Whatever.

I just don't know. A week ago it seemed like everything was going to work out for the Penguins to stay in Pittsburgh. A new owner, a wealthy young Canadian digerati hockey fan from a town too small to have its own NHL team but close enough to commute to games. The prospect of a new arena, whether via the Isle of Capri casino proposal or Plan B, which the new owner had finally somewhat endorsed.

Now it's all gone to shit. Jim Balsillie pulled out of the deal suddenly last week. The announcement came at 6 p.m. on a Friday, just an hour and a half before a really good home game (and tuque night!). Supposedly it had to do with the NHL wanting him to agree to never ever move the team ever. Stupid NHL.

Did I trust Balsillie not to move the team? No, but I believed that keeping it here was going to be a better business decision than moving it. I trusted him to give us the benefit of the doubt if other factors were equal.

At least they get to keep his deposit.

Second strike, today the gaming commission awarded the one license for a slots casino to the Mystic Star group. You might wonder what this has to do with a hockey team, but one of the competing applicants, Isle of Capri, promised to build a nice new hockey arena for free as part of their casino complex. Free. Gratis. At no cost to you. The Penguins made a deal with IOC that included the fact they could negotiate only with them as long as the proposal was valid, so there's no back-up plan.

And really, Lemieux Group has given us a fair shot to get them a new arena already. They've been telling us for years that the team is for sale and it needs a new arena to stay in Pittsburgh. What exactly did we think was going to happen?

On the other hand, you kind of have to wonder if there was something really crummy about the IOC casino proposal and they felt they needed to give us a free hockey arena to make up for it. If so, it wasn't obvious - I didn't see any problems in what I read about it, and the politicians who evaluated the plan seemed to say it was fine.

The one bright spot in the casino deal is that if it's located on the North Shore I'll never have to see it.

So, where does that leave my team? It's for sale to the highest bidder and the arena lease expires this spring. We obviously don't deserve an NHL franchise. Maybe they'll move to a nice city and I can go there. I'll have to change the blog subtitle, but that's just a few electrons. I guess 40 years of history doesn't count for much with local politicians.

Depressing Post-Gazette coverage:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06354/747594-100.stm

Better article (but still depressing):
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06355/747842-336.stm

Wrath of God

stray leaves,
originally uploaded by erink.

Or possibly just a real aggressive weather front.

Today it's dropping from 70 degrees (yes it's December 1) to the 20s. It's a little windy.

I found out the downstairs PC wasn't connected to the UPS properly when the power went out. Hey, but the printer stayed on, that's important. Right.

There was an exciting moment when I tried to close the kitchen window. It was blowing pretty hard, and as soon as I slid the window down it blew in at the top, the whole bottom pane tilted toward me. Okay, so gotta keep that one latched.

The part that pissed me off, though, was the leaves. On Monday I did my "last" leaf cleanup of the season - around here you are actually supposed to sweep the leaves into the street. Then the street sweeper picks them up. So I went out Monday afternoon and cleaned off the last few leaves of the season. This afternoon I went out and the leaves from the neighbor's oak tree have freed themselves and they're all over my yard again. I swear, none of those were there the other day!

Ah well. Time to go find my trash cans before it gets dark.

Safety First?

I don't care if it makes me a Luddite, some things just should not talk.

No.

Not ever.

Eeeew.

Bomb Dogs Sniff Out Human Cannonball

I love this story.

The circus was in town through Sunday, and since we have homeland insecurity now we apparently do routine searches of our arenas. Sunday morning, a bomb-detector dog alerted on a trailer in the parking lot next to the building.

Turns out the trailer belonged to the Human Cannonball.

It was empty, but I suppose the dog actually detected explosive residue.

I guess it's getting dangerous to be shot through the air in this political climate.

The full story:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06310/736106-100.stm

Trader Joe's Comes To Pittsburgh

And gets full.

Painting on 'Ludes

I was happy to discover that my local PBS station is running something called "The Best of Joy of Painting." It's been ages since I encountered the soporific tones of artist Bob Ross, using housepainting brushes to magically conjur trees and fields and mountains from thin air.

He was working on a mountain waterfall, so I didn't see him paint any "happy little trees," but he there was a trippy moment when he told us to "begin thinking about all the mist that would happen down here" at the bottom of the waterfall. "It would hit and splash and churn and carry on. Probably make a lot of noise, too," he said, coincidentally drumming the canvas with the brush, just "a little bit of titanium white on the corner."

