OK, so I’ve had friends tell me for years that I should become a writer, based entirely on my annual Christmas letter. Now, for those of you who haven’t received one of these self-congratulatory holiday blogs (usually accompanied by a picture of Junior and Princess wearing Santa hats), you probably either don’t have any friends with school-age kids or you haven’t opened your December mail yet. Either way, here is a typical Christmas letter excerpt:

"...Little Johnny is growing up so fast. Just yesterday, he reprogrammed the Mars Rover from our home PC and learned to speak Urdu. He is the most popular kid in the state and his teachers all adore him. He hit seventy-four home runs during Little League, and scored forty touchdowns in five Pop Warner games. He healed three lepers and is expected to be named Pope as soon as JP2 dies. We’re so proud of him."

Meanwhile, Johnny is busy shaving the cat, getting his underwear run up the flagpole at school, and setting his little sister on fire. Anyway, this kind of semi-fictitious writing inspired comments like “Geez, man, you should be a writer!” and “We look forward to your letter every year!” and “Hey, can I borrow some money?”, completely ignoring the fact that the job of WRITER is more nebulous than Justin Timberlake’s talent and is considerably less lucrative.

Somehow, somewhere, someway, I heard about the poker blogging community. I dunno, maybe the WSOP telecasts had me Google-ing for poker news, maybe it was my buddy who started me on UltimateBet in December... I honestly can’t remember how I started reading these damn things, but I quickly got hooked. I am not web-ignorant by any measure, but I had never even heard of a “blog” before finding Up for Poker by CJ [http://www.upforanything.net/poker/]. Naturally, I followed some of his blogging links to the other sites, and read about the expanding online poker community, and learned, and laughed, and said “Damn, maybe I could inform, entertain, amuse… Dammit, I can do that”.

So here it is. My first entry. I ain’t gonna write only about poker, because that ain’t all I’m interested in. If you read this, you’ll read about poker, baseball, football (I post crap all the time at footballoutsiders.com), entertainment, politics (moderate Republican, should be interesting considering the number of liberal bloggers out there), and my family.

Come on back soon. I'm gonna try for one 30 minute a day post.