Because it’s never too early for a child to learn how to mock the failings of others, and because if I have to endure one more Disney Channel sitcom my brain will burst into flames, and because Kate had already done her reading, her chores, and whatever else she had to do yesterday, and was ready to settle down for a perfectly defensible 45 minutes or so of television time, because of all this…

I let her watch “Wife Swap” last night. I watched it with her, in fact.

The families were a hip, urbane San Francisco quartet of museum-goers and mildly loony (by SF standards) personal habits (feng shui, sage-burning), and an utterly crackpot Iowa farm clan, who practiced “unschooling,” lived like pigs (bacteria is good!) and ate everything raw, right down to the chickens. I try, whenever we watch so-called reality TV, to keep a running director’s commentary going, explaining about editing and how once you allow cameras to record your life, you’re pretty much at the mercy of them, but after a while it trailed off. The Iowans, with their black toilet and raw chicken salad, were clearly insane.

So then you get the next parental situation: The family’s mental illness is, how you might say, sub-clinical. I don’t think there’s anything in the DSM-IV about brushing your teeth with a combination of butter and clay. (“Yeah, it tastes like dirt,” the teenage daughter says.) I know from long experience — in an Iowa-like state that also begins with an I — that this family’s peculiar beliefs and practices, while unusual, are hardly unheard of. If Kate ends up in the world with any sense of adventure, sooner or later she’s going to run across folks like this and needs to learn coping skills, which include the phrases, “No thanks, I’m not hungry” and “How close in the nearest main road, and how do I get there?”

I was pleased to see she picked up the most preposterous statements right away, as when the Iowa dad, in scoffing at San Francisco mom’s neat-freak squeamishness about germs, asked, “Would God put anything on the earth that would hurt us?” Kate, recently recovered from viral influenza, immediately expressed the idea that why yes, God did that very thing, you moron.

Harder to explain was the clear emotional instability in the house, as when the Iowa family went out to eat in a restaurant, consumed fried everything and paid a predictable gastrointestinal price the next day, and dad behaved as though his children had been fed cyanide milkshakes. And the son who couldn’t confront a contrary opinion without tears, followed by a march into the kitchen to gulp down a raw egg.

OK, the part where the Iowa mom goes out to eat in San Francisco, and the husband insists she shave her legs and underarms, and she says, “In that case, I’m gonna need some scissors?” — that was cruel.

So I think we came through the experience OK. I’ll leave the meta issues of what a brush with national TV exposure does to a person for middle school. But since most of you folks are adults, you might enjoy this, from Radar magazine: Prisoners of YouTube, a thoughtful and sensitive look at what this sort of accidental celebrity brings to a person’s life. HT: Eric Zorn.

So, bloggage:

Did you know that, according to an “unscientific survey,” “the average Grace Lee was a Korean American college graduate who had taken 3.5 years of piano lessons”? Neither did I. The next time “The Grace Lee Project” comes around on the Sundance Channel, we’ll watch that instead. (Demographic note: The name Grace is making a comeback, trend-speaking, but it wasn’t always so. I long ago realized that the only women younger than 40 named Nancy anymore tend to be Asian. My name is too ’50s for words, but Asian Americans, fond of traditional American names, still like it. For about six months I was getting puzzling e-mail from some Knight Ridder internal listserv, and finally realized the computer had mistaken me for one Nancy Na in San Jose, presumably Vietnamese-American.)

Fat Tuesday is extra-fat in Detroit. In Hamtramck, they call it Paczki Day, paczki being Polish for “jelly doughnut.” Think I’ll go get one. At least they’re cooked.

Needless to say, the hole in the sky closed up nicely, and we got…choose your verb. Slammed, dumped on, buried, pounded, whatever. I’d say maybe six inches on the ground, which was getting off easy in terms of this storm. The Fort got close to a foot, Indy a little more.

Needless to say, school’s out. All they’re missing is the all-day (no, I’m not kidding) Valentine’s Day party, so no biggie.

But I have to hit the road in a bit, so I’ll leave you with a few conversation-starters:

Why No One Reads Newspapers, chapter I-can’t-remember-what: Because, with a straight face, we repeat advice like this:

AAA Michigan suggests you stay bundled up while driving and keep these items in your ride during the winter months. The items include ice scraper and brush, coffee can furnace, tools and flashlight, sand or cat litter, food and blankets, jumper cables, first aid kit, cell phone, flares or reflective triangle and a shovel.

