A bridge too far?

  This morning I woke up, fed my 3 sons breakfast, poured a cup of coffee and sit down at the computer to see the latest news. The big story, obviously, was that President Obama had stated in an interview that he supported same sex marriage, which was the first time a sitting President of the United States had taken this stance. I jumped on to facebook to check things out and saw a post referring to the recent Time magazine cover that had just hit news stands, so I looked it up on the news and saw the picture, posted above. I was a bit taken aback, to say the least, but not for the reasons that you may think.

  I read the article that accompanied the picture to get a better idea of what was behind the cover before I solidified my opinion. The New York Daily News article gives a basic summary of the story of Jamie Lynn Grumet, the 26 year old mother (above) and her 3 1/2 year old son, standing on the chair in camouflage pants. You know, the one with his mouth on his mother's boob. Jamie Grumet believes that breastfeeding is not only good for a child with regard to nutrition, but to parent-child bonding. She, herself, claims that she breastfed until the age of 6. She cites this as a contributing factor in her feeling secure.

 
  She said she remembers the being breast-fed and the positive feelings associated with it.
“It’s really warm. It’s like embracing your mother, like a hug. You feel comforted, nurtured and really, really loved,” she said. “I had so much self-confidence as a child, and I know it’s from that. I never felt like she would ever leave me. I felt that security.”--NY Daily News article

  I, in no way, disagree with the basic premise that breastfeeding a child is a very positive experience, for both child and mother, for a myriad of reasons. I support the fact that this person chooses to continue breastfeeding her child and raises him in the manner that she believes is best. the article also reveals that she has an adopted child from another country. She states that breastfeeding helped forge a bond between her and the child as well as help comfort him during the possible traumatic experience of being in a completely new environment. At the end of the article, Grumet is quoted as saying,

  “There are people who tell me they’re going to call social services on me or that it’s child molestation,” she said. “People have to realize this is biologically normal. It’s not socially normal. The more people see it, the more it’ll become normal in our culture.”

 Once again, I support her rights as a parent and her decision to do this. The only problem I have is with the cover itself. Now before you start calling me a prude and a misogynist who's not comfortable with seeing something natural and beautiful, like breast feeding, let me be very specific. In the article, Grumet is quoted as saying that breastfeeding helped her "feel nurtured and really, really loved...I had so much self-confidence as a child, and I know it's from that."

  The imagery on this Time magazine cover does not give me the sense of nurturing or being really, really loved. You have a woman standing with one arm around a toddler, looking at the camera, with a look that does not say, "bonding moment" to me. Then you have her son standing on a small chair, with his mouth on the mother's breast as he stares directly in to the camera. How is this an example of a "very positive experience"? Is this how breast feeding is normally done in their household? Of course not, but my point is that this cover seems to be for shock value alone, which is what bugs me. Now, once again before you start hurling names at me like, curmudgeonly, sexist, white man, who should have been born in the 19th century, I understand the value of shocking imagery that can push the envelope and the conversation at the same time. I just don't think this cover is one of them.

  The biggest problem I have is the boy. Here is a 3 and 1/2 year old boy who doesn't understand the situation he's being placed in and has complete trust in his mother to do what's best for him. He is being dropped in to the midst of a rather controversial subject and he has not say in the matter, nor is he mature enough to make the decision if he was given the chance. the imagery comes across as stark, uncaring, and almost exploitative. Was this pose necessary to promote the content of the article, specifically the warm nurturing feeling that this boy and his mother get from the hug-like bond of breast feeding even at 3 and 4 years old?

  When this young boy grows up, he may very well defend this cover and be very proud of it, as I hope he does, but he may also have to fight through the jungle of nature when the nurturing factor of his parental bonds aren't there to protect him. That is quite a ball & chain to hand over to this child before he can even understand the enormity of what he has been assigned to. I don't believe that this is a horrific thing or that it should be taken off the new stands and I still defend the mother's right to decide what's best for her children, even though I may not fully agree. In the end, I think that this cover does more harm to the message as well as to Jamie Lynn Grumet's nearly 4 year-old year-old son Aram, than good. Then again, what do I know. I was given formula.







http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/time-magazine-cover-shows-mom-breast-feeding-young-son-jamie-lynn-grumet-practices-attachment-parenting-article-1.1075654

Short, unimportant update: Nothing to see here!

  So, much of what I have said with regard to planned posts and goals can be compared to Axl Rose's, magnum opus, Chinese Democracy which only took him 10+ years to record. My knee started hurting again a few days ago after playing with my 3 sons, so I won't be attempting a restart of running any time soon. I have not been to a casino in quite a while and my last time out was a disaster. I have been playing online at Cake poker rather consistently, but only for shits N giggles. My bankroll is a little over $80 is an all-time high since post Black Friday. Speaking of online poker, I stalled in my magnum opus on the subject as I was getting a little burned out. In my defense a lot has been happening in the debate over online poker legislation, but there has been legislation going on. I am starting to feel a small spark on inspiration coming on, so I hope to finish up the first part and then move on to the second half which will discuss online poker.
 
