The world map of happiness.

Chuck Norris owns the greatest poker face of all-time. It helped him win the 1983 world series of poker despite him holding just a joker, a 2 of clubs, a 7 of spades, and a green number 4 from Uno and a monopoly 'get out of jail free' card.

Ah, that night. I'll compress it before moving on. I played poker with the fathers of 4 Gally students. Got off the bus with an apparent quadriplegic. The walking route from the bus stop to "home" went downhill, so he had an advantage. The appartus he was on was like a black baby carriage, except that he was sitting not lying. There was a black awning surrounding him so I couldn't really see him. He quickly wheeled down while I ploddily walked. He was 100 feet ahead of me in no time but had to stop because a train was crossing. It was on the very tracks that killed Miss Deaf Texas. I think about her every time I crossed. The baby carriage stood still while I caught up. I took a quick glance to see what he looked like. He was a midget. Once the tracks "but" (sign it in asl), he motored on and became smaller until he faded out of the sight.

Do horses bite strangers? There's a couple of 'em in a pen on that route and I wanna pet them. They seemed friendly but they acted funny when I raised my hand to stroke them. Me not grow up on farm. Me shud dodo? Equine teeth are big enough to sink deep into the flesh of my precious talking arms.

In case if you're wondering, yup, a chimp can play Ms. Pacman.

Last Friday, I met up with Benj at a sports bar in downtown to play something called fantasy poker. Unlike regular poker, there's no buy in. If you finish somewhere in top 8 (out of about 100), you get prize money, $100 being the highest. There's nothing to lose. It's new to me. The first time, I played sloppily and got ousted in only 2 hands. Benj was done not long after, so we went out for a romp before the 2nd round started. 

I finally got to see the famed bats. If you didn't know, 1.2 million bats sleep under a large bridge over Colorado river. From springtime till autumn, when the sun sets, the bats wake up and fly away, gobbling up about 600 airborne insects each en route to Houston and back.

It was an interesting sight. The bats were smaller than I thought—they looked like large insects. They flew off into neat tunnel-like swarms, sorta like locusts, or like a smoke stack going horzionally, if that makes any sense. It wasn't in a straight line but in curves as they maneveured over trees and whatnot.

After the show was over, we walked to 6th St., the "party street" of Austin (if you watched Real Life in Austin, that's where the crew barhopped). A tall black guy waved at us and said, "You deaf?" We stopped to chat. Turned out he played for the TSD football team that travelled to DC to play MSSD in 1988. I was just a Kendall tyke watching. TSD won but barely.

The dude said he caught the TD that put TSD ahead and that he was one of the 2 guys who knocked MSSD's starting QB out of the game. I playfully made like I was gonna punch him out on the behalf of MSSD. Benj was lost, being a mainstreaming kid all the way till he got into Gally for a year.

(to be cont'd)

Fact: if you bought stock from Apple as recent as early 2003, its worth would grow 10x by now (price: from around $7 to $60's).

I camped @ Pace Bend Park the whole weekend.