Happy Birthday America (and a Terrence Chan Update) - Day 88

I spent two days in Las Vegas. It was a blast, but slowly the depravity of the city seeps in. I don't think anyone should plan more than a two-day vacation to Sin City. Just 3 hours driving in the desert that is Nevada, I was able to slowly unclench both my my grip on the steering wheel and my jaw. It took until the Great Basin National Forest before I took a deep breath.

But before the Basin, I was stopped at the quaint tiny town of Caliente. As I approached the town, I started passing townsfolk bordering the street in lawn chairs. Then more and more, there may have been 300 of them. And a few of them were waiving to me. I weaved, then waived back. After a mile of this, I came to the head of the procession. There's gonna be a Parade!!


I doubled back and took up position on the first block of the parade route. Front and center with the parade starting in just minutes. The parade started promptly at 11:00 AM. It was replete with old cars, two partial bands, one group of tween cheerleaders, and a lot of kids riding dirt bikes. They had about 6 ladies riding horses that provided the mandatory street poo (a cheerleader stepped in it), and they even had one old lady in a patriotic horse drawn carriage. The mayor was out and also the fire engine, the ambulance, and both police cars. Candy was being thrown. The parade ended promptly at 11:14 AM.

Promptly at 11:16 AM I figured out that I made a mistake about this quaint little town. There were in fact 3 police cars in town and I was clocked going 47 in a 25 zone. Busted. 22 over the speed limit would warrant a $219 ticket. Sheriff Uima and I had had a good chat, and when he returned with the ticket, he noted he listed it at just 10 over and it would only cost me $87 and I really must have a Happy 4th of July. He readily posed when I asked for his picture. Quaint.

After that, I hit the beautiful Great Basin National Park. At the gate that you need to make a tour reservation a day in advance to assure entrance to the stalagtite cave, so I missed that. Instead I took the 12 mile scenic drive and then hiked 3 miles to Stella Lake. Great hike. I took a deep breath of the aromatic pine air and felt 400 miles from Las Vegas.



I drove to Ely Nevada, passing the We Be Antlers shop, and am staying in the Historic Nevada Hotel. Quite a place they have here. Check out this Link. I'm staying in the Wallace Beery room.

-----------------------------------------

Side Note (11PM PST): I just found out that my web traffic has doubled (to about 100 visitors.) It seems that Terrence Chan at the World Series of Poker found playing with me entertaining

[Note my chip stack nearest the camera. I had Terrence covered! It all went wrong from there. After Woodstock (the bird at the far side of the table) lost, I was next to go]

and wrote a few paragraphs about me in his weblog of the event and had a link to my puny blog (thanks for the greeting cards Kris!) A bunch of WSOP followers have clicked on the link...funny stuff. Here is the page where I found his description of our table...he eventually won the table!

Terrance Chan's Journal: (http://terrencechan.livejournal.com/)

Here's what Terrence wrote about me!!!::

"...Oh, I mentioned Scott Murphy. Here is Scott's blog. He gave it to me on a business card. Scott had been playing blackjack at Bill's Casino (yeah, I've never heard of it either) all night. He won a few thousand so he decided on a lark to play the event. He clearly was extremely inexperienced in poker and had very little idea what he was doing (and I don't think he'll mind if I say so, as he was very upfront about it). He went on a very early rush and in the first level had gotten up to about 7000 chips. I notice him taking pictures of everything around him and offer to take a picture of him with his chips, and do so.

As I'm often doing because I'm bored, I'm watching the Pokernews/Bluff scoreboard rotate through the list of "chip leaders". Of course, any time a tournament is just underway that board is really just a list of a few famous people that have won a few small pots. At the time, Isabelle Mercier was listed as chip leader with like 4300 chips.

I say to Scott, "hey, you should be on the board; you've got all of those guys covered!" Scott beams, "oh wow, if I could get my name on that board, that'd be the best."So I collar up the first Pokernews reporter I can find and make him report Scott's chip count. The young reporter is very gunshy about writing down this random dude's chip count. He says, "well, I can try....I don't know if they'll actually put it up though..." and I berate (kinda) this poor exasperated young reporter: "How can you not put him up; he's got twice as many chips as any of the guys you have up there!"

So five minutes later, guess who's well on top of the leaderboard but one Scott Murphy. He's very excited as we all try to take a picture of it. Three people (and laren) all try to take pictures of the scoreboard to send to this guy. Finally we get a couple good ones and he's ecstatic. I don't know why I bring all this up but mostly because I guess with all the cynicism I've developed about the WSOP (and expressed in this blog) it's nice to have a guy who admits he's a total amateur and doesn't know what he's doing, but is just genuinely nice and thrilled to be there."

Thanks Terrence!