It was all so fascinating, the dark studio and the hypnotic voice and the stupid, coarse paintbrushes - and even palette knives - laying on smudges of paint that suddenly turned into such realistic images. I remember sitting on the wall-to-wall carpet in my grandmother's living room and watching this weirdo paint, wondering vaguely what my grandmother (an amateur oil painter herself) thought of him, and why all painters didn't work this way since his technique was so effective.

This particular episode broke up the painting with some strange video footage of two squirrels Bob said he'd raised and released. He said they were brothers, but for some reason they kept mounting each other.

And by accident, I also discovered a great new trick for watching the show: with TiVo you can watch it backwards. All the trees disappear!

My Trip to Venus

After passing this place for years, I finally got a chance to go in last month. (I stopped on the way back from my corn-picking trip near Mars, PA.) It's frequently closed when I'm out here, and I'm usually only there on the way to or from visiting relatives, so I don't get to stop for food.

The Venus Diner is on Rt. 8 north of Pittsburgh, near the PA Turnpike (Butler Valley exit?) and a few miles south of the town named Mars. I heard there's also a town near there named Venus. Various websites say it's from 1957 or 1959.

The exterior has seen better days, but the design is lovely, especially around the entrance.





I'd filled up on pastries on the way out that morning, so, uncharacteristically, I ordered a lunch dish - hot turkey sandwich. I know it's not how you're supposed to eat, but it's kind of fun when everything on the plate is the same color.



The diner makes its own pies. But I overheard the waitress telling another customer that they had to stop selling cream pies. Apparently the health department decided their built-in refrigerator cases aren't cold enough to store cream pies legally. "Everything was fine for 30 years," she said.

Being an old Twin Peaks fan, I ordered cherry.

I've always hoped that the diner was doing well - from the outside it looks pretty run down. Inside is another story - all shiny and beautiful. Next time, breakfast!

The rest of my Venus Diner photos are on Flickr.

Greetings from the Pacific Northwest

My first day in Seattle, I'm walking down the street where my friends live and I see a bumper sticker that says "Consider Karma." It's on a big, gas-powered SUV.

Local Food Week

It's "Local Food Week" in the Burgh. This is a new event organized by the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture to focus attention the local food culture and how to be a part of it. You don't even have to cook, since several restaurants routinely use local products.

PASA's website has a nice local food guide. You can search for farm markets, you-pick farms, CSA (consumer-supported agriculture, or farm share) programs, and businesses that sell local foods. If you're jealous of my veggies from last post, you can use the search to find your own farm share! (Mine is Kretschmann Farms.)

I started celebrating a little early by volunteering to pick corn with the local food bank, out at a farm near Mars. The Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank has a gleaning program, which means they get crop donations from farmers, they just have to go out and pick them. These fields have been picked already by professionals, but there is still food in them - I guess it ripened late or just was missed the first time around. So the food bank gets volunteers to come out and harvest it, and then they get fresh produce.

Somehow I lived in Pennsylvania almost 40 years without ever having picked corn. You can tell people who grew up around corn because they become corn snobs. They won't eat certain types of corn, no matter how fresh it is. One of the volunteers said he used to pick a few dozen before breakfast growing up, he had pretty high standards about what was worth picking. As a city kid, I had pretty low standards about what was worth picking.

When corn isn't ripe, the ears are flexible and a little squishy. If you open them to look, the kernels are little squares, kind of folded in on themselves. Ripe kernels are hard and round, which you can feel from the outside. The ears also have a different shape when they're all plumped up. The kernels develop from the bottom to the top. The riper ears also are easier to pick, they break off better than the younger ones - I already knew this about tomatoes and berries from my youth.

In the field we picked, all the ears were about waist level or lower, which I found surprising because I think I'd seen corn plants with ears at the top. I don't know if it was the type of corn or the fact that we were gleaning.

The food bank had a panel truck with big metal bins inside. We each got an orange plastic utility bucket and two rows to work. Runners worked the margins, swapping out empty buckets for full ones and taking the corn back to the truck. It was pretty easy, and the weather was good (overcast with sprinkles before and after we worked). We got a lot of corn and finished in only a few hours.

I didn't think to bring my camera out into the field, which I regretted because there were plenty of cool things to photograph. There's a weed version of Morning Glory that wraps itself around the corn plants, it's got wonderful white flowers. It's a bitch to cut through to get the corn out. There were amazing bugs, big bees and spiders that liked the flowers. There were groundhog holes along the rows two to three feet across. There was corn smut, a type of grey/black fungus that looked like it was pretty gross if you accidentally touched it, but sometimes it made fabulous, flowery extrusions off the top of the ear.

