Poor Richard's Poker Genius (Subtitled)

#1 Who knew: SU went and got cool.

I wonder if they'll be offering this as a correspondence course in the near future.

#2: Happy 300th Birthday to Benjamin Franklin. You were prescient enough to warn us about the problems a lack of civility would leave us with. Too bad no one in power actually read your warnings. Ah, civil discourse, we hardly knew thee. You magnificient bastard.

#3: G4TV became my new favorite station today. I tuned in around 8:00 this morning, looking to catch a little of Washington Journal. But the cable's been screwed up of late, and C-SPAN's currently unwatchable. So I start tooling down the dial and I stumble across Kaiju Big Battel. If you don't know what Kaiju Big Battel is, then I am a better person for prompting you with this link: Become a better person. Think Japanese B-monster flicks meets American pro wrestling circa 1987.

Following a Fighto!, G4 went directly into an episode of Beast Wars. Without commercials (a few words occassionally for other shows on G4, but no real ads). Fuck'n great. TV made for me. You know, since I seem incapable of watching four hours of 24 in two days, and have thus relegated myself to either a season of going, "now who's that guy again," or ultimately giving up by saying, "well, no, this show really isn't plausible."

#4: I ♥ Atlantic Monthly. They're celebrating their sesquicentennial this year, and in celebration are re-publishing excerpts of articles that have appeared in the magazine over its history. In the current issue, there's a fantastic article from September 1891 by Woodrow Wilson (yeah, the president... he was lowly college professor when he wrote for the Atlantic) about, essentially, pursuing your own genius. I'll provide a link to the article, but you need to be a subscriber to the magazine to read the whole thing. (See update below.) The best part, though, is Wilson's closing paragraph:

The ability to see for one's self is attainable, not by mixing with crowds and ascertaining how they look at things, but by a certain aloofness and self-containment. The solitariness of some genius is not accidental; it is characteristic and essential. To the constructive imagination there are some immortal feats which are possible only in seclusion. The man must heed first and most of all the suggestions of his own spirit; and the world can be seen from windows overlooking the street better than from the street itself.

He's talking specifically about how what we contemporaneously consider good books in the here & now become immortal works remembered through the ages. But taken more generally, I find it to be an encouragement to that inner genius we all possess - in some of us (ahem), it manifests itself in what folks today might call geekdom. I think, especially as we - and I'm talking chiefly of the GenXers among us - went through our latter high school and early collegiate careers, we fought to try to find that balance, finding an appropriate voice for that genius. And Wilson's point was precisely this: fuck appropriate.
Seriously, this article should be required reading for all high school junior english students. At least, that's when I could have benefitted from it the most.

UPDATE (8:44 AM, 18.jan): As a reader points out in comments, dopes like me can pay for the subscription, but you can read it for free. Atlantic is posting the excerpts from their celebration online at this page. The link to the Wilson article can be found here. So go, read!