A note on voting...

Did you know that Hodgman’s second book ‘More Information Than You Require” was written and published in the midst of the last election season. With that in mind this blogpost is going to be a special Election Edition. In the spirit of this year’s election I’m going to talk about the history of democracy. As many of you may know the democracy was was first recorded having taken place in ancient Greece. It was utilized by the Athenians to try and acquire a more civil society where, in theory, everyone would be able to have a say in how the government was being run.

What most people don’t know about democracy in ancient Greece is that the Athenians needed to first put democracy through a proverbial ‘Test Run’ -- they didn’t want to drop this on their citizens. In the recent findings of ancient greek texts, it turns out that the first use of the democratic systems was explored by farmers. They would let their sheep to decide when things should be harvested, because of the sheep’s natural affinity for agricultural. Every other day, farmers would poll the sheep through the number of ‘Bahs and Mehs’, it was essentially our present day ‘Yay or Nay’ system.

As a result of the direct success of Athens’ flourishing agriculture, the scholars of Athens decided to further test out democracy’s applications. Athenian scholars decided to use democracy in their own households for a while, until they realized that it wasn’t really working. Their children really couldn’t say much because of their limited knowledge of social understandings of the nuclear family and its functions. The husband and wife rarely ever agree so they would constantly be in the midst of a Mexican Standoff -- or as they call it in Mexico a 'Standoff'.

Thinking that this system might be a crapshoot the scholars decided to apply it to one more area of their lives. They decided to use it everyday for a week to decide the most important aspect of their day -- Lunch. At the end of every day they would drop ballots in a box to decide what they’d eat the next day. While some people didn’t always get what they wanted, it still proved to be a smashing success. A majority of what they ate every week was bread slathered in some sort of olive sauce and goat cheese -- which was the closest thing to pizza they had back then.
Democracy was later adopted by many other cultures and adapted to what we now have today in this country. People would argue that it’s flawed, but in my opinion it ain’t that bad cause it could always be worse.

- That’s it, Good Day...

Tips for the Internet (cont.)

1. Sarcasm has proven to be very hard to interpret over the internet, so in order to make it easier to convey there is now are indicated sarcasm fonts that people can use.
2. Big Brother is watching you...ALWAYS!

A note on the Internet...

The source of all the world’s knowledge at your very fingertips, the only other thing that comes just as close to doing this are Hodgman’s books. I think that it’s something that we sometimes take for granted -- before the internet we were forced to learn from school and read from books like savages. During the Internet’s inception do you think that it was originally intended for ‘finding out what celebrities you share birthdays with’ and ‘sharing pictures of cats with your friends’. The first concept for the internet, APRANET, was commissioned by the Department of Defense and it was originally intended as a way for computer systems to exchange data between each other over vast distances -- like a network of tunnels of as Hodgman termed it “A Series of Tubes".         

                           

If any of you remember, in my first blog post I talked about how the internet is something that we should trust entirely and while I would like to stand by my original statement I simply cannot. In light of recent events, I come to the harsh reality that the internet is a cold and dark place where the shadiest of people dwell. The things that I was exposed to would leave the burliest of sailors and lumberjacks whimpering in the fetal position. It’s not all fun and cats anymore dear readers, with the creation of Reddit, 4chan, 9gag -- just to name a few -- the internet has now become a forum for the people. Now you may be asking yourself “this doesn't seem like such a bad idea...” and in most cases you may be right, but do you really want to live in a world where someone is telling you that their cat is better than yours. A place where every argument just comes down to some childish cat-measuring contest. 

I say that the internet is dangerous for two reasons (1) because it’s become a disgusting place (2) and because this type of behavior is the classic precursor to a slippery slope. I’m not even going to get into the applications of Rule 34, but it’s out there and we’re all adults...at least in the eyes of the law. It has become the source of slander, deceit, and cats -- it’s like High School but everyone in your class is a faceless bully.  

The internet in it’s current form is only going to grow into a monstrous anthropomorphic blob comprised of tubes, trolls, cat pictures, sex, gambling, and even worse people with opinions. While the internet can also be a valuable source of information, it also has its flaws. Which is why I propose something that Hodgman didn't in his books which are tips for the internet.

