Knesset Votes for Israeli Compliance with UN Resolution 3379

From The Independent

Israel imposes 'racist' marriage law
Palestinian-Israeli couples will be forced to leave or live apart

By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem
01 August 2003

Israel's Parliament has passed a law preventing Palestinians who marry Israelis from living in Israel. The move was denounced by human rights organisations as racist, undemocratic and discriminatory.

Under the new law, rushed through yesterday, Palestinians alone will be excluded from obtaining citizenship or residency. Anyone else who marries an Israeli will be entitled to Israeli citizenship.

Now Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza Strip will either have to move to the occupied territories, or live apart from their husband or wife. Their children will be affected too: from the age of 12 they will be denied citizenship or residency and forced to move out of Israel. ...

(via Farah Mendelsohn)

Sam Phillips: Ave Atque Vale

Legendary record producer Sam Phillips died yesterday in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 80 years old.

Phillips produced Elvis Presley's first records for Phillips' own label, Sun Records. He also produced records for such artists as B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison. He was called by some "the man who invented rock and roll."

(via SF Gate)

Attention LiveJournalers

As I Please's LiveJournal syndication (http://www.livejournal.com/users/alanbostick/) is updating erratically; some of my recent posts are missing. To stay current, you are going to have to come outside and read my blog directly.

Relax. It's good for you to crawl out from under LJ's event horizon and see some of the real world, once in a while.

Bachelor Party Needs a Fix

Here's Mark Morford, writing in SF Gate's "Morning Fix":

Oh yes, there will be strippers. There will be skankiness. There might very well be illegal substances some of which are totally organic to the natural macrobiotic world and some of which most definitely are not and all of which make John Ashcroft scowl and pule and seethe with quiet jealousy.

There will most definitely be booze. And cigars. And gambling and yelling and laughter and guys sharing hotel beds to save money, and there will be music and drunkenness and all-night whoknowswhat and massive hangovers that require Bloody Marys all around, the next day, almost certainly.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm just projecting. I have little idea what to expect. This is my first full-fledged hardcore bachelor-party adventure, and I'm part of a group consisting of more than 15 other guys, and it will all go down in Reno and the e-mails are flying and revealing and somewhat hilarious as the Single Guys vie with the Married Guys vie with the Crazy Guys as to budgets and activities and who wants to chip in for a powerboat versus the "entertainment" versus the limo versus those whose wives clearly instructed them not to do anything dangerous or illegal or naked or else. [emphasis added — ALB]

Reno? RENO????

I hate to break it to you, Mark, but except for the gambling part, you and your buds can have yourselves a better, wilder time right here at home in San Francisco.

Reno's a nice town; I like to go there. But I like it for things like the view of the western Sierras from my hotel room, the Truckee River running through the center of town, the family-style home cooking at the Santa Fe Basque Restaurant, and the no-limit Texas hold'em game that gets down Friday and Saturday nights in the poker room at the El Dorado.

But aside from that no-limit game, the poker in Reno is nothing to write home about; you'll find more action at the Lucky Chances cardroom in Colma, or just about any other of the large Bay Area cardrooms.

Conoisseurs of sin and depravity agree: the strip clubs of Reno are second-rate — nowhere near as wild and crazy as those in Las Vegas to the south ... or as the Mitchell Brothers' O'Farrell Theater right here at home.

There are three ways in which Reno might be viewed as superior to San Francisco as a venue for a bachelor party:

(1) Overall gambling opportunities. Craps is one of the best damn party games around (although I don't know anywhere in Reno where you can get more than double odds; to get a more attractive 10X or 100x odds, you have to go to Las Vegas).

(2) Smoking is allowed in the bars, restaurants, casinos, etc., in Reno. (I don't personally think this is a genuine plus, but you might.)

(3) The legal brothels outside of town. Don't waste your money at the clipjoints outside Carson City, where (my sources tell me) a party can cost on the order of $500 to $1,000 per person; instead try the Old Bridge Ranch, just past Sparks, or the Wild Horse Resort, a little further east on I-80. Here you can expect to pay on the order of $200 to $300, at least if your hostess doesn't figure you for a total chump. (But if you aren't bothered by niceties of the law, those same sources tell me that you can find that sort of entertainment for cheaper in San Francisco.)

