whimsical tour through a century of major world conflicts, told through ethnic foods representing their respective countries.



PS: For those of you who can't tell your matzah from your falafel, a cheat sheet of the 'cast'.

o.

A few of you who know me IRL know this has been a HELL of a few weeks - in every sense of the word; your support and caring means more to me than I can convey in a simple blog post. All I can say here is - thank you.

In a moment, I will begin the long drive toward Monterey for pre-TED get-togethers; If I had my druthers, I'd reschedule these things, but unfortunately, commitments are what they are and there are promises to keep.

It's not all downside - I am having dinner tonight at 7:30 with fellow TED attendee Jon Staenberg and some mutual friends/business contacts. Local Monterey folk, LJ friends (I'm looking at you mauitian), are welcome to join in - please message me and I'll fill you in on details.

A repeat from a previous post: are there folks I know in Monterey, or people I should meet with when I am there? Are there others on this list who will be attending BIL or TED that I should meet? Please speak up!

More soon.

wo unrelated contacts in as many weeks suggested I take some of my essay-ish writings/dream journals and publish them on Divine Caroline, which looks to be a user-generated-content online version of the Oxygen Channel.

Does anyone reading this have any experience with/heard of Divine Caroline?

Also: on behalf of a client willing to pay good $ for the right person; I'm looking for a community of portrait/manga artists with a good eye for detail (preferably in the San Francisco area) - is there a specific group/community I should be aware of to make some inquiries?

o.

Through a confluence of good fortune, positive relationship-building mojo and no small measure of social engineering, I will be at the uber-l33t and completely sold-out-a-year-in-advance TED Conference in Monterey, CA. Hurrah!

This will be my first time in attendance, so a question: for those of you more familiar with its attendees and the environment - suggestions, recommendations, input?

Since I will be in Monterey, I've also signed up to speak at BIL, a 'counter conference' that is to TED what BARCAMP is to FOOCAMP, an open-source collaborative counterpart to its expensive, exclusionary cousin. Both have their virtues, and I will be speaking on the topic of positive psychology borrowing heavily from Martin Selgiman's fine work in Learned Optimism.

Are there folks I know in Monterey, or people I should meet with when I am there? Are there others on this list who will be attending BIL or TED that I should meet? Please speak up! :)

his weekend, I will be photographing History Channel's City of the Future contest, where top architecture firms from major metropolitan areas compete to assemble their vision of skylines of their respective cities 100 years in the future.

Local LJ friends/long-time lurkers/friends without blogs ... want to meet up for lunch?

Poll #1123628
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Lunch/Get-Together at Ferry Building?

outhern California.

Have a few social calls and year-end business meetings that require my presence from Dec 13th to Dec 18 in Los Angeles and San Diego.

The Usual Suspects are welcome to email me with your schedules - would like to Hike with the Geeks on Sunday before heading down to San Diego for a few meet-and-greets.

Lindsay, Lexi - the offer for a quick tutorial afternoon of range-time/shooting is still open - how does Sat afternoon (Dec 15th) sound right now?

Hope you are all well. Talk soon.

This post will self-destruct in 24 hours.

s motorsport enthusiasts know, the movie "Cannonball Run" was based on a long-standing underground race driving from NYC to Los Angeles - and the most recent record of 32 hours and 7 minutes (set back in a day when police cars couldn't break 95MPH) seems like an impossible time to beat in this age of high-speed pursuit vehicles and radar. Rally Car driver Alex Roy spent two years obsessing about the record, and the story of his pursuit in breaking it (and numerous speeding laws all across the U.S.) is documented in this story:

The Pedal-to-the-Metal, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory, in Wired Magazine.

Video of Alex discussing legally questionable modifications he made to his BMW M5 in preparation of his attempt at the record

He's written a book about the story, and will have a movie out in early 2008; Alex will be in town for a wine and fancy h'orderves served book signing at an exotic car dealership Enigma Motors in Dublin, CA on Nov 26th (Monday after Thanksgiving).

We're getting people from the Diablo Porsche Club, Bay Area BMW club, Enigma's own clientele, and motorsport enthusiasts there - and anticipating a crowd of 150 people (capped at 200).

I introduced Tim Ferriss, author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Four Hour Workweek, with Alex for a phone interview; the conversation is now live at Tim's website Meet the Real Fast and Furious: 130 MPH, Creating Supercars, and Breaking Records.