Tips for the Internet

1.  Install a heavy duty virus blocker, because you never know when a website or attachment is going to come with a friend. 
1. Note that virus blockers get worse over time, so constantly update them.
2. Wikipedia IS a viable source for information. The reason your teachers say that it isn't, is because they don’t want you fact-checking them.
3. Typing ‘HTTPS’ instead of ‘HTTP’ at the beginning of a URL can be an additional safety precaution against hackers.
4. Hot singles in your area do NOT want to meet you tonight. This is merely a scam to hack your computer or possibly ploy to “meet up” and get your kidneys stolen and put on the black market.
5. Hot single cats in your area DO want to meet you tonight -- I mean what can possibly be unsafe about cats, they just want to be loved and to ‘haz cheezeburgerz’?

*More safety tips to come in later posts

- Always use virus protection, Good Day...

x

A note on confidence...

'The con', 'the grift', ' the scam', ' the italian agreement' they all mean the same thing and they should be something that everyone should be more wary of. The reason I wanted to talk about it was because SOMEONE IS ALWAYS TRYING TO CON YOU – at the turn of every corner, in the depths of the shadiest alley ways, and in the most whimsical of puppy adoption shelters. There is always going to be someone that's gonna want to take you for all you've got,or give you a puppy. So in light of learning more about the art of the Con through Hodgman's book I decided to share with you all one of my experiences with 'the Con'.

After reading about the 'grift', I became under the impression that it required a little finesse. In it's most basic form, the Grift, it's essentially trying to make your 'mark' give you his or her money. So technically, it's not actually stealing because they give you their money. Which is why I'm going to present you with one of my many experiences with 'the Grift' and I'll let you be the judge of what it and what is not the way of the Confidence man.

The gist of the situation is that a coworker and I decided to go to our local coffee shop for an afternoon pick me up. As we were settling our debts to our barista Caesar, I had put down ten dollars to pay for my coffee and my coworker then proceeded to put down seven dollars. What proceeded afterwards was him taking the ten dollars and us going on our way. Did you catch that, because I did immediately although it was quite clever it I could barely call it a 'grift'. Knowing that my coworker could pay for both coffees with the $7 he swiped my $10 and pocketed the extra change.

This is where we got into a little bit of a spat – I extremely was a alarmed. I wasn't surprised that he would take my money, but more the idea that he called it a 'grift'. He just swiped the change from the counter like a common thug, hooligan, and/or rapscallion, and then he had the gall to tell me that I was a victim of the 'grift'? While I'd like to sway you into believing this wasn't just your common everyday hoodwinking. I'll leave it for you to decide. Because I guess this is merely my opinion on the subject matter.

On that note, I now present to you a challenge, because from in my experience it is always better to be the “Conner” than the “Connie”. We're all too familiar with the 3-card Montes, Bar Grifts, Nigerian Princes, etc. So I would like you to go out there and innovate your own 'Short Con' – those are the kinds of 'Cons' that tend to yield a small amount of profit, but require an even smaller time. I wouldn't want you people to get yourselves in too deep without knowing what you were doing. I present you this challenge because just want you guys (and gals) to just get a little taste of the Grift – just the tip of it, just to see what it feels like.

Now I know coming up with a brand new and innovative con like this could be difficult, because the variables and scenarios you'll put yourselves in can be very broad. First, you should always be prepared and you should have the 'Con' ready at all times, even before you find your mark. To give you an idea you should figure out the details of the your 'con'. So to narrow your fields for the details of your 'con' choose a place, something you like and something you hate to the fields of your 'con' – the person will be your mark. You'll use those fields to construct the backgrounds of your 'con' so you'll have a story ready for when you approach you 'mark'. You should also practice your story over and over again to get it down right, because if you can't believe your lie neither will your mark.

Here's a simple example taken randomly and by random I just asked the person closest to me:

Place: Park

Something you like: Bikes

Something you dislike: Rum

The Scenario:

