Monday

"Knock, knock! Knock, knock!"

Alright already! I'm here.

"It didn't seem like it."

I spent the morning mowing the back. The grass was dry, the sky was cloudy, I had the cats inside, and I thought that the work might do me some good.

"Oh, did it help fight off the blahs?"

Not really, no. I'm a little worried, too. Here I was, thinking that I might have found my life-routine at last: Solitaire and books. But now I am wondering if I am burning out on it.

Though, to be sure, I still want to play cards, and I still want to read. It just feels like I need something else. Aside from the real needs, of course: friends, sex, the whole social thing. A substitute. I need a little something that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning.

But I am a little afraid that I am running out of substitutes.

"There's always the desperate solution of getting a real life, you know, with other people and stuff."

Pfft, I wasn't handsome or tall when I was young. I'm definitely not more engaging in my 50s.

"Uh, news flash: a lot of people are in that boat. You could meet other regular, averagey people in their fifties."

Umm, I think I'll stick to the cats.

"Well, that's the problem, isn't it?"

Yeah, yeah, it's old ground, right? I don't think I'm about to get out of this trap.

"So, what are you going to do?"

Right now? Deal out a couple of triplets of Solitaire and take my afternoon nap.

"Stay the course?"

Yes, I am almost physically/psychologically unable to do anything else. I'm hoping these blahs are just a mood. But we shall see.

Artificial Intelligence

Interesting, Maureen Dowd wrote a long piece for "Vanity Fair" magazine. Maybe she wants to stretch her legs as a writer and do something longer than 800 words. Or are there two Maureen Dowds?? She wrote about the promise and peril of AI, which would seem out of her league as a Washington gossiper. A second Maureen Dowd is on the scene?

I skimmed it and want to keep one quote from Sam Altman: “It’s a very exciting time to be alive, because in the next few decades we are either going to head toward self-destruction or toward human descendants eventually colonizing the universe.”

[Source: Vanity Fair]

Spider

Alright, sequential dealing it is! I am only half-way through my Spider experiment, but this last game has convinced me that my intuition was right: you increase your chances by dealing out the decks separately one after the other, as you insure a wider spread of the cards. It obviously simplifies the game.

In the last game I played, I actually cleared the deck off the board before I even dealt out the first batch of ten cards from the second deck. I wouldn't have even thought that possible. The experience is tempting me to go for a bolder experiment: to try to play the full Spider, that is, to play the four-suited game rather than the two suited red/black game. Just to see what happens.