San Francisco is a wonderful town where bad boys can play, and Las Vegas is absolutely marvelous. Reno, as much as I love it, is instead a great place to take a wife, partner, or sweetie for a weekend getaway.

Pentagon Scraps Mideast Political Futures Market

From SF Gate:

Warner says Pentagon threat-bet program to be canceled

KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
07-29) 09:06 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the head of the agency overseeing the program, Tony Tether, "and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped." Tether is the head of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.

Later, in an interview, Warner said that DARPA "didn't think through the full ramifications of the program."

(via Liz Lynn)

Bush Caught Red-Handed

George W. Bush violates federal law on camera.

United States Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8 (g):

"The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature."

(via Elf Sternberg)

Maybe We Should Give Rummy's Job to Bill Bennett

In Las Vegas race and sports books, you can place bets on sporting events, but you can't bet on politics. The Department of Defense wants to change this.

The Pentagon's Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the people who brought us the Internet — is collaborating with the Economist Intelligence Group and a firm called Net Exchange to put together the Policy Analysis Market, a market in futures contracts that deal with "underlying fundamentals" of the Middle East:

Analysts often use prices from various markets as indicators of potential events. The use of petroleum futures contract prices by analysts of the Middle East is a classic example. The Policy Analysis Market (PAM) refines this approach by trading futures contracts that deal with underlying fundamentals of relevance to the Middle East. Initially, PAM will focus on the economic, civil, and military futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey and the impact of U.S. involvement with each.

The contracts traded on PAM will be based on objective data and observable events. These contracts will be valuable because traders who are registered with PAM will use their money to acquire contracts. A PAM trader who believes that the price of a specific futures contract under-predicts the future status of the issue on which it is based can attempt to profit from his belief by buying the contract. The converse holds for a trader who believes the price is an over-prediction – she can be a seller of the contract. This price discovery process, with the prospect of profit and at pain of loss, is at the core of a market’s predictive power.

The issues represented by PAM contracts may be interrelated; for example, the economic health of a country may affect civil stability in the country and the disposition of one country’s military may affect the disposition of another country’s military. The trading process at the heart of PAM allows traders to structure combinations of futures contracts. Such combinations represent predictions about interrelated issues that the trader has knowledge of and thus may be able to make money on through PAM. Trading these trader-structured derivatives results in a substantial refinement in predictive power.

The PAM trading interface presents A Market in the Future of the Middle East. Trading on PAM is placed in the context of the region using a trading language designed for the fields of policy, security, and risk analysis. PAM will be active and accessible 24/7 and should prove as engaging as it is informative.

In an example of how futures contracts might be structured, PAM's Web site provides an example of combining contracts on the (now historical) duration of conflict in Iraq with those on the likelihood of the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy, to show a way that, if someone who doesn't particularly know the likelihood of the duration of the conflict but with a sense that, should it last, a neighboring state is likely to be unstable, that person can hedge a prediction. (I.e. "If the war lasts longer than 1 month, then the Jordanian government is likely to fall.")

Registration of futures contract traders is slated to begin on August 1, with trading scheduled to open on October 1.

If this system is implemented as planned, it will be possible to gamble on the outcome of middle-eastern political and economic events. The system's business model resembles more the Chicago Board of Trade than it does the sports book at Caesar's Palace; but gambling it is.

As you might imagine, not everyone is happy with this prospect. Two Democratic senators have requested that the Pentagon kill the project before registration of traders begins on August 1. An Associated Press report quotes Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) as saying, "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," at a news conference held jointly with Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.)

Sen. Dorgan described the Policy Analysis Market as useless, offensive, and "unbelievably stupid." "Can you imagine," he said, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in ... and bet on the assassination of an American political figure, or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?" (One wonders whether Dorgan has ever been to the UK, and, if he has, whether he ever set foot inside a Ladbrokes shop.)