1. You're in a park and you see a simpleton coming towards you on a bike.
2. Put water on your face to make yourself seem worked up and exhausted.
3. You halt them where they ride, and seem like you have just been running.
4. Ask them “Excuse me kind ____”, but did you hear that Rum prices are going WAY UP!!!!” (It's best to say the number of exclamation points to your mark, so they know just how serious you're being)
5. They listen intriguingly “ You see the Dominican Rum Mines have imploded due to human error and now all the rum tastes of rocks”
6. “Go on..” says your mark
7. You respond “Well you see not all liquor stores have gotten wind of this yet, and if we act on it now we can make a ton of money.”
8. Now visibly grateful for this information you present him with a plan “I was sorry to stop you like this but I just had to tell someone because I've decided to comb the city for liquor stores that haven't heard the news yet. The reason I stopped you was because I've run out of money and while I was headed back to my Rum stock on east 48^th and I found another liquor right across the street”
9. Here's where it gets tricky because now you really need to sell it to your mark on this proposition “In exchange for you $20 dollars I'll give you this bottle of rum, which face value is $20 but after the rum prices sky rocket it'll easily be worth $150. I'll use that money to buy $20 dollars worth of rum from the liquor store.” – If you want to sell this more you can create a fake Dominican news clippings of the mine explosions.
10. Now what you should realize is that this is a terrible deal on your part because in hindsight you're basically trading $20 for $20. Now this scenario can fork into several directions
    1. The first result of this is that realizing that it's an even trade, he could give you more money to get more and split the spoils. Seeing that you were willing to give him some rum to get into good graces he'll believe you and would be willing split the profits of his investment. But little did they know that you'll run off with the profits....
    2. You could immediately stop yourself and realize that it's a bad idea and often him a percentage in your current rum take for whatever cash he's willing to give you. You give him a plan where you split up and buy out the neighborhood's rum supply using his money, because you'll cover more ground in the end. Afterwards you tell him to meet up at your rum stash. But little did they know that the rum stash doesn't exist...
    3. Nothing changes and you get the “even” exchange, but little did they know that the Rum is actually a bottle of your mother's homemade Iced Tea...
    4. He refuses your offer, because little did you know that they were a bike cop...

I just presented you with four possible scenarios, where in only three of those cases your plan will go awry. A plan working 75% of the time is pretty good nowadays and I'll take it. It was also extremely easy to plan and create, it's not like you needed a degree in creative writing to come up with something as ingenious as this.

- It's not stealing if they give it to you for free, Good Day.

A note on Gambling...

I wanted to talk about something near and dear to my heart today, more specifically gambling. I LOVE to gamble, I’m becoming addicted to it an “addict of gambling” if there were such a crazy made up thing. But it’s not like I have a problem or something I can quit whenever I want. It’s even managed to tailor itself into my everyday life. You could only imagine how ecstatic I was when I read in More Information Than You Require that John Hodgman is also a World-Class Gambler. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the savvy and know-how for a game that was as skill intensive as hermit crab racing, so I decided to go another route.

I ultimately decided that Poker would become my game of choice, and like most things that exist in this vast world John Hodgman gladly had something to say about it. And it was something that you couldn’t just read in a book, or rather any other book, or rather any of the poker books on the stand next to my recently acquired bidet -- and in my opinion, I don’t know how people have lived without one in current times.

I knew a fair amount about poker already like hands, betting, positioning, tells, etc. but there was just something that I could never quite grasp. Hodgman mentioned it in his book and it is essentially cultivating your poker identity. Let me explain, poker isn’t just a game of statistics and luck there is also a fair amount of psychology involved in the game. When a player sits down to a table they’re going to immediate psychological impact on the game whether they know it or the people they are playing with know it. According to Hodgman it’s best to cultivate a presence to mask your “tells”.

While playing sometimes your mindsets can sometimes be manifested into a “tell”, and you won’t even know that you’re doing it because they are a direct manifestation from your subconscious. Overtime, a poker player can catch on to a person’s tell and use it against them, the better a poker player is the faster he can see your tell, and in turn take more of your precious money.
   


Hodgman mentions the greatest players and how they’ve cultivated their own presence and it was something they created because it could be controlled as though an actor would make a character his own in a movie. The more drastic or crazy their character, the more unpredictable their game was and thus making them harder to “read”, or pick up their tells. Now we can’t all be Mike “the Mad Genius of Poker” Caro or Timmy “The Drooling Mastermind” McGoonish, an identity in this case is something that you have to make your own.

I decided to take Hodgman’s advice and cultivate my own, in a long and arduous process of discovering, developing, and testing my own identity. It wasn’t actually as grueling as I’m making it out to be, because this identity was something that was already within me, since I was a child. A ninja, you read that right for a ninja embodies everything and more necessary to be a great poker player. The intelligence to know when to bet, the discipline to know when to fold, a mask to hide your facial queues. But of course, we can’t forget the most important weapon in a ninja’s arsenal, LITERALLY their massive arsenal of weapons which they use to intimidate their opponents into a swift and bloody submission, which is more commonly known in poker as folding.

