ver the Xmas holiday of 2004 I was out of town, visiting my parents in San Diego and then vacationing for 4 days in Las Vegas with Malaya and a few other friends. I would have written something about the trip upon my return, but since I had Malaya's laptop with me on the vacation, I killed a lot of time banging out diary-style blog entries during the vacation. There were a lot of them, far more than I'd planned on, and when I got home it took three days of the blog to post them all, and then another day or two of responding to reader mails and comments to finally put the entire adventure to bed.

As you might have guessed, all of those blog entries, and the follow up comments, are archived on this page, in descending order. Scroll down to read it all, start with the San Diego leg, skip down to the Vegas leg, or skip it all and go right to the reader comments and my comments on them.

Also, there are numerous photos associated with the blog entries, but since I don't have them all sorted yet just go with the text now, while throwing in a few of the photos here and there. When the full array of pictures are ready I'll post them with added captions and such as I always do.

San Diego, December 23-27

6am, December 23, 2004

Well, here I sit typing away at my mom’s kitchen table, on Malaya’s laptop, at 6 in the morning. I should really still be in bed, given that I was up well past midnight and then didn't sleep well, but I slept so poorly that I've been awake since 5, rolling over and not feeling even a bit drowsy, and that bores me, so here I am, writing and waiting for the parents to wake up. I don't have any idea how much time I'll spend writing during this vacation, but I'm hoping that most of the time I do get to spend at work will be work on my novel. There's a problem, though. Somehow, I don't have the most recent version of the chapter I've been working on.

I don't know how it happened, but when Malaya transferred the six files I copied from my writing folder to her keychain 64meg zip drive, and she transferred them from there to her laptop, the actual version of my ongoing chapter 3 didn’t make it. My three .html pages with notes on the novel made it, and 1 .doc file with more notes and book blog comments (Which have not been posted on black champagne and may never be, but if they are it won't be until the fantasy novel is published in some future year.) made it, but the most recent copy of the nearly-completed chapter 3 did not, and neither did chapter 4.

The one saving grace is that I remember right where I was at the very end of chapter 3 since I was working on it just the day before yesterday, and I have my original outline notes for how the last bit of chapter 3 was going to transpire. So in theory I can easily pick up right where I left off, do the last section of three in a new Word file, and then go from there into 4, which I have my outline notes for as well. The main work yet to do on 3 is not stuff I was going to do on vacation anyway, since it requires a lot of rewriting and editing and moving text around, and I need more concentration and silence for that than I'm likely to get doing these blog entries in bursts of 30 or 45 minutes while killing time before dinner or heading out to a casino or whatever.

So I'll try and get some work done on the chapter, but I'm not expecting to get that much done on this relatively busy vacation. And yes, it’s much more fun writing about writing than actually writing, at least while I sit here in the cold dawning morning with cute kittens winding around my ankles.

1:10 pm, December 23, 2004

San Diego is nicer than most of the world/US, but it’s so flat and dry and plain that it's very boring, compared to the interesting little hilly roads and old, varied styles of houses I drive past every day in lovely but very expensive Lamorinda area. I really noticed the architectural and geographic differences yesterday, while mom was ferrying me home from the airport. My flight got in around noon, and from there we went to eat lunch, and then stopped at the beach for a bit, before driving back through much of the city to her home in the ever-growing Tierrasanta area.

Our lunch stop was in the theoretically-lovely Pacific Beach area. We ate at a place called 976; not the pay area code, but the restaurant. I’d never heard of it before, but as small as it was that's no real surprise, even though I lived in the San Diego area until a year and a half ago. The restaurant was basically in an old house, one they'd converted into a restaurant/coffee shop. It was pretty nice really, the house had a large porch area and lovely tree-shaded garden, and they’d put chairs and tables out there, while keeping the trees and landscaping in place. So the small tables were perched here and there on flagstones, shaded by large magnolia trees, and surrounded by bushes and creeping vines and such. San Diego has sun and temperatures above 65 almost every day of the year, so with water most any plants can grow year round.  The inside of the house had been more modified than the outside, since it was largely open and filled with tables, and I assume that back when it was a house it had like... walls.

Service was glacial in speed, but since all of the employees were sort of hippy nerd types who liked to talk more than they liked to work, that was basically to be expected. Lunch was pretty good though, once they finally brought it out. I had a portobello sandwich and enjoyed it, though it would have been nice to get some fries or chips or rice or something with it other than salad, given that my sandwich had about half a head of lettuce on it already.

From there mom drove a mile or so to the actual coast, parked in a tiny parking lot over the water, and we walked down the stairway and to the beach. The day was cold and windy, and the water was colder, so while neither of us had any intention of getting into the water, she did walk around barefoot and get her ankles wet. I was happy to keep my jeans, long sleeved shirt, and hiking boots on, and I was cold in that. The only ones in the water, other than lots of wetsuited surfers in the distance, were several little kids, who were playing in knee deep water and seemed oblivious to the elements.

The tide was out, and very low, like whale skeleton low, and it was strange to see how flat the beach was without water covering it. The kids looked to be about 5-9 in age, the three of them were knee deep, and had to be thirty yards from the water's edge, while the water was down at least fifty yards from the high tide marks on the sand. It was almost like one of those Florida Gulf Coast beaches where the sand goes on for 200 yards and they let you drive cars up and down the water's edge there's so much space.

 

1:40 pm, December 24, 2004

It’s depressing being back in the old neighborhood, but not for any of those sentimental reasons people usually express. I live in a nicer place now, up north with Malaya, and I'm a much happier person than I was in my teens and early twenties in San Diego.

The depressing thing is that I went to high school here, and still mostly considered it home once I moved out after high school and lived elsewhere in San Diego. Well, I definitely didn’t consider my apartments home, but I mostly thought of the dwellings in Tierrasanta as “mom’s house” and “dad’s house.” So I guess home was nowhere, at that point. I do think of my home now as the condo with Malaya, but neither of us can wait until we actually have a proper house we can start fixing up and really move into . She owns the condo now, but it still feels like a place we’re just staying until we can afford something we really want.

Anyway, the old hood is much the same; a few more stores and traffic lights, but it’s still as weather-free as always. Sunny and cool over Xmas, but that means it’s 65 in the day and 55 at night, rather than 80 in the day and 65 at night in the summer.

Boring weather aside, just walking around the neighborhood and the shopping center and such so reminds me of the high school years, when I was almost always bored and unhappy. There’s a Blockbuster where the hardware store used to be, and the supermarket is now an Albertsons rather than the Alpha Beta it was in the 80s, or the Lucky it became in the 90s, but it’s still the same architecture, and I still remember riding my skateboard around, or walking over to play Gauntlet in the supermarket. And since those are basically unhappy memories, it’s like, “why am I here again?” as I walk around. (I headed over to the shopping center to pick up some Xmas cards today, generating material for this blog entry.)

I don't dislike Tierrasanta or San Diego, and the memories aren't enough to make me not enjoy visiting my parents, but this place does remind me of unhappy times. And I can safely say I would never even give a thought to returning here for any reason other than to visit my parents.

Anyway, guests are arriving for tonight's Xmas Eve dinner, and I need to go be social and such. So more later, and I’ll be editing this before anyone sees it, since I’m in an armchair, typing with a natural keyboard on my knees and the laptop on a foot rest to my right, and much lower than my head. It’s giving me a neckache as well as two sore shoulders. but at least it’s a reminder of how wonderful a good, ergonomic chair with arm rests is.

7pm, December 25, 2004

Christmas Day Eve, or whatever you call this day. After all, Xmas eve is the 24th, but this is the evening of Xmas, and it’s the 25th? So um… Xmas Day Eve. Anyway, I’m at dad’s house and typing away on Malaya’s laptop on the kitchen table. Dad’s got a higher chair or a lower table, so I’m at less of an un-ergonomic angle here than I was at mom’s house two days ago when I was writing. It’s a good thing I don’t have a laptop that I take with me everywhere to enable me to do blog updates all the time, since I can see from this one and the last one and the one before that, half of each update would be about the height of the tables or the lack of armrests at Starbucks, or the library, or wherever. And that’s quite boring, as you can see.

Anyway, yesterday on Xmas Eve we had the big get together at mom’s house. Dad showed up, along with my step sister, a female friend of mom’s, and with mom, stepdad, and me, we had enough for a volleyball team. Appetizers were okay, but dinner was excellent. The entertainment was the best part really, since the two kittens were let out into the living room for the first time ever, and they were en fuego. Leaping everywhere, running everywhere, climbing, chasing, wrestling, and both Suzie (stepsister) and Lee (mom’s friend) brought bags of kitty toys that the kitties went nuts for. That entertainment almost didn't take place though, since that morning began with near kitten tragedy.

When I got up the morning of the 24th, the kitties were sleeping as usual and all looked fine. Fella was up in their bed on top of the piano, Bella was on a kitchen chair that’s got a blanket over it, and when I got up at 6am and went out into the kitchen to type, he purred furiously when I petted him, as did Bella. She stayed down though, sleeping with her eyes slitted, while he got up and started romping around a bit, eating and then playing with some of their various and scattered kitty toys.

I didn’t think anything of Bella’s motionlessness, at least not then. However when an hour passed, and then another and she still hadn’t moved, and Fella had climbed back up onto the piano (leap to the bench, then the key cover, then the top) and gone to sleep in their bed, I began to wonder why his sister was so motionless. I petted her and she lifted up her head and purred again, like always, and I carried her over to the piano and put her into bed beside her brother, where she settled down. For a while at least, since less than half and hour later, when Glenn had come down to make some coffee and mom was still upstairs preparing for the day, I noticed Bella trying to climb down from the piano and having a lot of trouble doing so on just three paws. She was holding her left front paw up, unable to put any weight on it, and when I put her on the floor beside her food dish and watched her walk, the diagnosis was confirmed. Glenn and I examined her, and concluded that her wrist was broken or strained, since it didn’t feel weird, but she squeaked in pain whenever we moved her paw at all side to side.

If it was my cat, and I was in my current financial situation, I would likely have taken a “wait and hope it gets better” attitude. One that Malaya would likely have concurred with. Mom and Glenn, on the other hand, were immediately on the phone with the local animal hospital, which was fortunately (or unfortunately, as things turn out) open the morning of Christmas Eve. They weren’t busy either, not at 8 in the morning, and we soon had an appointment for 8:30am, and with the kitty popped into a cardboard box with some towels for padding, we were off to the vet.

Really, there was no need for a box since both Bella and her brother are ridiculously cuddly and calm. I doubt she would have given us an instant of trouble driving over there, even if I'd simply cradled her in my arms the whole way. We used the box though, me going with mom just for something to do, and once we got there the vet on duty was able to see us quite promptly. She was good too, very caring and very thorough, per her recommendation we got x-rays of both of kitty’s front legs, so they could compare the one leg to the other. They just stuck both her paws out on the x-ray machine, so they were visible there side by side on the x-ray, so they could make a side-by-side comparison. Literally. Kitten’s bones grow so quickly that it’s very difficult to detect a slight break or crack with just one arm to look at, but when they can compare one leg to the other it’s much easier to tell.

While they were doing that, mom and I were off to the nearby coffee shop, which the vet gave us free coupons for. Nice of them, I thought, and figured they were coupons for small coffees. They were, or for equivalent value in something else, for people who don’t drink coffee. Like me. Not a bad deal though, since it was basically $1.50 off whatever else we wanted to buy, and as the coffee shop no-doubt planned on, I got a fruit smoothie and a cinnamon roll, while mom got a small coffee and a pumpkin muffin. So we ended up spending $7 there, instead of $10, but if we hadn’t had the free coffee coupon we wouldn’t have gone into the shop in the first place.

The x-rays were done when we returned, and there was good news. Nothing broken, but since the kitten was running a fever the doc thought maybe she’d been bitten or gored by her brother, and had a small cut and a minor infection. And since Bella had suffered from a kennel cough when they got her, and had needed antibiotics to beat that, they were worried that she might not be strong enough to fight off the infection on her own. So she got more antibiotics, and some other type of medicine that we were to dilute in water and then soak her paw in, plus the single x-ray they took cost $118, and in total it was $170, for a kitten they’d already spent over $300 on for purchase and shots and the examination for her kennel cough. It reminded me how lucky Malaya and me were with Jinx, since she’d had most of her shots and was already neutered, and she's never needed any vet care since then, other than a yearly check up and some ongoing vaccinations.

Bella took the orally-delivered medicine with good grace, and ate hungrily from wet food when she was given some back home, and that’s after she charmed everyone in the vet’s office to death. She is such a pretty girl, and she was so calm and friendly, purring non-stop, sniffing everyone, never afraid, etc. Quite the opposite of the young and terrified Jinx, sadly enough. By noon Bella was hobbling around pretty well, putting some weight on the paw, and by dinner she was running and playing, and by after dinner, when the new kitty presents were opened and she and her brother were battling to the death with the new bouncy toy on an elastic string, she looked fine; showing no signs of the injury at all. My conclusion is that she sprained or strained the wrist somehow; fell on it while playing, fell off the piano, or something, and the fever she had at the vets was from a reaction to that. I don’t see antibiotics doing that much in just 8 hours, personally. Which means that the $170 might have been a complete waste of money, but then again, I’m not a vet and maybe she really was bitten and had an infection growing, and if not for the medicine she would have still been walking that night, but would have needed intensive care in just a few days when the infection spread and/or killed her.

The thing that I found most interesting was talking to Suzie and Lee after dinner. They both own cats, and both have or had old cats, and they were talking about the money the animals cost then in old age. Suzie said she’d spent over $3000 on a 16 y/o cat in around a year, and that was almost entirely for diagnostic stuff, not treatment. Vet examinations and chest x-rays and other things I have not yet had the pleasure to experience in my adult cat-owning phase. So I asked Suzie, as they were trading stories about expenses incurred to keep their very elderly cats alive another year or three, “What was your limit?”

She replied instantly and confidently, “There was no limit. She was my baby.”

Now before you conclude that my stepsister is some silly romantic or a kept woman who doesn’t earn her own paychecks and therefore has no concept of money, let me point out that she’s neither. She’s very practical and realistic and cynical about a lot of things, and she’s single and has lived on her own and worked for everything she owns. And she’s not rich, and would not drop $3000 lightly. Which amazed me, since I like Dusty and Jinx a lot, but if either of them had something come up that was going to cost more than about $500, I’d have to give very serious consideration to just having them put to sleep for financial reasons.