  I've also considered blogging about some other subjects that I find interesting, but whenever I get close to the keyboard, I lose interest due to the fact that I don't feel that my thoughts in cyberspace make a whole helluva matter to anyone, not that I ever thought they would in the first place, but I need to kick myself in the ass and just do it. I have started singing again due to the fact that I have some more regular free time on my hands to practice. I hope that with my children all being in school come the fall, I will have even more time to devote to improving as well as other things like blogging my curmudgeonly opinions. For anyone out there, thanks for staying put, if that applies and I hope to talk to you very soon.

What's the Buzz...?

  So it's been quite a while since I have posted anything, but I have reasons. I haven't felt like writing. Well, thanks for stopping in, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Y'all come back now ya hear?!

  To be more specific, I was 85% finished with the 1st half of my magnum opus revolving around the hypocrisy of the government's policy towards online poker, but I became a bit worn out on the subject, so I am letting it sit on the shelf for a little while to see if I don't become more excited about it. So, even though I hadn't posted much in the last 2 months, I had been doing quite a bit of writing.

  Another reason is the fact that I haven't been playing much poker as of late, whether that be online or at a card room. The last live session I played was back in early January, if I recall, and I stunk up the joint as I was down $300 due to being on my D+ game. been getting in some hands on Cake Poker (NLHE & LHE), but nothing too serious. I had built my bankroll up to $72 once again only to see it take a quick nosedive back down to $48. I am now hovering in the middle $60s hoping to breakthrough the glass ceiling.

  I have also begun to (again) to practice singing on a semi-regular basis given the fact that my 3 sons are on a, more or less, regular schedule. I hope to have even more uninterrupted time in the fall when they will all have school in the afternoons. As I wrote before, I had been practicing singing a little over a year ago, but different interruptions caused me to suspend that hobby until now. I am looking forward to the fall not only because my kids will all be in school, which will be great for their social life and learning, but my wife and I have season tickets to the Opera which will be a nice treat each month of the year. I've been listening to a good idea of opera, not only for enjoyment, but to critique the singers I hear and pick out, from a technical standpoint, what I like and don't like. I hope it will help me in strengthening my abilities as well.

Updates about the pokerz

  It's been a while since I have posted an entry about poker, so here goes. I haven't had the chance to play much poker, although I have been thinking about it a great deal. As you may remember, I am in the process of writing a treatise on the hypocrisy of governmental policy towards online poker. What started out as a multiple blog entry has now morphed in to a blog paper on the subject. Since I am a stay at home father, I don't get much uninterrupted time to research and write, so I am far behind schedule which has been exacerbated by the fact that the more I research the more I need to research. I am about 45% complete and I hope that the 2nd half of the paper goes much faster as things come together. It's all part of the plan.


  To give everyone a little update on the poker challenge I started back in April, things have been moving at a snail's pace for the past 3 to 4 months. Real life has gotten so busy that I have little time for either online poker, or live poker. As yo may remember in a previous post back in October, I was focusing on my NLHE game online which fell off the proverbial cliff. I have slowly moved in a positive direction, thanks in large part to rakeback from Cake Poker. I am no where serious as to my development as I would like to be, but I just don't have the time to devote to my game in the way that I would like, so this is how it has to be until my 3 sons get a little older.


  The live poker has been a little bit better than my online results. I've only gotten 3 sessions in since the beginning of October, but am up $300 in 8 hours of play which was a nice recovery from the 3 buy in loss back in late August. I'm rather happy how I played in my last 3 sessions, not only because I am up, but I am taking more time to make decisions, consistently focused on the action, especially when I'm not in the hand, and applying that information when I am involved. I am still on the uber nitty side which helps my image and gives my bets a bit more respect, but I have time to learn the game and develop my gears. Right now I have 1st, 2nd, and reverse. All in all, I am +$634 for the year playing live NLHE over the course of about 44 hrs. This is obviously an incredibly small sample which doesn't mean much, but was important in giving me an idea of the concentration and patience I need to work on so that I can be on my "A" game whenever I play poker, especially if the time ever comes when I have the ability to put in 2-3 sessions per week. Anyways, thanks for reading, have fun, and I will hopefully start posting the fist 1/2 of my paper in the next 2-3 weeks.

Warning: There will be talk of Jazz hands!

