AaronGleeman.com

If nothing else, it's good to have her back in the mix.

Dr. Pauly is a one-man wrecking crew and has the market cornered on interesting off-the-table goings on (not to mention much-needed visual coverage of Liz Lieu, Shannon Elizabeth, Isabelle Mercier, and Brandi Hawbaker), but for further WSOP details about actual hands and tournaments I've also been heading to Card Player, Poker News, Gut Shot, and Poker Wire. Oh, and WSOP coverage or not, read Guinness and Poker too.

There's probably a joke to be made here about Jim Souhan, but I'm far too classy (or perhaps not quite clever enough) to make it. Also, if you missed the aforementioned question-and-answer entry from earlier this week, click here to check it out.

Occasionally I'll watch a movie, enjoy it, and fail to understand why it didn't get more attention when it was in theaters. Stranger Than Fiction is one of those movies. Will Ferrell is funny in what is for him a very understated role, Maggie Gyllenhaal is surprisingly good as his love interest, Emma Thompson is perfect as the quasi-star, and the quirky plot works just well enough to get you onboard. Plus, Buster Bluth is prominently involved. Grade: B-plus

I'm not really into horror movies and didn't even see the original, but really enjoyed Hostel: Part II. In addition to all the gruesome stuff and well-done gore, director Eli Roth did an excellent job allowing the audience to follow both the good guys and the bad guys throughout their respective journeys. The plot offered just enough twists and details beyond the typical horror-movie approach to intrigue me and somewhere along the way I inexplicably started fawning over Bijou Phillips. Grade: B

A few years ago Grow spoke to one of my journalism-school classes and, even then, had plenty of concerns about the way the Star Tribune was run. In fact, I remember being shocked as he openly criticized various aspects of the paper to a bunch of wannabe-journalists. He's certainly not alone in thinking that despite all that's going wrong in the newspaper world, there's always "got to be a place for this ... got to be something." I agree, but I'm not sure that the industry is willing or able to find that place.

Part of my motivation for initially wanting to discuss the subject is my never-ending fascination with the newspaper business and how it relates to so-called "new media." However, beyond that I had talked to several friends who work at the Star Tribune and it upset me a great deal to hear that their jobs were in danger. I felt like ranting about the newspaper industry and supporting my friends who were seemingly about to get screwed by it, but instead I held off and let things play out a little bit first.

While my original entry on the subject will never see the light of day, I'm happy to report that the news looks very good for the handful of friends and acquaintances whose potential layoffs had me so upset. That could still change, of course, and I'm sad to note that longtime newspaper veterans like Grow, Steve Aschburner, and James Lileks have been forced out. However, for now at least it's good to know that people whose work and friendship I've enjoyed so much over the past few years are safe.

In five years of writing for an online audience I've learned to appreciate advantages that "online" and "non-traditional" hold over "print" and "mainstream," but an advantage I never imagined is job security. Beginning with AG.com and extending to Hardball Times, Rotoworld, and NBC Sports, I'm fortunate enough to have lucked into some wonderful situations. Yet I've always sensed that the unpredictable nature of the medium and untested career path meant the clock could strike midnight at any time.

I once imagined that after getting my foot in the door at the Star Tribune, I could climb the organizational ladder rung by rung to the top, which for me was writing columns. In the online world, there's no clear "top" and you don't advance from rung to rung so much as jump from ladder to ladder. I always thought of that as a negative, but it turns out that it's the newspaper business that finds itself going through massive changes. Right or wrong, that gives me a sense of satisfaction.

However, as someone who grew up wanting to become a newspaper columnist and has befriended many people in the business, news of the Star Tribune's cuts hit me with an even bigger sense of sadness. I'll probably go to my grave feeling resentful of the newspaper business, but that's largely because of how badly I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted it and it didn't want me, and that's not something easily forgotten. But now it's changing for the worse and it pains me to watch it happen.

Beyond that, the "newspaper business" is really just an umbrella covering a bunch of hard-working, talented people who got into the club I couldn't. They're also people with families and mortgages to pay, and in the days since the Star Tribune's cuts were announced that point has really struck home with me. Whether through relationships I made while in journalism school or through this blog, I have a lot of friends who're being hurt by the changing newspaper world.

I reached out to several of them over the past month and came away from nearly every conversation thinking just how awful the whole situation is. As anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows, I've long felt that the newspaper business was in trouble and bound for landscape-altering change. The Star Tribune's cuts are the type of thing that I've been expecting, but that doesn't make it any easier to swallow when I see friends and people whose work I admire getting caught up in the crossfire.

They didn't spend half the game circling people in the stands with a telestrator. They didn't butcher the English language constantly. They didn't act as if it's still 1965. They didn't repeat the same tired lines over and over. Basically, they didn't make me want to put the television on mute, which is something I've done a lot recently with Twins games. I'd probably grow tired of Sciambi and Simpson to some degree if I listened to them as much as I have Bremer and Blyleven, but I'd pay to find out for sure.