So it was pretty cool.

On the way home I finally got a chance to stop at the Venus Diner on Route 8, which I've driven by for years. But that's another post.

This Week's Veggies

The box is getting heavier.

Random Internet Goodness

Because some things are worth passing along:

How to Be a Ninja:
homepage.ntlworld.com/philbooth/How_To_Be_A_Ninja.jpg

The Best Diet Coke & Mentos Video:
eepybird.com/dcm1.html
It's like the freakin' Bellagio in some dude's back yard.
Here's some science stuff about why it happens (via the Post-Gazette and Mythbusters): www.post-gazette.com/pg/06220/711813-237.stm

Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates:
www.craphound.com/images/piratekeyboard.jpg

Yum?

From a Mexican grocery in Pittsburgh. They have to know, they put it in the window.

Mike Lange: WTF?

It was more than a month ago, but at the time I was just speechless. I mean, the guy's in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Voice of the Penguins for 30 years. You don't just drop a guy like that. But they did - back at the end of June, Fox Sports Pittsburgh took an early exit clause in his contract to drop play-by-play man Mike Lange from the Penguins TV broadcast team. I'll be cow-kicked.

As I mentioned in my first post, Lange was the inspiration for this 'blog's title and URL. When I didn't have cable, Lange was on radio. When I got cable, he was doing play-by-play on TV. I can't imagine watching Penguins hockey without him.

Supposedly it was a money issue, a tough contract negotiation. They're replacing him with Paul Steigerwald, who used to do color commentary on the radio with Lange and stayed on radio as play-by-play until now. I have nothing against Steigy, but even if he was a really good play-by-play man, he couldn't compete with Lange. And if FSN wanted a "fresh voice" as they say, then they would have hired someone new to the market.

I suppose there will be a lot of changes this season. At the end of last season the Pens fired their general manager (another hall-of-famer) Craig Patrick, famous for the trades that got us the Stanley Cup. I don't disagree with that, it seemed like he'd been coasting for a while. The new GM did some housecleaning, dropping scouting and assistant coaching staff that had been with the organization for years (Joe Mullen, Rick Kehoe), and even the bench staff like 18-year equipment manager Steve Latin. (Sivvy!)

And purportedly we have a new owner now. We're working on a new arena - I just hope it's in Pittsburgh.

But all is not lost. This week Lange announced that he's taken his old job back, doing radio play-by-play for the games. (Which is now Steigerwald's old job!) The Penguins control their radio staff, not the TV staff. So I'll have to figure out a way to synchronize the radio broadcast with the TV - because I use a TiVo, which buffers live TV, my video is a few seconds behind broadcast realtime, and the radio has typically been several seconds ahead when I've had both on in the past.

But still, firing Lange? WTF?

Post-Gazette coverage:

Cow-kicked: FSN fires Lange as Penguins' TV voice (Friday, June 30, 2006)
Strong negative reaction surfaces to dismissal of Penguins' TV voice (Saturday, July 1, 2006)
Shero continues to make changes (Friday, July 28, 2006)
Penguins, Lange agree to 1-year deal (Friday, August 4, 2006)

FLOYD LANDIS IS A GOD!

I went on vacation and missed two stages of the Tour de France on travel days. The first one put my boy Floyd Landis in the yellow jersey for the first time in his life. The second one, which was yesterday, saw Landis figuratively crash and burn in the mountains, falling from number one in the G.C. to 11th and losing a huge amount of time - about 10 minutes - to drop over 8 minutes in the chase.

So he even comes out after that stage in the evening and talks to reporters. He says he had a really bad day. Everybody thinks he bonked but he says that wasn't it - but apparently people deny it when they do. He says he doesn't expect to win the race any more, but that he's going to continue and keep fighting.

The last mountain stage is today. A large breakaway group goes out at the beginning - 14 riders, no GC contenders. About an hour in, Phonak ups the pace at the front of the peloton, and then maybe 40 minutes later, Landis breaks away. Comes up to the breakaway group and immediately passes them. From this point in the race he never drafts again, because even when he rides with another guy for a few miles, he won't pull him. Landis rides the rest of the race - and I think it was like 100K - as a 1-man breakaway. Water bottle in hand until the last climb, mind you, and taking on food every few minutes from his team car. He made up his 8-minute gap and with his time bonuses is only 30 seconds out of the lead now. Damn.

