Corrupted poker files.

We had a poker game at Scott's on Saturday night. Scott, Matt, Alex, Tits McGee, Cilarus and I were in attendance.

It was a Mexican Salsabration.

Scott cooked up some taquitos and tacos and served them up with his special homemade guacamole. Actually, he just threw some frozen taquitos and tacos in the oven and squeezed the guac out of a bag. But he did drive to the store and pay for them, and I appreciate that he did that because they were good.

For some reason I was really looking forward to the poker game. I don't know why.

It began with me working on Scott's old computer while sitting at the table. I will now digress into the story of Scott's old computer:

He has this laptop that he bought in the summer of '00 that went down about 1.4 years ago. It didn't actually break, the boot files just got corrupted. Scott wanted a new computer anyway and this was his excuse, but he wanted his data off the old one.

Scott's landlord, Sammy Chan, is an IT professional and volunteered to look at it. It sat in Sammy's apartment for a year. Sammy came back and said: "They used this goofy file compression software, and you can't get the un-compression software anymore." Then Scott's computer sat in Scott's apartment for 5 months with me periodically saying: "Hey you still got that computer? Can I look at it?"

I remembered to bring my gear and I finally looked at it on Saturday. While playing poker I extracted the old hard drive, hooked it up to an IDE-to-USB adapter, and plugged it into Scott's current computer. The files were recognized and they sure didn't look compressed to me. I copied them over to Scott's new computer and reformatted the old drive. Sammy Chan is a liar. He could have just said: "I'm too busy/lazy to look at it and I have been using it as a doorstop." Good one, Sammy. He didn't count on Scott having a friend that's not afraid to rip apart electronic devices.

I now have Scott's old computer up and running and she's purring like a kitten. I installed the latest state of the art operating system: Windows 98. It even plays mp3's and DVD's. I am awesome. Scott offered to trade it to me for my set of poker chips (they are the 11.5 gram "Dice" ones that everyone has). He has a deal.

While the others were playing poker I was slowing down the game with my side project. I didn't really play while I was tinkering, I just got dealt shitty cards and folded everything. When I got done working my IT skillz it was time to get down to business on the felt. I cracked open a Boone's Orange Hurricane and was ready to go.

Apparently, cracking open a Boone's Orange Hurricane causes one to be the subject of ridicule:

"Hey, I didn't know this was an 8th grade slumber party. Did you bring your New Kids on the Block tapes?"

That's not nice. I wonder if this is specific to Boone's Orange Hurricane. I will bring Boone's Strawberry Hill next time. Maybe then they won't make fun of me.

I started out playing well. I had more than doubled my buy-in when the crazy wild-card games started. That's when the wheels came off and Scott served tamales. Actually, they didn't come off. I just started playing bad. I really need to fold more and gamble less with these games. And Scott served tamales.

He brought them out in a cooler for comedic effect (please see Poker night to see why this is funny). At first I thought he made them but he just got them at CostCo (along with some frozen taquitos and a bag of guacamole). They were hard to eat without a fork, and a few of us went back to the kitchen to get some. Tits McGee and I were both done with our tamales by the time Scott realized he wanted a fork. Tits chimed in with: "You can use mine." And then I added this gem:

"Yeah, I mean, it's no big deal, it's not like we're gay..."

"...except for Cilarus."

I have no clue what being gay has to do with sharing forks, or what sharing forks has to do with being gay. I meant to just say: "It's not like my mouth has anything worse in it than your mouth." But instead I thought I would mention that I'm not gay. I'm glad I added the blatant "except for Cilarus," because otherwise there would have been an awkward vibe in the room. Cilarus has already let me know that he doesn't mind when I refer to things as "gay," but maybe he was lying. I want to be able to use the word "gay" without worrying about offending gay people.

The poker continued and I lost all my money on a hand of night baseball. Gay. Then I left with my new computer. The game went on without me. Matt got drunk, lost all his money and threw things.

Or so I hear.