I was writing my poker monologues for the last episodes of "HUWRH" today. It has been quite hard to think of 10 monologues which revolve around poker (as many of you will have noticed it gets quite dull even when you talk about it just once or twice and there's not all that much amusing to say about it), but I think I've done OK with it.
Today I got to thinking about how now that poker is really trendy how everyone is trying to give other things a poker connection. In the last couple of weeks I have either heard about or noticed poker versions of Keno,Yahtzee and Scrabble. I wonder where this will end and how far the market can saturate with poker before people start shouting out, "All right, that's enough ludicrous and bodged together poker hybrids - let us get on with our lives!" It should be about one day if public reaction to poker mentions in Warming Up is any kind of gauge.
So I was trying to think of funny things that you could shoehorn poker into for humorous effect. My favourite idea was poker funerals in which you could mourn the loss of a loved one, but have the chance to win millions of pounds. It's hard to think how this would logistically work. To begin with I thought that maybe you had to register your dead person on a website and once 52 stiffs were signed up you'd have one big mass funeral for them all. To begin with I was thinking each coffin should get a card (or maybe each dead person has a card tattoed on their face), and then are shuffled around on a big carousel. Maybe the chief mourner of each deceased is then dealt two coffins and then the five community coffins are placed down on the altar of the church/casino and then you just play poker in a normal fashion (but with coffins or cadavers instead of cards). But it might be nicer if your actual deceased person got to play against the other recently departed. Maybe the coffins are left open and sent down one of those conveyor belts where you'd usually get cremated. But then instead of being burned cards are dropped from the ceiling and whichever ones land in the coffin become the corpse's hand. And the corpse with the best poker hand made up of the cards that have fallen into his coffin will win. Or rather his family will. Everyone pays to enter and winner takes all!
It's just an idea.
On a similar theme I thought up a good prank for the
Balls of Steel pranksters from Channel 4 to get any blind person who walks around using a white stick. Simply put a little mechanical screen into the pavement. When a blind person passes by with a stick let them feel that the pavement is flat and safe, but in the second that the stick has moved beyond the space, but before the blind person's feet reach it, press a button and raise the screen and the astonished blind person would have a nasty fall. Come on Channel 4! You haven't pushed things far enough. We want to see blind people pointlessly humiliated and dead people being used in a card game. Yeah some people won't like it, but that's just because they will be too old to understand it.