Oh, it was his first stage win too, but that's like getting the Vezina trophy along with the Stanley Cup. Now he says he'll have to win another one on Saturday (the last stage, an individual time trial) to get the rest of his lead back.

His personal coach says he trains on rides like this, long solo rides. Also it's more likely a lone rider can have success in a mountain stage because drafting doesn't figure in very much when everyone's climbing. But it's still amazing.

Of course you all must have heard that he's got practically no bone left in his right hip because of a complication after he broke it in 2003. He's taking time off after the Tour de France to have hip replacement surgery! I suppose that might have figured in to this move - he has nothing to save for next year because he doesn't know if he can race again after the operation, nobody ever has. Then again, nobody ever came back from super-metastatic cancer before Armstrong.

Anyway, it was a pretty exciting day.

Hope he wouldn't mind my saying that god thing - he was raised Mennonite (he got special permission from his spriritual leader to wear lycra when he started getting serious about racing mountain bikes). I meant one of those other gods, you know.

Oh yeah, George Hincapie is still my boy too. It's not exclusive, okay?

Handy links
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycling_terminology
- http://www.olntv.com/tdf/

What Were We Using Before, Old And Lousy?

Just "non-ultra".

We just happen to have an opening...

Spotted at a local chain restaurant. Since it's hard to see - the sign on the right starts "Funeral Arrangements for Barb N***"; the sign on the left says "Now Hiring - Experienced Server".

I actually posted this, originally, from my new phone! So that's why the photo is so crappy. That and reflections. I thought it would be coarse to take too long with it....

Days of Disc and Chicken

MikeSell's
Originally uploaded by erink.

Spent last weekend at Poultry Days, a combination Ultimate Frisbee tournament and local Ohio town fair (Versailles OH Poultry Days). These two strange bedfellows have been together for 25 years, and the relationship seems pretty stable.

The tournament is enormous: 65 teams. But it's not all that hard core - it's about having fun, playing ultimate, and eating chicken. All the teams have to have chicken-related names, so you get things like Breasts and Thighs, It's Raining Hen, Automatic for the Chicken (from Athens GA), Gonzo and Camilla, and Party Fowl. We played against Cock Block, a longtime Poultry Days contender with team members from Colorado, Illinois, and I think Arkansas - apparently the team just reconstitutes itself for the tournament every year. Everyone camps in this little park next to the fields, there's a "Cool Hand Luke Egg Eating Contest" on Friday night - a charity fundraiser, with per-egg sponsorship for each contestant. And strangely enough, it's technically an "open" tournament - which is an ultimate euphemism for "men's" since it just means there's no requirement to play any women - but all the teams that play are mixed.

Unlike all Poultry Days in recorded history, it was cold - low 60s - and pouring rain almost all day Saturday. So there are no pictures.... Unfortunately my team lost all our games, though we did get better and better while we played. I actually played pretty well, for me - not sure if I've finally learned from all that training or if it was the magical +3 gloves of power I was wearing in the rain.

Then there's the fair. After playing until almost 6 on Saturday we walked over to the fair to get chicken dinners (and showers, at the high school) and check things out. There were rides, food, and games. There was a big bingo tent. Apparently in the daytime there were things like flea markets and craft shows, but I didn't get to see any of those. (I probably would have liked staying at the fair longer Saturday night, but I felt the need to bond with my team over canned beer back at the campsite.)

I did go to the cane booth and win a cane. You throw a ring over this rack of canes and then if you ring a cane, you get it. I was trying to throw the rings straight sideways (the ultimate term would be a push pass), which wasn't working out very well, and the booth guy advised me to spin them, "like a frisbee. You know how to throw a frisbee, don't you?" he said. "Well, that's up for debate," I said. But I did win a cane. I also liked the sign at the booth that warned you not to use the canes for any inappropriate activity at the fair. No, I didn't get a picture....

I did not stop by the ping pong pitching booth and try to win a live baby rabbit. I did meet another ultimate player who had won a live rabbit, and was trying to figure out how to get it home on the plane. We told him a shoebox wouldn't work, but I don't know what happened after that. They did sell him a little hamper to hold the bunny in, and gave him a handout with helpful information like "Never pick a rabbit up by its ears." Hmmm, maybe I am glad to live in an urban area.