Dusty’s 5.5 and Jinx is 1.5, and they've got a decade or more of live ahead of them, but I’m very poor and there are thousands of other cats who deserve a nice home and are unhappily languishing in various animal shelters around the Bay Area. And honestly, if new cats didn’t have a $150 or more price tag on them, for acquisition and shots and such, my cut off limit on health care for Dusty and/or Jinx would probably be lower than $500. I just figure a new kitten could easily go $300+ with one early sickness and vet visit, and I’d hate to part with a cat I own and like for a new tabula rasa one that might cost almost as much as the previous one did, before I knew if the new one was worth spending anything to keep alive.

Of course Malaya’s opinion would need to be factored in, especially in regards to Dusty, and we may someday have much more money than we do now, etc. As for Malaya though, when I mentioned the conversation and situation in our phone call that night, she was in complete agreement with me. She was like, “$3000? Fuck that! I love you Dusty, but there are a lot of other cats out there.”

Neither of our cats can read, and I’m not real sure about their Internet skills either, so I doubt they’ll see this blog entry. I’ll tell them when I get home though, and I’ll be like, “Y’all better stay healthy, kids.”

As for dinner and the presents and such on Xmas eve, all was good. Dessert was interesting, if only partially successful. Mom had a pumpkin pie from Trader Joes, and Suzie had brought some home baked brownies and a new one on me, Candy Cane ice cream. Peppermint flavored, sorta, with chunks of real candy cane frozen into it. I wouldn’t have thought the ice cream would have been very good, and I really wouldn’t have thought it would go with the brownies, but I would have been wrong. Suzie insisted we try them together, and when I did I had to admit, it was great together. Of course it’s hard to go wrong with brownies and ice cream, but the flavors she selected seemed to go together very well.

Dinner was more traditional, at least partially. Mom had baked a big turkey, there was stuffing cooked both in and out of the bird, cranberry sauce, a wild rice dish Lee had brought down, gravy, mini-croissant rolls, and for the non-traditional part… tofurkey. Tofu made to taste like turkey, since Lee is a vegan, and therefore doesn’t eat most everything the rest of us ate. She even had her own gravy, made without butter or cream or turkey bits. She seemed happy enough, but if you’re limiting your diet that severely and avoiding almost all of the tasty and fattening stuff like dairy and meat, you’re pretty much used to deprivation.

It was also due to her vegan predilections that the appetizers weren’t that great, since we made a big thing of spinach dip, using non-dairy substitutes for mayo and sour cream, and it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very good. Lee loved it though, and ate at least half of the total consumed by the six people, since as I said earlier, if all you eat is non-dairy substitute stuff and veggies and nothing processed, just about anything that’s even faintly tasty to non-vegans is going to taste colossal to you. Trust me on this; I remember the exquisite pleasure I received from merely sipping some vegetable broth and eating a couple of rye crackers when I came out of the Master Cleanse last summer. And then, when I moved up to very-diluted OJ and some rice cakes… heaven. After surviving on nothing but lemon juice with maple syrup for a week, anything tasted great.

Gifts were exchanged on Xmas Eve as well, though dad didn’t bring my stuff over and I didn’t give him the stuff Malaya and I picked out for him until Xmas day. I didn’t get or give much; gift cert and a 100 year old book collection of fairy tales from Suzie, carved rock quartz light from mom, and a few other small things, but the opening of presents is always fun, even if the contents aren’t overwhelming. Plus all during the present opening the kitties were just playing non-stop, and at one point they had four cameras flashing away as Lee, Glenn, me, and Suzie took shots of their leaping and tussling antics. I haven’t seen the pictures yet since I’m not going to offload them until I’m back home with Malaya in a week, but since I’m not going to post this until then, and I’ll include some with this update when I do… there was really no reason for me to even mention the time delay.

Xmas day I actually slept in a bit, putting the new sleep mask I bought before leaving NoCal to good use. It worked nicely too; enabling me to doze another couple of hours even in the very bright, east-facing guest room at mom's house. I was still up by 8, a time I’m often not even in bed by at home, but hey, after last year’s Xmas vacation, when I got about 16 hours of sleep total over 4 nights, 5 hours of sleep plus 3 hours of dozing felt pretty damn good.

We got up early since mom wanted to take me to the zoo. The World Famous San Diego Zoo, as they bill themselves. She and Glenn have an annual pass, but of course they couldn't find the two guest passes they got when they signed up last year, so it still cost $21 to get me in the door.  I'd talk more about the zoo, but I'm all typed out for now, and since I took about 200 photos there, I'll probably save my talk until I've got photos to accompany it, back home in NoCal in early January.

 

11:30am Sunday, December 26, 2004

The day after Xmas, and it’s times like this that I’m very glad I don’t need anything sold at stores all that badly. Yes, there are sales and discounts and other happy shit, but since those require leaving the house and braving the traffic and the mobs, I’d rather not. Especially not after driving (well, being driven) to the zoo yesterday when there were about 10 other moving vehicles in all of San Diego. I could sort of use some new sneakers, since my running shoes are a year old and somewhat worn down, and the black Nikes I usually wear for Kali class are three years old and were worn for hundreds of hard miles over concrete at my old vending job at the stadium. But neither of them exactly have holes in the soles, and they still give me adequate foot support, so I’m pretty happy with them both.

I am angling for new shoes for Xmas though. Malaya and I have settled into a pattern of exchanging one gift for Xmas and birthdays; a gift of about $100 in value. I still owe her the leather pants she wanted for last year’s birthday, since she doesn't want them yet. She's steadily dropping pounds from diet and exercise, thus she says there's no point in me buying her some expensive, non-stretching pants when she’d shrink right out of them in a month or three. There might be some point in buying a pair that were way too tight, just since they’d be sexy now and sexier when she could more comfortably fit into them, but she keeps saying she wants to wait, and since it’s her present, it’s not my choice to make.

This Xmas I got her a lovely brown leather briefcase type bag at TJ Maxx. Malaya loves it and she’s got a bag fetish (to match her shoe fetish, but that’s why they call it “coordinating” I suppose) so she was quite happy with it. I want hiking boots for my Xmas gift, but since I want real quality ones; not poseur boots like Timberlands or cheap junk like Nevados, they’re going to be expensive. So, we're waiting for after Xmas sales, ideally at the one outdoor gear store in Concord that’s going out of business and putting everything on 50% off sale after New Years. Of course it remains to be seen if any of their super heavy duty $180 and $250 and $340 (really) hiking boots will remain, in my size, when the real discounts begin. If not I’ll probably have to settle for some decent Nikes or some other common brand. The ones I wear now are Nikes that my mom got me maybe 8 or 10 years ago, and they fit great and I love them, but the leather is cracked and scuffed all over and parts of the side plastic by the sole are peeling off, etc. It gives them character, and such are the perils of buying only shoes you actually need when your old pairs are actually worn out, but it probably wouldn't hurt for me to get another pair of shoes now, before my current ones are completely disintegrated, for once.

Honestly, the type of shoes I most need are some dress ones, since my only pair of those are cheapies I got for $20 at Payless Shoes a year and a half ago, and while I hardly ever wear them they’ve been scuffed and scraped several times, and don’t look very good. And since the whole point in those shoes is to wear them to formal things when I need to look good… yers. I just don’t want to spend $25 on shoes I hardly ever wear, and I don’t want to waste a gift on something I don’t really want to own in the first place.

2pm, December 26, 2004

Just finished watching the Chargers lose a heartbreaker to Indy, on the road. Even though they lost, I don’t think they can take it as a total defeat. They were underdogs by 7 or 8, on the road against the best offense in the league and the best passing offense maybe ever, and SD had a 31-16 lead in the fourth quarter, and had really kept Manning down all day. Whatever they were doing that was working so well faded in the last 10 minutes and then in Overtime though, or else Indy figured out their defense and adapted to it, since Indy looked able to score every possession from the 4th quarter on. It wasn’t effortless for them though, since SD kept getting pressure, and kept stopping the run, so it was always 1st and 10, then 2nd and 9, then 3rd and 12, and then Manning would hit someone over the middle for a 15 yard gain and keep the drive alive. Indy even converted a 4th and 5 on their own 30 with about 2:30 to play, and a failure there would have doomed them. Frustrating to watch when I was rooting for the defense.

SD had their chances to put it away too; they had a 3rd and short on about the Indy 30 in the middle of the 4th quarter, with an 8 point lead. All they needed was a field goal to go up by 11 and make Indy score twice, but the Colts switched their pass rush speed guy Feeley from the left to the right, he blew past an unprepared offensive lineman and got a big sack to push SD out of field goal range and force a punt from the 35, which of course sailed gaily into the endzone and led instantly to Indy’s 80 yard scoring drive.

Fortunately, the outcome of the game was probably irrelevant to the playoffs. SD has already clenched a playoff spot and had virtually no hope of moving up from the 3rd or 4th spot to the 1st or 2nd, where they’d get a first round bye, so the game was largely meaningless in terms of the standings. It would have meant a lot to SD to win such a tough game on the road, but knowing they played the Colts even and lost it only at the very end, likely when they lost the coin toss to see who got the ball first in OT, is a moral victory. It certainly beat showing up and playing like shit and being down 28-3 at the half while all of Indy danced at the ease of their victory and the records they were setting.

As for the playoff ramifications, it will only matter much if both SD and Indy win their first two playoff games and wind up playing again in the AFC Championship game, since Indy would now be the higher seed and would get home field advantage. In the shorter term, being 4th might actually be an advantage, since the top seed looks likely to be Pittsburgh and they have a great defense but a very average offense, while New England is 2nd seed and they are a much better all around team. I’d give SD much better odds against Pitt than NE, and assuming SD wins their first round game and the seedings go as expected and there isn’t some weird NFL playoff match up rule that swaps the usual 1st vs. 4th and 2nd vs 3rd scheduling, SD will play Pittsburgh in the 2nd round, assuming SD wins their likely first round game against a fading Jets team.

Anyway, enough football for now, since I’m not reading any sports in the paper and I haven’t been online at all for 3 days and won’t likely be for another week, when anything I might say now would long since have been debated to death and/or completely discredited.

2:30pm, December 26, 2004

One other strange thing about the Chargers’ game. At the end of regulation, when Indy had just scored to tie it at 31, San Diego got the ball back with a minute to go and were driving to try and win at the last second. They only had one time out though, which basically caused them to lose, since they ran about 20 seconds off after one quick completion to mid field, when their WR got crunched and was slow to get up and SD had to run up and spike the ball. Another time out they could have had 40 or 45 seconds, and instead they were down to 25 or so. Anyway, they then got a bit further and had a 3rd and 10 with about 15 seconds left and one time out, and they needed about 15 yards to get into possible field goal range. They didn’t make it; Brees got pressure and threw it up over the middle and had it picked off.

My point though, about the strange thing, involved San Diego's kicker. All during San Diego’s last desperate drive, the TV coverage kept showing the SD kicker, as they always do during those sorts of situations. And the kicker is always spending his time kicking the ball into the net on the side, warming up his leg or burning nervous energy or whatever. Always; I’ve never seen a kicker who wasn’t doing that, usually to the point that he gets one last kick into the net and then races onto the field just in time for the other team to call time out so he can then stand around for 3 minutes of commercials.

What made this game different was that the SD kicker, who is a talented rookie, was just walking along the sidelines. Pacing nervously, but not once in the 5 or more minutes they showed him did he kick a ball into a net, or even go near the net. It was damn near unnatural, and makes me wonder if he was too nervous to kick, or not nervous at all, or what. If he’d gotten a chance to kick the winning FG and made it, would that have begun a new trend of kickers not warming up in their traditional, foot-intensive manner? I guess we’ll never know, at least not until the Chargers get a chance to make a last minute drive and win a playoff game and everyone sees Kaeding, their kicker… not warming up properly. If he does it his way and hits a game-winning kick... would all the upcoming high school and college kickers out there affect a change in their play style, or at least their warm up style?

December 26, 2004

If you’ve ever wondered if those expiration dates on the bottom of cans of soda are real, I can now confirm that yes, soda does not age well. Dad’s fridge contained a can of Pepsi and a can of Dr. Pepper that I’d left here at least a year and a half ago, and when I cracked open the Pepsi last night to accompany some pasta… it was barely drinkable. It still had fizz, but it was chalky-tasting, and oddly-bitter. Not very good straight from the can, but once I poured it over some ice it wasn’t too bad.

I wish I knew exactly how old the sodas were, but the expiration dates on the bottom of the cans were basically rusted off; the ink had faded and smeared from condensation, or something. I know I didn’t buy them a year ago when I was here over Xmas, so they must have been left behind back when I lived in San Diego. I moved up north to live with Malaya in July 2003, so the sodas were at least 18 months old, but since I doubt I bought them within 2 or 3 months of when I left, we’ll say that they were more than a year an a half old, but probably less than two years.

And thus does science march on.

Las Vegas, December 27-31

Cast of Characters

I'm not using anyone's real name because... well I don't really know why. I don't use Malaya's real name and even though there aren't any pictures of anyone mentioned here, I don't want to drag them into my blog entries without their permission, and asking their permission would be way too much trouble.  It's not like you need to know anyone's real name to follow along anyway; 98% of what you'll read here is stuff I thought about Vegas anyway, with virtually nothing about my fellow vacationers.

December 27, 2004

So, we arrived in Vegas more or less as planned. Malaya’s flight from Oakland was set to arrive 5 minutes before mine from San Diego, but when mine was delayed 10 minutes I figured she’d be there a while before me. Airlines being airlines though, even on Southwest, I got to Vegas and checked the big board and saw that her flight from Oakland was… 15 minutes late.

I would have waited at the gate for her, but the Vegas airport is giant and weird. First of all, you have to take a train from the terminal we landed at to the baggage claim. And yes, there are slot machines all over the damn place, including a huge bank of them, all types, at least 50 in number, in the middle of the train waiting area, flanked by various fast food outlets.

I managed to resist, and got on the train, which ran about 30 seconds to the other terminal building, where I followed the signs around a couple of corners to the baggage claim area. It’s huge, of course, with 8 large round and round things, all of them with multiple flights spewing their baggage forth and digital displays of the airline and flight number. I couldn’t see any of them for Southwest though, and eventually wandered over to the American Airlines area and asked a guy in the oversized baggage area. He pointed me down the whole room, past all of the visible baggage carousels, and when I began following his directions, I immediately encountered… Malaya, standing in the middle of the carousels, with her cell phone in hand, dialing my number. That was easy, she thought.

