that I studiously decline to join. Designer jeans or chinos, expensive slip-ons rather than expensive lace-ups, and labelled polo shirts rather than cufflinked shirts from Horton & Bent of Old Broad Street. Nonsense, the lot of it.

Uniforms, ah, uniforms. I think that one can always guess the lack of intelligence in young people by the extent to which they attempt to pretend that they are "individual" and then all end up dressing like their friends. Anyone "truly" rebellious gets short shrift from the conforming "rebels". Rebellion against authority has its own rules. If you want to find the right person to employ, pick the rebel who goes outside conforming rebellion. The trouble is, that person will probably be expelled from school because the teachers are also too stupid to understand.

Jeans that hang down to your butt cheeks? Revolutionary? I mean, Hello? Boring, dude, boring and conventional.

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I have to put the following in to get my free entry.

If you are planning on enterting, make sure you put down my site as the referrer! Who knows? Maybe Pokerstars will pay for advertising.

I have registered to play in the
Online Poker Blogger Championship!

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 7606369

September figures

SITE/STAKES	$5-$10	25c-50c(PLO)	$5	$25	$3-$6	25p-50p	Grand Total
Party Poker	-$155.00				$261.00		$106.00
Ultimate Bet		-$220.00			$69.50		-$150.50
Betfair	$61.00		-$47.95			$5.00	$18.05
Stan James				-$27.50			-$27.50
PokerStars	$155.00				$180.50		$335.50
Winnings	$61.00	-$220.00	-$47.95	-$27.50	$511.00	$5.00	$281.55
Hours	28.20	23.75	7.50	1.00	31.75	1.00	93.20
Avge Per hour	$2.16	-$9.26	-$6.39	-$27.50	$16.09	$5.00	$3.02

 

Well, I "saved as HTML" this time. Net result is nicer, I admit, but I can't figure out how to reduce the height of the cells! Changing the "height" parameter(yes, even I can work that one out) doesn't seem to make any difference, no matter whether I do it in points, percentages, or just as a simple number. Much of the Office coding is utterly incomprehensible (as well as being pointlessly bloated) and it's hard to see how it links in with the Live Journal restrictions.

At first sight this is not a promising month. $270 in bonuses and oly $280 profit. But I was happy with it. I can take a Zennish attitude to losses (indeed, a series of losses) at this level. I have lost $180 today (although I got $100 of that back in a bonus), but I felt quite calm and in control, which is the important thing.

I was also somewhat cheered by Roswell's figures. Roswell is what I would call a typical very good young American player. He can win absolutely bundles at $15-$30 ... and then will always find some other means by which to lose it back. Then he will beat himself up about it, promise never to try $100-$200 or $10-$20 NL again, or something like that, and go back to the $15-$30 grindstone.

Anyway, that wasn't what cheered me. What it was that gave me a calmer outlook was the revelation that over 30,000 hands or thereabouts, at which he won $20,000, there was a period of 14,000 hands in the middle where he lost $1,000. As Roswell points out, the margins are so thin at upper levels that you can play for a very long time before you can even be sure that you are a winning player.

The point here is that, for 14,000 hands, that could mean seven months or so for me. This makes my chart for this year somewhat easier to bear (a kind of decent rise through to May, then an atmospheric air-sucking leap over a six-week period, followed by stasis for three months) and easier for me to understand. Basically, at 2,000 to 3,000 hands a month, this is quite within expected levels of variance.

By playing $3-$6 I think that I reduce my variance significantly (at least, that is how it seems from the past couple of weeks' play). I'm not sure that I really want that, in the long term, but at the moment it's the right thing for me.

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Picked up Hero from HMV yesterday. And that is what I'm just about to watch (again!).