  As I approach the inevitable certainty of my 20 year high school reunion, I cannot forget, no matter how hard I try (and I am still trying), that I was a 3 year member of a show choir. My name is Figaro and I have used jazz hands. I had always wanted to perform,  but hadn't sung before with the exception of the countless sold out arena performances that I had conducted flawlessly in my room with a music stand as the microphone. I repeatedly got the 20,000+ crowds on their feet with renditions of Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages" and then silenced them with "Yesterday".
  The loophole  I used to get in to show choir my sophomore year was the trumpet and they were looking for 2 new members. Luckily for my trumpet playing, only one other player auditioned. That got my foot in the door and sonn it was off  to the races. By my senior year in High School, I was one of the officers, the dance captain, and teen age heart throb wannabee of show choir. I think I just threw up in my mouth...

  Thinking back on those years, I have a lot of mixed emotions. I enjoyed being involved in music and performing which would turn out to be the road I pursued in college, but there was a great deal of "drama" in show choir which remain as a reason why I have no interest in going back to my 20 year high school reunion. As I mentioned earlier, I have been trying to forget this part of my life for quite a while to no avail, especially when a few years ago, a certain TV show came out with the gut wrenching title, "GLEE". Once I saw the first commercial, I knew that this horrific display of futility would never stain the beauty of our 52 inch flat screen HDTV. Of course my wife set it on unlockable DVR which means...

  ...that's right, I would be forced to experience small doses of GLEE. I was surprised that in the first episode, a male choir teacher was fired for manhandling a male student. Later I read that this was based on an actual event in the late 90's/early 2000's when a male high school show choir director had had an inappropriate sexual relationship with one of the girls in the group. To my further shock and awe, the choir in which this happened was in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago and even more surprising was the fact that the the male choir director had been in a neighboring high school show choir to mine around the same time.

  Time passed and whenever my wife wanted to watch the increasingly annoying world of GLEE, I made myself leave the room for fear of retribution. Much like the times that I had watched American Idol, I could not help myself from making negative comments about the characters, the plot line, and the fact that this high school had countless professional studio musicians ready to perform at a moments notice without music or rehearsal. Last fall, I overheard the all too familiar sound of cliche "mashups" and inappropriate sexual dialogue, alerting me that GLEE was being watched. Then it happened. A male student and a female teacher started kissing. Are you fucking kidding me? Now, I am not a avid watcher of the show so I can't say how the plot went in this direction, but anyone who has been following the news over the past 15 years would know that this is nothing, but an incredibly irresponsible choice by the writers.

  It has become rather common to hear of a female high school teacher having a sexual relationship with a male student. Just a few months ago, a teacher in Northern Illinois was let go for allowing a male student whose family had moved to live with her for a short time and up to that point, there had been no evidence of a sexual relationship, although I wouldn't be surprised if that hadn't been the case. I remember going to see the comedian Dennis Miller back in 2005 while on vacation in Las Vegas and one of his jokes was,

 "Hey female teachers in the audience! Stop fucking your students ok?"

  Soon after asking my wife to rewind the scene so that I could understand the context of what was happening, I had a strong visceral reaction towards the show, which she echoed. The show, GLEE is very popular and is watched by a wide range of people. It has also been praised for it's confronting the issue of homosexuality and the inherent difficulties faced by teens who are either afraid to come out or terrorized on a daily basis. But plot points such as the romanticizing of a teacher-student relationship derails that effort and in my opinion, hurts the cause of gay advocacy, whether that be for civil rights, same sex marriage, or the plight of gay teens across the country. The writers of the show set the characters up as role models of sort as the issues that they confront are also problems that many of the audience face. A large demographic of GLEE are teens from 12-18 years old who are hardly mature enough to fully understand or appreciate the nuances of what some of these messages are. Kids tend to take out the glorification of performing and the overly sexualised apparel that goes along with it in addition to the stream of big name guest stars who pelvic thrust their way to water cooler relevance.

  After rereading the above paragraphs, I realize that I must sound like a naive, curmudgeonly, out of touch old fart who has no understanding of how things have changed since the time I was in high school and I may agree with that in some small way, but I would not be at all shocked if someone were to tell me that situations like the ones presented on GLEE are happening on a regular basis in real life. As I said before, it's commonplace to hear about the blurred lines of interaction between the youth and the youthful. With each year that I was in show choir, eighteen to twenty years ago, I learned more and more astonishing news that entailed my director. Classroom hangovers, drinking with students, a couple of relationships with students after they had graduated, and explicit conversations that would have gotten any Calculus teacher fired on the spot. Regardless of the regularity of extracurricular tutoring that was commonly found in a 1980's Rob Lowe feature, the presence of it on shows like GLEE does nothing, but send the wrong signal to inexperienced kids who want to fit in. The reality of TV is ephemeral as can be seen in the redundant story lines and mid season cancellations of relabeled premises, but the hyper-sexual content lacking any justification is just a form of porn marketed to teenagers similar to Camel cigarettes. This advertisers wet dream of cross marketing and synergy amongst the generations may very well give way to a cultural recession that could have Orwellian consequences in the form of right wing fanatics proposing legislation that would restrict progressive movements for the gay community and the liberties of women's right to choose. Oh wait...they already have.