She was also wondering where the Southwest baggage was, so we walked over together, down the long room and through a long hallway to another huge baggage carousel room, with 8 more of them spaced out over half a football field of space. What made it Vegas though were the huge stadium-like TV screens, and the blaring commercials playing on them, every one for some B-league casino, while every wall around the baggage area, which was like the food court in a huge mall with a balcony level all the way around it, was covered in huge casino ads for the good shows. Seinfeld at Caesar’s, Penn and Teller, Elton John, Camelot Tournament of Kings at the Excalibur, etc. There are lots more slot machines in that area too, down the whole center of the room, between the baggage carousels. It’s sort of depressing to me that some people are so eager to start pissing their quarters down a bottomless pit that they can’t even get out of the airport before they begin, but I guess that’s the sort of dedication that Vegas was built on.

The truly absurd thing was noted by Malaya. She told me that there were special smoker gambling rooms there, since there’s no smoking allowed in the actual airport itself. So every so often, at random intervals along the concourse, there was a little side room with a wide-open door, filled with slot machines and people working on their lung cancer. It’s a natural connection after all; people who are willing to kill themselves one cig at a time are certainly willing to go broke a quarter at a time. And of course the smoking room gambling had their doors open widely enough that everyone else stood a fair chance of enjoying some lung cancer as well.

December 27, 2004

Late night, 1:30am, I'm in Vegas, and despite the fact that I got up this morning at 6:30am after about 4 hours of sleep in order to make my 9:30am flight, I’m still wide awake. I suppose that’s what a night spent prowling the Vegas Strip will do to you. I actually sort of enjoyed myself, surprisingly enough. It occurs to me that Vegas is actually a very fun town, assuming you’re not in any hurry and you’ve got unlimited funds, or at least a lot of funds and don’t much give a shit what momentary diversion you piss them away on. I don’t have the funds and I’m very picky about what I spend them on, but I managed to suspend my usual disbelief long enough today to have some fun, or at least long enough not to ruin the vacation for everyone else, which was my real goal.

We arrived in Vegas as detailed previously, got a ride back to the home of M’s parents, and after a couple of hours of lying around and unpacking in the alcove atop the stairs that we’re using for a bedroom while there are still three other sets of guests in the upstairs guest bedrooms, lunch was served. Several other families of relatives came over, and there were Filipino families galore there, which means lots of food. For lunch we had our choice of huge pans/pots of lasagna, two vegetable dishes, rice, sweet rice, grilled steak, grilled chicken, bread, fried noodles, and several other things. Basically an at-home buffet, provided by the various parents and guests. Quite tasty. The second half of LotR:FotR SEE provided our in-meal entertainment, and by the time we’d eaten and relaxed and bit afterwards, we were ready to head out for our first adventure; indoor skydiving.

Indoor Skydiving

I’d heard of it as a popular pastime in Europe in the past, but since damn near everything is a popular pastime in one part of Europe or another, that doesn't tell you a whole lot. And since the sport is still pretty much unknown in the US, you may have no idea what I'm talking about. Here's the website for Flyaway, where we went. Check it out for more info and photos. 

The skydivery is basically a silo-like structure with padding on the walls and a huge plane engine below the floor, with a tough netting of metal wire above it so you don’t, you know, fall down and get chopped into several million pieces. It’s typical Vegas though; short, expensive, and unusual. $50 for about 3 minutes of fly time, but since you get your jumpsuit, goggles, gloves, and helmet rental as part of it, and get a safety movie, and it’s actually quite difficult to do, the time didn’t seem so painfully short. I’d still rather have gone and leapt out of a plane, but since there is not an insubstantial risk involved in real sky diving (mostly in terms of the plane crashing on take off; a much bigger danger than your chutes failing), and it takes a lot longer and costs a lot more, I was pretty okay starting out floating over a huge fan. Plus it was cold and rainy outside while we were in Vegas, and quite the opposite inside the sky diving place, as we found out.

The way the process works is that the room is about 15 feet across, with a padded ring all the way around the outside that’s about 3 feet wide. You all stand on that while the instructor stands in the center and shows how much air resistance matters, by being able to keep easily on his feet while the rest of us in our baggy jumpsuits are fluttering above his head. It's far from easy to get airborne though, since it's all about wind resistance and body form.

You start off lying flat on your face, with your hands over your head and your legs out straight, and as they turn up the fan you let yourself bow backwards a bit, while trying to relax. It's not hard to get some lift, but it's very tricky to keep your lift and to stay level. All of us drifted immediately off to one side or another, or started to turn over, which is why there's an instructor/handler in there. He basically grabs you by the jumpsuit and keeps you in place and upright, while giving you tips on body form to get better air. Hand signal and pantomime tips, since the engine roars incredibly, not that you could hear much over the 120+ MPH wind anyway.

Flying up and steering around looks very easy, but as we found out, it's tough. Malaya was the best of our group, and on her first try (we all got three sessions of about a minute each, alternating through a group of five) she was steady and aerodynamic enough that the instructor tossed her up overhead like a chef throwing pizza dough. She sailed up 10 or 15 feet, spinning slowly around, and when she came back down the guy would grab her by the handles on the shoulder and hip of the jumpsuit and toss her up again, before finally steering her off to the side.

She has no idea what her trick was, but she was by far the best of anyone we saw or had in our group, and the instructor was dropping bows and waves and such to her after her first time.  I, on the other hand, felt like a brick in a nylon suit, and struggled mightily to get off the ground even a little bit. I tried to keep my hands out, I tried to relax more, I tried to keep my legs bent or straight or arch them more back at the hips... and I got up a little bit, but only by them cranking the fan up higher, and by the handler hauling me up, at which point I would promptly nosedive or veer off to one side or the other. I got to fly some, and I really couldn’t tell where the guy was holding me or what direction I was facing anyway, but I could tell that I wasn’t floating as effortlessly as I desired.

The biggest downside of the process was the heat. I guess it’s unavoidable from the friction of a huge plane engine turning fast enough to blow air at up to 220MPH, but hanging over the fan was basically like standing on top of a huge hair dryer. Our instructor went in with the first group of five, ran them for their 10 or 15 minutes, then came out and put on a sweatshirt since he was so hot that his arm hairs were crisping. My main after effect was a neck ache, a sore back, and sinus pain from the hot air being forced up my nose at such great velocity, but those discomforts weren’t enough to make me regret the experience.

I still want to go real skydiving someday though, since I love heights and love the sensation of falling and love elevated, panoramic views. There were not any heights or views at the indoor skydiving place, and there wasn’t really the sensation of falling either; since you never did, other than just a few feet when the instructor pushed you off to the side of the fan when your time was up. I do wonder how that feeling would compare to real skydiving though; is that what it feels like once you’ve reached terminal velocity, and there’s no more feeling of acceleration? I’ve never fallen that far, just down on rollercoasters and water slides and high dives and such, and in those cases I was always far from equalizing my downward speed with gravity. I expected that there would be more of a rush of falling feeling indoor skydiving, and was surprised to find none of that. There was a rush, but it was mostly the feeling of trying to relax and keep a good form to let the air lift me. I spent most of the time with a big smile on my face, but it wasn’t the same feeling I’d expected going in.

December 28, 2004, evening

It’s not exactly the biggest surprise of the trip, but we’re receiving ample evidence of the fact that it actually does get pretty damn cold in Vegas in the winter. It even rains, as the several inches that fell all day on the 28th proved. It was in the high 40s all day, cold enough to breath smoke even in the very high humidity, and raining lightly or heavily all day. Nothing dramatic, no flashfloods, but steady rain on and off, and cold.

In fact, it’s been cold the whole time we’ve been here, though the sun was out a bit the afternoon of the 27th. It could be a lot colder than this though; the desert is often freezing in the winter. It’s just not what people who don’t live here think of, when they think of the 120 degree oven that the Vegas basin is all spring, summer, and fall.

Look, actual water from the sky, in Vegas!

December 28, 2004, late night

Dinner in Vegas was my first real show and dinner here, even if it was a relatively low-budget one. WE went to the Tournament of Kings at Excalibur, and it was ridiculously cheesy, but still pretty fun. It wasn’t worth anywhere near $53 a ticket in the real world, but in the “money is just a theory” hyper spending atmosphere of Vegas, it practically seemed like a bargain. For your $53 you get a dinner of vaguely-medieval food, that you must eat with your hands; no utensils are provided. The food started off with a splash (literally, it was maybe 1/2 an inch deep) of tomato cream soup in a bowl with a handle. After that we got our plastic mugs filled with flat Coke, and they brought out the entrees, which were whole Cornish game hens with a hand-sized hunk of steamed broccoli, a few seasoned potato wedges, and a roll which was best when dipped in the soup. We got small muffin-sized apple fritters for dessert. There were supposed to be constant drink refills, but I was thisrty and drank my mug dry twice and waited at least 10 minutes for a refill each time; reasons that made me perfectly content not tipping them a penny.

The ticket isn’t really for the food though, it’s for the show.

The whole thing takes place in an arena about the size of a narrow hockey rink, with 6 or 8 rows of tables all the way around it, save for one side with a large castle model from which the entertainers emerge. All the seating is at long tables, more like counters than tables, with the seats all on one side of them, so everyone is facing down at the arena. Our group of 10 had pretty good seats, on the 2nd row right in the center, so we were close enough to see everything and to feel the heat from the constant pyrotechnics.

I won’t go over the whole plot, which was WWF-esque, but with guys dressed in fake armor and swinging fake weapons while riding real horses. There’s a King Arthur figure, and he has 7 Kings at his Round Table and they’re in a tournament since that’s the sort of thing knights did back in those days. It’s got zero historical accuracy, of course, but if you’re hung up on that sort of thing you might as well not even bother to attend. The “kings” are like the King of Ireland, the Czar of Russia, the King of Norway, the King of Austria, and so on. Seven of them, and the seating areas are divided up into eight sections, one for each of the kings with the 8th, our section, labeled “Dragon.”

Since we had plenty of time to sit and chat while the seats filled up and we took in the atmosphere, the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings jokes were flying. Our group had a few good chants of “Huff-le-puff!” and “Gan-dalf Gan-dalf!” going, much to the annoyance of others. At least that was our goal, as well as amusing ourselves. It’s a good thing none of us was drinking anything stronger than watered-down Coke, or we’d have been really disruptive. There were drinks of every sort available, of course. It would hardly be Vegas without them.

As for the events, they weren’t bad. The guys could ride pretty well, and with Merlin and a jester doing their crowd amusement routines and then King Arthurr talking a lot, and some other MC guy in red livery talking as well, there was never a moment of silence or inaction. It’s well-produced, at least, with no dead spots or quiet moments. Not that that’s exactly high praise, given the ringing we all had in our ears when things came to an end.

Anyway, the seven kings were out and prancing around, while our section grew restless. Where was the Dragon Knight? Finally, about 15 minutes into things, Mordred appeared, dressed in black face paint like a cheesy wrestler, and loaded up with flame thrower devices that enabled him to shoot some relatively impressive bursts of fire from his hands. The Arthurian legend was played fast and loose, since there was no Guinevere, no Lancelot, no Gawain, and no mention of Mordred being Arthur’s son. Instead we had "Prince Chris." No, really. He was a wimpy looking little dude who appeared to have gotten his costume from his big brother, who had originally worn it to a Beastmaster fan festival. We were still supposed to root for Chris though, since much to our surprise, it soon became obvious that he was actually the hero of the show. No one much cared for him though, and his applause was at best lukewarm. The real applause winner was the dragon knight, since our section was by far the loudest, with by far the least reason to cheer, since we hardly saw our guy until the protracted finale, where all of the knights died at least three times each, other evil knights came out in ridiculously large dragon headdresses, Mordred blew a lot of flames from his arm flamethrower costume, and so on.

Arthur died, his son avenged him, Mordred was banished for another day, and the show ended with Prince Chris' coronation. Not marriage though, since there was no romance to be seen. In fact, the only women in the show were 8 dancing girls who did a lot more walking and standing than dancing, though they made several costume changes, including one with white tops where they all looked to have padded bras that added at least 6” to their busts. It was silly, really.

There was also an annoying jester, dancing girls, tumblers, muscular himbos in leather man-panties, and more. Not a bad show, on the whole, and it lasted over an hour, so it didn’t feel like a rip off. Not too much of a rip off, at least. If I hadn't had to wait and wait for my soda refills, I'd have been a happier Flux, on the whole.

Games and Prizes

After the show we stayed in the Excalibur for a while, playing the prize games. Downstairs in the Excalibur is basically a poor man’s Circus Circus, with every sort of carnival game. They’re easier than they are at carnivals though, with the throwing spot closer to the milk bottles you need to knock down, or the softballs you need to get three in a row to win a stuffed animal, or whatever. It's simple; they don't care if you win with virtually every throw; since you’re paying a dollar or two to play a deceptively difficult game that will reward you with a $.50 stuffed animal at best. The only one I really like is the ball rolling horse/camel/car/whatever race, where there are up to 18 players at once, all of them spending a dollar for the privilege, and all rolling a small red rubber ball up a slight incline, towards an arrowhead shaped cluster of holes. The closest ones are worth 1 point, the middle V is worth 2 points, and the last two in the middle are three points. The goal is to roll as quickly as you can and hit as many 2s and 3s as possible, since the first one to get their horse to the end of the track wins that round and a prize based on how many people are playing the game at once.

I used to love that game at Circus Circus when I used to go to Vegas back in the late 80s when I was in high school, since it’s skill-based, and I enjoy competing with the other people. The fun is that you can trade up your prizes to good stuff, and after about 3 games of it at the Excalibur I won in a 16 person game (there are better prizes when more people play) and got us a big cardboard box of Excalibur plates. Not one of the prizes they had on display, oddly enough. It looked like an 18 piece set, with six each of large plates, small plates, and bowls. Malaya was happy to have it since I'd won it, but fortunately, after ten minutes carrying that around and playing other games, she agreed that we could do better trading it in for a bigger prize, and I started playing again, at the same time as our friends and hosts M and R.

R showed some skill, rolling a win after a few games and scoring an ugly marionette-type clown in a box, which wasn't a prize they had on display either. He didn't even consider settling for that though, and kept right on playing. I kept playing too, and after having a lead and losing with two straight gutter balls to close, I won in a nearly-full game and that was enough to trade in our box of plates for the biggest prizes they had; large stuffed teddy bear-style cats. Malaya wanted the snow leopard one, and when I handed it to her she was so cute; giggling and smiling and jumping up and down and giving me hugs and such. While we were still celebrating another game went on, with M and R still playing. I felt bad at that point, since I would have kept playing and tried to win another one that they could have traded their clown in for to get the big kitty, but happily for all involved, R won the second game after my win, with enough players to qualify him for the big kitty, with his trade in of the ugly clown.