FutureMAP, the program which manages DARPA's participation in the project, has this to say about the market's utility and application:

There is potential for application of market-based methods to analyses of interest to the DoD. These may include analysis of political stability in regions of the world, prediction of the timing and impact on national security of emerging technologies, analysis of the outcomes of advanced technology programs, or other future events of interest to the DoD. In addition, the rapid reaction of markets to knowledge held by only a few participants may provide an early warning system to avoid surprise.

As a gambler, I have no a priori objection to the Policy Analysis Market. If policymakers can use market activity as a warning sign of sudden changes, more power to them.

I see difficulties with this system. No one in their right mind would trade these futures contracts unless they had some reason to believe that they had insight into the occurrences which underly those contracts.[1]

Punters — err, investors who trade these contracts are going to be at risk of losing their shirts, unless they have some kind of edge. There's a saying about commodity futures trading: The way to make a small fortune in futures is by starting with a large one. How can you evaluate whether a contract is trading at a fair price unless you have a sense of the odds?

The market will respond usefully to the activities of a knowledgeable few if and only if it is sufficiently liquid, that is, if there is sufficient interest in buying (or selling) contracts when someone suddenly wants to sell (or buy). Are the market-makers prepared to take the kind of short-term risks that are needed to provide that liquidity? How large a spread between bid and asking prices will be needed to tempt them into taking that risk?

And the experience of the existing financial markets is that with such liquidity goes volatility. They respond when an informed buyer starts buying in quantity ... but they also respond to unsubstantiated rumors, to irrational exuberance and bleak pessimism, to the manipulations of crooked traders. A sudden flurry of activity in contracts predicting the assasination of Syria's Bashar Assad might reflect the knowledge of someone close to Muslim Brotherhood cells working in Syria, or it might reflect the need of a trading firm to create a climate of rumors in which it can profitably dump contracts it had bought earlier.

In his autobiography Jimmy the Greek, by himself, Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder described the lengths he had to go in the days he ran an illegal sports book in Ohio to gather intelligence about college football teams in order to get a leg up on the gambling public. And as such things go, football teams are relatively well-defined and clear. Al Qaeda is not going to publish its DL for the benefit of punters. In order to gather the information needed to consistently come out ahead in this market, a punter would need intelligence that was good and consistent enough to rival (if not outperform) the secret services and intelligence agencies active in the region. Everyone else is going to lose their shirts, on average, to the market makers' spreads.

(via Talking Points Memo)

[1] This is gambling, though. Abdul Jalib's First Law of Gambling is "People are stupid," and his Second Law of Gambling is, "When people are stupid, there's money to be made."

"You'll Never Be Able to Trust Your Staff..."

Almost as an afterthought to my post after midnight this morning, Avedon Carol blogs an Op-Ed piece from yesterday's Washington Post by Joe Robinson on the incredible shrinking vacation of the American worker.

Avedon has never been slow to offer her own opinion. Here is part of her response to and amplification of Robinson's points:

Create a friendly environment and get employees who are willing to put out that bit of extra effort for you, work to a higher standard rather than just work to rule; create an adversarial environment and you'll have a worforce made up of exactly that: your adversaries. Which, among other things, means they will be less likely to waste an erg of their energy correcting (or admitting to) mistakes, or staying a few minutes late to make sure the last t is crossed and the last i is dotted. It also means you'll probably have to either buy far more office supplies than are ever used on the premises, and you'll never be able to trust your staff because they hate you.

As I pointed out yesterday (and as Teresa Nielsen Hayden pointed out last March), Bush in the White House (and Rumsfeld in the Pentagon) manage their operations by using their authority to cover for their lack of competence and knowledge, by being provocative and challenging to their subordinates — by treating them as adversaries.

This explains why a "loyal staffer" like Joseph Hadley, Condoleeza Rice's number 2 in the National Security Council, while nominally taking the fall for not reacting to the CIA's disavowal of the Niger uranium ore forgery, says things in his press briefing last week such as, "What we know is, again, a copy of the memo [from the CIA, doubting the Niger forgery] comes to the Situation Room, it's sent to Dr. Rice, it's sent — and that's it. You know, I can't tell you she read it. I can't even tell you she received it." I'm voluntarily taking the fall, Hadley said, in effect, because Condi won't cop to reading what I send her.

