I’d say more, but I’m afraid of what might happen to me and my wife if I were to do so.

This past Saturday Nashville received 6.32 inches of rain, the third heaviest rainfall total in a single day since 1871. That caused the local streams and rivers to begin rising. Then on Sunday the city received another 7.25 inches of rain, the single largest rainfall in a single day since 1871. The Weather Channel says that the two-day total rainfall was equal to 28% of precipitation we usually get over the course of an entire year. The US Army Corps of Engineers is calling this a “once in 1,000 years event.”

LP Field across from downtown (Photo: Keith Gallagher)

The streams spilled over their banks and last night the Cumberland River, the heart of Music City, began to threaten downtown Nashville. More than 600 water rescues took place, but there were still a handful of people who died in the flood waters. Tens of thousands of people are still without communication to the outside world when phone cables and power lines went down and cell phone towers became overloaded. One of the city’s two wastewater treatment plants was submerged and went offline yesterday, and now the other treatment plant is being threatened as well; local and state officials are asking people to halve their water usage by only using water for drinking and food preparation. They fear a shortage of clean water by the end of the week if everyone doesn’t cooperate, and even with cooperation there’s still a chance that the entire 1.2-million-strong population of Metro Nashville could soon be drinking bottled water.

Second Avenue in downtown Nashville today (Photo: Keith Gallagher)

Overnight the rain stopped, but the water levels have continued to rise. The Cumberland River isn’t expect to crest until this evening, when it will hit 52.5 to 53 feet; flood stage is considered to be 41 feet. Thousands of people are already staying in shelters, and local charities are trying to provide food and water to thousands more. Even once the water is gone in a few weeks, there will be tens of thousands of people displaced. As you can see, we will be dealing with a very serious situation here in middle Tennessee for quite some time.

More flooding on the Nashville riverfront (Photo: Keith Gallagher)

Poker players are known for their generosity. If you can spare any sort of money at all to help, the people of Nashville and middle Tennessee would be grateful. Per my friends at Nashvillest, here are some charities that are accepting monetary donations:

Middle Tennessee Red Cross: Donate online at www.nashvilleredcross.org, or by phone at 615-250-4300. Remember, the Red Cross is not a government agency and is funded solely by donations.

Second Harvest Food Bank: Provide monetary donations to Second Harvest HERE. The Second Harvest offices are located in Metro Center and are currently inaccessible, so monetary donations are the best bet right now.

Salvation Army: Monetary donations are preferred and can be made online HERE or by phone at 1-800-SAL-ARMY.

The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee: In partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, donate online to the Metro Nashville Disaster Response Fund and/or the Tennessee Emergency Relief Fund HERE (checks can be mailed to P.O. Box 440225, Nashville, TN, 37244).

If you’re able to send anything, please leave a comment so the people here in Tennessee will know who cared enough to offer assistance. I’m looking into setting up a charity tournament somewhere online in the very near future; details will be available as soon as I have them.

Now for something completely different, those of you who have to play Tech Support Guy for every relative in your extended family will enjoy this from XKCD:

If you're not reading XKCD, you probably aren't laughing enough.

The NHL decided to lock its players out for the 2004-05 season about two months after my buddy Charlie Tuttle and I purchased season tickets. Needless to say, we were a little miffed. I eventually canceled my tickets and wrote a letter to Craig Leipold, the man who then owned the Predators (and who was also instrumental in getting the lockout going), telling him why I was no longer going to let him hang on to my money. I also called for the NHL to sack its commissioner, the aformentioned Gary Bettman, who was even then in the process of running the NHL so far into the ground that even Major League Soccer got more respect than the fastest game on earth.

A few weeks after Charlie died, the NHL and its players finally worked out an agreement to get back to the ice. Great timing, boys! I went to two games at the beginning of the 2005-06 season but it just wasn’t the same without Charlie there. I also hated the idea of giving any more of my money to two organizations run by men who preferred scorched-earth tactics to finding a workable solution. So, I stopped paying attention to hockey altogether. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Bettman’s league was looking for, but it’s what they got.

I’ve only watched a handful of games on television since that time, and I haven’t been to a single one in person. But if the NHL decides to sack Bettman, I promise here and now that I’ll buy a 10-game pack for the 2009-10 Predators season. I’d love to have a reason to catch live hockey again, NHL. Make it happen.

We’ve divided the work up into three posts examining three players each, beginning with the biggest stacks and working our way down. Accordingly, the first post deals with Darvin Moon, Eric Buchman, and Steven Begleiter. Head on over to Poker From The Rail and check the first installment!