M had won a cute high-pointed witch’s hat in the meantime, which she plopped on the head of her tiger, amusing us all, and we made a cute group as we wandered around the hotel and the strip with our two tigers and the ugly miniature reindeer in an Xmas stocking I’d won at the softball tic-tac-toe game. I wouldn’t have won it at all, but that they had Shrek dolls for prizes, and it looked like you could get a Shrek for 1 win, and a small dragon for 2. I wanted the dragon, but when I won on my 3rd try (at a dollar a pop) the counter girl informed me that they had no Shreks left, but just the Xmas leftover thing which was so ugly they didn’t even have it on display since then no one would have played. Not only that, but I needed to win four times to trade up for the dragon. I’d won on my 3rd try, and figured I could win every other time from then on, now that I had the hang of the game, but I didn’t want a dragon enough to spend another $6 or more trying for it.

My prize was so ugly that I would have just given it back, if not for Malaya saying we had to keep it. I tried again a bit later, when I wanted to leave it in the gift shop with the other stuffed animals, just to cause confusion when/if someone actually tried to buy it. Malaya nixed that one as well, but then not five minutes later, as we were walking through the lobby of the Luxor next door and some Germany woman asked us where we got the stuffed animals and was told the games next door at Excalibur, Malaya says to me as we’re walking away, “Why didn’t you give her the stuffed reindeer?” As if she hadn’t just stopped me from giving/throwing it away three other times!

The prize games are pretty easy there, by design, since the casino wants you to be happy. All of the money they take in from those games and the arcade games is certainly part of their bottom line, but they mostly have the games to give some adults a break and to amuse the children of adults. They want you in the casino as long as possible, and if you need a break losing some money on carnival games before you return to losing serious money with actual gambling, that’s fine with them.

The Strip and Whores

After having our fun at the Excalibur, we went out to walk the Strip a bit. In the old days you could do that in half an hour, but with the massive building boom in Vegas for the past decade, you're now lucky to drive the Strip in half an hour. Especially with the constant gridlock traffic, despite the fact that the road is huge; four lanes each way. I don't even know how they define what the Strip is now, since there are parts of it with lots of little stores (M&Ms store, Coca Cola and Pepsi stores, Adidas store, etc), but other parts are the gigantic casinos, which take up huge city blocks each; you end up walking past Egyptian architecture for three minutes as you pass the Luxor, or you're next to a waterfall jungle for half a mile beside Mandalay Bay. It was nearly midnight by the time we were out that night, and while lots of the stores were closed, the foot traffic was undiminished. There were literally thousands of people walking around, and yes, it was Monday night.

Vegas really is another world though; with drunks walking everywhere with huge drinks or bottles of champagne in hand, guys out in packs desperately looking to score, slutty women in pairs and threes who are so hammered they can hardly walk upright, and families out with two kids under the age of 5... at midnight. The funniest thing is that while they've gotten the actual whores off of the street corners in Vegas, virtually every corner now has a big stand of metal newspaper boxes, with at least a dozen small boxes full of glossy color whore mags. Literally, they are pamphlets with photos of whores and numbers to call them at, most of which say, “Actual photo of performer. She can be in your hotel room in just 20 minutes!"

Whores fascinate me. Not that I've ever talked to one, much less done anything sexual with one, but the whole concept of having sex with complete strangers, for money, is hard to wrap my mind around. What's it like for them? For their customers? Is it ever any good? What do they think about during? Do they ever get sore? Do they dread drunk guys on Viagra? Do they have tricks to coax an orgasm if a guy is taking too long? Do they bother to fake orgasms? Aren't they worried about being murdered or getting AIDS?

Malaya is fascinated by the whole concept as well, which is lucky for me since that means she doesn't get upset or think it suspect when I'm grabbing the whore pamphlets and then looking up their websites once I get back home.  www.vegasblondes.com, for instance, which redirects to www.vegasgirls.com. There you can browse to your heart's content as you view the hundreds of girls, all of them supposedly-available for immediate rental. The photos and ridiculously-fake bios on those sites are basically identical to what you see in the whore pamphlets, with the same censored nude softcore photos, so click around some if you're curious.

Here's a sample I selected just because the bio was so amusing:

• Full service.
• I love to entertain. Reasonable rates.
• $69 special treatment.
• I can make you very happy tonight.
• Wanna play with me? I'll meet you free. No obligation.
• The art of pleasure is not unknown to me. (It really says this, on an Asian girl, of course.)
• I am available to entertain gentlemen, parties, or couples.
• We can perform extra special shows just for you in the privacy of your hotel room.
• Make a beautiful naked woman in the privacy of your hotel room a realty in 20 minutes or less. Just call. (Yes, "realty." She sells houses and sucks cocks?)

I assume this is all some sort of legal requirement. No full nude or porn photos in the free boxes on the street, and no direct mentions to sex. Amusingly, there is an ad in one of the pamphlets for a free adult directory delivered to your hotel room in 30 minutes or less, and they promise that it's uncensored, and updated quarterly. Plus, "Directory lists swingers clubs, after hours places, strippers, escorts, etc, and includes bios, stats, pricing and availability." Now that is what I should have gotten, to satisfy my curiosity. Does it include price lists for oral, anal, different positions, etc? Or is that negotiated on site? Is it customary to tip, or are guys haggling for every penny's worth of their $59.95 quickie?

December 28, 2004, late night

A minor gripe, but the whole time we’ve been in Vegas we’ve been driving around in M’s car, with M or R driving, and the radio has always been on “K-Oasis,” a Vegas soft jazz station. It’s not horrible music; nothing I’d ever listen to on purpose, but at least it’s not R&B or Country or Oldies or anything truly ghastly. I’ve actually sort of enjoyed some of the instrumental songs they’ve played, though nothing yet has been preferable to silence.

What’s driven me crazy though, are the ads. Not that the ads are so horrible; they’re no worse than the usual insipid radio ads, and since the station isn’t a rock station the most awful screaming concert promotions and car stereo sales and other commercials populated by screaming idiots aren’t blaring forth. These soft jazz ads are much more low key, so we've learned all about clothing stores and home finance options and food values and so much more. The problem is that whoever is operating the car has yet to turn them down, or change the station when they come on, and for a person who loathes hearing advertisements as much as me, that’s pretty painful. 

Last night when we left The Excalibur we heard the last half of some boring song, then a few commercials, then a long “here are the rules and regulations for contest winners on K-Oasis," then another half dozen commercials. I was ready to claw my ears off, since I just hate radio commercials, especially when I’m in the back seat of a slowly-moving car, on a desert road at night with zero scenery, and I’m too amped up after a night full of cola and carnival games to doze off or zone out and ignore the insipid babble.

I noticed that my dad was watching commercials too, which was painful. TV commercials, but even if I’m not paying enough attention to the TV to change the channel when a commercial comes on (as was the case at dad’s house, since I was reading or typing blog entries at the same time), but I will almost always mute the commercials ASAP, since they make me very unhappy to listen to.

December 28, 2004, late

I often read interviews with authors or “about the author” info that tells me some authors write whole books at the park, or in coffee shops, or on their laptop at the playground while their child is running and screaming. Having now spent parts of the past 5 or 6 days typing away on Malaya’s laptop, I can honestly express my complete amazement at that ability. I’m not that slow at typing on this since I’ve got my good natural style keyboard to type on; the laptop keyboard would completely crippled my style and speed. But even though my fingers can keep going at an acceptable rate, my mind is never even slightly organized. Part of that is due to the constant noise and interruptions; tonight at M’s parents’ house there are about 4 families over for an extended dinner/social time, and there are upwards of 10 kids shouting and playing cards and fighting over the Xbox downstairs, while more than half a dozen adults sit around the living room and kitchen talking loudly. Of course they have to talk loudly to be heard over the noisy children, but my point is that there’s a lot of noise down there, Malaya and M are chatting away in the hallway a dozen feet to my left, and I’m sitting on our air mattress, on the upstairs landing, typing this with at least 33% of my brain somewhere else. Oddly, it’s a good thing that 90% of the words I hear from downstairs aren’t in English, since it’s easier for me to tune out Tagalog and other foreign languages than the only language I can understand.

The distractions weren’t as constant when I was writing at mom’s house or dad’s house in San Diego, and oddly enough I’m less distracted here with the constant babble of background sound than I was with just dad’s TV playing in the other room in SD. I'm still too distracted to write anything of any real quality, though. And I can't even imagine sustaining the concentration required to write or edit fiction, in this environment. Yet many authors do, as I've been told.

It's my own fault, it's just that I've grown used to typing in a nice silent room, or with low music of my own choice, and that's what I need to write well. Other authors don't have that much peace and quiet and they just learn to write with background distractions that would keep me from doing more than playing minesweeper.

It's actually lucky for me that I like writing in a peaceful atmosphere, since that's the sort of environment I like all the time, writing or not. It would pretty well suck if I could only write while in a noisy and expensive place, of the type that I wouldn't ordinarily tolerate for a minute. I can't even really complain about the setting here, since as you can see, I'm pretty comfortable sitting on an air mattress, with pillows and a wall behind me, and Malaya's new stuffed tiger holding up the laptop.

I'm not completely scatter-brained, I can write blog stuff and I doubt I'll do very much editing on these entries when I'm back home and prepping them to go online, but I can't shut out the distractions and sore shoulders from no arm support and unfamiliar iMac Word program well enough to think and write like I do at home.  The only bonus here is that since this isn't my machine, and it's not a PC, and it's not online, I've got zero distractions. At home I'd be dicking around online, or playing a quick game, or reading email, or whatever. Here I've got the option of talking and interacting with real people, or typing on this machine. Which means, of course, that there's no real option at all. I just wish I had the concentration to shut out the other things and spend half this time on the novel, instead of spending it writing far more blog stuff than anyone is ever going to read.

December 29, 2004, early morning

Free casino buffet last night, courtesy of an aunt of our host. Well, a sister of our hosts, since this house actually belongs to M’s parents, not to M herself, even though it’s through her invitation that we’re here. Anyway, her uncle/aunt (I think the aunt, though I have no idea if that's actually M's aunt, or aunt in law. Not that it matters.) gamble very regularly and for high stakes at the Green Valley Casino we visited last night, and as VIP players they get lots of bonus points that they can convert into perks. Such as free buffets for their friends. Our party of sixteen got in for free, and we even got to wait in the much shorter VIP line, rather than going through endless aisles of death with the commoners. I was afraid to look over that way while we were waiting, honestly. Imagine you're over there for an hour, almost in front, and then 16 goddamned people walk in at once and delay your dinner another five minutes?

While we were waiting in line (waiting for the 12-16th people in our party to arrive, not waiting to get in) I was musing that it would have been worth having the VIP access just to avoid the line, which was gargantuan at 6pm on December 29th. Seriously, what would it take to get VIP there? $5000 in advance credit or something? You walk to the customer service counter, you plunk down your platinum Visa, you become the newest VIP, you get a free meal you didn't have to wait 90 minutes in line for, and then you cancel your membership and get your credit advance back.

As for the buffet, it was pretty good. Nothing phenomenal, but they had food from most every food group, though there was a distinct lack of deep fried goodness. No breaded fish, no french fries, no fried shrimp, and with free Pepsi, I was jonesing for grease.

The best thing was a cook to order Szechuan grill, with one of those huge round cook tops you see in shopping malls sometimes. You just had to take a silver bowl, pick out the fruit/vegetable ingredients you wanted grilled, and then tell the chef what sort of meat and sauce you wanted, and he'd fry it up right there.  I picked out snow peas, shittake mushrooms, and pineapple, and had the guy do me some spicy shrimp, and it was very good on rice. The only problem was a silly one; too much shrimp. He used small ones, but I counted tails at the end and I had something like 60 shrimp on it, which would be about a pound frozen, I think. I didn't want that much of one thing, not at a buffet, and the weirdest part was that the shrimp still had their tails on. As I've learned since coming to live with Malaya, lots of Asian people simply crunch up that part, and lots of restaurants serve shrimp with the tails still on. Even small shrimp. But in a stir fry it was pretty annoying, since I didn't want to crunch up those tail parts, and I therefore had to fork every shrimp and bite off the tail, getting my fingers in the very spicy sauce. And with over 50 shrimp to bite, there was no point in licking or wiping my fingers off after every one; so I just ate it quickly with my left hand stained red until the end.

Then waited about 15 minutes while others went for seconds since I was so full I could hardly move.

They had a pretty good taco/nacho bar too, with refried beans and most of the toppings you'd want. I had a side dish of nachos supreme, went back for two tacos, and remembered how much I enjoy Mexican food with 6 or 8 ingredients on top of my refried beans. I'm definitely making some of that when I get home, though it'll likely have to wait a week for our fast or juice cleanse or whatever. More on that later.

The desserts were okay; lots of pie but none of it very good, which is par for the course at buffets in my experience. They did have an decent ice cream selection though, with actual tubs of it under glass with a guy to serve you cones or cups full, just like a discount Baskin Robbins store. All plain flavors; no Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake or anything like that, but I enjoyed a sugar cone of vanilla with miniature M&Ms, crushed peanuts, chocolate syrup, and whipped cream on it.

And I used that as part of my double dessert buffet rule: If you have a dessert at a buffet and then eat another plate of real food, the first dessert no longer counts, and you are allowed to have a second one.  Which is why I had my ice cream early, then had two tacos, and then some sugar cookies and half a slice of pie.

The main question at the buffet was, since this was free, how do we know when we've gotten our money's worth? Ordinarily Malaya and I starve ourselves all day pre-buffet, and then egg each other on to eat more by pointing out that we haven't gotten our $10 or $20 or whatever worth yet. If we're not that hungry this motivates us to at least go for the big ticket items, and eat up the sushi or crabs legs or cheesecake, just to feel like we got a better value.

We didn't need that sort of motivation at Green Valley, since we were starving at 6 when we got there, and by the time everyone straggled in and we started eating at 7:30, we were ravenous, but all the same, it was hard to know how we were doing on food destruction (Since after all, you don't necessarily have to eat it, you just have to taste it so they can't put it back on the buffet to feel as though you've gotten something for your $.) when we had no price tag to pace ourselves by.

December 29, 2004

We’ve been doing some gaming here, on their huge widescreen TV, playing Halo on an Xbox. It’s pretty fun, although I don’t see anything in the game to approach the complexity or mental involvement of even Diablo II, much less a real RPG. Basically it’s Tomb Raider without the puzzles, ability to climb, running speed, ability to leap acrobatically, etc. Replacing those features are an incredibly-unintuitive method of driving, but a much more fun combat style, with one joystick to move your little dude around, and another to control where you look and where you shoot.