If you want in on the fun: http://alexroy.eventbrite.com (code: kaialexroy)

s some of you know, November is the month for Nanowrimo, better known by its full name: National Novel Writing Month. Aspiring scribes of varying talent commit to a hard 50k wordcount by the end of November, using the occasion as a vehicle to eliminate procrastination.

Now, like most low-traffic blogs, the average Nanowrimo project isn't worth a second glance, unless you're connected to the writer somehow.

Through an odd confluence of searches related to recent semilucid dreams and no small measure of serendipity, I stumbled across a Nanowrimo project that blew me away with its sharp dialogue, sardonic antihero protagonist, and a richly nuanced cast of supporting otherworldly and mundane characters - Descant.

A quote:

I’m not a sorcerer.

I tell you this, because it’s usually the very first question almost anyone who comes into my office asks me. They expect a man who deals with the supernatural to be some sort of supernatural being himself, I suppose. It's odd that they ask, really, considering that very few people really believe in the stuff, but I guess that doesn't mean they're not intrigued by it. Tolkien, and Rowling, and Lewis, and all those other writers who created fantasy worlds sparked the creative imaginations of the human race and made them wonder if any of that fiction was based in reality.

It is, obviously. I'm just not a part of it - not really anyway.

...

I suppose that means half my customers are disappointed when they come to my office expecting to find some steely-eyed Gandalf-meets-Columbo type character, and what they get is me- Desmond D. Descant, Paranormal Investigator, just a normal average guy. Almost.

- Chapter Two: Whatever the Case May Be, Descant

Like any work-in-progress, the tale as it stands can use some editing - but the objective of Nanowrimo is volume, not perfect prose - and for an unedited stream-of-consciousness story, it's a hell of a yarn.




-

o.


A good friend and lifelong Florida resident recently accepted an offer to be the new Art Director of a major San Francisco-Headquartered web portal, and will be wheels down in SF next week at Oct 17th.

Because of my supposedly large number of contacts here, I've been volunteered to be the ringleader of a Flash Mob welcoming her to the area. Right now, we're envisioning two stages for that evening:

Working with the Cacophony Society, we will have a small welcome-mob at the SF Terminal when she crosses baggage claim, and then segues into a mixer/wine-and-chocolate tasting somewhere in
the city. Participants will have printed instructions on what to do at each stage, and the idea is to make her a temporary 'celebrity' by having a crowd of 'paprazzi' and autograph-seekers crowd her as she steps out of a limo into Union Square.

If you or someone you know is in the SF Metro area and want to be in on the fun, please reply below.

Details forthcoming.


Poll #1070249 Flashmob - Oct 17th 2007 7:00 pm -> 10:00 pm
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

You in?

s a seasoned curmudgeon, not much gets to me - and if you would have told me a Life Insurance commercial from Thailand would be the thing that wrenches at my jaundiced heart on a Sunday evening, I would have laughed at you merrily before showing you the door.

From ad man caffeineguy.



Grandpa Chew

Also: Father And Son.

Christ, where are these kinds of commercials in the U.S.?

unday, two dozen friends, bloggers and assorted dessert enthusiasts converged at the kitchen of Anthony Ferguson, boutique chocolatier and owner of Cacao Anasa, where we spent two hours with our sleeves rolled up as Anthony walked us through the world of high-end confections. During this process, we created several plates of chocolate-dipped cookies, a dozen pineapple-and-apricot 85% chocolate bars, some rather potent chocolate-flavored alcoholic cocktails, and a exquisite platter of spearmint-flavored ganaches ... all of which were devoured as soon as they were cooled and edible.

Fellow foodie Anita Chu, who managed to exceed even my own chocolate-overdrive weekend, wrote about her experiences at her blog appropriately titled Dessert First.

Interest has been far stronger than I anticipated - even with the late notice, we sold out days before the event, and, given the size of Anthony's kitchen, I had to turn away a dozen or so last-minute queries (sorry guys!) With the strong interest in a repeat of Chocolate Sunday, we expect to announce another Chocolate Sunday at Cacao Anasa sometime in mid-September ... keep your eyes posted if you wish to join in on the fun next time.

Until then ... photos.