That's what I meant when I said I'm glad I don't work in the White House. The boss leans hard on his subordinates, and they hate him for it; and their own staffers stand ready to catch them with a knife in the back should they stumble under the boss's leaning.

If you should happen to get that evening phone call asking if you stand ready to help your country by coming to Washington, think twice.

A Quote From Last March

The foreign policy/national security mess in which the Bush White House has mired itself was foreshadowed by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, writing on March 28 in Making Light. Teresa recalled an interview of George W. Bush by Bob Woodward, appearing on CBS' 60 Minutes in November, 2002:

Woodward says [Bush] told him that when he chairs a meeting he often tries to be provocative. When Woodward asked him if he tells his staff that he is purposely being provocative, Mr. Bush answered: “Of course not. I am the commander, see?”

Bush: “I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

Here is what Teresa said about this:

I recognize that behavior. Lord help me, I’ve seen it done. It’s one of the tactics you can use if you’re in an executive-level job that’s beyond your abilities, you have to have meetings with underlings who know more than you do, and your only concern is to save face while making sure they’re giving you what you want. ...

If ... you run the meeting in a deliberately provocative fashion, it skews the discourse out of shape, generates a lot of noise and confusion, and throws everyone off balance. This camouflages the fact that you don’t know which end of the stick is sharp. It also teaches people that they’re only safe if you’re happy.

Having to ask questions is likewise unacceptable. Being provocative is a way to get your underlings to automatically give you a recap of what the issues are, their relative importance, how the whole picture fits together, and where that underling comes into it. How so? Because of the skew in the discourse. Someone giving an answer he’s already thought about will generally just give the answer. But if you knock him off balance, make him think on his feet and talk while he’s doing his thinking, he’s more likely to narrate the whole mental process leading up to the answer. Even if you don’t get the whole process out of him, he’ll still be giving you half-formed answers, and those will have a lot of context still sticking to them. Either way, you’ll pick up a lot of framing information, and can then act like you knew that stuff all along. You’re unlikely to get called on it by someone who’s still trying to regain his balance. ...

Your more earnest and straightforward underlings are still going to be trying to fit all that random noise you’re generating into some larger overall picture. It’ll be tough going. The less honest ones will just be trying to keep you happy while pushing their own agendas—and they’ll be at an advantage. It’s tough to come up with truthful, responsible answers under those conditions, because there are thousands of bits of real-world circumstantiality one has to account for. Agenda-pushers just need to know which direction to push, and they’ve got that going in. There’ll be no one to save you from folly.

The chaos Teresa describes is just the sort of environment in which a "fact" about (say) a sale of uranium ore to Iraq can be repeatedly spiked as unbelievable and reinserted by someone else who needs to have it believed, with the man at the top having no sense of what to believe. Chaos takes over from orderly process, and backstabbing politics trumps carefully made policy.

Now we have the CIA at war with the National Security Council over the Niger yellowcake forgery; the Pentagon at war with the State Department over the role of the UN in rebuilding Iraq; and the Pentagon at war with the CIA over CIA cooperation with Syria in pursuit of al Qaeda. Nobody in the White House can keep their story straight from day to day.

I'm glad I don't work in the White House.

Schadenfreude

In my just-previous entry, I alluded to this entry on Talking Points Memo, in which Josh Marshall quotes a Washington newsletter called The Nelson Report:

Until or unless the President steps in to provide leadership, the long-awaited showdown between the "neoconservatives" and the "pragmatists" will soon reach crisis proportions — this, due to CIA director George Tenet's extraordinary decision to name the President's staffers responsible for misleading, or false, pre-Iraq war intel, Administration sources confirm today.

— and the war has just begun, intelligence community sources warn. The Iraq/Niger debacle is but one of "a whole series of stories which are ready to break", a source told us today, adding, "I've never seen such hostility and disdain as now being expressed between the White House and the CIA. Never."

This is, bluntly, the best, most heartening news I've seen in about six months.

Who's Got the Button...?

