With a little research, I found the EVO Vertical Mouse:

As the name implies, you hold an EVO mouse with your fingers vertical, as though you were shaking someone’s hand. This eliminates the need to twist your forearm, enabling you to hold it straight in what feels like a more natural position.

There are some medical/scientific argument on Evoluent’s website for why this grip is preferable to the traditional, arm-twisting method of manipulating a mouse. I don’t nearly enough about ergonomics to evaluate those claims, but I do know that my pain went away within a week of switching to an EVO Vertical Mouse. To me, that was worth the $100 that Evoluent charges to buy directly from their website.

Specifically, I bought the EVO 3, which is the only wireless model available. I believe it has fewer buttons than the EVO 4, but it still has more than my old mouse, which is huge for getting the most out of Table Ninja. There are left, right, and middle (or top, bottom, and middle, really) buttons for your fingers plus a scroll wheel and a thumb button.

I found the EVO quick and intuitive to get used to. Any time I’ve switched to using a track ball or a touchpad, it’s taken me days to get used to navigating with the new tool. Not so with the EVO. Although the grip is different, it feels pretty much exactly like using a mouse. The buttons are right where I expect them to be, and I felt right at home on it within an hour.

I haven’t actually used the EVO 4, but I don’t feel like I get particularly much use out of the EVO 3′s wirelessness. It’s too large and akwardly shaped to fit easily in a laptop bag, limiting its portability. Also, the USB adapter is well over an inch long, meaning that it juts prominently out of the side of my laptop and must be removed before putting the computer in a bag for fear of breaking it.

For frequent mouse use at your “home base”, though, I recommend the EVO Vertical Mouse to ease muscle and joint discomfort.

While I see tremendous potential here, the current Rush Poker application, playable on Android devices, hasn’t quite got it right yet. It’s close: the graphics are clean and crisp, the interface is uncluttered, and all of the information you need is easy to find and read on a small screen. The major problem is that the bet slider is extremely difficult to control. This combined with the generally short time to act allotted in Rush Poker games and the occasional lag left me intermittently timing out and folding or settling for a bet size that was merely in the neighborhood of what I wanted.

On my Droid X, the application was somewhat slow to load and connect to the server initially, but once it was up and running, the lag that I experienced on the Verizon network, even from rural Texas, wasn’t in itself unmanageable. The only problem is that it ate a second or so off of the time that I had to fiddle awkwardly with the bet slider.

The familiar radio boxes to “Fold to Any Bet” or “Call Any” aren’t available, which isn’t really a problem since you can only play one table at a time anyway, nor is there a chat box. When applicable, an “Auto-Fold” button appears prominently on the screen in case you want to fold and move on immediately to the next hand. Otherwise, buttons to “Fold”, “Call”, or “Raise” appear when it is your turn to act.

Clicking “Raise” brings up more buttons and a slider. Your options are “Minimum”, “Pot”, “All In”, or the amount that you select with the slider. Maybe I’m still new to the whole touch screen thing, having had my smart phone for only a few months, but I found it virtually impossible to pin the slider down on exactly the amount that I wanted. Playing 1/2 NL with play chips, I could reliably get within 1 or 2 chips of the amount I wanted to bet, but even lifting my finger off of the screen after selecting my size sometimes caused the slider to shift slightly higher or lower. In the half-hour that I played, I both timed out and made incorrect bet sizes more often than I actually bet the amount that I wanted using the slider.

To be fair, the application is still in its public beta testing and restricted to play money games. Hopefully they can either improve the bet slider or provide a virtual number pad to enter bets manually. Maybe it isn’t so bad if you’re playing on a tablet. What lag issues there are will presumably improve as cellular networks get faster. I wouldn’t recommend playing Rush Poker Mobile for real money in its current incarnation, but it makes me extremely optimistic for the future of mobile poker applications.

I don’t much care for Sandra Bullock, but she’s exactly as good as everyone says she is as the loving, no-nonsense matriarch of a wealthy Southern family. And the movie in general is pretty much what you’d expect: cutesy, saccharine, uplifting, and formulaic. It’s good for what it is though, with a remarkable story, quick pace, witty dialogue, and genuinely likable characters.

As for the film’s racial politics, I can’t say that I entirely agree with most of the critiques I’ve seen, though I do have a few of my own. A. O. Scott’s review for the New York Times encapsulates the most common criticism of Blind Side:

To the extent that Michael represents a social problem (or maybe a whole bunch of them, including poverty, drug addiction and family dysfunction), the solution depicted is individual, charitable and, at least implicitly, faith based.

The fundamental problem with this critiques is that it expects entirely too much from a movie and from an individual. Granted there is a temptation to read more into it, but The Blind Side is a small movie about one person and one family. It is not a polemic, and it is not an overtly political documentary. It does not explicitly advocate anything. It simply tells the story of one extraordinary woman who welcomed a complete stranger into her home and loved and cared him as her own son.