	Straining Coffee Beans & Mint Leaves
	Linda & Rob reading the instructions
	Happy as clams - the truffles are almost ready!
	Anthony - ready to rock
	"Heads up!"
	The chemistry of chocolate
	Locke's creation ... truffle ganache ready to be coated with cocoa powder
	Cookies!
	Wait ... one more ingredient ...
	Stirring melting chocolate and sampling when nobody is looking ...
	Chocolate assembly line
	B&W kitchen shot
	Ash - with a potent chocolate cocktail

bsurd and surreal -
Basic Instructions, by Scott Meyers.



Public posts will be spotty while I work out a few things on the personal front. More in a few weeks.

ne of the seminal experiences of growing up Chinese-American was the phenomenon of our shared hatred of "That Kid."

I guess this requires a bit of explanation.

In Chinese culture, children exist primarily as source material for parents to brag to others - and in the winner-take-all world of bragging parental one-upsmanship, there can be only one; some kid out there whose accomplishments eclipse everyone else's best efforts and make them look weak and paltry by comparison ... a fact your own parents never fail to remind you of.

Score a 1500 on your SATs? "Did you know Uncle Walter's daughter got a 1600 on her SATs - two years younger than you!"

Graduate salutatorian from high school? "Well, Auntie Beverly's son was valedictorian. At age 15!"

Place in a regional science fair project? "Did you know Dr. Leung's daughter is a national scholar with the Westinghouse Science Talent Search?"

And so on.

The thinly-veiled message, driven into our insecure and impressionable minds since about age 13, is that you are a defective, lesser version of so-and-so's kid, and if your parents could replace you with him or her, they would do so in a heartbeat. Thus, from our early teens, those of us not at the local maxima of academic brilliance in our respective Chinese-American communities grow to loathe and curse one name, one kid (who we may not even know) as the impossible standard by which all our parents compare their children against.

During lunch with Niniane Wang a few months back, she admitted she was "That Kid" in her community - an apotheosis of technical/academic accomplishment that other parents barely known to her family would use to berate their own defective offspring ... and we shared some laughs about a skit I wrote in college mocking that entire phenomenon.

RAW Power
Without a doubt, the biography of Ray Arthur Wang (no relation to above) firmly cements his place as the Golden Child in the world of his parents' friends - BSEE from Berkeley, PhD EE from Stanford, concert-level pianist and professional filmmaker.

It's in the latter he departs from the script of stereotypical Chinese-American career advancement - rather than accepting the sure-thing technical career that a EE PhD would provide, he choose the riskiest path of filmmaker; during his final year at Stanford, he put together an ensemble cast to shoot a film about a haunted car titled Carma that won accolades from a swath of prestigious film festivals and has since fully immersed himself in the uncertain world of independent film production. (Well worth checking out - you can watch the movie at the Carma website.)

Ray, whose initials "RAW" became the basis for the name of his production company "RAW Power Productions" and I have begun work jointly on a screenplay after a serendipitous meeting at a concerto a few months back; I've joked that it's probably a good thing my parents did not know him ten years ago so I am spared being compared to his formidable biography and the need to get over the irrational loathing such comparisons inspire. HA!

More recently, RAW completed the whimsically entertaining project Line for Heaven which takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the notion of salvation as a Web 2.0 application.

Keep your eye on this man. You'll see his name on an Academy Award inside a decade. Until then, would invite you to check out Carma.

uick hits.

• Robot Chicken Star Wars. Good God, that is like 25 minutes of some of the most side-splitting spoofs this side of the Cartoon Network.
  
  "Bring me a taco!"
  
  
• For those who've lived with difficult roommates, Passive-Aggressive Notes is a hysterical collection of some of the best snark between those who share a roof.
  
  My favorite, for whatever reason ... "When PhDs get frustrated" which wins a gold medal in the "excessive explanation" department.
  
  
  

ecause I am evil, and because it is finals week, I posted yet another anonymous confessions thread on the ucsd community.

860 comments and counting ... with highlights like:

• Hot lesbian lust on campus
  
  From what I hear, Berkeley and Santa Cruz took all the young lesbians in CA. I was bi-leaning-les in my first year at this school and after a year I fell into a long-term relationship with a man because I couldn't take going to the gay dances and seeing the usual suspects: the same ten girls who had all dated each other and had high-school-style drama times a million. No thanks.
  
  I love my boyfriend a lot and at this point wouldn't have it any other way but I have to wonder how my life would have been if I had gone to, say, Smith.
  
