In our college group, my friend Joe was a legendary poker player. Legendary for being the worst poker player imaginable. In the words of my late father as he was leaving our private game one night in a suite I booked at Harrah’s Marina in Atlantic City, “Joe shouldn’t play cards.” Joe is one of my favorite people — highly amusing, witty, and full of life. But no matter how acerbic, he doesn’t have the sort of killer instinct that makes you a good poker player. (One indication:  His favorite game to call is Indian.) He’d rather enjoy the company, and if that means losing enough to stay in the game, that’s enough of a goal.

I now feel the same way about Barack Obama. Except without all that fondness I have for Joe. Joe means a lot to me, but there aren’t millions of people counting on him.

When Obama sat down, the cards were in his favor. Yes, he inherited a crisis of epic proportions — but in that seat, if you don’t inherit one of those, you’d better figure one is on your way. Obama was dealt a huge numerical advantage in both the House and the Senate, and enough sense of crisis that he was able to put in place enormous change. But Obama now strikes me as someone so charmed in so much of his life that he’s ill-equipped to handle setbacks. The GOP captured one — just one — chamber of Congress, and now he’s folding every hand. The deal on the unemployment extension — in which benefits were supplemented in exchange for both an extension of the Bush era taxcuts and a rollback in capital gains — reads like a strong hand played weakly. (For more of the poker metaphor, check out this piece on Slate, which recounts in sad detail all the ways that Obama is throwing away his chips.) From reading Obama’s expression, I’d gauge that he doesn’t like what he sees in the flop. I’ve got news for him:  The turn arrives in January with those new Republicans, and he’s going to like that card even less. A little aggression at the table would help.

Lately, zombies are getting all the attention. This holiday season, mummies are tired of being kept under wraps.

Now that everybody has changed their Facebook avatars back from cartoon characters, how great has the upswing in child abuse been?

I guess comics really aren’t for kids any more.

There was a time when Batman looked like this:

This is more like what you’ll find now:

This isn’t a new trend. Even Wolverine looked a little… milder… in his debut.

Now he’s more likely to look like one of the vicious, battered bums in the backdrop of a Bukowski novel:

But even with all the changes that any character will go through over the course of almost 70 years, I’m still surprised to find what a downer Archie has become. I hated high school, so I couldn’t relate to the character at all, no matter how great a time he seemed to be having with Moose and Jughead and those fetching girls of his. But now even Archie is a victim of the recession, battling joblessness in what Slate calls “a middle-class hell.” Here’s their take on it, and here are some representative graphics. Looks interesting — if you can handle it.

So evidently, Charles Manson can field cellphone calls from inside his prison cell, behind acres of concrete and steel. Meanwhile, my wife could stand on a cell tower with her cellphone in her hand, and all the incoming calls would still drop directly to voicemail. Explain, please.

NASA has announced that they’ve found new life. As Gizmodo puts it, “[the] life form—called GFAJ-1— doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes.

“NASA is saying that this is ‘life as we do not know it.’ The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.”

My first thought on reading this is that I’ve seen this new life, and it was in a river in New Jersey. (I’m from New Jersey, so I get to say that.) But then I read further and learned that scientists then found a very similar life form on Earth that uses arsenic rather than phosphorous for its molecular building blocks. Where did they find it? Mono Lake, California. Make of that what you will.

My final thought is:  I’m surprised that they’re surprised. Haven’t any of them seen “The Andromeda Strain”? My father and two older brothers took me to see that when I was nine,  and to this day I’m as thrilled about that movie as I was then. The “Strain” of the title is an alien biological infestation that, wait for it, lacks ways we recognize to create DNA, RNA, proteins and amino acids. In other words, it’s “impossible” life that’s similar to what we just found. And which all of we science fiction fans have been expecting for 40 years.

It’s the Hot Guys and Baby Animals calendar.

(For my family, it would be Hot Guns with Dead Animals.)

Here’s a primer in how to invest wisely, from someone who no longer has any stake in the outcome. (Thanks to Joe Stafford for letting me know about this.)

#1 in the list:  A Klingon Christmas Carol.

(Although I have friends I suspect will be there.)