i dont practice santeria, i aint got no crystal ball

Here is a snippet from our Interns jam session. Unfortunately, lead singer/guitarist/songwriter/frontman/boss TC was unable to make the jammmmmm. The three of us tried our best with a bass, a synth and drums.

The sound quality is bad because it was recorded with my iphone, the bass and the synth playing were actually pretty good, especially for two dudes with no plan just jamming. The drumming needs work though (Notice it's the same drum roll to start every song. I'm like Randy the Ram--a one trick pony)

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av8RduMjnyw

Next week is exciting. For one we'll have our guitarist/frontman/mastermind/Ziggy back. We'll also have a legit recorder to record, so my iPhone can go back to doing the other 1400 things it does (best purchase I've ever made), and we'll even have a female lead singer next week!

You know the Social Distortion lyric "you can run all your life and not get anywhere"? I almost got that feeling yesterday.

I was at the Hong Kong Poker House and Bankroll last night. Bankroll is this Japanese restaurant/poker room with nightly cash games, and the HKPH is well, self-explainatory. Between both venues, there were over 100 people player poker last night.

I have ties to poker going back to my days in LA; I worked at Commerce Casino, which was, and I think still is, the biggest poker room in the world, and my friends and I had poker nights at least twice a week. Throw in Vegas trips and my own personal playing at Commerce, I was around the game 7 days a week. Even though the game has broke into mainstream culture and is accepted as a sport, I still felt a bit weird being around poker so much. Dunno why--I couldn't fully embrace the lifestyle. I wanted something different. So despite making good money working and playing at the casino, I left for HK to pursue to do what I really wanted to do.

It's amazing to see how much the game has grown the past two years. I remember when I got here two years ago, I couldn't find a game for months. Then I found one through meetup.com and played with a few expats at King's Hotel in Causeway Bay. Even though what we were doing was legal and is a normal "guy's activity", it felt seedy as hell--the hookers roaming around Kings didn't help matters.

Then a year and half ago I heard from the poker diehards that a HK poker room is in the works. Then Starbiz PR starts pitching me stories on the poker room in Macau. This year Golden Scene announced they'll be distributing a local poker movie (currently filming) starring Lau Ching Wan and Louis Koo.

Funny how things work. I thought I left the game behind when I moved here but now it's closer than ever. Commerce Casino was a 15 minute drive from my house; HKPH is a 15 minutes walk from my house. Vegas was a 3 hour drive from LA (I'm a fast driver); Macau is a one hour ferry ride away.

So there I was last night, five hours at the HKPH and Bankroll...to do interviews and research. The old me would have felt the urge to "check raise dumb tourists and taking huge pots off them" (Ed Norton's quote in Rounders), but instead all I could think about was how I was gonna structure this story and how to find the best angle to write about the lives of poker players: I want to get the grittiness of the game out there but not represent the game in a negative light.

To those not familiar with the game, they think it's "gambling", they still think it's a degenerate game. But at the HKPH house last night, the players were suits from Central, bankers, college students, girls, fathers, regular healthy people.

So that's what I'm gonna write about. I don't even know if the piece will run, but dammit I'm gonna try.

"It's a skill game, jo"--Matt Damon in Rounders.

Was having lunch at a cha chan tang in SoHo. Looked up and saw...friendly neighborhood Spiderman with STONE COLD STEVE AUSTIN.