  
• An informative thread discussing the pros and cons of hash brownies.
  
  hash brownies...
  
  what are the side effects of a first time user who's never gotten high before, by either ingestion or smoking? i'm trying to decide if i want to eat it now, or after i'm done with finals. i don't want to freak out over it and screw up my studying pattern or anything.
  
  google's a bitch and it's not coming up with side effects of hash brownies, so yea.
  
  
• Infrequent laundry guy.
  
  I do laundry about once a month. I don't even have that many clothes, either.
  
  >> At least you're kinda helping the environment in a way by wasting less water and detergent
  
  
• Female self-gratification thread.
  
  I'm female, and I rub them out frequently, more days than not.
  
  I'm curious, it seems like my roommates, a lot of other girls I know have NEVER touched themselves. C'mon, what's up with that? How can you expect a man to do to you what you can't do to yourself?
  
  Someone want to answer this for me?
  
  
• I am still laughing out loud in front of my computer after the sixth time reading this thread.
  
  flappers used to tape their boobs down to make them look smaller. it's just our society that makes us think the bigger the better. we're not genetically mal-dispositioned.
  
  signed,
  girl with 32A's.
  
  > yes, but we DO live in the society that thinks bigger is better.
  >
  > good luck nursing.
  >
  > -34B
  >
  >> I win.
  >>
  >> -34C/D
  
  (and then it gets really, really amusing)

Something about anonymity brings out all sorts of fascinating stuff. What are your favorite threads? Post in comments.

Ok, enough of that. Back to work.

first heard of Ben Casnocha through a few friends who spoke of him in tones of awe; boy-wonder entrepreneur, voracious reader and accomplished writer all before he was allowed to vote.

I met Ben less than a year ago and, like most people, was blown away by his energy, enthusiasm and humility. There is the stereotype that boy-wonder business prodigies must by necessity also sport an ego to match, but with Ben there was no such thing - he is eminently approachable and likable in spite of being light-years ahead of his same-age peers.

As fitting for a person of such an unusual biography, Ben has written a book - My Start-Up Life, which chronicles his story of how he started his first company at age 15, squeezing in to meetings with clients and prospects between high school classes and ball practice all the while maintaining his own version of balance in between.

Ben's intense and thoughtful in turns, and I am proud and privileged to count him as a friend. His book is an inspiration, and is the best graduation gift parents of teenagers can offer.

And now ... back to work.

artin Blank: (on a headset, talking with his secretary from his hotel room, trying to cut short an awkward conversation) I have to go.

Marcella: Well we all have to go sometime, sir, but we can choose when.

Martin Blank: (Standing up to disconnect the call) Nobody chooses when.

- John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank

Imagine: You're a 53-year-old CEO of a well-respected international consultancy that spans the industrialized world. As a matter of profession, you socialize with and advise chieftains of multi-billion-dollar firms, and your life is scheduled out eighteen months in advance, optimized to the nth degree from dawn to midnight, juggling the obligations of a family and the demands of a job where your thoughts and insights are constantly sought by colleagues, subordinates, clients and compatriots. Retirement to a golf resort is still over a decade away - until then, every moment brings new challenges, new opportunities and you are primed to handle them with the same energy and focused attention that got you where you are.

Life is good.

Now imagine: a doctor's visit. You've been in excellent health your whole life and expect your recent headaches to be a minor annoyance to be chased away by time or the right handful of pills.

"I have bad news. You have inoperable brain cancer. You have three to six months. I'm sorry."

Like a rain of lit kerosene on a well-manicured garden, Gene O'Kelly's meticulously-planned, ordered life was torched in an instant, and he now has to compress the balance of his life into 100 days.

What would you do?

What would you do?

On Ben Casnocha's strong recommendation, I picked up a copy of Gene O'Kelly's haunting memoir, Chasing Daylight, which chronicled his final journey into oblivion, beginning with his diagnosis, and ending with his wife writing the last chapter of a book he was unable to finish.

In one measure, he was fortunate - the cancer that afflicted O'Kelly would not compromise his mental facilities; he would have the presence of mind to be himself right up until the end - and in this, he considered himself blessed, as he wrote in the opening lines of his book.

In his final 100 days, O'Kelly brought the methodical, organized ethos that made him an effective executive into the realm of settling his interpersonal affairs: drafting a plan of how he wanted to say goodbye to friends, colleagues, family - in the right order, and in a manner that preserves the best parts of their memories without maudlin moments of regret or anguish.

