Tuesday Foto Funnies

It has been brought to my attention by my luncheon date today that I've been a blogging slacker of late. When the Las Vegas Weekly comes out this week, you'll find out why my mind has been otherwise engaged, but nonetheless I decided I ought to feed the masses, such as they are, with some of those entertaining images I love to collect.

WTF is that atop? Well, in early March, I was hired by a trade publication to cover the Fun Expo, a big confab for the amusement park and family entertainment center -- "FEC" in the lingo -- industry. And one of the seminars I covered was all about throwing better birthday parties. One idea was a game where two teams stuff balloons inside the oversized shirts of the competitors. Here's the other lady:


And here's the whole room learning the importance of mascots and gettin' jiggy wit it:


Not your typical convention, huh? That's where, by the way, I learned of the automated cotton candy machine that made it into this March 26 version of this blog feature.

I had to get directions for David McKee of LVA's Stiffs & Georges blog to come subsitute host for Miles on The Strip a few weeks back. When I went to Google Maps for the LVRocks.Com studio, I saw this:


That little jog that re-aligns Maryland Parkway is called South Rue 13. Ooh la la, huh? How fancy for a run-down area with a truly gross 7 Eleven! I was sure that it was some sort of misprint, but there's also a Rue 13 street sign, too.

Near Rue 13, by the by, I spotted this inventive deployment of Strip junk:


Speaking of Blogger McKee, he's been busy noting that Harrah's Buffet of Buffets deal, at first $29.99, is now $39.99. Some believe Harrah's always planned to jack up the price, but this...


...proves otherwise. You may recall from magician Nathan Burton's appearance on The Strip, a wrap like that costs $25,000 or more. So for the foreseeable future, it seems, Harrah's will have a knowingly out-of-date or misleading billboard on Bally's. Or maybe someone can get out there with a bucket of red paint and fix that "2"? I mean, yeah, it'd ruin the view from a couple of rooms, but they're not selling out anyway, right?

Here's a Google alert I really wish my parents hadn't received:

I stopped in on Harrah's comic-magician Mac King's 10th anniversary-on-the-Strip party on Sunday, as I Tweeted. He's the homespun guy with Coke-bottle glasses who wears plaid suits, so I guess it makes sense that this appears in his living room:

That's Mac. He's funny. He has a syndicated Sunday comic, but the R-J cut their Sunday comics pages to four pages recently and decided the only Vegas-originating cartoon of the lot had to go. Way to support the hometown hero, Shermy!

It was a nice shindig with all the usual. You know, a little person dudded up like Col. Sanders passing out KFC...

...and the likes of Penn Jillette, Rita Rudner, Vinnie Favorito and other fellow Harrahite stars chilling by the blow-up flume:

It's tricky business letting hoards of people into your home, but this works:

On another note, given all my fascination with the taxi life lately, I spotted this and realized that cabbies clearly don't view the Las Vegas Monofail as competition anymore:

Remember how I dropped in on Turnberry Towers a couple weeks ago for a blog post? Well, this is what the lobby looks like...


...and this is what the inside of the elevator I took looked like:


Ain't that fancy?

My two favorite license plates lately:

And finally, when I'm done with big projects or long blog posts, I play a little Scrabble on ISC.ro. And look at what bingo (Scrabble lingo for using all your letters) I got last week:


That enough for ya, Amy? Well, is it? Huh? OK. Time to get get some real bylines now!