Is the last of the great poker reads at this ESPN article the memoir by your colleague alec? ("Poker Face" by Katy Lederer?) The funny thing is after enough jetBlue flights watching ESPN2 I know both of the siblings mentioned. Annie Duke in particular is great, she cuddles up with her feet on top of her chair and likes to listen to her iPod.

In other news, yet again something has gone wrong in my attempts to buy fanclub tickets from REM. First time they got sent to Harvard who wouldn't forward them because they came in a package. Then last year there was another big mess with them being sent to an address right around when i moved and UPS being a pain. This year I can't even buy them. Apparently when i set up my username and password I was supposed to magically know that if I put a symbol in it that it wouldn't complain when I set it up, but if I ever tried to login it would inform me that passwords had to be alphanumeric. Grrrr...