But man, that was some good chicken. It's not just that we were hungry, in fact, we bought an extra dinner before we left Sunday, carried it home in the cooler, and reheated it yesterday - it was still damn good. Your $7 chicken dinner comes in a big styrofoam box with a little carton of chemical orange drink. There's a thigh-to-breast of chicken in there, some MikeSell's Potato Chips, one of those ridiculously sweet dinner rolls (with faux butter), and a cup of applesauce. And a spork, napkin, and wet-nap. I was expecting a red barbeque sauce (which I don't like) but it was more of a salt-and-pepper rub with some hardwood smoke flavor. It was mighty fine. The potato chips were MikeSell's, which come from Dayton (about 30 miles away). MikeSell's are my favorite, and they aren't sold in Pennsylvania. After the salty chicken they were a little lost, but I did save some for later.

Poultry Days also has a beauty contest (or some sort of pageant) where they crown Miss Chick. We saw her around the fields on Sunday; the tournament winners get a team picture with her. I hear she and her two-woman entourage played a few points in the all-star game on Saturday evening too!

We went back to the fair for a little while on Sunday and I got to watch a little of the Kiddie Tractor Pull. It's a complete plug-and-play event, it comes in its own trailer. The kiddies get a pedal tractor attached to a sledge kind of thing. As they pedal forward, the weight on the sledge moves so that it becomes harder to pull. I wanted to try it, but it didn't seem appropriate (I wasn't sure I could pedal the thing anyway). If you get to the 5' mark you get a ribbon.

I hope we get to go again next year. Poultry Days is a legendary tournament, so spots are competitive and partially based on making a good impression on the tournament directors - which I hope we did - but I know we can do better. On Saturday we were riding back from the remote fields on the shuttle bus (there were two converted school bus party buses running shuttles) and the last woman to get on the bus pulled out a boom box and a gallon of vodka (in plastic - no glass allowed!). Someone else contributed a 2-liter of Coke as chaser and we passed them around the bus twice in the 8-minute ride back to the park. On my way off the bus, I decided: next year, I want to be that person!

Exotic Flavors of the Orient

I went to the local Japanese grocery store yesterday. Since I don't cook, I typically spend most of my time in the candy aisle.

I can read some Japanese, but that's not always enough to figure out what things are - turns out Japanese fruit-flavored candies come in a few flavors that we don't use. One is muscat, which I've seen before but haven't tasted, and the one I bought yesterday, acerola.

Muscat is a kind of grape, and the candy usually has pictures of green grapes on the package. Wikipedia says it's one of the few grapes eligible for making sherry.

Acerola is a totally different plant from anything we eat. I've heard of it before, mainly in vitamin supplements - apparently it's a potent source of vitamin C. It's a berry, like a crabapple or cherry, that grows on a little shrub in the West Indies and South America. The flavor is similar to sour cherry, but supposedly the plants aren't related - and the fruit only looks a little like cherries, from the pictures I saw. The candy was pretty good.

Then there's lychee, which is more and more common here now. They show up in the produce department at Whole Foods occasionally, and we've actually been buying bags of lychee gummy candies from the Asian grocery store for a few months. I was happy to finally learn how to pronounce lychee from the Japanese kana on the bag - the first syllable rhymes with fly, not with see. I'm a big fan of the candy, though one of my friends said it kind of tasted like perfume.

There's another mysterious Japanese fruit I've encountered in non-candy form at a local restaurant: yamamomo. It looks a little like a lychee from the outside, but it's more like a raspberry, with little sections. I think the name is fun to say (I'm guessing it means "mountain peach" but you never know with Japanese, there are so many homonyms). Yamamomo. Ha.

Joys of home ownership

white violets
Originally uploaded by erink.

My notebook computer has become more and more unstable, and so I'm a bad blogger. No cookie.

The beau and I are discovering the joys of lawn ownership. Back when we each had our own place, we didn't care so much what our yards looked like, just managed to keep the grass under 8" most of the time. But now that we have a new neighborhood, we actually care what our neighbors think about us - at least so far!

A few weeks ago I had my first experience with internal combustion lawn tools when I decided to mow the grass. It was terrible. My arm got sore pulling the cord to start the engine, the fumes made me sick, and I spilled gasoline everywhere when I turned the thing over to see why it had stalled. Plus the mower was heavy and sprayed poo and old mulch on me. I'm starting to understand my family's love for electric mowers - I think this was my dad's bias since he and his father were longtime Westinghouse men. In retrospect, it seemed a bad choice because my childhood home had a huge grass yard, and so did my grandfather's place. I distinctly remember yards and yards of orange extension cords, and you'd see Dad off in the distance with the cord slung over his shoulder.