I’d never played anything on a gamepad before (my home gaming experience ended many years before the technology progressed beyond joysticks and paddles) but I find the little joysticks pretty easy to use and well-designed to fit the human hands. I'm also a lot more accurate with it than with the usual keypad aiming system on computer shooters. It took me a couple of hours of Halo to get the hang of moving with it, ducking when I wanted, and keeping my target more or less aimed at the enemy while my avatar was running up and down hills and in the side to side strafe while dodging fighting style the game demands, but now that I’ve played it for maybe 4 hours total, I find it pretty fun.

The single player (which you can do cooperatively) aspect of Halo isn't very good; I don’t like the balance of exploration vs. fighting since it seems like there’s always a short burst of battle with multiple enemies, and then five minutes of standing around wondering which direction we’re supposed to go next in the huge outdoor arenas. That, combined with the extremely difficult-to-pilot warthog jeep vehicles makes movement sort of a pain, though as I was playing it this morning with Malaya I was mostly getting the hang of steering the truck around without constantly oversteering the bumper car-like handling of the thing. I still think it turns far too quickly, both for physics and for ease of operation, and I don’t like how much it slides on the ground, but I suppose that’s largely since they had to make it handle like it was on ice to let you pilot it around while bouncing off of every wall and pine tree in your path.

The basic style of combat is pretty okay in Halo though, especially now that I can sort of aim where I want to, but since I always heard that the single player element was pretty mediocre, I guess I shouldn’t be disappointed that I’m finding it pretty repetitive and tedious. The basic problem I have with all mindless shooters is coming in though; I don’t care. It’s fun to play and shoot some, but since my character is exactly like everyone else’s, minus whatever weapon I might have picked up in the last 30 seconds, there’s no feeling of personal involvement in the struggle. I got the same feeling during various free play sessions of Diablo II, at E3 and at Blizzard North, in that since I was just using a pre-made character with equipment I didn’t pick, I just felt no emotional attachment, and didn’t really care about finishing the quests or missions either.

Shooters are obviously very popular, and maybe I’d enjoy the strategy type more, in Half Life or something like that, where your character has an inventory and changes over the course of the game. But as for Halo, I’m enjoying it in relatively short bursts of playtime here, but when we leave I’ll have no problem forgetting it almost immediately. And since Malaya and me have no console games and no time to play them even if we did, that’s probably just as well.

I do keep having creeping desires to play some big computer RPG though; Baldur’s Gate or Never Winter Nights or something like that, where I can get the D&D fun of guiding a large and varied party through a long quest game, with dragons and NPC villagers to terrorize and the whole bit. I have no time for that sort of thing, and I’m not disciplined enough to just play it an hour or two a day as a reward for doing lots of writing, but it’s a notion I’ve been kicking around in my head for a couple of months, since there aren’t any other games available that interest me.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t still play some games; I’m doing online free ones and Pengu Golf and Diablo II and fricking Minesweeper for an hour or more a day, in 5 and 10 minute bursts, and I’m not at all happy about that. I just can’t seem to help it.

It’s more about me than the games though; I just have to get more organized and disciplined in my work, and if I were doing a solid 6 or 8 hours a day on my novel and making huge progress and needing a break every night to clear my thoughts and have some fun, then I could get far more work done and have far more fun relaxing and gaming afterwards. Instead I don’t do much work, I dick around with some games and surfing, and then I feel guilty afterwards for not getting anything done, which keeps me from enjoying the work I did do, and tinges all of the gaming with guilt that ruins the fun of it as well.

December 29, 2004

Another petty gripe about the lovely mansion we’re being given free food and board in… the shower heads. The house is just 3 or 4 years old, in a new complex, and it’s gorgeous. Almost 4000 square feet, which is more than 5x the size of the condo I share with Malaya, and it’s lovely with thick crème carpet, a huge living room, three small and one huge upstairs bedrooms, a downstairs bedroom, a huge kitchen, dining room, 3-car garage, 3.5 bathrooms, etc. Which makes the showerheads all the stranger, in that they are a good brand, Moen, but they just suck.

The basic problem is that it’s “gentle spring shower” all the time, and that no matter how you twist the dial on the shower head, you keep getting just a gentle sprinkle of water down from the entire circle of water vents. In fact, as far as I can tell the little dial you turn on the inside of the showerhead is entirely functionless; the water just keeps coming out of all the outside holes at the same velocity, and there aren't any inside holes, there is no pulsation mode, no way to cut off half the holes to increase the pressure through the others, etc. It's the worst shower head I've ever seen, to be honest. Even the ones in cheap motels are half rusted up, so while you have no control over them, at least you can aim the thing so that a fair amount of water hits you at once. With these Moens you can't get a hard pressure and the spread is so wide that you can't get more than 1/3 of them hitting your body at once. To wash shampoo out of my hair I've actually been holding one hand up to the showerhead to block all of the water so it runs down my arm and straight onto my head, as if I've got a hose up there.

They're pretty too, all gold and chrome and they probably cost a fortune. I would seriously have considered buying her parents 3 decent Shower Massage faucets for a thank you present; hell they're about $20 at CostCo, and I'd gladly have paid $20 for the privilege of using one while I stayed there, just to get a decent shower.

The funny thing is that I mentioned this to Malaya on the 4th morning here, asking if it would be wrong to buy them a Shower Massage as a parting gift, and she dissolved in laughter since she'd had the exact same experience as me in the shower, but even worse since she's shorter and has much longer hair. So there we were, lying in bed and wishing we'd gotten more sleep, laughing hysterically as we envisioned each other trying to devise some method of increasing the water flow from the worthless goddamned Moen shower head. I saw her hopping up and down in the shower, unable to reach the control, while she saw me standing there turning it endlessly round and round with a puzzled look on my face, and we laid in bed cracking up for about ten minutes while I started throwing out ridiculous analogies as to what it was like trying to rinse off under the factory default showerhead.

Washing a car with water balloons. Washing an elephant with a syringe. Washing a truck with a turkey baster. You get the idea.

It's not that funny in retrospect, but at the time, suffering from casino and Halo deprived sleep, both of us thinking the exact same thing about the showerheads, it was about the funniest thing in human history.

December 29, 2004

One thing I forget about overweight people, since I’m so seldom around them (or anyone but Malaya, really) on a regular basis, is how much and how often they eat. One of the other guests with us these days in Vegas is a female who is 100 pounds or so overweight, and while she’s not a stereotypical glutton, she does eat. And it's not real food that she's pigging out on; I've been hitting the buffets harder than she has, it's the food choices and snacks that kill her.

When we eat dinner she has basically nothing but meat and bread and pasta and other fatty, starchy stuff, while I eat some of that stuff but far more vegetables, salads, etc. I don't really do it for diet reasons, I just prefer the lighter fare. It's the snacking that really sinks her though, since she'd been getting huge hot chocolates from Starbucks every morning, and seemingly every time we all go into a store she comes out with a Coke and a donut, or a bag of M&Ms, or she’s nibbling on the giant-sized candy bars M’s parents stocked up on for their guests, or whatever. Meanwhile I'm drinking water, or eating a piece of fruit or a few dates or something like that. Again, it's not by choice, I just don't want soda and candy all the time, or at least my self-loathing for the weakness that leads to indulgence in that sort of thing is enough to keep me away from it.

This isn't a real scientific survey, since we're both in someone else's house without our usual food available. Also, we've been doing a lot of buffets with far richer food than I usually eat, and since she doesn't have her own car here she's unable to do any late night burger/pizza splurging. I don't know if she does that sort of thing at home, but since it's not even an option here I thought I'd point it out.

But just going by what we're eating here, her average day's diet is not much different than mine in total food eaten, and in fact I probably eat more. I just don't eat all of those empty calories in snacks, and I save my hunger for bigger meals, and I drink water instead of soda, and so on.  So I'm eating more food total and enjoying the food more, while still probably taking in 1000 fewer calories a day.

Besides the weight gain and other health issues, I can't help but think about how expensive it must be to be fat like that.  It’s not as bad as being a smoker, spending $5 or more every day for something that doesn’t feed or entertain you, and that gives you deadly diseases, but dropping $3 or $4 twice a day on junk food and a soda, plus the daily impulses visits to McDonald’s and other purveyors of junk food, has to add up. I’m feeling pained by the money we’re spending for food and entertainment in Vegas, but perhaps I could just think of it in “what if I were fat” terms, and count $8 or $10 a day in savings, and then feel okay about spending some % of that on healthier treats?

No snacks and two large and relatively healthy meals a day or not, I'm feeling bloated from the meat-intensive diet I’ve been on for the past week. Since Malaya is feeling much the same, we'll probably go a week with just vegetables, or maybe even do some sort of a fast when we get home. Or perhaps just a cleanse, though I certainly hope we don't do another Master Cleanse. I still shudder when I think about the taste of that lemonade with maple syrup in it.

I don't think I'm actually putting on weight this trip, even though I'm not getting any exercise, and that's almost entirely due to the lack of snacking. I've got miniature candy bars, but that's about it, and the lack of easy shrimp ramen, corn chips, french fries, fried rice at 5am, and all the other crap I regularly indulge in at home is saving me from blowing up with Xmas fat.  It's funny, since I can imagine lots of people gaining 5 pounds a day here. There are always platters of cold fish, chicken, fried rice, chocolate, etc in the kitchen, but I'm starving myself every day pre-buffet, and afterwards I'm too bloated to snack before bed. Plus it’s not my house and I feel guilty enough sleeping on their floor with my suitcase open and clothing scattered all around; I’m not going to start raiding their pantry on top of that, no matter how open and sharing with the food Filipinos are.

December 29, 2004 Wednesday, 1am

On our third night in Vegas, we left Vegas. Gambling was sought, and we planned to leave around 8. The innumerable house guests were still here though, and with M talking to them I blogged for an hour or so, then moved downstairs to use M’s imac and wireless router to siphon off some neighbor’s wifi and do some surfing. While I was surfing Malaya and C were playing cards at the table beside me, and after 30 minutes or so they asked me to play with them. Texas Hold ‘Em was the first option, but since we weren’t going to get into betting and chips and such, I didn’t see much point. After all, the “skill” of poker is in the way you bet and fold and such; it’s all about cutting your losses and maximizing your wins. If you don’t bet it’s just the luck of the draw, and while that’s apparently enough for lots of people, as the millions of busy slot machines in this town testifies to, I don’t see much point in that.

So with poker ruled out, so we went to Crazy 8’s, which isn’t really any more skill-intensive in the single draw form we were playing, but it’s relatively amusing for a small group. There were the three of us for a while, and then one of the house guests came in, a boy of about 8, and we had 4-way going for about 5 hands until someone went out.

It didn’t seem like we’d been at it for all that long, but when we checked the time it was almost 10, and M had moved upstairs where she was talking to half a dozen teens; the kids of the party guests who were her cousins or nephews or something; as an only child from two only children, I'm not good at figuring out that extended family stuff. It wasn't a party, it was more of a typical Filipino family get together, where everything is very low key; fully informal attire, modified pot luck food where everyone eats in buffet style, paper plates, sit anywhere you like, etc. I like it, since I hate formality and sticky rules, but I do wish someone at one of the houses I attend these gatherings would someday have enough chairs for everyone to sit down. Hell, I just want enough chairs for me to sit down, and not just on the floor. Again. White people are damn formal about dinners and such, comparatively speaking, but I must admit that my kind doesn’t expect anyone to share a sitting surface with the dog. Not that anyone has yet had a dog, but if they did it would be sitting on the same level as most of the guests.

So it was late, but hey, this is Vegas and everyone on this trip has been pretty into staying up late and sleeping late, and M was game to go, and C was the one who wanted to gamble, and Malaya and I were game to get out of the house and walk around a casino some, so off we went. And as I said several paragraphs ago, we left Vegas.

Well, I don’t think we actually left Vegas, but we did get off the Strip, which I was somewhat disappointed by, since I don’t enjoy gambling or casinos, but I do like the wild architecture and design and strange crazy energy of the Strip. Since pretty much all Malaya and I do in casinos is walk around and watch people lose money, we like there to be interesting places to watch them lose money, and gift shops full of weird stuff, and weird people wandering around, and whores, and so on.

We got none of that, since we were driven to Green Valley Casino, located in lovely… Green Valley. The same place we had the buffet. It’s an upper crust suburbs, one of the first really expensive suburbs, and I suppose that technically it’s still in Vegas, but it’s maybe 10 or 15 miles from the Strip, and therefore doesn’t really feel like “Vegas.” I’d usually say that was a good thing, but in this case it just made for a medium sized casino in which all of the interesting fast food places had closed or were closing by 10pm; a quarter hour before we arrived. Malaya and I wanted to split a Dryers’ Ice Cream chocolate sundae in a waffle cone, and when I inquired of the sullen counter woman if that came with two scoops of ice cream, she said, “Yes, but we don't sell sundaes after 10pm."

Apparently the liquid chocolate dries up and clogs the pump 2 hours before Cinderella’s party ends. We didn’t want ice cream enough to just eat it plain, or at least I didn’t and Malaya didn’t insist, so we wandered off with my cynical mouth unable to resist muttering in semi-audible fashion, “Well, we know for sure we’re not in Vegas anymore.”

For comparison’s sake, last night on the strip, walking through the food court in the Excalibur we passed Krispy Kreme and they were baking donuts at full speed, with literally thousands of them on racks and hundreds coming fresh off the grill… at midnight. Of course there were literally thousands of people walking past that store at that time, and about 25 people in the entire food court of the Green Valley Casino at 10pm, but it seemed pretty idiotic to me to have the ice cream place be open, and have it doing almost no business (there was no line whatsoever), but have policy to refuse to do a fraction of extra work to sell something that a customer wants, when it’s just 15 minutes after the time you’re not supposed to do it anymore.

So we did without ice cream, and we went and walked around some and watched people lose money at roulette, and watched C actually win money at roulette, and watched M play some Pai Gow, a game that I know nothing of. She lost $20, apparently, though we didn’t stay to see.

