Shabbir's Diary

Miami!

Ok, this is disturbing.

I've logged over 100 hours playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the sequel to the violent, immersive crime game where you gangster your way around Miami with the voice of Ray Liotta. I know the streets of the game by heart. Turns out they're modeled very closely on the real streets of Miami, especially South Beach. So how do you think I felt getting behind the wheel of my rental car, driving those same streets.....No carjacking..no carjacking!

Positively Fifth Street

I blame James McManus for getting me hooked on poker. His article for Harper's Magazine in 2000 on the World Series of Poker, in which he entered as a rank amateur and nearly won the tournament, was an excellent introduction to a game that is appropriately associated with people who smoke too much, don't bathe, and have poor impulse control.

He's expanded his entire trip into the book "Positively Fifth Street" in my reading pile right now.

$5k poorer, and your ass gets fatter

I've just received the story of the Segway, "Code Name Ginger", from Amazon. I'm convinced that it's really a ploy of HG Wells' Morlocks to make us slower and fatter, for good eating.

Calamities of Exile

Want to know what it's really like inside Saddam's Iraq? Lawrence Weschler takes you deeply into the mind of an Iraqi exile who still has close personal and business ties to Iraq, describing both the excesses and the eccentricities of the still-mysterious regime.

Spray-painted pigeons?

The makers of Virtua Tennis 2 are going to use spray-painted pigeons to advertise their game at Wimbledon this year. Just how long before it becomes easier to raise genetically modified pigeons with the logos on them?

Settling Accounts with Torturers

This is another Weschler book about how societies confront torturers after their regimes have fallen. Given the fact that Human Rights Watch says that as many as 290,000 people have gone missing in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein's regime, one wonders, "How will society function without coming to terms with it?" They could take the South African route, trading amnesty for admission, placing the value of "getting it all on the table" as the highest good.

Or, they could take the punishment route seen in many war crimes trials, which incentivizes the accused to deny their actions to the end. Weschler's book examines how this process has proceeded in Brazil and Uruguay.

Share the wealth

Was I not paying attention and missed the start of a wave of Hollywood generosity? I notice that stars from both the Sopranos and the Matrix have passed large hunks of their paychecks along to co-stars and crew in recent weeks. It makes me like these guys even more.

Speedbump in the Roadmap

You actually don't need hate groups in the modern world, when the rhetoric of your own debates over peace plans reach this level. Or this. (Read the last paragraph)

Casinos

In the course of reading various autobiographies of poker legends, I noticed this book. It's title was so pompous, and it's customer rating from Amazon so high, how could I resist? It turns out to be an excellent primer on statistics and how they work in casinos.