Note “coffee can furnace” hiding in the middle of that list, like we’re not going to notice it. Some people can make a case for packing some of that crap, although the only people I know who carry sand are pickup drivers who use bags of it to weigh down the rear wheels. If you need to travel in the remote country, sure, carry a collapsible shovel. If you’re crossing the Rockies via back roads, some Balance bars might come in handy. But for most of us, a cell phone and a snow scraper do just fine. I’ve pushed and/or rocked myself out of deep, icy ruts without kitty litter approximately a million times. And the last time anyone jump-started my car, we had a tiff over whether it’s universal knowledge that the red cable always goes to the positive pole on the battery. (I say yes; he claimed ignorance; a fuse paid the price.)

But the coffee can furnace — that’s a new one. As usual, it raises more questions than it answers. What do you burn in it? (Old parking tickets.) Where do you vent it? (The sunroof.) What do you use it for? (Cooking squirrels you catch in snares fashioned from useless jumper cables.) Now that’s some useful information.

And for those of you who enjoyed the “CSI:Miami” ham-fest the other day, you’ll love this just as much. Note, please, the critical role played by the Sunglasses of Justice. I think they actually trigger the critical event in the clip. He takes them off, the device is armed; he puts them back on, kaboom. Those are some crazy sunglasses:

First, a little light housekeeping: I’m adding some Google ads to the site. From time to time over the years, people have asked me whether I’d consider hosting advertising here, and my answer was always bafflement: Who in their right mind would advertise here? In the six years I’ve been wasting time on this lunacy playing around with this blog, I’ve never really strayed far from the original idea, which is: Daily life, with links. That’s all. If people want to stop by and read, or participate in the discussions, I’m flattered to pieces, but really, if there was ever a blog about nothing, this is it.

However, even nothing has its readers. I added Google ads to my poor, neglected Grosse Pointe Today site when I launched it last fall. Even with haphazard updating and constant excuse-making from its proprietress, I checked my account status the other day and discovered I’d made, lord almighty, $19. Why, that means NN.C could conceivably make, oh, $60 in the same time period. As my friend the Other Alan used to say, “If you saw $60 lying on the ground, would you pick it up?” Of course I would. Google ads are text-based and unobtrusive and do not feature dancing silhouettes or punch-the-monkey games or, my new bete noire, those rollover-and-it-speads-like-a-stain things.

So we’ll see how it works out. Trial basis. Etcetera.

Content will remain status quo. As tempting as it might be to become Perez Hilton.

Another housekeeping note: I’m going to start limiting the time I spend writing here, and dammit, there’s nothing you can do to make me feel guilty about it. All that means is, I’m limiting myself to 45 minutes a day to put together a main entry, and if nothing good emerges in 45 minutes, then I’m going to go bake brownies or something. “But Nance,” you might be asking. “Frequently I read what you post here, and it’s nothing good. Are you saying you spend more than 45 minutes on it? If so, what a waste of time.”

I’m saying it’s none of your damn business. Just that I have to devote more time to paying work, exercise and keeping the dust bunnies from taking over the living room, not to mention my oft-laid-aside fiction writing, which is this year’s do-it-or-drop-it long-term project.

Perspective. It’s all about perspective. I actually considered taking a hiatus, and then realized that’s probably not doable, either. For whatever reason, I seem to need to write this thing more than anyone wants to read it.

OK, then. Bloggage: Fans of this week’s On the Nightstand pick will want to read the NYT’s interview with Jim Harrison today. The picture alone is worth the click-through; if I can live like he does and look no worse at age 69, I’d say that was a fair deal.

TV time. Who’s watching “Rome” this season? (Silence.) Thought so. So let’s start the one-sided discussion!

There’re a lot of nits you can pick with any depiction of ancient Rome. Some aren’t worth picking anymore — I’m fully willing to believe that everyone in the eternal city spoke with a British accent — and some still have some life in them. I’m puzzled, watching this show, as to how they could spend a nine-figure sum and still not have one scene with more than 20 actors in the frame. (I guess they blew their production budget on that silly gladitorial contest between Titus Pullo and six or seven unfortunate would-be executioners last season. Although HBO probably could have financed that entirely by selling T-shirts with “XIII” on them in its immediate aftermath.)

