Everything Has A Limit

Well, there must be some reason for me sitting here, looking at a blazingly beautiful day outside, and knowing that I have to spend the next few hours trawling for insurance stories, so global warming is as good a vilain to blame as any. It hardly inspires me to add on an extra hour or so compiling the information on other people's blogs so that I can get some kind of all-encompassing "sense of the WSOP", even though so doing would be infinitely more satisfying than writing about insurance. Unfortunately, it would also be infinitely less remunerative. So, let's have some general impressions.

Added together, bloggers at the WSOP are down. However, throw in cash games, online games and satellites, and it's more marginal. They are probably still down, but not so significantly. The Youngster pointed out that putting online games in as part of a Vegas visit was, at the least, disingenuous, and at worse, self-deceiving, since you could just have easily have played those games without heading to the airport.

Anyway, my freelancer in the US has decided that the life of tapping away on the computer on Redondo Beach is far too stressful, so he's heading to the lakes of Italy for a couple of weeks, leaving poor old muggins here to write the American stuff as well. Fuck me, it's lucky that I write like a rat on amphetamines.

Will Harry Demetriou ever win a bracelet? I think that he will, but even he must be wondering when. The Short-Handed NL Hold'em final table seemed to have "Bracelet for Harry" written all over it. But it wasn't to be. Still, how many bracelets has Bill Hellmuth won with more than 50 entrants?

The extent to which Harrah's is damaging its own reputation seems so illimitless that you doubt that they can come up with anything new. But surely strong-arming the European players for taxes from last year, which the Europeans don't owe is about as bad as it can get. Well, no, actually. Because they also managed to recycle cards for a $50,000 buy-in. You have to assume that the half a million or so that they are trousering for running it doesn't stretch to hiring enough dealers or buying a new set of cards.

You have to assume that Harrah's is offering Boyd Gaming the Rio in exchange for the Barbary Coast (because that's the last bit of land on that part of the strip that Harrah's needs before it can tear down 70 acres worth of buildings and put up the new urban village that it is dreaming of). Otherwise why would Harrah's try so hard to destroy the hotel's repuation? I really would love to avoid ever staying in a Harrah's hotel ever again, or ever playing in a Harrah's-run tournament ever again. Unfortunately I can be fairly certain that my ambition will fail.
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A biography of Spike Milligan last night fairly summarized the man's manic-depression, and I was a little bit too personally touched by some of his scrawlings when in his depressive mode. "Didn't I write that once?" I asked myself when I saw one particularly disturbing note. Manic-depression must be a truly desperate illness to suffer, particularly if, like Milligan, you are also very clever.

I caught the Milligan programme because it preceded a re-run on More4 of GBH, in my view AAlan Bleasdale's greatest achievement, and probably Michael Palin's and Robert Lindsay's too. It was this series that first alerted me to the land of TS Eliot beyond The Waste Land and The Hollow Men (for which thank Apocalypse Now )

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(Later): After two hours of struggling with such august publications as The Hindu and The Philippines Star (not to mention motor insurance in British Columbia and California - darned socialist states; get some free enterprise like our insurance system. No rate setting by politicians here. Durned sounds like comoonisum to me..."

Anyway, I needed a break so I caught up with Julien Temple's Glastonbury. I didn't think I was going to enjoy it for the first 10 minutes or so, but it definitely improved as the film went on. I thought that he had got it dead right when he seemed to have concluded with Pulp's 1995 performance of Common People, which I think was probably one of the best ever Glastonbury performances. Unfortunately he followed this with David Bowie's (2000?) performance of Heroes, which had me feeling like shouting "Oi, Temple! NO!"

But he picked up on some forgotten highlights, particularly the incomparable Melanie, performing "There's A Chance (Peace Will Come)". Melanie Safka, unlike Janis Joplin, didn't die young, and didn't do heroin. But that didn't stop her having one of the freat female voices. I fell in love with the 1970 Melanie Safka in, oooh, 1969, and I've loved her ever since. The albums that I had of hers were stolen in the late 1980s, and she was unfortunately associated in Britain with her not-very-good hits such as "Brand New Key", rather than brilliant stuff like "Lay Down".

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