Of course we did, goddammit!

From the NYT:

“Even growing up around it, little shards of the language stayed alive in our mouths and came out as slang,” he said, spouting a string of words that sounded straight out of a James Cagney movie.

“Snazzy” comes from “snasach,” which means polished, glossy or elegant.*

The word “scram” comes from “scaraim,” meaning “I get away.” The word “swell” comes from “sóúil,” meaning luxurious, rich and prosperous, and “sucker” comes from “sách úr,” or, loosely, fat cat.

There is “Say uncle!” (“anacal” means mercy), “razzmatazz,” and “malarkey,” and even expressions like “gee whiz” and “holy cow” and “holy mackerel” are Anglicized versions of Irish expressions, he said. So are “doozy,” “hokum,” “humdinger,” “jerk,” “punk,” “swanky,” “grifter,” “bailiwick,” “sap,” “mug,” “wallop,” “helter-skelter,” “shack,” “shanty,” “slob,” “slacker” and “knack.”

*ahem.

BEIJING, China (AP) — A man in southern China appears to have died of exhaustion after a three-day Internet gaming binge, state media said Monday. The 30-year-old man fainted at a cyber cafe in the city of Guangzhou Saturday afternoon after he had been playing games online for three days, the Beijing News reported.

Paramedics tried to revive him but failed and he was declared dead at the cafe, it said. The paper said that he may have died from exhaustion brought on by too many hours on the Internet.

The report did not say what the man, whose name was not given, was playing. The report said that about 100 other Web surfers “left the cafe in fear after witnessing the man’s death.”

China has 140 million Internet users, second only to the U.S.. It is one of the world’s biggest markets for online games, with tens of millions of players, many of whom hunker down for hours in front of PCs in public Internet cafes.

Several cities have clinics to treat what psychiatrists have dubbed “Internet addiction” in users, many of them children and teenagers, who play online games or surf the Web for days at a time.

(I’m always suspicious of those “wacky stories from China,” but so far I’ve found this on the AP and CNN. So if it is an urban legend, it’s their fault.)

Left LA at 11:00 am yesterday, got home at 1:30 am after a trip to the track at Del Mar, one 4 hour poker game, and a trip to the Foxfire later.

Not a bad day at the track: hit two trifectas, one modest superfecta (the first 4 horses in order) composed mostly of favorites, and a neat 5-6 quinnella, that in the 4th race, with the 6-5 battling down to the wire, well ahead of the pack.

It appeared that the day might be near-legendary, when in the 8th my 7-11-13-14 superfecta full of longshots going off from 11 to 29 to one ran in a perfect fucking pack for about half the race, sorting out of the gate on the backstretch in nice order and heading around the final curve with an 11-1 horse in the lead and all four horses in front. I figure the superfecta would have hit for at least $3-4,000 provided 7 13 or 14 won.

Then, the legs fell off every single one of those fucking nags and only one finished in the top 5, with 3 of the 4 finishing 8-10 in a 12 horse field.

Well, it was a long race. If it had been a shorter one, who knows.

Del Mar is a weird place though — filled with white people, and particularly well-fed blonde housewives wearing sun dresses and $600 sunglasses, who looked like Paris Hilton after too many trips to the buffet line.

At Hollywood Park, the crowd has scroungy looking men of mixed ethnicity drinking pints of Coors light from plastic bottles, and munching world class Pink’s childogs. At Del Mar, there are blonde hausfraus sipping Veuve Cliqout from chilled champagne glasses, munching stuff that passes for corned beef if you’re a goy, or never been to New York, or even Langer’s.

All in all, a pretty fucking good day.