This is my friend Marty.

Marty rides motorcycles. Sometimes, Marty wears a mustache. Marty always plays music. His music lives here.

From the cat from which I bit dynamic CSS palette generation via PHP come 3 more cool things I realized I use fairly often:

A Javascript function to add tabbed navigation to existing pages with minimal refactoring. Simple and way sweet.

A online tool to properly encode URIs. Quick and useful when doing one-off hardcoding of web addresses into scripts.

A CSS positioning cheat sheet, with live examples. For those brain-friend moments when everything’s breaking in IE and you need to be reminded why.

My ex-wife tries to throw herself a 30th birthday party in her secret undersea lab while O.J. Simpson and my cousin Dr. Pramalamaprkashrztzabin battle a zombie outbreak.

(Based on true events.)

I got invited to Sleezy & O-Town’s place this week for what promises to be a fun-filled multi table Texas Hold ‘Em smack down. I figure it’s because they know me to be a lovable scamp who digs a friendly card game among lovable friendly friends. What they don’t know…yet…is that I suck. Severely.

Seriously. When it comes to poker, I’m the equivalent of a retarded circus monkey hanging from a merry-go-round in your living room, tossing money in the air from a velvet & rhinestone sack. Go ahead, Doris! Catch the monkey’s money! It’s free! All freeee! Wheeeeee! Look at his shiny hat!

The few poker games I do find myself at consistently reveal that I’m far more hooked on the action than the ante. To paraphrase my boy Rands, you either love to play or you love to win. And, shit man, I just love to play. And watch folks play. But I’ll be a gosh dern derned if I can even remember whether a full house beats five of a kind.

It’s not that I don’t play a lot of poker. Well, actually it is because I don’t play a lot of poker. I’m a roulette guy. No skill. All luck. Sure, I’ll have another martini. Oh, is Dazzle you’re Christian name, or is that just for the stage? Of course I love your clear heels! Hmmm? No. It doesn’t matter. Just pick any five numbers and tell your buddy there to spin the wheel. Here. Take my credit card. I’m just here for the shrimp cocktail. And your hotel room key.

So, in an preemptive effort to lose less money this weekend and cry a bit less than usual the day after, I’ve been scoping online poker games to practice some before hitting my next real table. I’ve found a lot of pay-to-play sites out there. But the most fun I had was on a free online poker party site named, aptly enough, PartyPoker.net. You download a free desktop app that runs on OS X, take 30 seconds to start a free account an shazaam! you got 50 rooms to jump into. Hold ‘Em, Omaha, 7 Card and more. The crowd ranges from hardcore world series wanna-bes who were ready to rip my head off whenever I made a mistake, to casual but still skilled players like SillyKK & HuggyLuvs, who may have silly online names but nonethless taught me some cool stuff about the game. And, more impressibely, did so while engaged in a really funny conversation about unibrows, MC Hammer and automotive marketing. Who knew?

I think there’s also an members section where you can play online for real money for those who want all the risk of a casino without any of that distracting drugs, sex or free pancake buffets…but who cares.

Anyway, the rest of the site has plenty of info on strategy, etiquette and even a thing called the poker trainer which is pretty neat. So everyone go and sign up, hurry up and get a free education in playing poker. And the next time there’s a game amongst friends I won’t be the only one losing his shirt and loving every minute it.

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way affiliated with, own a part of or make any cash off of PartyPoker.net. I’m also not responsible if the entire thing is a scam aimed at stealing your grannie’s mattress money, or if any of their downloads lead to your hard drive exploding.

FURTHER DISCLAIMER: I’m just kidding about your name being silly, SillyKK. But HuggyLuvs…? C’mon, man. That’s just freakin’ creepy, dude.

Israeli President Moshe Katzav, speaking just 24 hours after Israel’s attorney general announced that there’s more than enough evidence to lock Katsav up on charges of rape & sexual harassment, continued to insist that he’s innocent. The soon to be ex-president said, “Even if I have to fight a world war to prove my innocence, I will struggle to clear my name.”

Moshe, sweetheart? Forgot the fact you’re about to spend the next 50 years in a baked mud cell with Balfour, the transvestite Palenstinian weight lifter who still remembers how loudly you loved that little fence called the West Bank barrier. Forget that school houses across your nation are pulling your picture off their walls because the kids are frightened shitless of your oddly Capoteqsue grin.

A more important item to consider if you wanna prevent getting assassinated in the next week: do you really think a Middle Eastern leader who’s name has appeared next to the term ’sex crimes’ about a 10,000 times in the news since yesterday should be declaring intentions to start a world war for purely personal reasons?

Shvi besheket, jackass. Even if by some stretch of the imagination you are innocent, playing the cuckoo world leader on a crusade to prove his innoncence ain’t working. Take a lesson from famous tight lipped psychos Claus Von Bulow and O.J. Simpson. Fire your PR team and just keep your mouth shut, already. You’re giving sociopaths a bad name.