Posts Tagged ‘humor’

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.

The camp scheduled field trips one day a week, every week for all of the kids. Mostly they were to educational city attractions like the science center, the zoo, etc. The most ambitious trip we took was to a beach that was more than an hour’s drive from the camp.

For logistical reasons, they scheduled and planned these trips far in advance, so we didn’t have the option of postponing or rescheduling for bad weather. The day that our group went to the beach, it was windy and overcast, not exactly swimming weather. Kids being kids, though, many of them wanted to get in the ocean, and of course that necessitated that most of the chaperons be in the water as well.  Read the complete post...

(Sorry for all the low-content posts lately, I do plan on getting some more poker-related stuff going soon. For now, enjoy the filler!)

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.

Most activities at the summer camp were scheduled, either field trips or “classes” like art, library, music, etc. These activities were always led by a specialized member of the staff, and those of us who were just group leaders kind of helped out as needed but weren’t in charge at those times. Most days the kids got at least half an hour for “recess”, which was time for which I as a group leader was primarily responsible for occupying them.  Read the complete post...

I’m all out of Tales from a 7-11, but I’ve had a few requests for more stories, so I’m going to reach back to another job that I once held for a new series called “Tales From a Summer Camp.”

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.

I’ve done a lot of work with kids ranging in age from 8 to 18, and I’ve found that whether you want to or not, you quickly learn who knows how much about sex, drugs, etc. I’m sure to sound like an old fogey when I say this but it never ceases to amaze me just how much some 8-year-olds know. I once heard one kid in my group, “Terrence”, teasing a friend of his by describing with eyebrow-raising detail and sophistication some things that he supposedly did with his friend’s mother.  Read the complete post...

At the end of 2010, I urged poker players to send me write-ups about their favorite charities in order to encourage year-end giving and paint a broader picture of just what the non-profit sector looks like and how many diverse opportunities there are for charitable giving. Quite a few well-known poker players responded, but at the time I chose not to publish their responses. I wanted Cheque-Raising For Charity to be about the average, workaday poker player, not the superstar celebrities. Now I feel enough time has passed that today I can present Cheque-Raising for Charity: Celebrity Edition! Read on as your favorite poker celebrities describe their favorite non-profit organizations in their own words, and please remember to give generously!

David Williams- Share Your Soles

Many people don’t appreciate just how valuable feet can be. Millions of youth in poor countries around the world destroy their feet for lack of comfortable, protective footwear. Too often, minor cuts and injuries become infected and gangrenous, wasting a perfectly good pair of feet. If only these impoverished young people realized the economic opportunity that a fine set of toes represents and had the means to safeguard this valuable asset! We could strike a major blow against world poverty.  Read the complete post...

Edit: Support tells me that they are “experiencing some delays” but that points should be awarded appropriately within 24 hours.

My thanks and apologies to everyone who played in last night’s Triple Stud event. I’ll start on a positive note: I had a great time, and it seemed like many of you did as well. Thanks for playing and for being good sports throughout.

Technical Difficulties

1. Structure. It took over 9 hours for us to play from 30 runners down to the 3 who got paid, and several people understandably chose to abandon their stacks rather than continue to play a $1 tournament for so long. All I can say in my own defense is that I don’t get a lot of information about what various options mean when creating a tournament and am still getting the hang of setting the structure. Obviously this was a huge fail, and I appreciate everyone being so understanding about it.  Read the complete post...

I’m all out of Tales from a 7-11, but I’ve had a few requests for more stories, so I’m going to reach back to another job that I once held for a new series called “Tales From a Summer Camp.”

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people.

We counselors got about a week of training before the kids showed up. There were a lot of silly team-building exercises but also some more practical training about stuff like how to talk to kids about violence in their neighborhoods. There’d been a shooting the week before, and we were warned that many of the kids would know the shooter, the victim, or both, and they wanted us to be prepared.  Read the complete post...

Thanks to everyone who played in the inaugural Thinking Poker cash game last night. We had our share of technical difficulties:

1. When I set the stakes at $.10/$.25 and 100-250BB buy-in, I somehow thought that would mean a $2.50-$6.25 buy-in range. Of course it’s actually 10x that, so we ended up playing for larger stakes than I was envisioning. Sorry for those who were turned off by that, but we still had about 10 people drop in over the course of the night.

2. At one point, I was trying to open a second table and accidentally closed the one we had filled. Apologies to everyone who was confused or inconvenienced by this.

Nevertheless, we had a good time. The next game will be at a more Euro-friendly time: 13:00 ET on Saturday, 3/5. Of course anyone’s welcome to play, but since it’s timed to accommodate our European friends, we’ll be playing $.05/$.10 PLO.

Several people asked me if there’s any prize for winning (or losing) the most in the cash games. There isn’t, but last night at least I personally left a lot of money on the table that a few lucky (what else could it have been?) participants managed to carry off:  Read the complete post...

A Hungarian poker site picked up on my recent post about money disappearing from my old UB account. Curious to see what they said, our Esteemed Webmistress ran it through Google Translate. Playing around with GT is always fun, and I especially like seeing what happens when you translate from English into another language and then back to English.

In this case, GT employed much better phraseology than I did. This is an excerpt from the de-translation of the excerpt from my blog that was quoted in Hungarian on the site. Note the bolded phrase, which I swear I am not making up:

“Yesterday I accidentally found it in a spam email in Mail, which informs me that my account is $ 1,040.26.The letter 2010th February 19 dátumozású was only yesterday, but stumbled as the spam filter caught. I thought this is something a refund of the UB Hall of frauds.”