If you haven't played poker in a public cardroom, you probably have never seen a dealer button. But you've heard of it many times: another word used for it is buck. "Passing the buck" literally means letting the dealer button pass you by, so that the next player, not you, has the responsibility of dealing the cards — and the advantage of acting last.

President Harry S. Truman, well known for his love of poker, surely knew this when he put the famous sign on is desk, the one that read, "The buck stops here." There was no one else to whom he could pass the buck. He had the final responsibility. The sign also served as a warning to those knowledgeable enough to read it: "The buck stops here" also means "I'll always have position on you." As Doyle Brunson put it, In No-Limit Hold'em, position is ... well, it's the name of the game. It's everything. If I had position all night, I could beat the game ... and I'd never have to look at my hole-cards. (Super/System, p. 334) Tor Books editor Beth Meacham, talking about Tor's publisher, Tom Doherty, puts it another way: "Tom bats last."

There's been a lot of questioning of "where the buck stops" in the Bush White House in the dustup over the Niger yellowcake. The reporter questioning Scott McClellan a week ago asked that very question, and that was when CIA director George Tenet was the Designated Fall Guy, i.e. the player on the button. But then a new hand must have been dealt, because The button has been passed to Deputy National Security Advisor Joseph Hadley. If the Truman Administration's motto was "The buck stops here," that of the Bush White House seems to be "Button move!"

Anyone who can read English can take backbearings from both Tenet's and Hadley's statements of culpability; and those backbearings point straight at Hadley's immediate supervisor, Condoleeza Rice.

To continue with the poker metaphor, Rice is obviously sitting in the small blind right now, and the buck will inevitably be passed to her in the next hand. In the big blind is Vice President Dick Cheney (whom Josh Marshall, at least, thinks is the person genuinely responsible for the State-of-the-Union gaffe). President Bush is obviously under the gun, which perhaps explains why he's lobbying right now, with that little stack of "Missed Blind" lammers in front of his chips. Meanwhile, George Tenet, now in the cutoff seat, is giving off a huge tell that he's going to be moving all-in soon, and it wouldn't be wise for any of the White House players to call that bet.

Bless the nominee,
And give him our regards,
And watch while he learns
That in poker and politics,
Brother you gotta have
That slippery haphazardous commodity
You gotta have the cards!

—"Politics and Poker", music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick; from Fiorello! by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott

Great Moments in Radio Comedy

When I first read it in Talking Points Memo it sounded familiar in a way. It wasn't until I read it again in Tapped that I realized why.

In your mind's ear, have Lou Costello take the role of Question, and have Bud Abbott read White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's part:

QUESTION: Regardless of whether or not there was pressure from the White House for that line, I'm wondering where does the buck stop in this White House? Does it stop at the CIA, or does it stop in the Oval Office?

Scott McClellan: Again, this issue has been discussed. You're talking about some of the comments that — some that are —

QUESTION: I'm not talking about anybody else's comments. I'm asking the question, is responsibility for what was in the President's own State of the Union ultimately with the President, or with somebody else?

Scott McClellan: This has been discussed.

QUESTION: So you won't say that the President is responsible for his own State of the Union speech?

Scott McClellan: It's been addressed.

QUESTION: Well, that's an excellent question. That is an excellent question. (Laughter.) Isn't the President responsible for the words that come out of his own mouth?

Scott McClellan: We've already acknowledged, Terry, that it should not have been included in there. I think that the American people appreciate that recognition.

QUESTION: You acknowledge that, but you blame somebody else for it. Is the President responsible for the things that he said in the State of the Union?

Scott McClellan: Well, the intelligence — you're talking about intelligence that — sometimes you later learn more information about intelligence that you didn't have previously. But when we're clearing a speech like that, it goes through the various agencies to look at that information and —

QUESTION: And so when there's intelligence in a speech, the President is not responsible for that?

Scott McClellan: We appreciate Director Tenet saying that he should have said, take it out.

QUESTION: But it's the President's fault.

Scott McClellan: In fact, if you look back at it, I mean, we did take out a different reference, a reference based on different sources in a previous speech because it was said — the CIA Director said, take it out.