Every decision was weighed with an eye toward making the best of each of his remaining days (refusing chemotherapy, for instance, since the putative benefits of extending his life by weeks came at the expense of wracking him in distracting pain), chasing the remnants of daylight left in the accelerated sunset of his life in pursuit of "Perfect Moments" where he and the person he was saying goodbye to had full presence of mind in the now, with no room for useless 'what-if' dwelling in the past or idle speculation of a future that he can no longer be a part of.

Everybody draws different things from such a powerfully personal story - what took my breath away about the entire account was its supporting character who made sporadic appearances, Corinne O'Kelly ... Gene's wife, upon whom the burden of his decline and demise must fall the heaviest. Right at his side the whole time, faithfully transcribing his notes for the book chronicling his final days to share his journey with others, all the while channeling her own grief, her sadness and her love into this, their final project together.

If I am allowed a criticism of the book, it is this: O'Kelly did not give his wife nearly the space she deserved, her quiet devotion and running interference on the background that gave him license to fully explore what it meant to die well and on his own terms. But perhaps this, too, was intentional and as it should have been, a long-winded tribute to a beloved wife is something more fitting for private reading - and the book, like Gene O'Kelly's business life, is the public man than he chose to share.

Thank you, Gene - for a thoughtful and soul-stirring read. I hope to raise a toast to you one day in Valhalla, but if it's all the same to you, I hope that day is far off. And thank you, Ben, for the recommendation.

Off to work.

Related Reading: Twilight of my Years (musings on mortality)

Motivation and Gratitude (essay on the invisible miracles we take for granted that keep our bodies working)

handy tool that I have been forwarding to every client I've been speaking with in recent weeks since I found it:



Note: I have a few quibbles with some of the default assumptions in the 'general' tab under the advanced settings section that has a rather dramatic effect on the calculations

• "Return on Investments" ought to be at least 7% if one assumes a 70/30 equity/fixed-income portfolio - even 100% bond funds average about 5~6% per annum.
  
  
• The average home-buyer is probably closer to the 30~35% tax bracket, not 20%.
  
  
• Inflation tracks rental increase rates - both should be at or close to 3% given historical trends.

Other resources:

For a more, ah, slanted perspective on the whole issue, I would direct your attention to HousingPanic, who gleefully trumpets the misdeeds of real-estate speculators and those who accept crushingly unsustainable debts to bankroll their properties. ernunnos, any suggestions of other blogs people should be following on this subject?

P.S. After re-joining Toastmasters through the Lee Emerson Bassett club two months ago, then adding a double-membership at Adobe Speakers, I've sustained a grueling pace of delivering almost a speech every week out of the Ten-Speech CTM Manual; normally, members are expected to finish the CTM course over one to two years, but I am on track to complete the CTM in three months. This Weds, I will be delivering Speech #8, entitled "Why Smart People Are Statistically Destined to Remain Single - a Whimsical Look at Dating Markets for Outliers" (a spoken version of Why Pjammer is Doomed to Eternal Bachelorhood with "Lawrence Lessig" style slides).

Those in the Palo Alto area are invited to come along and check it out - drop me a comment and I will add you to the guestlist.

lmost everyone I know familiar with the sociological phenomenon of Dunbar's Number first came across it in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

Briefly stated, there is a cognitive maximum size of a 'tribe' the human monkey-brain has evolved to credibly cope with and manage: that number is 150. Beyond that, we need systems, formalized codes of conduct to deal with those outside whatever we classify as our own tribe - and our capacity for empathy drops precipitously for those who do not live within that sphere.

David Wong, whose hysterical Ultimate War Simulation I first came across a few years ago, wrote on the subject of Dunbar's number in The Monkeysphere.

Excerpts:

Famous news talking guy Tim Russert tells a charming story in his book Big Russ and Me (the title referring to his on-and-off romance with actor Russell Crowe) about his father, who used to take half an hour to carefully box up any broken glass before taking it to the trash. Why? Because "the trash guy might cut his hands."

That this was such an odd thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spend time worrying too much about the garbage man's welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don't usually consider his safety or comfort at all and if we do, it's not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend or even our dog.

...

[O]ne way or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's simply the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people. Usually it's our own friends and family and neighbors and classmates and coworkers (or at least the ones in your department) and church or suicide cult.

This is literally the reason society doesn't work quite right. The people who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters.

Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at Taco Bell picking up and eating a whole Taco Salad with her bare hands? Or you saw your principal walking out of a dildo shop?