Though the casino didn't look that large from the outside, and though most of the food places were closed at that hour, the movie theater was still going. And it wasn't some tiny place either; they had at least 10 theaters with all the latest films. Unfortunately most of the last shows of the day had begun at 9:30 or 10, and the arcade downstairs by the movie theater had closed at 10 also. Which probably explained why we saw two white kids, a boy and girl aged about 12, sitting on the floor by the doors when we entered the casino. They'd been kicked out of the closing arcade, but their parents weren't done pissing away their college fund yet, so they had to sit and wait, and since there are no chairs anywhere in any casino other than those right in front of the slot and video poker machines, the kids had to sit on the floor.

Ahh, Vegas.

Since neither Malaya nor myself felt rich/adventurous enough to actually gamble, we ended up killing about 45 minutes in the bar. It was pretty nice actually, located in the center of the gaming tables, it was perfectly round, with a long curved bench all the way around the outer wall, low tables and chairs in front of it, and a round bar in the center. They even had silly hootchie-dressed waitresses, two of them in tight white leather short shorts over fishnet stockings, with matching white leather bustiers. Neither was a woman you especially wanted to see in such an outfit, though the one Asian girl pulled it off better by virtue of being about a size 0 and weighing maybe 80 pounds. She had no ass whatsoever, but she brought Malaya her shot of peppermint Goldschlagger and a bottle of Perrier quickly enough, so I guess we can cut her a break.

The amusing part was that the table beside us had two guys in their early 30s, looking pretty well lubricated, fondling unlit cigars, and trying their best to flirt with the Asian waitress. Neither of the guys were at all good-looking, according to Malaya, but they seemed to be having some success since she dropped a napkin on their table with her number (or a price list?) on it, and then appeared in the bar ten minutes later in a knee length partially transparent woven trenchcoat sort of thing; obviously intended to cover up her tiny outfit and perhaps even keep her warm when she was off duty. She had a few words with the very happy-looking guys and said something about being back in ten minutes. Malaya and me left at that point though, before her return, so we never found out if she was hot for them, or running a hustle, or working as a whore, or what.

I'd imagine a girl charges more for a threesome, but what I wonder about is how the guys took it. Say you're a guy and you're in Vegas with a friend, and you both start trying to chat up some cute cocktail waitress. You don't seriously think you'll get any play, but she's friendly and you start to wonder, while expecting her to start making eyes at you, or your friend while ignoring you. But she keeps treating you both equally, and at some point you realize sex is a possibility, if you're wiling to pay for it. But it'll be sex for you both... Do you go there? Do you want to take turns? Do you settle for sloppy seconds? (Well, not that sloppy since I'd assume a whore would require condoms with no exceptions.) What does that do to your friendship afterwards, when you sober up and fly back to St. Louis, or Denver, or Houston, or wherever, and see your friend in the light of day, a week later, while knowing what his cock looks like and how he likes to have his nipples bitten and how he grunts when he comes?

It's got to make for some awkward moments at the coffee machine in the Ford dealership, doesn't it?

Other than the possible whore cocktail waitress, the funniest things we saw at Green Valley were penny slots. Yes, $.01 and $.02 slots, and even video poker. I guess that covers the cost of electricity for the casino, and they figure you've got to drink and eat while you're there, but Christ, talk about low rollers. On the other hand, I can't see the point in playing that. I guess you can play all day for $10, but what's the fun in hitting a big 200 to 1 payoff, and winning enough for a soda from the gift shop?

I doubt anyone really plays then for a penny a shot, since every slot machine has all sorts of "bet 3" and "bet 5" buttons, urging you to gamble far more than you intended to when you put your money in, but still, it's got to be sort of embarrassing to walk past the real gamblers on your way to the penny slot machines.

And in my other casino fetish, there were two wheelchair sightings in the Green Valley casino, but neither of their occupants were dragging an oxygen tank along, so there were no bonus points awarded. We saw a person doing that at an Indian Casino in California on a gambling trip with Malaya's mom in summer 2004, and the memory has forever remained vivid in my head.

December 30, 2004 Noon

After another breakfast/lunch of rice and some form of chicken (adobo today, a Filipino dish that’s basically seasoned, boiled chicken pieces, which makes it so tender that the “meat just falls off the bone” as they say) I’m giving more thought to some sort of cleanse or fast once we get home.

Initially, back in San Diego after the largely meat-intensive diet there, I started thinking how nice it would be to get home and be able to live on vegetables and salad and beans and potatoes and such. Now though, after another 4 days of lots of meat and few veggies, Malaya and me are feeling like fat little piggies who need to be purged. I don’t want to do the Master Cleanse again since thanks to it I still shudder at the thought of maple syrup, but I do want to do some sort of diet that involves not putting anything solid into my body for a few days, while doing something to send lots of unwanted matter out of my body. If you know what I mean.

I also don’t want to sacrifice an entire week to it, as we did to the MC last summer, even though I did lose 7 pounds that I’ve since kept off successfully. My current thought is something like an OJ fast, which fortunately has nothing to do with professional football players not eating very much while in prison for double murder. No, I’m thinking more in lines of a liquid fast, where we mostly survive on the calories in orange juice, while perhaps doing water flushes, which involve drinking 4 cups of warm salt water very quickly, early in the morning, and then waiting for the somewhat frightening results. The problem is that those water flushes only work if your digestive tract is empty of food, since then there’s nothing for the water to soak into or back up behind, and less than an hour after you drink it it comes out and carries a lot of unwanted stuff with it.

Anyway, I didn’t intend to go into quite that much detail so soon after lunch, but another cleansing option is the fiber/roughage technique. There are various diets of that type available in every health food store, and they basically involve taking a lot of pills while not eating much food. The pills are sort of little haybales that expand within your digestive tract and push “things” down as they pass through the small intestine and colon. I’m not going to go into that much detail again, but we’re talking ratemypoo.com gold medal stuff, if you get my drift. This diet appeals more to me since it’s a cleanse, but you only continue it for a few days, rather than starving yourself for a week. Of course the hard part of a liquid diet is the first day or two, when the food cravings hit you, and once you’re past that it gets far easier. But there’s no need to bring that up.

As of now the plan is to scrounge whatever food we can find when we return home, while planning for some sort of purge and/or cleanse, which will begin after a couple of days, once we’ve accumulated the required ingredients. 

December 30, 2004, afternoon

I mentioned Halo yesterday, but since we played a four player frag-fest for about 3 hours last night, I’ve got more comments.

My memories of Halo reviews, which are admittedly sparse since the game came out years ago adn I’d never played it or given it any real thought until this Vegas vacation, were that most people thought the single player missions pretty much sucked, but that the multiplayer was great. I can’t really speak about the SP stuff, since I’ve only done the first 2 areas and most of the 3rd, but none of them were very good. The first area is very annoying; you’re in a spaceship that‘s under attack by alien-looking aliens, and you have to find your way through lots of dark corridors and shoot occasional packs of aliens while following shouting NPC Marines around. It’s a good introduction to the most annoying aspect of Halo, the lack of any sort of overhead map, since in the two player co-op games we’ve played we’ve spent at least 67% of our time trying to figure out where we are, where we have been, and where we’re going. Perhaps if I'd played the missions alone, and in a slower and more thoughtful fashion I would have enjoyed them more, but on a big screen with another person we've been rushed and lost the entire time.

The second area is on the surface of a planet and it’s much more fun, though it’s still very easy to get lost and run for long minutes through areas you’ve already cleared, since the game doesn’t really tell you much about where you are supposed to go next. You’ve also got the very difficult to drive warthogs lying around on that level, and on the first day playing it, R and myself both tried to drive repeatedly before just giving up and running, since we made better time on foot than in the truck, which was usually sideways or backwards or stuck against a wall. I did better the second time playing, with Malaya, since I had a bit of experience in the vehicle and I’d done the area before, so we didn’t waste endless time exploring and trying to figure out where the game wanted us to go next. The whole experience basically reminded me of the pre-beta playtesting I got to do on Diablo II at Blizzard North, when they had hardly any quest prompts in the game, and we were constantly lost about what to do next or which direction to go. That play situation wasn’t much different than the one here though, since in both cases the players were in a large group in the same room and play was much more hurried and full of conversation and much less thoughtful than it could have been.

The third area of SP Halo is mostly outdoors, but it’s also entirely at night in canyon areas filed with ridges and ledges you can’t quite leap up to, and that really make the lack of maneuverability of your little soldier obvious. I think the game would greatly benefit from an option to holster your machinegun and be able to climb up a head-height wall, an opinion that was born on those SP areas, and cemented in some of the large outdoor areas we played deathmatches in, since there is always some place you want to go that’s just out of range, and that you have to run around a mile to reach. I can accept that in a 2D game like Diablo where you can’t step over a knee high wall or leap a meter-wide river, but it seems dumb in 3D games where the Z-axis is not a foreign concept.

We never finished the 3rd area of Halo, since after slowly and painfully battling through at least a dozen dark outdoor areas filled with deadly aliens, we finally got to a large round canyon with a huge glowing thing on the ground. There two big humanoid robot things were dropped from the sky, and they proceeded to charge around and crash into us, killing us every time. The results might be different if I played it again, now that I’ve vastly improved my control and firing ability, but doing it two days ago it was just impossible due to the slow footspeed and lack of maneuverability of our guys, and the lack of adequate weaponry in that area after the inevitable respawn. Our uncoordinated teamwork didn’t help either, since we could never quite seem to get organized on both shooting the same robot to death, then turning on the other one. Plus our grenade-throwing accuracy was terrible as well. And it’s entirely possible that there’s some sneaky way to make our avatars run really fast, or fly, or leap up the ridges, and that we’ve just never figured out how to do it, which is why we felt like such incredibly-slow sitting ducks for the two deadly robots.

As for the multi-player, it’s fun, a lot more fun than the SP missions, and there are a wide variety of game play types, but I didn’t much care for the maps. We had four people in the same room, each viewing just a quarter of the very large widescreen TV, but the visibility was fine. The main problem we had was that the maps were either too large, too small, or too filled with twisting corridors that no one could ever figure how to navigate. At least half the time we played some of the interesting capture the flag or king of the hill or oddball games, one or two people would never figure out how to navigate the maze-like levels, or one person would find the skull and then just stand still with it for the 2 minutes required to win before anyone else could find them. Or the king of the hill area was only findable by one person, who would stand in it for the whole 2 minutes. Even when we did the respawning king of the hill game, where the target area moved every 45 seconds, the winner was always the one who got a lucky spawn after a death, and appeared a screen or two from the hill while everyone else spent 35 seconds trudging across the vast maps, only to have the hill target vanish just as they finally arrived.

The shooting levels were quite a bit of fun though, since the actual controls to move and strafe and shoot are enjoyable. It’s just plain fun to run around a small area with guns and blast away at everyone else you see, while chucking grenades like a mad man. I also think that many of our other game complaints, mostly those about the maps being too big and labyrinthine, were based on the fact that we didn’t know the game or the maps at all, and that experienced players would figure out right where the objective was and get there quickly. At least they would playing on the same screen, where they could see their opponents’ view. I have no idea how you’d find where someone was if you were all connected over the Internet, and couldn’t see their view and they were hiding in some hallway somewhere in one of those multi-level mazes, but maybe people just don’t play those sorts of maps or game types online.

My gripes are somewhat misleading though, since overall we had a great time playing last night, and I could have happily kept going until dawn, rather than stopping at 3am, which was still at least 2 hours longer then we’d intended to play. Of course it’s easy for me to say that, since I won at least 90% of the games. We’re all complete noobs to Halo or playing a game with the gamepad controls, and I never even play shooters, but I’ve been able to learn the controls more quickly than anyone else, and just being able to hit where I’m aiming, while strafing side to side, gives me a huge overall advantage when my three fellow players can’t. Especially when one of our foresome is in her 40s and never plays computer games.

December 30, 2004, evening

Something I have not talked about yet (yes, there really is something) is the kitties. Not mom’s kittens, who I will be posting numerous photos of soon after I return. I'm talking about Malaya and my kitties, Dusty and Jinx. They’ve both been over at Malaya’s parents’ house while we’ve been gone, and it’s been… interesting for them, judging by the status reports Malaya has gotten from her mom. It’s not such a big deal for Dusty really, he’s been there many times before, including living there for more than a year while Malaya was overseas. But as for Jinxie… she’s never lived anywhere but our condo, and as you may recall from past updates, she’s rather nervous around other people. In fact, my dad has visited our condo several times and has yet to lay a hand on Jinx. Hell, he's hardly even seen her as more than a crouching silver form, ready to turn and dash back into hiding in the bedroom if approached, and my mom has never touched her either, though she’s seen her at close range thanks to some kitty treat bribery. So to say that we were worried about how Jinx would adapt to 5 days in a strange house, with strange people, is a bit of an understatement. Fortunately, she’s done pretty well.

The first day Malaya took her over there around noon, to give Jinx time to adapt a bit while someone she knew was around. Jinx is more impressed on me, but she’s calm around Malaya and doesn’t run from her or anything. At least not at home; in Malaya’s parents’ house she immediately streaked beneath a bed, then another bed, and when Malaya and parents returned from dinner, most of the sweaters and other things her mom had stacked on top shelves in closets were knocked to the ground. Jinxie seeks higher ground when stressed out, oddly enough.

Jinx remained freaked out all the first day, hardly eating, though she apparently came out at night and slept on Malaya’s bed at night. She hid in the morning though, when Malaya and family were up early for the drive to the airport, and there was really no telling how Jinx would behave once Malaya was gone.

As I said though, she’s apparently mellowed quite a bit, and while she’s still not letting Malaya’s mom touch her, she is eating and coming out at night and sleeping on Malaya’s mom’s bed, and using the litter box properly, and so on. I didn’t seriously think the cat would lose her mind or claw a hole in a screen and vanish into the streets, but I was worried that she might be traumatized for weeks, or that she might hide and crap in the corner of a closet or something else unpleasant.

It’ll be interesting to see how or if she changes at all from this experience. Maybe it’ll work like electroshock and she’ll be much changed and calmer and happier now, and not so afraid of construction workers or strangers in her house? Dusty is far from a social cat, and he runs when strangers come in, but he gets over it pretty quickly and comes back to rub heads and roll around on the floor in front of our rare guests. Jinx never has, but she’s younger and she’s hardly ever been around other people. It’s almost impossible to compare her to mom’s two new kittens, who have spent more time around strangers in the first two weeks with mom than Jinx and Dusty have in their entire 6 years of combined life, but it would be nice if our cats could show a bit more courage and dignity when the opportunity presented itself.

And maybe they will, from now on. 

December 30, 2004, afternoon

Home seems to be approaching quickly now. It’s 2pm on the 30th, and in 20 hours I’ll be on a short flight back to Oakland. I’ll be at the airport in like 17 hours, since we’ve got to get there way in advance of our flights, so we can then sit around reading and feeling bored for 2 or 3 hours, as required by post-9/11 aviation regulations.