The central storytelling trick of the show — two fictional soldiers who wander, Zelig-like, through the well-known historical events of Rome — is still amusing, never more so than in the episode dealing with the birth of Cleopatra’s son by Caesar. Cleo’s back this season, pressing her case for the boy to be legitimized, laying the groundwork for the seduction of Mark Antony, which should be about as difficult as falling off a log; Antony’s the King of Goats and Cleo’s about as hot as hotties come. I’m noticing the profanity has been upped in this season, which is sort of disappointing, but it’s given me a whole new oath to swear by, thanks to the King of Goats: “on Juno’s c*nt.” And Atia’s whispered parting shot to Cleo is a keeper: “Die screaming, you pig-spawned trollop.” It’s a little strange to see Lucius Vorenus turning into Al Swearengen crossed with Tony Soprano, but I guess even high-quality HBO series have to have a little synergy with one another.

Is my 45 minutes up? It is. Time to walk the dog and hit the shower, in that order. Hope I don’t meet anyone important on the first errand, although it is about 18 degrees at the moment — it’s pretty unlikely.

Last New Year’s Day, TCM showed “Sunset Boulevard” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” back-to-back, which is about all you can ask of an afternoon devoted to taking down the Christmas tree. This year, no such luck. So we dipped in and out of the “Twilight Zone” marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel, which started New Year’s Eve and showed no signs of slowing by midafternoon the following day.

I introduced Kate to TZ after our trip to Chicago and the American Girl Place. I was trying to explain why I didn’t want to buy a doll that looked like her, and told her about the “Living Doll” episode, then found it at the library. She was appropriately amused/creeped out by it, and we watched a couple others on the DVD, including the one about the ventriloquist whose dummy starts talking to him. It was one of the very few times in my life as a parent that I could act like a TV parent (appropriately enough) and say, “So now you see why mom finds certain dolls a little creepy,” and Kate replied that she understood perfectly.

When we turned on the marathon Sunday night, they were showing “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” with the young William Shatner. A classic, that one, followed by “It’s a Good Life,” with Billy Mumy as the monster kid who can make his imagination come to life. Of course that was a big hit with Kate, who’s been going around the house ever since shrieking, “Die, three-headed gopher, die!”

I let them wash over me and thought about all that was admirable about the series — the swish pan to Rod Serling and his elegant, well-written intros, the pop-cult references to Freudian psychiatry, and finally, the thing that makes them as good and fresh today as they were 40 or 45 years ago — the way they send their taproots right down into the collective unconscious. Seriously. Kate is a modern kid, ever-wary of being seduced by anything I like, which she considers boring and old. (She was assigned to do a school report on Stevie Wonder — this is life in Detroit — and acted like she had to write two pages on Millard Fillmore.) I can still reach her with an old movie and sometimes a pop song, but it requires extra effort; the minute she sees black-and-white photography she puts up her blast shields. But Talky Tina in “Living Doll” hooked her immediately, and after that she was a sitting duck.

Hit the Big Themes, and you’re golden.

(Pause.)

I just spent the last 45 minutes writing quite a bit more for this post, doubling its length, including linkalicious bloggage and more brain-numbing details of my pathetic daily life. And then Safari quit unexpectedly and it all went away.

Die, three-headed Safari, die!

I think it was a sign. Time to hit the showers.

The thing about “The Wire” is, you can never say you didn’t see it coming. Disaster lurks around every corner, and is usually standing smack in front of you when you get there. But because this is TV, the land of 12-minute DNA tests and prosecutors who never lose, you keep hoping for a miracle. TV is supposed to make us feel good. “The Wire” never does that. And yet, we don’t feel bad. We — I, anyway — feel something else.

The season’s centerpiece was four middle-school boys teetering on the precipice; they could go either way. Of course the odds were overwhelmingly against them, and that’s how it went. One is now a coldblooded killer. Another is living with the first boy, earning his keep dealing drugs. A third has been thrown back into the organization we laughingly call child protective services, and the fourth is kinda-sorta safe, but probably not. Which is pretty much the way these things go. You can do everything right, and yet, when you’re this kind of kid, it’s still not enough to save you.