QUESTION: Let me come back to your "nonsense" statement here, and let me slice it as thinly as I possibly can, just growing out of what Scott asked. Is it nonsense to say that the White House wanted this information included in the State of the Union and negotiated with the CIA to find a way to put it in to the State of the Union?

Scott McClellan: I'm sorry?

QUESTION: Is it nonsense to say that the White House wanted this information in the speech and went through negotiations with the CIA on a way to get it in the speech?

Scott McClellan: That there were discussions? Speech drafts go — we've stated that these speeches go out to the principals, it goes out to the State, it goes out to DOD, it goes out to CIA, when it's going through the drafting process.

QUESTION: Scott, you said it was "nonsense" to say that the White House was pressuring the CIA to put this in the speech. Is it nonsense to say —

Scott McClellan: I think the question that you asked about was that someone was insisting —

QUESTION: Durbin said, a White House official insisted —

Scott McClellan: — insisting that it be put in there in an effort to mislead the American people, I think is what —

QUESTION: You didn't explicitly give a motive.

Scott McClellan: And I said I think that's just nonsense.

QUESTION: I'm just trying to slice it a little bit narrowly, to say, is it nonsense to say that the White House wanted this information in the speech and negotiated with the CIA on a way to get it in the speech?

Scott McClellan: Are you asking me to characterize the discussions that occur going on during the speech drafting process? I don't —

QUESTION: I'm saying, does your "nonsense" statement apply to the idea that the White House wanted it in the speech and negotiated with the CIA on a way to get it in the speech?

Scott McClellan: I think that it still goes back to, these drafts go to the various agencies, it goes to the CIA, this is an intelligence matter. It was based on information in the National Intelligence Estimate. That's the consensus document of the intelligence community, and that's what the information was based on in that speech.

QUESTION: So what I asked you about in that speech, your "nonsense" statement —

Scott McClellan: I'm trying to walk you —

QUESTION: You're trying to walk me out the door. (Laughter.)

Scott McClellan: I'm trying to walk you through this.

QUESTION: So your nonsense statement doesn't apply to what I just asked you?

Scott McClellan: I'm trying to walk you through the drafting process. And that's why I was trying to put it in context, so you understand how this occurs.

QUESTION: Scott, on Keith's question, why can't we just expect, basically what would be a non-answer, which is, of course the President is responsible for everything that comes out of his mouth. I mean, that's a non-answer. Why can't you just say that?

Scott McClellan: This issue has been addressed over the last several days.

QUESTION: Why won't you say that, though, that's, like, so innocuous and benign.

Scott McClellan: The issue has been addressed.

THIRD BASE!

The Long Betrayal of Christopher Hitchens

Patrick Nielsen Hayden points us to this memoir of Christopher Hitchens and Bill Clinton from their Oxford days of the late 60s. It's notable enough on its own terms; but the truly astonishing thing about it is the author, our own true Roz Kaveney.

The New Card Shark

An article in the Technology section of today's New York Times covers the rise of poker players like Chris Moneymaker, schooled in online poker sites:

While the Las Vegas hype machine focused on the rags-to-riches tale of a man who parlayed a $40 entrance fee into a huge pot, many poker players recognized that the amateur's success signaled the arrival of a new age in the game. Mr. Moneymaker may never have been in the same room as other players in a tournament of Texas Hold'em poker, but he had played extensively online, where the game is faster but the money is just as real. He was as much a rookie as Ichiro Suzuki, who joined the Seattle Mariners after nine years in the Japanese major leagues.

The article also features a way cool picture of Darse Billings, one of the creators of Loki, the University of Alberta's poker-playing bot.

Back From Chelan

We had a lovely time on Lake Chelan, with Debbie's brother, David Notkin; David's wife, Cathy Tuttle; their children, Emma and Akiva; and David and Debbie's mother, Isabell Notkin. We stayed at Kelly's Resort, with the family divided between two cabins in the woods.

I brought some sourdough starter along, and was able to bake three loaves of bread in the kitchen of our cabin. It turned out reasonably well, considering that I had none of my baking paraphernalia with me (no baking stone, no spray bottle, no parchment paper, no dough knife). Everyone else thought the bread was marvelous; I know what it could be, though, and judged it merely good enough for the circumstances.