Today’s schedule, after the group karaoke session breaks up downstairs, is to run some errands, then head out to the Star Trek Experience at some casino downtown. After that we’re going to a buffet at another casino, the Mandalay Bay, I think, though I could be wrong, and then some gambling after that. We also want to get over to Circus Circus to try and win some more stuffed animals, ideally with the ball-rolling horse race game, which everyone seems to now be a fan of, largely due to our success at it at The Excalibur two days ago.

We even had some success last night gambling after the buffet. Malaya threw away a dollar on the slots, and M lost a little money on craps, but C won over $200 on blackjack, largely due to a run of luck where she was dealt 2 straight 21s, and then a 5 and a 6, doubled down, and pulled a face card. She earns bonus points for being smart enough to take her money and get out while she was ahead. I did the same thing, though on a far smaller scale, and it took me two tries to wise up.

I played video poker, put in $5, bet a quarter, and got a full house on the first game, putting me up to $7 or so. I should have just stopped then, but I didn’t want to stop after just one hand, so I played some more and lost while treading water with frequent pairs of jacks or better, or two pairs. I was down to $4.50 but when I got a 3 of a kind and was back to breaking even at $5, I cashed out on that machine. Malaya and me wandered around some more after that, with about 10 minutes to go until our pre-arranged 10pm meeting time, and I decided to play some more, figuring I’d probably just lose my $5 print out voucher thing (the machines don’t give out actual money, of course). I got lucky again, losing two quarter bets before going up to 4 credits ($1) and being dealt a 6, 7, 8, 8, 9. I went for the straight, of course, and when a 10 came up I was sitting at $8.50, and yes, I cashed out at once this time.

That seems to be how video poker goes; you lose or tread water 80% of the hands, but there is that 15% or 20% of the time when you can nail a 3 of a flush or straight or full house and make money. You’ve just got to be lucky/psychic in upping your bet on those hands, rather than on the inevitable string of pairs of 7s or king-high hands that come in between.

And yes, the machines at the Vegas casinos have been the ones with the decent odds and no wild cards. You break even with Jacks or better or 2 pairs, and you make money with 3 of a kind or higher, though they still screw you on 4 of a kinds, paying higher for face cards than others. Not that I got any of those hands of any value. There are some machines here with the deadly wild card odds that I bitched about so much in past casino updates. On those you need 3 of a kind just to break even, and two pairs or jacks or better pays nothing, plus the higher payouts are truncated if you got the straight or flush or 4 of a kind with the aid of a wild deuce, as opposed to drawing it naturally.

I didn’t learn from my $3.50 profit through, and while we waited I ended up throwing three bucks away on a $1 slot; one of the sucker ones that are tied into some massive multi-million payout that bridges dozens of casinos and that one person and one person alone takes home about every 3 months. It’s funny, I never consider spending a dollar on the lottery at home, ridiculing it as a tax on people who suck at math, and the lottery has a much better return rate and higher jackpots. But somehow seeing that digital display at $2.5m and counting interested me enough to throw away 3 perfectly good dollars at a 0.0000001% chance of winning it.

So I left with a fifty cent profit; enough for about 1/3 of a bottle of soda, given Vegas store prices. And that's only if I don't count the $5 I spent in the arcade downstairs. But hey, at least I didn’t lose money gambling, and after the free buffet we got yesterday, I came out well ahead. And if I count the hundreds I've saved on this vacation with free rides to and from airports, free meals, free lodging, etc, I'm hundreds ahead. Plus I've had a good time.

December 31, 2004, 2am

It's late and I'm all packed and I need to get to sleep so I can get up in the morning and get to the airport, but I thought I'd do a quick blog entry here. As I said earlier, we went to the Strip and rode the monorail and walked through some casinos and played for a while at Circus Circus. Dinner was a buffet before that, and it was awesome. We at at Paris, a huge French-themed casino, and the buffet was $26 a head, but well worth it, as these things go. The food was French, sort of. No escargot or anything like that, and they even had the mandatory casino buffet never ending heap of crab's legs, but the rest of the options had a distinctly French taint, with somewhat classier flavors and textures than the "All you can eat Denny's" style of most other casinos.

I had good pasta, great asparagus, good scalloped potatoes with onions, two different types of delicious chicken breast, edible mini shrimp quiche, and much more, but that was only because I did not discover the mashed potatoes until I was nearly full.  They were unbelievable, easily the best food I ate on my entire vacation, and they were made with the Iron Chef not-so secret recipe.

If you've ever watched Iron Chef, or any cooking show, you've probably begun to grasp the reason food is so good in quality restaurants. It's because you don't have to cook it or clean it up, and especially because they use all of those unhealthy fatty ingredients you don't use at home. Whole sticks of butter, full-fat cream, beef fat, chicken skin, and so on. All delicious, if you enjoy that type of food, and all so expensive and/or fattening that you don't dare use it in your own cooking. Restaurants have no such compunctions though, and whoever made the mashed potatoes at Paris certainly didn't, since they had to be about 80% dairy. They were glorious though, whipped perfectly, totally without lumps, white as new snow, and almost entirely butter and cream. I had a scoop of those with a marinated chicken breast and some steamed vegetables, getting a little of each per bite, and I was sitting there rolling every bite around my mouth and moaning with about as much passion as the three women and one somewhat pudgy guy at our table were attacking the desserts with.

I wouldn't go back to Vegas and that buffet just for the mashed potatoes, but I wouldn't mind either.

Speaking of the desserts, I was pretty disappointed. The desserts were good, all very gourmet French pastries and cakes and such, but I don't really like delicate desserts like that. I'm not a big chocolate fan, especially not dark chocolate, and I don't like cream fluff and pastry filling and other such things, and virtually every type of cake and pie they had was all about whipped insubstantiality. I'd have loved a plain piece of cheesecake, or chocolate cake, or a brownie, or even just some CCCs out of the box. Instead there were 20 types of pie, none of which weighed more than about 3 grams per bite, and lots of things with dark chocolate that everyone else oohed and aahed over, and that I took one quick taste of and pushed aside.

After the buffet we drove over to Circus Circus, since it's not on the main strip and not accessible by the monorail. It was much as I remembered; noisy, sort of tawdry, very crowded, and with a full second story of almost impossible carnival games and hundreds of hyperactive children. I was one of those children several times back in the 80s, when I accompanied my parents or went with my friend Bill and his parents to Vegas, and spent most of my time playing arcade games and winning stuffed animals at Circus Circus. We didn't play any arcade games tonight, but we did lose a lot of money on the deceptively impossible carnival games, while winning a few stuffed animals.

The upstairs at Circus² had three of the ball rolling race games, the type we won the stuffed animals on at the Excalibur, but it was a case of too much of a good thing, since there were never more than about 8 people on any of the games at once. We were also there at nearly midnight, when most of the kids had gone to bed, so the crowds weren't that great. The 20 player ball rolling machines weren't very good either, since two of them were embarrassingly old and beaten up, looking as if they'd last had some maintenance around the time I last played them in like 1987. They basically looked like juke boxes in biker bars; all the plastic rings were cracked and broken and missing, the flat surfaces were scratched, they had gum stuck on them, the ball rolling surfaces were crooked, and so on. Given that those games have to clear $10,000 a night, the quality of them was pretty appalling.  Worse yet, one of them had the exact same prizes as the one we'd won on at the Excalibur, and the other one had big Warner Bros stuffed animals that looked pretty lame. No one really wanted a Tweety Bird or Sylvester anyway.

Everything else at Circus² was about the same as Excalibur, but tweaked to be a bit harder. The counters were farther from the targets in ball-throwing games, the buckets were a little taller in the softball toss, the blocks were placed more in the center of the beanbag throw, the bottles were a bit farther apart in the ring toss, and so on. We spent more and won less than we had at Excalibur two days earlier, and my conclusion is that the Excalibur knows that Circus² is the place people think of for those types of games, so they're trying to undercut Circus² by making their games easier and thus more fun to play.  Plus at the Excalibur they're just there to amuse the kids while the parents blow a nut in the casino; Circus² is so well-known for their games that they want to make a huge profit off of them. And I'm sure they are, given that the return rate might be 1% on carnival games, while it's 97% on the slots.

Overall, I enjoyed my SD trip, and I enjoyed my Vegas trip. I'd have enjoyed Vegas a lot more if I had money to spend without feeling so guilty and poor about it, but that's more about me than about Vegas, I suppose. I would have liked to have seen some more shows while I was there; David Copperfield or Penn and Teller or some comedians or something. Hell, I would have gone to see Elton John since the GF would probably have enjoyed it and it's got to be a great show. I wouldn't have sat through Celine Dion for any amount of money, but fortunately for me Malaya wouldn't have wanted to see her anyway, so that wasn't a risk, even if we could have afforded it.

Next time, perhaps.

Follow Up and Reader Comments

January 10, 2005

My Xmas vacation took me to San Diego for four days, and then Vegas for four more, before I returned home on the 31st.  I blogged extensively while on vacation, posted all of them in three parts last week, and happily enough, received a fair amount of reader feedback on the write up of my adventures. Since most of the reader questions and comments hit upon things I didn't cover in the updates (raising the possibility that some of you actually read the whole damn thing) it seems prudent to quote some of those mails and respond to them here, as a conclusion to Flux's vacation week blogging.

After the emails there's a longer discussion of The Star Trek Experience, a ride/attraction we hit on our last day in Vegas.

First off, here's a mail from Donnie, who had two good comments in this one:

I must start with a quick note about prostitution in Vegas (noting that I have gone there on vacation once each year for the last four years) and the legality of it. Prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas, in fact, if memory serves, it is illegal in all of Clark county (as well as several other counties in the state). I just spent some time trying to find a link to a definitive answer, and this was the best I could do . Which does confirm the illegality of prostitution in the entire county. 

As far as the little pamphlets that are in all of the newspaper-like boxes on the corners, I think they are only able to get away with that because they never actually say that you will get sex from one of the "escorts". I am basing this assumption on the fact that while in Vegas in 2002, my wife and I saw a guy actually being arrested for putting playing card sized ads for actual prostitutes on a street post.

I've been meaning to read up on this since he mailed last week, but I've never gotten around to it yet. He seems to have a point though, and I know I've heard lots of contradictory mentions of what is and isn't legal within the Vegas city limits when it comes to prostitution. There definitely aren't any big whorehouses in town, and trust me, if they had them, they would be packed beyond belief and would sell their wares with gigantic neon signs right on the strip. Which means it must not be legal in Vegas, or at least not in such overt fashion.  There are lots of whorehouses in Nevada though, but mostly out on the highways and away from towns. So maybe there are local city laws everywhere prohibiting them, but they are legal in the state, if not banned by a given municipality?

If anyone has researched it or knows more about it, feel free to enlighten the rest of us.

On an amusing side note, a good friend of mine back in my 20s, who I knew entirely from playing video games with, was a nice guy, a very calm and mellow and average white guy, and a computer nerd, though he didn't really look the part. Nevertheless, he was a virgin, at something like age 25, and he eventually lost his virginity by driving to Nevada and spending a weekend in a whorehouse. I don't recall which one, and while I wouldn't ordinarily consider it real sex since he paid for it so directly, I had to give him credit for planning it like a true engineer.

He didn't just drive out there one night, fueled by too much Smirnoff Ice, and he didn't pay $50 to some street corner whore. He researched locations, he called ahead and got brochures, he made reservations and worked out a fee structure in advance, and his breathless recitation to me was to be believed, he did two girls at once, got about a dozen blow jobs (not to fruition), and spent hours being pampered by various different girls, all of them quite a bit more attractive than the average girl on the street.  He said they took special care of him, were delighted that he was a virgin, gave him two girls for the price of one since he was nice and they weren't all booked up, and so on. There was much playing around without the condom on, then they'd put it on for the moment of glory, then start up again once he had his breath back, and so on.

I wasn't tempted to follow in his footsteps, so to speak, but it did sound like a lot nicer time than I ever imagined paying for sex could be. And hell, he definitely had a lot better time losing his virginity than 99% of the rest of us.

Donnie's mail continued:

The second reason I was emailing is that I am curious to see if you took in the show "Bottoms Up". It plays at the Flamingo, Monday-Saturday, in the afternoon. I thought that you might have seen it since the entrance price is pretty cheap, that being free. Well, free if you happened to pick up a coupon booklet from any casino, hotel, eatery, etc... Then you also have to buy a drink, so I guess, technically, it costs about three bucks.

It was a pretty funny show. Like most Vegas shows it started with some topless dancers, followed that with a short comedy routine, then went back to the topless dancers. Thing is that the second set of topless dancers were male, and one of them looked quite similar to you. I had mentioned this to my wife while we were watching the show and when we got back to the hotel I went to your site to find a photo, sure enough, she agreed that the guy looked a hell of a lot like you (maybe this is why eyewitness testimony should never be allowed in court).

While looking at the photo of you and comparing it to the memory of the we saw on stage, the wife commented that the hair was the same, the eyes were the same, the jaw was the same and etc. In fact there were only two reasons why she questioned if it was the same person; The first reason was that his chest/stomach was just absolutely ripped (no offense), you could have bounced a quarter off of any part of his abdomen. The second reason was that he seemed to have a small tattoo on his inner thigh (at least that is what my wife said, I didn't notice it, but, I was looking at someone else's candy).

I do understand that, in reality, the guy probably looks nothing like you. Things like hair and eye color are hardly the best identifiers, but, man, I really thought it could have been you.

So, were you a dancer in Vegas last July?

Just curious.

This question made Malaya laugh, at least. And just in case anyone else was wondering it, no I have never danced nude or semi-nude. At least not professionally, and not at all in Vegas. I was curious about the show though, once Donnie mentioned it, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be covered online other than with brief mentions on lots of "shows in Vegas" type pages. It's not mentioned on the official Flamingo website at all, where they stress their bigger name entertainment and don't mention strippers or whores at all, oddly enough.

And as for the physique, I'm not quite to quarter-bouncing fitness yet, but that's what 5 days a week at the gym and godawful powder diet cleansing is for, right?

The next vacation-related email came from A., who had some comments on Halo and video gaming in general.

As I was reading up on your adventures through this particular Xbox game while you were in Las Vegas, I noticed that you didnt really watch much of the cinematics, because they bring out a much deeper story for you than if you just play through.