It’s not just the kids who are unsaved. The police, the teachers, the politicians — all bang their heads against something bigger, and all get bloody foreheads, while the immovable object remains unmoved. The overarching lesson is that it’s best not to try, except that the best characters, and the redeeming moments, come from the people who do try, and fail to move the object, but somehow find a little bit of hope. Remember McNulty last season, his career in tatters, going back to uniformed foot patrol, swinging his baton merrily and looking genuinely happy for once. Colvin tried to solve the drug problem in his own way last season, failed, but came back this year and succeeded (we hope) on a far smaller scale, by saving Namond from the corner. And Bodie, who shot Wallace in season one, found a shred of decency and tried to do the right thing, only to pay for it. He redeemed himself, however, in finding the shred. A small miracle.

So what is it we feel, then, if not good? Here’s my guess: Connection. In a TV show, connection is to feeling good what real intimacy is to just having sex. (Remember Prez’ remarks on this topic to his class?) More satisfying, deeper, sometimes painful but always worth the effort.

There is no justice in the world, so this episode, this season, will of course be ignored by the people who give the awards that make more work like this possible. That’s no reason to stop trying. I can’t wait for next season.

Discuss.

Call me crazy — Hey! You crazy! — but in all the discussion of getting news online, my imagination is increasingly taken with the, shall we say, meta. Let lesser drones worry about delivery systems; I’m all about the voice. The syntax. The evolving grammar of a new language of news. (And if you can’t tell I’m being kind of snarky here, move along, you lesser drones.)

I can, and have, gone on for many zillions of words about this, but here it is in a nutshell: I once heard Nora Ephron speak, and she quoted Milton Glaser on car design. (I have looked high and low for the original citation of this, to no avail. So let’s trust Nora for a bit, shall we?) He said the look of cars mimics the prevaling mode of transportation of any era. When cars were first invented, they looked like buggies. As horses gave way to trains, cars started to look like locomotives (witness the Cords of the 1930s). As the interstate highway system began to spread, and cars came into their own, so commenced the glory days of car design, in the 50s, when they looked their most carlike. And then we were in the Jet Age, the come-fly-with-me years, and cars began to resemble airplanes.

(Yes, this train of thought begins to go off the rails in recent years, but I heard the speech in 1980 or so. Nowadays you’d say car design is tapping a deeper vein in the human subconscious. As the gap between the classes grow, we increasingly armor ourselves in quasi-military vehicles, the Hummer being only the most obvious and unimaginative example.)

Anyway, the same can be said for news media. Each technological advance starts by mimicking the one before. When radio news came along, it was little more than newspaper stories being read on the air; same with television. The telephone allowed radio reporters to give live reports on the air, something newspapers could obviously never do. As satellite trucks, ever-shrinking equipment and easy-edit videotape came along, TV news came into its own, fully exploiting its visual potential, and giving us the one-alarm house fire or two-car fatal as the lead story. We could write a whole book about the curious rise of the car chase as national news, but we won’t — I think the New Yorker had a pretty good piece about it earlier this year.

You could cite 1980 as the year newspapers finally acknowledged the obvious, when USA Today debuted with short-short stories, flashy graphics, throbbing color and, just in case you were still too stupid to get it, vending boxes that looked like televisions.

(So ends the in-a-nutshell version of my theory. A very fat nutshell.)

And now here we are in the 21st century, and online news is coming into its own. Newspapers are starting to figure out that putting the same old crap online isn’t going to make it, that you have to use the medium’s unique capabilities to craft a new kind of storytelling, and anyone who sits in a meeting and says, “But if we put links in stories, people will go away from our site and never come back” needs to be told to go make some more coffee. And as this is still a transitional period, occasionally you get a glorious mash-up. I give you this item from the Freep’s main page today, flagged as a “news bulletin:”

A manhunt is under way this morning after a prisoner escaped at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Check back for more developments.

Now that’s immediacy, eh? The story’s main source is a TV report, which tells you the newsroom is still virtually empty but for a few website-updaters, who have the right idea but no staff yet, but screw it, cite the TV guys, information wants to be free. Yet note the language and imagery, which is right out of a Superman movie: manhunt, carjacking, police searching “on the ground and in the air” and then, that bang-up last line, cut off in mid-sentence — can’t talk now, deadline! You can almost hear Perry White: “Olson! You know about these newfangled machines. Get this story on DailyPlanet.com!” (Meanwhile, Clark Kent slips quietly from the room.) Check back for more developments! This story’s so hot we gotta get it out there now!