...

6. That's not my fault! I don't know those people!

Right. And they don't know you. That's why they don't mind stealing your stereo or vandalizing your house or cutting your wages or raising your taxes or bombing your office building or choking your computer with spam advertising diet and penis drugs they know don't work. You're outside their Monkeysphere. In their mind, you're just a vague shape with a pocket full of money for the taking.

That's the whole thing, right here. Life on Earth, in a nutshell. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside and out of our Monkeysphere and those outside make up 99.999% of the world's population.

- Inside the Monkeysphere

The problem for me is there is no one single easily-identifiable 'tribe' I feel fully at home in - for most of my life, I've felt like an outsider in nearly social group I was putatively a member. Whether it's the community of free-market libertarians, sleight-of-hand magicians, vegetarians, gun owners, film enthusiasts or Chinese-Americans, I never felt fully comfortable within the Venn diagram of any of these worlds, even though I find myself actively participating in all of them.

Perhaps my tribe is elsewhere - another world, another time, and this is just a way-station en route.

P.S. There were a few technical glitches in the audio of my interview with Asian Playboy; will be cleaning up those files this afternoon and posting it by Tuesday.

Until then ...

n a recent conversation with Ben Casnocha we touched on Robert Greene's book The 48 Laws of Power; Ben expressed dislike for Greene's ruthless and cynical view of human nature in the work.

Understandably, idealists have the hardest time accepting the darker side of human nature and find the entire topic of power plays to be unpleasant and distasteful. For pragmatists (and I count myself among them), understanding the mechanics of cons games and ruthless manipulation are essential tools to thrive in an imperfect world.

Currently reading through Greene's new work - The 33 Strategies of War - a richly dense collection of anecdotes and insights into human nature distilled from warfare throughout human history.

As a subscriber to Greene's blog - was intrigued by his recent post Angles, Hustlers and Suckers which reemphasized much of his principles with the pool table as a metaphor:

As in pool, so in life. Suckers and beginners are locked into the single-ball-at-a-time mentality, and get all excited when they knock one in on a clever shot, but leave themselves nowhere to go. They never learn the angles above the angles above the angles.

Then there are people who raise their game a little, who give the appearance of knowing how to hustle, who can actually knock in a few shots in a row. In Hollywood, I worked for some people like that. They would let others do the work and take all the credit. One writer/director I knew would constantly play the game of hiring someone else to direct the pet script he had written, someone young and eager and inexperienced. This person would inevitably fail rather early on in the process; the writer/director would have to come in and rescue the situation. Better to set it up that way, than for him to be seen as always wanting to direct his own projects. Similar to how Pat Riley engineered his whole return to coaching.

But these types did not really see the whole table, or have a good endgame mapped out. They had some angles, but not of a high order. They never really got that far. They are low to mid-level hustlers.

...

Lately I have been rereading Iceberg Slim, one of my favorites. To Iceberg, the world is divided between hustler and sucker. You are either one or the other. The sucker has no angles on life, no sense of the art of indirection, can only make one stupid play at a time. The hustler always aims for the angles, learns how to play them, becomes an artist in the game. The following are the main distinctions he makes between the two types:

• "Chumps prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth." The sucker wants to believe certain things about life and so projects these wishes on to the real world, seeing what he wants to see, not what is. A hustler thrives on reality, ugly or unpleasant--finds his poetry in the real. He sees the whole table and plays it as it lays.
  
  
• "No point in getting upset about the unknown. Only suckers do that." A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It's part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about. They represent opportunities for new angles, new hustles. The sucker cannot stand the unknown and so either fouls up by getting impatient and over anxious, or retreats to a false world of security and the known.
  
  
• "Stop letting your mind leapfrog like a screwy sucker." A sucker's mind moves all over the place, forgetting the order of things and making chaos where there is none. Hustlers have to stay cool and focused on the chain of events as they unfold, the various angles that are being played, with the possible reactions. A hustler never forgets where the 8 ball lies and how to get to it methodically.
  
  
• "You can't learn con by memorizing words. Every mark and every play of any con game is different. You have to memorize the elements of con." A sucker wants formulas he can memorize and plug into situations. He has no flow because he is so rigid in his mind. The hustler has flow because he plays for the overall game, knows the elements, can improvise and make angles where no one else sees them.

For those interested, I've already set up an LJ feed, powersedwar_rss.