I don’t think the film has to be interpreted as a statement about either the causes or or the solutions to social problems like poverty and drug-addiction, though I would certainly disagree with anyone who maintains that private charity is a sufficient solution. Granted, The Blind Side is all but silent regarding the circumstances of Michael’s youth and the complex web of forces, both social and individual, that dooms so many young men to the violent death that Bullock’s character, Leigh Anne Tuohy, realizes, via internal monologue voiceover, could easily have been the fate of her adopted son. But I don’t think that every artist who touches on a theme like poverty is obligated to explore every facet of the problem and offer a solution, and in fact I think all but the best art does well to steer clear of such overt politicism.

I also don’t think that Tuohy’s behavior is charity, precisely. Charity is fundamentally an economic relationship, not an emotional one. The vast majority of charitable dollars given in the US are donated in a disconnected way. People give money either directly to a panhandler they barely know and will probably never see again, or indirectly through a large organization that pools and distributes their money, again almost always to people they do not know and will never meet. Motivations for charity are varied and complex. They usually include good will, but they rarely include love, at least not the kind of emotional, interpersonal love that a mother has for a son.

This is the real limitation of charity, the reason why the critics rightfully consider it an insufficient solution. People will give enough to alleviate immediate suffering, but rarely enough to prevent future suffering or change underlying conditions. It is all well and good for the relatively wealthy to give their excess, to give what they have above and beyond what they feel they need, but few are willing to sacrifice for strangers in the ways that they would for their own children.

This is the remarkable thing that Leigh Anne Tuohy did, and while it is not a large-scale solution, it is as much as many individuals can accomplish and more than most, critics of The Blind Side included, will ever do. Private action is absolutely not a substitute for government action and institutional change, but too many people use their inability to accomplish the latter as an excuse not to attempt the former.

My own problem with the Blind Side is that it makes everything look so easy. This is both an artistic problem and a political one. As a film, Blind Side lacked conflict. I’m struggling to remember a single problem that occurred that wasn’t resolved within minutes of its introduction, and I couldn’t tell you what the central conflict of the film was supposed to be.

This is a political problem because Michael is too easy. He is a perfect son, easy to get along with and unfailingly polite and lovable from the moment the Tuohy’s take him in. Michael is easy to love, and this is what makes The Blind Side‘s message about the power of love so fundamentally weak. There are plenty of endangered children who have as much potential as Michael, who are as deserving of love and opportunity as Michael, but who are not such easy children. They fight, they steal, they use drugs, they join gangs. They need loving, caring adults in their lives at least as much as a “gentle giant” like Michael does, but they have far more trouble finding the support that they need.

It’s certainly unfair to compare a mainstream Hollywood production to a great American novel, but I’m reminded of Richard Wright’s introduction to his novel Native Son. Wright, who had previously written Black Boy, an autobiography about his own childhood experiences with poverty, racism, and hunger, chose a far more controversial protagonist for Native Son. The fictional Bigger Thomas is a thug, a thief, a murderer, and a rapist. Wright does not ask us to love him, but he does ask us to understand him and to see him as both a villain and a victim.

Wright realized, after Black Boy, that he needed to give his audience a challenge. Wright himself was too easy a young man to sympathize with. Bigger Thomas forces us to sympathize with a far less sympathetic character, and in so doing, makes a far stronger statement about the effects of racism and poverty.

The best indication that The Blind Side doesn’t advocate private charity as the be-all and end-call to social problems is that this solution is most explicitly proposed by Leigh Anne’s predictably patronizing and snobby country club friends, who seem willing enough to donate and host fundraisers if Leigh Anne is organizing a “Project for the Projects.” What these ladies lack is genuine concern of the sort that would compel them to pursue meaningful change or follow through on such an initiative. While it would have been nice to see Leigh Anne radicalized by her relationship with Michael, ready to invest her considerable resources in a larger-scale solution, her life and story are still an inspiring example of the love that is necessary to accomplish real social change.

What Leigh Anne will not accept for Michael, no parent, white or black, should accept for any child, white or black: no roof over his head, deteriorating clothes, ignorant teachers, and threats from drug dealers.  Yet these are exactly the outcomes that millions of American parents, white and black, would never tolerate for their own children but are willing enough to accept for other people’s children. Real improvements for children with troubled lives is going to require the relatively privileged to extend their circle of moral concern to include more than their immediate families, to care enough about all children, even and especially the most difficult cases, to protect and fight for them the way Leigh Anne does for Michael.

Professional No Limit Hold ‘Em, Volume 1 (PNLHE) is one of my all-time favorite poker books and the one that I recommend to anyone looking to get started to the game. I eagerly awaited the publication of Volume 2, which was rumored to deal with short-handed games and more advanced concepts, and mourned its loss when its authors parted ways with Two Plus Two Publishing.

Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, and Matt Flynn ultimately self-published the book now known as Small Stakes No-Limit Hold ‘Em (SSNL), and it’s even better than I’d hoped.

Read the full review including my “Two-Minute Recommendation” in the Book Reviews Section of the site.

Read the full review