As the spring went on, we couldn't help but notice the big yellow spots on the front yard weren't getting any nicer. My pseudo-in-laws advised us to de-thatch and replant with perennial grass seed. Off to the home improvement superstore for a thatching blade for the mower, grass seed, and to read all the labels for "weed & feed" treatments. The grass seed told us we needed fertilizer and to water, so we got a new hose and a sprinkler. Luckily, it started raining a few days ago and hasn't stopped since, so my battles with the sprinkler are over for a while.

On the bright side, we have flowers everywhere. We haven't done a lot of yard planning, the people before us had lots of plantings and so far we're just seeing what turns up. We have azaleas and rhododendrons and tulips and some other flowering bushes I don't know. There are two orange azaleas, which seem a little weird to me, but they're pretty. And we have a big honeysuckle bush next to the back porch - the fragrance has been amazing the last few weeks. Haven't seen any hummingbirds yet.

Also I've found these weird white violets in the neighborhood; there are a few in the yard. This was a factor in our eventual decision to avoid the "weed & feed" lawn treatment, since it kills all broadleaf weeds like clover and violets.

In other news, we removed the large bird feeder, which has cut down on the pigeon population a bit. The squirrels are still there, but a friend of ours who lives across the park says he's been seeing owls and kestrels, so we figure we're still feeding the birds, indirectly!

As God Is My Witness, I Will Never Wear Gauchos Again!

I thought it was just a few crazy people, but now I've seen gauchos in a department store ad. The new ones look actually uglier than the ones I had in the 80s, these are more typically knit and flared and above or at the knee, plus there's this new thing about wearing them with boots. WTF?

In the same ad I found a picture of a denim skirt with black, lace-tipped leggings worn underneath. I knew I should have kept those!

In other news, I heard last week that a 10-year-old girl was protesting her right to wear an obscenely short skirt in school. Who would let a 10-year-old girl wear an obscenely short skirt anyway? She said the principal told her, "Your skirt has to be longer, because the boys are getting older."

I don't see what we have done to deserve these fashions. They manage to be both ugly and ridiculous at the same time. I've seen skirts, in my size, that would be indecent if I tried using them as a tube top. It's literally freakish. Especially considering how fat our kids are now - I mean, I'm really happy that these girls have a positive body image, but some of them really shouldn't. There are things I just don't need to see. In some ways, I dread the coming of summer.

Mysteries of the Dollar Store

foreign_tissues1
Originally uploaded by erink.

(Or, The Case of the Translated Tissues)

Couple weeks ago I went to a local dollar store. I got away for less than $10, but I did impulse-buy this pack of tissues that was at the register. They actually have really cool packages, much more stylish than I'd ever seen.

Wasn't till I got them home and was playing with them that I saw the writing on the package. It's one of those languages I don't even recognize. According to omniglot.com, I think it's Thai.


The rest of the story...


Thank goodness.

Vegas, Baby!

flamingo_1
Originally uploaded by erink.

Spent 5 days in Vegas last week, it was my first time there. Though I have gobs and gobs of things to talk about, that doesn't make a good blog post, so you'll get (I hope) the witty highlights.

So shiny!

We thought about staying at the Flamingo, but ended up at Caesar's Palace, which is just across the street. This worked out great, because Caesar's was a bit more ridiculous inside, and we got to look at Flamingo's signage all the time. I took a bunch of pictures of signs, which I'm slowly uploading to Flickr. Check out my Vegas set, which I hope will be growing!

Among the many amenities of our hotel rooms (we moved once) were ergonomic toilets. Seriously, the seats are designed with these leg grooves that wedge your butt down and your legs apart. I guess Caesar's just wants to make everything a little easier for their guests.

Casinoooooooos!

As I expected, casinos are designed to disorient. Caesar's is gigantic, we spent the first evening just wandering around inside. There's a mall, a couple nightclubs, a bunch of restaurants, a main casino, and several mini-casinos. You get a map when you check in that tells you which tower to find to get to your room. There are no windows, no clocks, and no exits! If you follow an exit sign you'll probably find an emergency-only exit. In fact, the entrance that was closest to our room is actually an entrance only - you can't go out the same doors.

Also, there's this weird pervasive slot machine sound. Kind of a gurgling little tune. You just have to hear it.

I didn't expect the casinos to be so stinky. Smoking is allowed just about everywhere in Las Vegas. I hadn't realized how much I'd become used to smoke-free living.

Crossing the Street

There's a special way to do this on the Strip. There are pedestrian overpasses at most of the major intersections, though getting onto them is sometimes confusing. Also, a lot of the casino complexes are connected to each other by walkways, so you don't even have to go outside. This was kind of convenient for us, because we had crummy weather the whole time - it's normally in the 70s this time of year, but we maxed out at 60 about once, plus it rained twice.(If this was payback for our freakishly rain-free visit to Hilo, Hawaii a few years ago, I'll take it!)