OK. Maybe I’ve had too much coffee.

I think I have. God, I love this French Roast stuff.

Bloggage:

Slate caps its gallant crusade to promote “The Wire” with a lengthy interview with David Simon, the show’s creator. If you’d like, Wireheads may use this thread to discuss the penultimate episode, although I just watched the finale and can barely speak of it yet. It should win every Emmy and six more Peabodys, just for good measure, but it won’t. Ah, well. No one should go into any business to win awards, but still, some truths need to be acknowledged, and this is one: Best season of television, ever.

Jimmy Lileks writes five, or maybe fifteen, columns a week about nothing. Jon Carroll writes five columns a week about all kinds of things, and once in a while he tackles a real manageable topic that fits well in a 650-word space, like, oh, work and illusion and our lizard-brain fears. Enjoy.

I have no strong opinions about the six imams ejected from the US Air flight in Minneapolis. People are jumpy; these things will happen. Considering the things that have gotten people ejected from flights in this country — everything from having a buzzing sex toy in your luggage to defecating on the beverage cart — my policy is this: Give the folks a seat on the next available and chalk it up to experience.

However. Reading Debra Burlingame’s revved-up account of what got them booted — chanting “allahu akbar” at the boarding gate, bitching loudly about the war in Iraq, asking for seat-belt extenders for no apparent reason, I have to wonder if anyone thinks these things through. Sure, they were acting suspicious, at least as we consider suspicious behavior in a post-9/11 world. But they were acting ridiculously suspicious, at which point it comes around the circle and becomes non-suspicious again. Because really, if you were going to hijack a plane, would you stand at the gate with five other traditionally clad Muslims, chanting “allahu akbar?” Hell, no. You’d shave your beard, wear Western clothes, carry a briefcase and adopt the bored/irritated expression of every other air traveler. That’s how I’d do it, anyway. Just a thought.

Dorothy asked for a Wire post. Said she wanted to share her theories. I encourage her to do so, as my feelings about “The Wire” this season are pretty direct:

1) Every episode rocks the llama’s ass, and;
2) Every episode breaks my heart into a million pieces.

I just watched Ep. 11 this afternoon, a week ahead of you folks without On Demand cable, or the discipline to wait and watch with the rest of the country. (I always love how the whole neighborhood settles in and watches at the same time; you can practically hear the exclamations from nearby houses, and as soon as it’s over we all go outside and stand in the street and discuss it over beers. In brown paper bags.)

I don’t want to make predictions, as I’ve signed on for the ride and I’m willing to be led in a new direction, but so far, a few random impressions:

Chris is emerging as one of the more subtle and interesting characters of the season. His beatdown of Michael’s…father? Stepfather? …was as revelatory as anything he’s done all year, and shows how much he knows without being told. He should really be Marlo, but maybe we’ll see that happen.

Michael: Soul sold. Dukie: May yet make it. Randy: Jury still out. Namond: Oy, that mother. Was the whole school project about demonstrating the uselessness of No Child Left Behind? Has Prez bet on yet another losing horse? Where’s Cutty? More will be revealed.

Dorothy, take it away.

Nikki’s mother called a while ago with bad news: The sleepover birthday party set for tonight is cancelled. Which means two things.

1) I will probably have to wait for “The Departed” to appear on DVD, like all the other parents in the world, and

2) I can find out what happened to the Whiskers as soon as everyone else does.

Yes, we’re watching “Meerkat Manor.” If you’re not watching this Friday-night Animal Planet serial, you don’t know what you’re missing. One 30-minute episode tracking the antics of extended meerkat clans in the Kalahari Desert routinely features family, fellowship, squabbling, grooming, sex and fleas. “Desperate Housewives” does not have fleas. Added value.

I’ve loved meerkats since I saw a mob of them at the Toledo Zoo, and they seemed to be the only animals there that didn’t know they were in captivity and didn’t care anyway. They live in extended families in complex relationships with one another, which is why their lives make such interesting television. The narration comes close to, but does not cross, the line of anthropomorphism, which makes it feel like science. But it’s as gripping as any old soap opera.

