tigertoy

I guess I never posted about FNM last week. ( I got smacked. )

This week, I decided to go back to my green and white Thragtusk deck. It seems to have gotten very stale being benched for a week.( I got crushed. )

It's that time of year again, when people should be thinking about their calendars for next year. Obviously, I believe no one's walls should be without an EFRC calendar, with a photo each month of one of the animals I take care of. The photos are all by Stephen McCloud. (Don't buy the calendar to support me as a photographer, I'm not there. Buy it because tigers need to eat, and because it's beautiful.) As always, the best way to get a calendar is to go to EFRC, take a tour, and visit the gift shop, but if you can't do that, and you'll be in the same place as I sometime in the next few months, I can sell you one. You can also order one over the Internet, but then you'd have to pay for shipping and all.

Please tell me if you're interested.

I missed FNM last week because I got dragged off to Iowa a day early.  Played this week, drafted in the silly format of the week: AVR-NPH-RoE.  Got an Ulamog, not much else, in a green/white aggro deck with too little removal, went 2-1 with it.  I hadn't played in after draft for many weeks, so I was determined to; it was a bad idea.  We didn't start until about 12:15.  I drafted crap again, couldn't find any removal, had two matches go 1-1 and not have time to play game 3 because of horribly long creature stalls, and just got crushed in the other match.

I never got around to writing about magic last weekend.  ( Let me bring anyone who happens to care up to date. )

The fun got started Thursday evening, when I played some casual magic with tcgtrf.  We actually quit playing magic at a relatively sensible time, but then we got mired in conversation about politics and the state of the world for a couple of hours longer than we should have, and I didn't get to bed until after 3, but I still woke up at a relatively normal time.  Then Friday, I headed to Friday Night Magic, where I did moderately well in Standard -- 3-2, winning two prize packs plus a pretty good door prize -- but didn't get out of the store until nearly midnight.  I still had enough time to get a decent night's sleep, but unfortunately, I woke up at about 6 and gave up on getting any more sleep by about 7, so I was pretty sleep deprived.  I headed to the Gopher for the main pre-release event for the new magic set, where I did well in the tournament, 4th place out of 36.  Then I grabbed some food and came back for a second prerelease event, Two Headed Giant, where my partner Dave Abzug and I ran the table, finishing first in a field of 14.  So I had a lot of fun and got to open a lot of packs of the new set.  I didn't get very many of the chase rare cards, but I got a very cool door prize in the second event and a somewhat cool one in the first.  But again I didn't get out of the store until about midnight, and with the sleep debt I came in with, I was completely non-functional when I woke up this morning to go to EFRC.  Just not in shape to drive over, much less to spend several hours outside (even though the extreme heat seems to have broken today, it's still July in the midwest) and then drive home.

( details )

So, after months, no, years of increasingly vitriolic rhetoric and weeks of a feeling of impending doom, the Supreme Court finally ruled on the Affordable Care Act.  I've never been very enthusiastic about the ACA; instead of really fixing the health care problem by really breaking the health insurance money machine in favor of a public system, the Democrats adopted a pure Republican plan, apparently assuming that they would get Republican support.  The Republicans, of course, being far more concerned with opposing anything Democrats try to accomplish, immediately decided that their basic concept of health care reform was horrible, un-American, and evil.  But as poor as the ACA is, it is the biggest improvement in the mess we call a health care system in my lifetime.

I find that the main points of the ruling -- that the Commerce Clause does not give Congress the power to mandate that individuals purchase a product, but that the power to tax does give them the authority to impose a tax on people who don't -- to be about the best solution that could be found in this mess.  I do think the individual mandate is quite a stretch of the Commerce Clause, but I do think it passes muster under the taxing authority.  I would be happier about it if the politicians had just called it a tax from the beginning -- but then, I believe that we do have to have taxes, and that it is not only allowable, but fundamentally absolutely essential, for taxes to be used with intent to encourage behavior that benefits society as a whole.

I have to praise Chief Justice Roberts for a decision that I actually think is right, in spite of the expectations of the right wing.  I'm concerned about the commentary that says that he did it to protect the integrity of the Court, rather than to make the right decision in this case -- if the Court does not make right decisions, it has no integrity to protect.

I got to Friday Night Magic last night.  I was quite short of sleep either Wednesday or Thursday, and I was pretty tired.  ( tl;dr: didn't do very well. )

Same symptoms this morning as last night -- I was apparently logged in but no pages other than the login page itself recognized this.  Same behavior from my phone browser, so I don't think my computer is the problem, but I used the default Windows solution -- if it doesn't work and you don't know why, try rebooting.  I rebooted the computer and the phone and connected with my backup (dialup) connection, LJ was fine, so I connected through the phone and everything now seems to be working normally.  I sure hope this is a one-off, but if anyone could actually explain it, that would be helpful.

I didn't have anything else going on today, so I went over to Kennekuk for a bit.  It was pretty warm today, but I found it tolerable, which I think means I'm starting to acclimate to summer.  Good thing, because it is scheduled to be beastly hot tomorrow and I'm going to be at EFRC.  Things are pretty dry -- no mud to worry about, and very few mosquitoes, which it's hard to complain about, but I'm worried that if we don't start getting rain, things will start shriveling up.  I was in the lookout point and marshes area, and I had the place to myself.  I saw a number of odonata, including the metallic looking green/blue damselflies, and a reasonable number of birds, including wood ducks, purple martins, bluebirds, and a towhee.  I hadn't been in that area for a few months, and I was surprised to see that they're putting in a paved walkway to connect up the observation platforms that sprang up last year.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars of concrete.  I think they're doing as good a job as possible in terms of how much of the woods they're destroying to put all that in.  I just hope that enough people benefit from visiting the site to justify the amount of money (which I assume is coming from my taxes, though I guess it could be from a private foundation) this is costing.  It does look like it will be a fine site for environmental education, and it will be easily handicap accessible while it's new... how long the concrete will stay smooth and level in the real world remains to be seen.

Fresh Air today featured an interview with Neil Young about his new album, with some audio from the album.  The album is a bunch of folk songs such as "Clementine" and "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain", but with very non-traditional heavy rock arrangements and not necessarily any recognizable trace of the familiar tune.

My reaction is that he's stealing Toyboat's schtick.