Fear of an Advanced Derivatives Planet

The winter blahs are in full effect here in Toronto. Today when I was walking past Flight Centre I found myself transfixed by that big board with the names of all the cities on it. All the places you suddenly realized you would much rather be right now. You can never get the flight for anything near the price that’s listed, but that didn’t matter. I was staring at that list the way an Atkins victim would stare at a TGI Friday’s menu – you know, the one with all the pictures. Las Vegas, Cancun, Veradero, I had my palms and nose up against the glass. Ibiza, Athens, there was a large oval of condensation forming on the glass around my mouth, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aries, I started to weep quietly to myself. Eventually someone had to come out from behind the counter and ask me to leave.

Thanks to Dwayne I am now officially hip to the new show “Tilt” about the poker culture in Las Vegas. One of the best things about the show is that the eminently likeable Michael Madson is one of the stars. Tilt is produced by ESPN and is not on Canadian television, but you can download the episodes here. Jay Lovinger, a writer a ESPN.com’s Page 2 rightly points out that

1. none of the characters on the show were remotely likeable -- they are all cheaters, or paranoids, or socially maladjusted in the extreme, or sellouts, or vicious psychopaths, or some combination of the preceding -- a problem which, if not addressed, might eventually sink the show, dramatically, since viewers would have nobody with whom to identify.

(see my discussion of Kill Bill below to see why I don't agree with this)

2. the central premise -- that the best poker player in the world, a man "who can see into the souls" of his opponents, would have to cheat in order to beat "home-game heroes" (is) absurd.

3. the poker playing was dangerously unrealistic -- the winner of every key hand started without a pair or even a face card (6-4 suited, 4-3 suited and 10-6 unsuited), a recipe for fiscal disaster if ever there was one.

Jay, your pink slip from ESPN is on its way down from upstairs.

Is there a hotter trend in pop culture right now than poker? Not only is there an ESPN writer now dedicated strictly to poker, but you have the World Series of Poker, World Poker Tour and Celebrity Poker on TV, plus books and instructional videos all over the place in Chapters. For my money though, the best poker related entertainment ever produced is Rounders.

At school, I am finding Prof. John White’s calculus-laden Advanced Derivatives class, by way of understatement, to be “very challenging”. From time to time I have to remind myself what an honour it is to study under such a high caliber faculty, but as the late, great Jonnie Carson would say, this class is some “whacky, wild stuff”. Here is a taste of some of the topics we are covering.

- Wiener processes and Ito’s lemma
- The Black-Scholes model
- Numerical procedures: Binomial & trinomial trees, Monte Carlo simulation; finite difference methods
- Exotic options
- Martingales and measures
- Interest-rate derivatives
- Real options

It’s not that I don’t find the material stimulating, but this course challenges me intellectually and academically like no other course at Rotman has. Unfortunately, as it turns out, Wiener processes are much less delicious than they sound.

I finally broke down and bought the Kill Bill Volumes 1& 2 DVDs this week. I could stand to wait no longer for the mythical KB Box Set to be released, which has been rumoured on the message boards to be chock full of special features. I am a big fan of those little extras. If it’s a movie I liked enough to buy, I’m usually fascinated by all the little nuances.

The KB2 DVD has a nice little “making of “ documentary that illustrates my point. Apparently Michael Parks’ character, Texas Ranger Earl McGraw, is the exact same guy he played in From Dust Til Dawn (the Sheriff who walks in on the General Store robbery at the very beginning). And did you know that Parks also plays Esteban the Mexican pimp in the second movie?

In this documentary David Carradine of the title role expresses the opinion that it’s not the violence of Tarantino’s movies that are their defining feature, but rather it’s the look into the minds and hearts of violent people that make them unique. Pretty insightful, no? That got me to thinking that the non-violent characters in Tarantino movies help to achieve this end. They are two-dimensional, they work mind-numbing jobs and worry about things that don’t matter just because they don’t have the sack to do crimes and murder people. Take the role Tarantino himself played in Pulp Fiction – he was a boring, hen-pecked coward. All he cared about were his good sheets and his gourmet coffee, which made the Wolf, Jules and Vincent more appealing characters by comparison.

Finally, be aware that Flava Flav is part of the cast for Surreal Life 3. Not that I can in good conscience recommend the show, but seeing Flava in that Viking hat cracks be up for some reason.