The Whiskers are the central family group. They’re led by a tough female, Flower, who reserves all breeding privileges for herself and doesn’t hesitate to kick the crap out of any female who defies her, including her own daughters. The Lazuli are their close-by rivals, and a third group appeared this season — the Commandos. Their leader is Hannibal, a male who appears to be missing an eye. Every week we are reminded that meerkats are adorable little weasels of menace, no matter how much time they spend grooming one another and looking out for the clan’s babies. Last week a Commando war party found a lightly protected Lazuli den holding two pups, Bubble and Squeak. The Commandos streamed down the hole and killed Bubble. On camera! It was tough to watch.

Last week, the episode ended with Flower and a small band of adults desperately trying to hold off another Commando raiding party. The Whiskers were outnumbered by the Commandos, and had pups with them, too. I know enough about television to know the chances of the producers allowing the central band to be taken apart midseason are pretty slim, but you never know. I keep thinking of Flower, whom I have loved and hated throughout the summer — yes, I willingly allow myself to be manipulated by producers and editors — trying to do her duty, and I just…I just…

Well, I just would have happily DVR’d it if I’d been able to see “The Departed” tonight, but now I’m sort of glad I don’t have to.

And if you hear me making references to war dancing and scent-marking, this is where they come from.

Bloggage:

There’s shameless, and then there’s shameless. Vote GOP or share responsibility for the next terror attack. I spit on these people.

I’m pretty plugged in to the daily news cycle, but missed the Great Stadium Threat yesterday. Dirty bombs in trucks? Huh. A few years ago, in a private conversation, a police official sketched out a scenario for attacking stadiums that was far easier, more plausible and likely deadlier than the hoax under investigation yesterday. I have a friend, a sportswriter, who believes that if al-Qaeda knew us better, they would have attacked us not on September 11 but on September 9, flying their planes into four NFL football stadiums scattered around the country. The casualties would have been higher, the shock more profound, the blow to the economy graver, he believes. “If you want to rattle Americans, get them at play,” he said. So it’s not a stupid idea. But I wish dumbass armchair warriors conducting “writing duels” would do it in private e-mails, not on websites.

My local weekly wins the headline of the month award. No link (paid subscribers only), but it’s short, and so:

Arrested with meat in pants

Oh, baby. Have a great weekend.

And now the plot is thickening, isn’t it? Who can’t see the seeds of the school experiment failure — and you know this one will be a failure, it’s the way of the city — being sown with the discussion of tracking? But Chris and Snoop’s Burial Crypts is about to be busted. The election is now a horse race. And Lt. Marimow learns, probably not for the first time or even the tenth, that he’s not the police he thinks he is. Discuss.

If you need time-wasters to put off starting your Monday and justify a third cup of coffee, you could hardly do better than Eric Zorn’s particularly rich Land of Linkin’ today. Stay away from that movie one. You’ll be there all. Damn. Day.

This week’s forgotten soul track, unearthed by Old-School Saturday and downloaded from iTunes immediately afterward: “The House That Jack Built,” Aretha Franklin. I’m calling this perhaps the best breakup lyric ever:

There was the fence that held our love,
There was the gate that he walked out of
This is the heart that is turned to stone
This was the house, but it ain’t no home
This is the love that I once had
In a dream that I thought was love,
This is the house that Jack built,
I’m gonn’ remember this house!

Michael’s avoiding Cutty. Obviously, the boy thinks the man has gay cooties. That seems to suggest one of two things:

1) Cutty has gay cooties; or

2) Someone has already demonstrated to Michael that a fatherly hand on the shoulders is sometimes not fatherly at all.

Neither outcome would surprise me. We know from that smokin’ hot party we saw last season that Cutty enjoys the ladies, and we saw him in bed with a girl the week before last, but still. The man did his time in prison. And if Michael has already been shown the way of the world, well, that would explain a lot, too, including his default setting of anger-at-all-times.

What else? Proposition Joe demonstrates he is not a stupid man. Marlo shows his George Bush side — he cannot see the value of an alliance. But I think my favorite scene this week was the brief one with Herc and his new boss, the odious Lt. Marimow. We see how lousy or mediocre cops can continue to rise and rise in an organization that, like most of them, takes care of the organization’s needs first. And every organization needs its ass-kissers and toadies.

Oh, and the poker game. “I’m starting to see why this game is so popular.” InDEED.