The Vegas "Experience"

"Experience" is the special Vegas word for things that are fake. "The Eiffel Tower Experience" is what you get when you ride up to the observation deck at the fake Eiffel tower at Paris Las Vegas. "Star Trek - The Experience" is what you pay $40 to see at the Hilton. "The Fremont Street Experience" is the sky-lighting show they dreamt up to get people to visit the original downtown. Oh, yes, you're on Fremont Street, but did you have the Experience?

My favorite was the Penn & Teller "Box Viewing and Envelope Signing Experience," which takes place in the hour before the Penn & Teller show. Penn Jillette (on bass) and pianist Mike Jones (who has ram horns tatooed on his bald head!) play jazz, and the audience is invited on stage to inspect two props that are used in the show.

To Boldly Go

"Star Trek - The Experience," which is an attraction at the Hilton near the convention center, was pretty cool. There are two "rides" and I don't even think you can buy them separately. Do the Borg first, because it's got a better beginning (lots of human interaction) but a mediocre end (the main action is a 3-D movie). I kept wanting to try pushing buttons on the wall displays in the "briefing rooms" where you start out the ride. The Klingon ride is in a motion simulator and there's lots of aggressive space flight that I found a bit nauseating, but it's pretty cool. It's got much better effects and better pacing, though the Borg ride probably wins on plot.

The Star Trek Hilton also provided prime shopping fodder. Too bad we couldn't think of anyone appropriate to buy the "I'm With Illogical --> " t-shirt. I got a spiff classic Trek toy/replica phaser. It has a "type 1" (black, cell phone shape) phaser that you can detatch from the "type 2" (gray, gun-shaped) phaser. It has dials and lights and even had a sound effect for "overload". It was totally worth having to check luggage on the way home.

The Experience Continues

Speaking of airport security - at the Vegas airport they run these cute informative videos while you're waiting in line at security. They have various Vegas archetypes illustrating airline regulations - there was one with a magician removing "loose change" from his ears, one with medieval type warriors dropping off maces and swords and chain mail before going through, one with Wolfgang Puck about taking open food through security, and one with a Klingon who wouldn't remove his headphones. You can see them on tv.accessvegas.com/play.php?id=105&vid=251 - though I don't see the Puck video here just now.

Unintentional Exercise

Walking - so much walking. We were center strip, so we tried walking to a lot of things, but the whole "strip" is like 4 miles. The longest we walked was to the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, which is on the highway south of Luxor. That was way too long, but we did get to check out the fabulous arcade in the Luxor on the way back.

Intentional Entertainment

So we also saw shows. We saw Follies Bergere, a somewhat dated showgirl show. We had crummy seats at a back table, I had to lean way out to see half the stage, but it was worth doing if not for full price.

We saw two Cirque du Soleil shows (of the 5 resident shows in Vegas!): O and Zumanity. O is still the most amazing, it's staged in this custom built pool stage, and people can enter and exit via the pool. There are trapeze artists flying into the pool, clowns sailing in the pool, and then in the next moment someone will be walking across the surface of the water. Pretty sweet. Some other shows have started doing similar tricks, so don't go see any of those unless you've already done O. At one point in the show, the stage floor platform comes up and beaches these 6 or 8 SCUBA divers in full gear - these are actual support staff for the show!

Zumanity is unlike other Cirque shows, it's adults only and has only about 30% amazing feats and 70% titillation - but very high grade titillation. It was awesome. I mean, who wouldn't like to see scantily clad twin contortionists cavorting in a giant fishbowl?

I think the show I liked best was Penn & Teller. Even though I'd seen some of the bits before, it was just cool to see them in person. Maybe I was starstruck, I have always thought they were awesome. Plus after the show they hung out in the lobby and signed autographs and took pictures with everyone, which was majorly cool. We also enjoyed their ads wherever we saw them. ("Evil, as it turns out, has two names.")

Some show strangeness: There are no intermissions, and no program books. Also, you can take your drink in (you pretty much can take a drink anywhere on the Strip, you see abandoned glassware everywhere), but you have to use a plastic cup.