After learning the way of the ninja, as well as the poker player, it was time to put my newly found skill set to the test. And what better way to do that then a session so I was off to SIn City, where what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Unfortunately, the way of the ninja is actually pretty costly and I didn’t have enough for flight and room accommodations. So instead I was off to visit my next best option in the gambling world “Creepy Uncle Jack” or “Sloppy Aunt Rita” or in the non-gambling world Atlantic City. It’s known by those names because the events that perspire there hauntingly stay with for the rest of your life and mold you as a person for better or worse, but mostly worse because Atlantic City is not a pleasant place to be.

So with a dollar, a dream, and a ninja suit I was ready to take this city for what it was worth, which isn’t a lot (Note: I had more than a dollar on my persons, because trying to win at poker with dollar is almost impossible). Now I don’t want to bore you with the details and poker slang, but in summation my trip was of great success. I wasn’t giving people an inch, they couldn’t see any tells because of my mask and flashing my sword as an intimidation tactic certainly kept them from calling any bluffs. I swiftly took down all of my opponents one by one. I was untouchable because everyone knows you don’t touch a ninja unless you want a finger cut off. I honored myself and my family and thank goodness, because if I hadn’t done as well as I did I would have had to pay the consequences, possibly in the form of a finger or toe.

I’m not trying to tell everyone that they should take a bus down to Atlantic City dressed up as a ninja, because that is my thing and the point of this exercise is to come up with YOUR OWN identity. Also nothing good could possibly come of people dressed as ninjas they would all be evenly matched and tensions would erupt causing a Ninja War.

- Keep your friends close and your money closer, Good Day

An Introduction...

Who exactly IS John Hodgman? In just a few words he’s a man of many trades and talents--Writer, Actor, Radio Personality, Judge, Personal Computer, Deranged Millionaire, Doctor, and many more. But you must be asking yourself He can’t possibly be ALL of these things!?, but alas he is. It probably says so right on his Wikipedia page, which I didn’t lightly skim for information when I wrote this. And the internet has no reason to lie about something like this. I’ve know the internet for ten years now, and you should believe everything the internet says. If you don’t want to believe everything on the internet, it sounds like you have some trust issues you need to work out, and you know who can help with that...THE INTERNET.

While I’d love to talk about YOUR problems I simply can’t, because if I do then I must do what is fair and talk about everyones problems. And I just don’t have that kind of time, for you see I have a dentist appointment in thirty minutes....

...Now that I’m back from my cleaning, what I am here to talk about is WHY Hodgman. To begin, he’s man that has a lot to say and the know-how on how to say it. He’s not afraid to say what’s on his mind, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. How many authors do you know that have the balls to fully disclose the Secret Hobo Wars, that were so deviously covered up by the Roosevelt administration.(to be referenced in a later blog post)

It was to my surprise that people in class weren’t simply jumping at the chance to talk about Hodgman, or even acknowledge his presence. And not a here’s a surprise birthday party’-surprised but rather Mitt Romney finding a five dollar bill in his diamond-encrusted money clip’-surprised. How was this even possible? Are you aware of the “Most Interesting Man in the World”, well John Hodgman has based his life on him. Unfortunately, Hodgman is an asthmatic and must limit his ventures to the city and suburban areas, rural and wooded areas take a toll on his allergies.

His book series is an almanac of “World Knowledge” and I used quotation marks because the book’s “facts”-- quotation marks again--may or may not be fake. FAKE you say, but how can an Almanac -- by very definition a book of factual knowledge-- be built upon a House of Lies. Well did you know that the almanac also was endowed with information containing probable future events like tide tables and weather forecasts, it was only later on that it began to include facts about past events in the year. So by that logic, can Hodgman really be lying about something if it hasn’t happened yet. But if you feel like your trust issues are starting to resurface be my guest and do the faq checking, but good luck trying to find anything on the Secret Hobo Wars.

In summation, the ultimate end-goal for this blog is to educate you on his teachings. So I hope that you can open your eyelids and earholes and take what I have to say to heart, or you can open your wallets and read his “books” for yourself.

-Good Day