Thom Forbes

Old time Cronies know that every year about this time we play the "Can You Find The Slightly Butchered and Lightly Buried Obscure Leonard Cohan Lyric" game. This year's winner is D. Stein, Esq., breaking Babaloo W.'s string of five consecutive victories. D. correctly traced the phrase, "Bixby is building a moat in the desert (where's he playing for nothing now; I hope he's keeping some kind of record)" to "Famous Blue Raincoat." 

"I had to take two sick days to figure it out," D.told the Cronies blog in an exclusive interview. "That's about $100 grand, give or take, in billable hours. But it was worth it, if just to beat Bobaloo. By the way, who the hell is Bixby?" 

D. has no idea just how valuable his victory really is. This year's grand prize: Five free lessons in the "The Art of Folding, Kvetching and Subsequently Offering Baseless Predictions and Unsolicited Advice To All Those Remaining in the Hand." I need not tell the cognoscenti the name of our resident guru. Plus, this year he's throwing in a bonus session billed as "How To Address Your Cards." 

Writes one enthused former attendee, an erstwhile Crony: "I thought 'How to Address Your Cards' was something of a gag, a la "The Honeymooners" with Jackie Gleason, where Art L. would get four cards dealt to him, just like everybody else, but would wait until it was his turn to bet and then would, ever so slowly, turn them over, over by one, saying to each as he did: 'Hello, Card.' 

"But this oh-so-didactic experience was much more than that. During this seminar I learned nifty phrases like: 'You scurvy, no-good mongrel of a hand' and 'Why you worthless cur, I'd cuff you one if you were an animate object.' You can't get actionable insights like this anywhere else on the Internet, or in Hastings-on-Hudson" --Johnny X.