Atypical Tourism

We even left the city once and went mountain biking. Boulder City Outfitters
(www.bouldercityoutfitters.com) will pick you up from your hotel and take you to Bootleg Canyon. The rental bikes weren't the best, but it was fun. I'm a relatively timid mountain biker, and we're both out of shape, so we stuck to some of the tamer trails - there was a lot of variety, but a little too much climbing. I was glad to see some of the local terrain, since it was my first desert oasis (you can sometimes see mountains behind the casinos, if you look). They also run kayaking and some other kind of nature tours.

Winning Big as a Low Roller

What else - gambling? We were too intimidated to try any of the table games, but I did put a dollar in the Star Wars themed "penny slots". I was down to about $0.40 when I hit something good - so I left! I won $10.70.

Everything Else

There was enough stuff we didn't get to that I'll have to go back in a few years. We never did manage to see the exploding volcano at Mirage, or the smarmy "Sirens of TI" show. We didn't make it off strip to the Liberace Museum, the Atomic Testing Museum, or Hoover Dam. But maybe I'll wait until I get through posting all the good pictures before planning the next trip!

What is the Flavor of One Hand Clapping?

optimum_zen
Originally uploaded by erink.

Found this in the supermarket the other day. Now we don't have to spend hours in boring meditation to achieve enlightenment, we can just buy this cereal!

Now, with most religions, I would expect the followers would find something like this a bit offensive (didn't some car company name a truck Brahma a few years ago?). But the Zen Buddhists that I know seem pretty laid back about such things. So it could be worse.

But still, it's a pretty lame marketing gimmick. Which is why I'm more than a little ashamed to admit it, but I actually bought the instant oatmeal version of this a week later. It was on sale, and organic. The oatmeal actually didn't tell you what flavor "zen" was, though. (Apparently it's cranberry and ginger; not bad, but the ginger is a little weird with milk.)

Research Shows - Birds Do Not Eat Fruit

Never mind what you read on the internet or in the newspaper, they just don't eat it. I've put apples and oranges out many a time, different locations and different seasons, and they never ate a one. What, they want organic? Okay, it wasn't exactly fresh. But still.

In the mean time, here are a few photos from our squirrel feeders.





It could be worse; at the old place we had pigeons. Strong, healthy pigeons (they learned to perch on that big silver feeder), but still not as cute.

She Wants to Sell My Monkey

I've been following ice hockey since the late 80s. It was a lucky time to start, being in Pittsburgh, because I got to follow the whole storyline of the Pittsburgh Penguins' back-to-back Stanley Cup wins.

Play-by-play announcer Mike Lange has been with the Pens longer than me. When I started watching, not all the games were on TV, and Lange did radio. KDKA-TV, the local CBS affiliate, had the broadcast contract, but if the game didn't sell out, they wouldn't show it. There may have been a cable deal, but we didn't have cable, so most games, unless we had tickets, I listened to the radio. Eventually Lange moved on to doing the TV games when that got to be the more popular way to see the games, and he's even in the Hockey Hall of Fame now, I suppose for being so cool. He's quite a good announcer and hockey analyst, and of course he has encyclopedic knowledge of the team. It's pretty common for him to say something about a particular player being due for a goal a few minutes before that player scores.

But my point actually was to explain the URL. See, Lange has these bizarre catch phrases that he uses to celebrate Penguins goals. "She wants to sell my monkey." "Scratch my back with a hacksaw." "Let's go hunt moose on a Harley." "Buy Sam a drink and get his dog one too." "Call Arnold Slick from Turtle Crick." "Oh no, Eddie Spaghetti." "Great balls of fire." Sitting here trying to find an open Blogspot address that had something to do with my life, I fell back on Mike Lange. I guess it also could have something to do with that hockey game on TV across the room right now, too (though it's the Olympics, not NHL).

So, monkey sales are open.

I heard that some hockey friends of my dad's tried to get the officiant to work a Langeism into their wedding ceremony, back in the early 90s. He apparently wasn't a hockey fan, though, because he said something about spanking his monkey instead.

I still have Penguins season tickets, though it's been a lot tougher being a Pens fan in the last few years. Those of us who made it through the fire sale of 2003, when every player I'd ever loved was traded away for peanuts (mainly young prospects and cash) in the course of about two weeks, had little left to lose. Bankruptcy is old news, as is Lemieux's hit-or-miss health. It may be optimism, but I think Pittsburgh politicians would be too embarassed to let us lose the team altogether. After last season (two years ago, before the NHL lockout), I have learned some coping skills to deal with an abysmal record, but this season's failure to deliver even with established talent has been a bit hard to take. Still, Crosby and Fleury are awesome even when the team does poorly. And, I mean, what are you going to do, not watch hockey?