I also brought chips along, because David's a serious poker player, but we never did get a game going. Instead, we played a lot of Dictionary, and David took on Debbie at Anagrams.

Emma taught us to play a wonderful bluffing card game called B.S. All the cards are dealt to all the players. Each player discards face down between one and four cards, supposedly of a given rank — first player discards aces, second player deuces, and so on. After a player discards kings, the next player discards aces. If you don't have anything in your hand of that rank, then you lie! If you think the person who has discarded has lied, you challenge by saying "B.S.!" The discarded cards are revealed: if the discarder has lied, then she must take the muck into her hand; but if she was truthful then the challenger must take the muck. Once the next player discards, it's too late to challenge. The winner is the first player to discard (unchallenged) her last card(s). Play can continue until two players remain, at which point the player holding the most cards is the biggest loser.

It's a deceptively simple game; children can play it straightforwardly, but it engaged my poker brain thoroughly, as card sense and player-reading makes it quite interesting.

I came away from the game thinking that I'd love to watch a matchup among people like Men Nguyen, Dan Negreanu, Layne Flack, and Phil Hellmuth. Or even among the usual suspects like Bill Chen, Patti Beadles, JP Massar, or Spencer Sun. There's going to be card playing at Peter "Fold'em" Secor's party this Saturday; I'm going to see if I can drum up interest in a game of B.S. It should be easy enough to play it for money stakes — perhaps as a reverse freezeout (four players put up $25 [or $2.50, or whatever] each. First player out gets $50, second $30, and third $20; or maybe $60, $30, and $10).

The highlight of the week for me was when I took the ferry on Wednesday to Stehekin, at the far end of the lake, and stayed there for two days at the Stehekin Valley Ranch. Deb joined me on Thursday. The Stehekin Valley is isolated, accessible only by boat or plane (or by hiking in over the mountain passes), with no telephones or electrical power. You go there to be isolated, surrounded by the Cascade mountain range. The buildings of the ranch were maybe fifty yards from the foot of a mountain maybe a mile and a half high, whose rocky and icy peak was only something like three or four miles away in a straight line. The mountain peak on the other side of the river was almost as close. The view from the porch of the dining hall, up the valley, included McGregor Peak and the glacier on that mountain's uppermost slopes. If you love mountain vistas, this is a great place to see them.

Wednesday afternoon, after getting settled in my cabin, I went for a walk, two miles up the dirt road to a trailhead, then on a two-and-a-half-mile hike along the Agnes Gorge. I was completely on foot, like I had gone for a walk, no pack, no water bottle, nothing. (Perhaps I was being foolish — but I did put on sunscreen.) At the trailhead I crossed out of the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area into the North Cascades National Park; and about a mile along the trail crossed into the Glacier Peak Wilderness. I had walked into the wilderness! Way cool!

The scenery ranged from shady pine forest to open mountainside meadows with thrilling views of the surroundings. Early on the trail I could see McGregor Peak behind me. Then, after crossing into the wilderness, the trail rounded a bend and entered a meadow, and ahead of me was the sight of the still-more-magnificent Agnes Mountain. The gorge itself was hidden for much of the walk, until the end, when the trail wound along close to its edge, and I could look down and see the rushing rapids below me. The trail ended beside a hundred-foot waterfall.

The hike was incredibly satisfying to me, to be close to the mountains and the creeks and the forest, completely alone, like I had eluded the consensual hallucination that comprises the maya of civilization and had found myself walking in the real world.

Debbie joined me on Thursday, and we left on Friday, the 4th, to rendezvous with the family and return to Seattle. That night Debbie and I went to Jane Hawkins' new house, next door to her old one in Wallingford, to have dinner with her, Luke McGuff, Vonda McIntyre, and Rich and Linda McAllister (who were in town for Westercon). Afterwards we sat on the roof of the garage of Vonda's house to watch the fireworks over Lake Union. This turned out to be the best fireworks display I have ever seen.