Correction; we paid zero attention to the cinematics, and that's about par for the course in gaming sessions with more than one person, in my experience. None of us really cared about the game or the story; we were just having fun shooting things and shooting each other, and paying attention to the long cut scenes, which were 1) not very well-animated, 2) very long, and 3) full of words, was totally off our list of priorities. And that's how it goes most of the time with a bunch of people playing; if you wanted to watch a story you'd put in a DVD. You're all playing and you want to get back to playing, and death matches are not a spectator sport.

Unfortunately, lots of times companies rely on public play sessions for game feedback, and that can lead to things like the quests being nerfed or many more hints being put in for them, when play testers who raced through the game without paying any attention to the in game movies or NPC conversations get stuck on something any solo player taking a bit of care would breeze straight through. That's sort of what happened to the quest difficulty in D2 between my pre-beta play test and what the quest hints looked like when the game was released, at least.

A. continues:

You are right about the warthog, that thing drives like a canadian zamboni, what with slipping and sliding, but hey, that slipping and sliding 2 ton vehicle ( that you can manage to flip over but still cannot just punch everything to death ) makes for a wonderful death machine, simply by driving at enemies, and forcing one of those slides, you can run over grunts ( the tiny shrieking little cannon fodder of the game, you encountered them right after gettting a pistola from captain keys in level 1 ) Elites, those tall ones that seem to take charge and blow you away with the plasma rifle, and even hunters, the " giant robots " that kept killing you in act 3 after they show up on the grav lift in the third level.

...

I also recommened that you get an xbox if you enjoy consoles, because a) the xbox has a hard drive, so it doesnt need memory sticks unless you want to play from a certain spot on a friends same system, b) Xbox gets you twice the cool points as any other console, and c) there are tons of fun games on xbox, not to mention that xbox is made in America, and it would be wise to support the economy ^_^. The xbox also can play music cds, and with a small upgrade, can play dvd's as well.

We never played the missions again after the time I mentioned in the Vegas blogging, but we did find the Warthogs very fun to run over other players with, on some of the large outdoor death match levels. And while I don't have any consoles on the shopping list, I guess I'd look at an Xbox. I really pay no attention to consoles though, so other than knowing the Xbox and PlayStation are competing, I have no idea which is more popular, which has the better games, if the best games go cross platform, etc.  My ignorance is unlikely to change any time soon either, since we don't have time for gaming and even if we did, there are a ton of computer games we'd have to get through before looking at consoles.

Speaking of gaming, here's a mail from Aahz on that very subject, and a bit more.

Dude, you write a lot. I generally print out the daily update (any plans for a more printer-friendly version on the horizon?) and read the first part of it while I’m nuking my lunch in the kitchen here at work. It was 27 pages today! Sheesh. Good quality, though-I love Vegas and reading about it. (Only been there twice.)

...

Coincidentally, I recently re-installed Baldurs Gate 2 and have been playing it for the last week. I actually bought it when it first came out but I could never get into the slower pace of the game (compared to D2). But for whatever reason, this time it stuck and I’m really enjoying it. I played the original quite a bit, going through the game multiple times. (I also picked up Neverwinter Nights to play once I’ve finished BG2. Like Blizzard, Bioware hasn’t disappointed me yet.)

Last topic: Moving right along to the end of today’s blog, I saw Penn and Teller in Vegas. Great show; I highly recommend it.

On the length... yeah. I had no idea just how much I'd blogged while on vacation until I got home and pasted it into my usual HTML program, and saw that just that one file was like 174k of pure text. I'd initially planned to throw all the vacation blogging into one day, or two at most, but due to the length that was just out of the question. Hell, as Aahz points out, just the third day of it was 27 pages long, though that will obviously vary by your screen size and such. That was the longest of the 3 days, but not by all that much, and sorry but no, no plans for a printer friendly version. I never print out webpages so that sort of thing never occurs to me, but in some future php-style redesign of Black Champagne (one I'll be hiring someone to do, since learning the scripts for that and converting all the old pages myself would be impossibly time consuming) I'll definitely insist upon a script that has an easy option to convert to printer friendly. In the meantime feel free to open new word document, copy, paste, and control P if you must. You can even widen the margins to save paper.

As for gaming, there's been none of that since we returned, and after Malaya and me shared a semi-intense longing for some more Halo deathmatch the first couple of days back, we've largely settled back into our normal lives here. Lives that do not include any serious computer gaming, at this point.  And while I did mention Baldur's Gate in my vacation blog musings, it's no more than a "maybe some day" at this point. I'd probably do Warcraft 3 first anyway, since Malaya bought the battlechest months ago, and neither of us has yet so much as found the time to install it.

Actually, I've got the time, I just lack the organization.  I screw around too much and don't work enough, and then don't feel I can let myself enjoy any actual fun game play time since I've got too much work still to do. Ironic that I could play much more if I could only work harder in the first place.

And on the topic of Vegas shows, prepare for the big story, since it's something I wanted to blog about from Vegas, but never had time.

When I think back that's the only thing I really regret about our visit; that we didn't see more shows. Even the Excalibur show, cheesy and hokey as it was, provided some good memories and was a fun experience. We did see one other show, on the last day there, which is why I never had time to blog about it.  It was at the Hilton, and it was the Star Trek Experience. That show, like the Camelot Tournament of Kings at The Excalibur, was featured right at the top of Malaya's "must do" list pre-Vegas, which explained my attendance at both of them.

The Star Trek Experience

The Star Trek thing was sort of a museum in the hotel, with a large attached gift shop and Quark's Bar, a tavern done up in an outer space theme, with a Star Trek-centric menu.  I don't see the menu for Quark's online anywhere, but this review quotes a typical passage:

My husband and I split a Warp Core Breach (for two or more), and as he placed it in front of us he said, with little intonation, "No matter how fast you drink, how much you drink or how drunk you get, don't reach in and grab the dry ice -- it hurts!" The Warp Core is described on the menu: "Red Alert! Order this drink and prepare to separate your saucer section! Sensors indicate Bacardi Lemon, Bacardi Light, Bacardi Spice, Bacardi 151, Razzmatazz and So Be power drink. We add pure ice crystals from the planet Exo III. You'll need more than one officer to handle this situation." Essentially, it is a shot served in a fishbowl -- you can't beat that.

We ended up in the bar, and got pretty well hammered, but more on that later.

First of all, was the Experience. You can simply head down the stairs into the bar, and up the hallway into the gift shoppes, but the Experience itself comes in two flavors. The original one was a Next Generation themed thing called the Klingon Encounter, and the newer one was the Borg Invasion. They were something like $25 each, or you could buy the right to go on both as many times as you liked for $36 or so.

If you're ever planning on heading to Vegas and paying to go through these rides, you should stop reading here and skip to the end, since this is a spoiler for the surprises on the rides.

Still reading? Okay then. The basic theme of both rides is that your tour group is suddenly in the Star Trek world, due to the typical show scientific absurdity of a rip in the space time continuum, or something like that. The whole group of about 25 gets into an elevator, the lights go out and the floor shakes and you hear explosions, and when you come out you're in a perfect model of the Enterprise or a space station, with crew members in costume. From there they lead you through some scripted dangers, you see various other actors in full make up and costume (the Borg were pretty good) and one of the actors from the show talks to you via a projection system; I.E. they're on TV and you're watching it while the crew member actors talk back to the screen.

It's well done; everyone is in character and it looks just like the TV show, and I can imagine some young kids believing the whole thing. I doubt anyone on our tour did, and we didn't have any hardcore Trekkies joining in like some misguided soul at a Ren Faire, but the little play acting was entertaining enough.

The meat of each ride was a video program with everyone hustled into a projector room, and that's where they became a lot more or less fun.

The Klingon one was less well done, with fewer extras, and just a quick talk from Richer and Jordie as they explained that some renegade Klingons, with zero concern for the potential destruction of their entire future timeline, were after us since one of us was Captain Picard's distant ancestor. The Enterprise crew was going to try and get us back through the wormhole to our own day and age though, and for that they had to stick us into a shuttle craft.

From there it was pretty straight forward; the strapped us into chairs with motors in them and under the floor, and we watched some nice computer graphics as our ship flew and dove and dashed through a nebula, away from Klingons, and back to Vegas. Where another Klingon Bird of Prey showed up and nearly got us, until the Enterprise appeared and blew them away in "Han Solo at the Death Star" fashion (bonus points for getting that Star Trek TNG reference).  I got slightly car sick from that ride, as I always do in those sorts of simulators. I love real roller coasters, but my body somehow knows I'm not really moving as the screen shows on shaking chair in front of TV rides, and I always get queasy.

Wobbly as I was, I wasn't going to go on the Borg ride, if it had another one of those shaking chair movies. Fortunately, it did not. However, before I describe what it did have, I should mention the walkway into the rides. That was a major part of the Experience, since it was a sort of walking museum, with models and costumes and props from every version of the show in large glass storefront style cases. Running along the other wall was a lighted display of the entire Star Trek timeline, with DOBs of major characters, capsule summaries of key events in the various series, pictures, historical events in the future timeline of the show, and more. It was pretty entertaining, even for me, someone who hasn't watched more than a handful of episodes in any ST series since the early seasons of TNG.

Plus, since you have to walk past the whole museum/timeline as you wind your way towards the ride lines, you might as well read them as you go. I have no idea if they ever get lines that long and people spend hours waiting for the rides, but on the day we were there, during the relatively-busy Xmas season, we had no trouble walking up and being 10th or so in line each time, and that was after taking our time working through the museum part. Whether that means the exhibit is failing and they're losing money or not is unknown.

Anyway, the Borg Invasion was a bit better and more involved than the older Klingon ride. On the Borg one we appeared on a space station that was under attack by the Borg. The ominous cube sailed into sight, power went out, explosions went off, sparks flew, and suddenly there were the half a dozen guys in their Borg Cenobyte style costumes. The actors playing Federation characters were picked off or dragged up through the ceiling in Aliens style, the Borg kept coming, and we were quickly hurried into a shuttle; but fortunately one without the "if you suffer from vertigo you shouldn't ride this" warnings. I was going to get off there if it had been another shaking chair thing.

The Borg one was better though, it was a 3D ride and our shuttle was promptly captured by the Borg tractor beam. After we landed we got a speech from the bodiless-Borg Queen, who was a character in the last movie that no one saw, according to Malaya, who saw it. The plot of the ride was that we were a special batch of test subjects with some mysterious property in our blood that would enable us to fight off Borg infestation. The holographic doctor from the 2nd Enterprise series told us this in the first place, and then the Borg queen gave a long speech about resistance being futile while sending Borg eye-poking tentacles and other such things out at us, all of which looked "right at the tip of your nose" close with the 3D glasses we had on.

There were miscellaneous explosions and crashes and other things flying at our faces, until the glorious rescue commenced and we were all saved. The one thing I couldn't figure out was where the spray of water came from. On several occasions during the movie things were splatted right next to the screen, and each time we got a few drops of water on our foreheads or hands... but from where? The backs of the seats in front of us didn't have anything to spray it from, and the ceiling was at least 20 feet overhead, so it didn't seem the most efficient water delivery system. Still, misters up there were all I or Malaya or our friend M (R and C stayed in the casino and gambled rather than hitting the rides) could think of when we talked about it afterwards.

Overall, the Borg ride was a better show before the ride, and the ride itself was better, if only because we didn't get jostled around as much and dizzied. M wasn't bothered by it, but Malaya and me both got queasy on the Klingon ride, and while I expected it from my past experience with those sorts of rides, it was the first one Malaya had ever been on, and she never gets dizzy. I'm not sure either of them were worth the money, but given typical Vegas prices they're not a rip off, if you get some enjoyment from the museum and timeline on the way in.

Malaya and M both enjoyed the gift shop and they both even got their pictures digitally stuck into photos of a Borg crew, so they'd have something to remember the visit by. I passed on that and didn't see anything in the gift shop I wanted, but we did end up spending some time in the bar while we waited for C and R to find us, and after being captivated by the amusing bar menu, we went for a triple shot.  The options were any of the 12 or so shots listed, or even shot-sized versions of the martinis. Plus, if you got 3 at once it was slightly cheaper (like $15 for 3, rather than $6.50 each).  The presentation was good at least; the shots came in glasses that tapered to points and were impossible to sit on a bar, but since they came in a metal stand about a foot high with three arms sticking out with holes at the end to stick the shot glasses into, that wasn't a problem.

The bigger surprise was that all three of us, all very occasional drinkers, really enjoyed our shots, which were concocted from multiple colorful ingredients. We enjoyed them so much that we were going to get more, until I pointed out that full drinks were like $7 or $8, and we were paying $5 for about 1/12th of that in a funny cup. So we got full sized drinks, and they were way heavy on the liquor.

I don't remember what Malaya and M got; hell I hardly remember what I got, other than that it had about six ingredients and was served in a tall narrow glass, poured in so that it formed a horizontal rainbow of bright colors. Each layer had a different flavor, and I amused myself by moving my straw up and down and sucking from each type of liquor, while the bar's design seemed to become more and more amusing with every second, and my bar stool began moving in slow, steady circles beneath me.

I drank mine fast, (getting over being dizzy is thirsty business, damnit) and was left sucking ice cubes and wishing for dinner while Malaya and M sipped at theirs. We're all total lightweights since none of us drink more than about once a month though, and we were all feeling rather loopy by the time the drinks were gone and the rest of our party had assembled in Quarks. Fortunately we held it together well enough to ask the fully-costumed Klingon to pose in picture with us. I say fortunately since he was way in character, and snarling at rude people, giving serious consideration to our requests before saying, "I will permit it." and so on. Pretty fun, and not just for those of us who were not drunk.

From there we walked a while, found the Strip monorail, let the people who weren't drunk buy tickets, and all rode several tops until we were within walking distance of the Paris casino, where we hit the buffet, as I mentioned in my last blog from Vegas. I felt mostly sober by then, over an hour after finishing my drink, but Malaya and M were amusingly-bagged; Malaya going so far as to sit down several times during the long buffet line. She told me later that she actually fell asleep a couple of times while in line, sitting on the ground, surrounded by noisy strangers.

Ahh, the joys we miss out on by not drinking heavily more often!

We did recover enough to enjoy dinner, and one thing I discovered from drinking; it totally cured my lingering headache from the Klingon car sickness simulator ride. Ordinarily when I get dizzy I feel a little tension headache right above my nose for an hour or more, but in that case it was completely gone by the time we wobbled out of Quark's, on the way to the buffet.  I don't know if that would work after my usual dizziness from Kali class circling, but it's something to keep in mind. Plus, I could unleash my drunken novice technique, if need be.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.