Live poker update

Whenever my wife has some time off, I try to get an outing, or in this case, two to the casino about 45 minutes from where I live. There are a few closer casinos, but they don't offer the amount of poker tables that will allow me to get in a game soon after arriving. Last week while I got a chance to get out to the Hammond Horseshoe twice to play some NLHE $1-$2. The last time I had played any serious poker, let alone live, was in Las Vegas back in September when I joined a group of five other friends for a faux-bachelor party over a long weekend. I played poker a disappointing two times then which was basically nothing due to the fact that I was trying to be part of the group. I wish I had just gone to the pool and drank some Pina Coladas instead. Anyways!!!

  I made the trip out to the Horseshoe and quickly got into a 1-2 NLHE game. My first hand I picked up pocket Queens and raised a limper to $14. I got a drunken coldcall from a guy immediately to my left who ended up folding on the turn when I hit my set and bet $55 in to a $65 pot. NAILED IT!!
Next big win I had pocket Kings which took down a nice pot. Things evened out for a while until I hit a set of 6s which once again took down an nice sized pot to put me up almost $2oo in the first hour. Soon after that , I young reg joined the game who had fleeced me a 4 months earlier when he caught 2 pair on the turn vs my small flush only to hit a 4 flush on the river to beat me. I limped with pocket 3s and he iso raised me to $16. I called and hit quad 3s. He fired the flop and checked the blank turn. He folded to my large river bet even though the final board totally nailed his preflop raising range. I made it up to +$300 at one point and finished my 4 hour session at +$271.

  The next trip was a few days later which ended up being uneventful as I slowly lost $100 in the first 2 hours only to make it up in the last hour and cashed out exactly even for the shortened session. I was quite happy to have the positive results as well as feel the excitement for poker that has been waining, especially online due to the lack of games, post Black Friday. I am still working on the Part 1 of my magnum Opus which will ultimately have to do with online poker legislation. the first part is an extensive survey into the history of deregulation starting in the 1920's and then jumping to the modern era (circa 1980). I was hoping to have finished it before New Year's , but I feel as though I have to do more research in order feel comfortable with my facts. I hope to have it for you soon. Have fun!

Reflections and Refractions

If you are the author of a blog, then there is the obligatory posts that one must write and I am no different. With that being said, this is my "New Year's Blog entry" on the past year and my goals for the next, in no discernible order. 2011 was a wonderfully challenging year for me that tested my limits and questioned my sanity. It was a year of goals and failures, both being important to one's growth and education. This past year reflected my  areas of expertise and the many areas of limitation that I want to overcome. 2011 reminded me that I am human and riddled with faults that I don't want to be chains like Jacob Marley.

  The year started off on a high note, so to speak, as I was engulfed with teaching myself how to sing, once again. When I say "teach myself", I mean taking lessons with my musical mentor. That unfortunately came to a screeching halt with some family drahma which overshadowed my interests, like any family issues do. I was forced to make some tough decisions that were for the best, IMO, but was derailed from myself once again. I used what was left of March and April as a spring board back in to Online Poker, which had taken a back seat to music only to be thrown out the window by the DOJ when Full Tilt, Poker Stars, and Absolute were shut down. Thanks a lot Osama Bin Laden. I no longer could have my Cake and eat it too.

  I made some new goals to build an alternative online bankroll and separate live roll as well only to have that fantasy put on hold, by the happy realities of being a stay at home father of 3 sons under the age of 5. They have been the reason why I am not beating myself up for the countless stretch goals which I have not been able to complete in any way shape or form which leads me to my last  effort of self improvement (a.k.a. an exercise in futility). The Chicago Marathon

  I made the goal of taking up running again which I hadn't done seriously in 15-18 years when I was in Cross Country. I had always been an above average runner who never reached my potential which was reason enough to become more healthy and active for the sake of my family and a little ego boost to boot. The first 5 weeks went well until one day I couldn't straighten my left leg without excruciating pain. A little rest with the addition of scotch persuaded my inner procrastinator to take some medical leave which I have yet to recover from. This leads my to the 2012 portion of this entry which will hopefully set the tone for the new year:

  I am hoping that if I make my goals smaller, more reasonable, and attainable, that I may be able to reach and larger, stretch goal, like the Chicago Marathon, not necessarily in 2012 like I had wanted, but perhaps in the next year or two. I have so much going on as a parent, that any individual goal I make beyond that becomes unrealistic due to the scheduling conflicts inherent in taking care of 3 kids. I can only hope that this realization helps to decrease any peripheral pressure that I have place on myself in the hopes of any self improvement. Ironic, isn't it?