And home again the next day. We spent some time at the Doubletree Inn, across from SeaTac airport, to catch a tiny bit of Westercon. Debbie had to meet with Geri Sullivan about a project to which Geri is contributing; I hung out for a while in the bar, reading, occasionally chatting with familiar people who came by. Then we flew home.

Straight Flush!

No shit, there I was, in the 6-12 hold'em game at the Oaks Club early this evening. Most everyone at the table was new to me, except for Laura in seat one and Danny Flores in seat two. I'm in seat seven. The dealer is Anya, the beautiful woman who used to help Alan Wasserman run the Oaks' tournaments when she was a chip runner.

In this hand, I'm in the cutoff seat, and my downcards are the six and four of clubs. The player under the gun folds, and Danny opens the betting by limping in, and gets a caller after him. The cutoff seat isn't the button, but I like my position enough to feel I can take a flyer with my hand, so I trail in.

The player on the button, a genial gambler with whom I've been building some friendly rapport, puts in a raise. Oh well, that's why its not such a good idea to limp in with a hand like suited 6-4 when you don't have the button. Not only was I committed to throwing an extra bet after a speculative hand, but the raiser is the one player who has position on me. Oops.

The player in the small blind drops out, but the big blind, a serious young Asian man whom I read as more of a thinker than a gambler, calls. Everyone else who is already in the hand puts in an extra bet.

The flop comes down 8c 8d 5c. Suddenly, I like my hand, although I'm not head-over-heels in love with it. I've got a gutshot straight flush draw, which means that three sevens give me a straight and the fourth, the seven of clubs, gives me a straight flush. Any other club will give me a flush, too. But a non-suited seven could give anyone holding 8-7 (a plausible limping hand) a full house, and there could easily be better flush draws out there. The good news is that, given the action and the players in the hand, 8-5 is fairly unlikely, so that I'm reasonably comfortable that no one has a full house — yet. I've got twelve outs to make a hand, but there's a reasonable likelihood that some of them are tainted.

The action is checked through to the player on the button, who, unsurprisingly bets. Big blind calls, Danny Flores calls, seat 5 calls. I like the pot odds, even though the number of players still in the hand means that my draw is thinner than I'd like it to be. I call.

Anya burns and turns the 46-to-1 longshot miracle: the seven of clubs. I've made my straight flush! Now my only problem is to get as much money into the pot as I can. I decide to slowplay, and give someone holding an eight in their hand the chance to catch enough to commit money to the pot.

The big blind checks. Danny Flores bets. He might be playing a suited 8-7 — I've seen him play cards like that in early position before — but I think the more likely hand for him is the ace of clubs and a suited kicker. The player between us drops out, and I just call the bet, waiting for the river to put the squeeze on Danny. The player in the big blind overcalls — better and better.

The river card that Anya puts out is the queen of spades. The big blind checks. Danny bets again. Now is my moment: I raise.

To my complete astonishment, the player in the big blind reraises! Five more chips, all-in. Danny cold-calls my raise and the big blind's all-in reraise. And here's the only bad luck I had in this hand: the Oaks Club's rule on raising all-in bets and raises is that you can only "complete" an all-in's bet, i.e. raise it enough to make it a full bet; and in this particular case, since the all-in player's partial reraise was in response to my raise, I couldn't even complete the bet! (The rationale for this is that doing so would be me raising my own bet.)

I said, "I sure hope that somebody has pocket eights!" and tabled my hand. No such luck; no jackpot this time. The player in the big blind showed his queen and eight of hearts. He had flopped three eights and rivered eights full of queens. Danny never showed his hand, but I assume from the fact that he called the double bet at the end that he, too, had a full house, presumably eights full of sevens. He lost with his usual grace and style (Danny's a mensch), but it must have gotten to him, because he got up immediately and lobbied for a while.

That's only my second straight flush. My first came early in my poker career, when I was dealt a pat royal flush in clubs on fifth street in the Oaks' 2-4 stud game. That time all I won was the antes and bring-ins. I think I might have won one more bet if I had checked it down to the river.

(Meanwhile, I've got a partial draft written about our trip to Lake Chelan; I hope to finish it and put it up tomor—err, later today.)