The lunatic fringe has indeed been given the opportunity to show up in force at town hall meetings, those Clinton-era mutations of the New England tradition that are curiously unsuited to accomplishing anything of substance outside of their native environment. Fringers have taken that opportunity, like they always do, to jump and yell mind-bogglingly bizarre things – and, most importantly, to be caught on camera doing all those things so television can show them to us. We’re all rightfully shocked by the flat-out retarded things these people come up with. But the problem I see again and again is that these crazy folks are being made out in the media to be the *core* opposition to the Democratic government.

The same leftist punditocracy who blanched at Bush-era accusations of not supporting the troops or loving America’s enemies for opposing policies with which they disagreed are now all too willing to play the role of propagandists for a cause they believe in, leveling blanket accusations of racism or stupidity or just plain craziness at anyone who mistrusts either the government’s intentions or abilities on this issue. Painting all opponents of the Democratic health care reform plan with the crazy/stupid brush is the same sort of rhetorical tactic the Bush/Cheney administration and its cheerleaders used for eight years, with the only difference being that it relies on belittling others’ sanity and intelligence and political correctness instead of belittling their patriotism. Check out this post at Reason for a recent round-up of such rhetoric, which includes links to six previous round-ups of rhetoric.

I’m not a fan of the Democratic-controlled government’s proposal for a lot of reasons. My opposition is based partially on practical concerns (e.g. how on earth is a dead-broke government going to pay for this plan?) and partially based on principle (e.g. government reform is inherently less efficient and responsive than market reform). Because of that – or as some people seem to think these days, despite that – you won’t find me waving a gun at a town hall meeting or screaming “Heil Hitler” and sticking my tongue out at fellow town hall attendees or otherwise acting like a buffoon because I lie awake at night, drenched in sweat, intensely afraid that George Soros and his socialist minions will soon convene my death panel, ready to condemn me so they can take my wife away to their communal love farm and have their filthy, European ways with her.

Instead I’m doing a lot of reading and head-shaking – and basically staying silent on the sidelines. You see, my peer group is almost universally in favor of the government’s current idea of reform. We are all relatively young and middle- to lower-middle-class. We all also happen to think that the current system is a pretty shitty affair. But where they see a benevolent government that cares about them trying to step in and solve their problems, I see a small cadre of powerful people trying to quickly force their wishes on a population that clearly has some reservations about going along with the plan.

But I can’t really get that across to anyone who supports the government right now. The moment they find out that I’m not on their side, I get lumped in with screaming “birthers” and Sarah Palin and the entire right wing of the GOP that is so completely opposed to most of the things that are important to me. The current tenor of American political discourse doesn’t allow me to be a reasonable person who agrees with my friends on plenty of things but happens to disagree on this particular issue. Instead of being the principled opposition, instead of being a person who reads and analyzes and considers, instead of being a citizen who’s concerned about the future of his country, I’ll always be an outraged retard.

With that in mind, I’m putting together a gathering of all the people who loved Charlie at the site of his funeral outside Nashville on Sunday, June 21st – the day before the fourth anniversary of his death. We’re going to do potluck food, there’s a pool to swim in, and at sundown we’re going to launch another Viking ship with some messages for him.

If you’re interested in attending, log in to Facebook and look for my Charlie Tuttle Day event. If you can’t attend but would like to pass a message along to be read to his friends and family or to be put on the ship for the sundown ceremony, get in touch with me on Facebook or by email (jason -at- jasonkirk -dot- net).

Tao of Poker
Pokerati
PokerNews
PokerListings

There are also going to be a ton of people posting on Twitter. You’ll probably get a fair number of updates on the more interesting moments from the sites listed above, but if you want to get your news firsthand you should check out @FollowPoker on Twitter. Jay Newnum, another oldskool poker media man, put together this account that follows a very large number of poker people.

As a fan of poker, one of the disappointing things about working at the Series is that there’s very little time to actually play the game, so this year I’m going to take advantage of my considerably lightened schedule by getting some time in at the tables. Full Tilt Poker is running its Mini Series of Poker again this year, with buy-ins 1/100th of the corresponding WSOP event, and since that suits my meager bankroll well I’m going to play all of the PLO events as I can. I’m also planning to play the PLHA (pot limit hold’em/PLO mixed) event and probably a few hold’em events here and there. If I were to do well in one of the other events I might consider playing some of the other limit and mixed events, but for now I’m sticking with the games I know best.