From Politics To Poker

OK, I'm ALMOST there.

I think I may have finally stopped writing about the 2010 midterms with this Politics Daily piece that expands on my earlier blog post in crowning the mainstream media a big winner this year. It includes some insight from Sunbelt chief Bob Stoldal and Tony Hopfinger, the Alaska reporter handcuffed by GOP candidate Joe Miller's goons. Favorite line: "But it went further than that, with Angle providing so much footage of herself running from cameras that she may be ready for this weekend's New York City Marathon ... ."

And then it was on to poker. Early this morning, the World Series of Poker Final Table was reduced from nine to two, and these two guys will square off at 8 p.m. PT at the Rio. I've been covering for Agence France-Presse and for AOL News, and you can see how subtly differently the approaches are based on the audience. If you're really, really into this, totally check out Howard Stutz's and Oskar Garcia's coverage of same.

If you're not hip to the rah-rah poker stuff, check out my current Las Vegas Weekly column about the fact that the Cosmopolitan won't have a poker room and what that portends for The Game. And apologies to East Coast Gambler, who had known and blogged about the Cosmo's no-poker deal back in August.

I had planned to do some other blog posts today about stuff in the papers and such, but I've gotta be up ridiculously early tomorrow to appear on radio shows around the country discussing my Daily Beast and Politics Daily coverage of the Harry Reid-Sharron Angle race. So after that, I'll post this week's episode of "The Strip" and catch up on some other stuff.

From Veganism To Reindeer Steak

Within two days, I've spanned pretty much the entire culinary spectrum on AOL News.

First, of course, was my report on Wynn Resorts' new vegan gambit, which I also covered on this blog last week.

Then, today, Rudolph is on the menu! My trip to Alaska was a failure as far as dealing effectively with the private family drama that drew me there, but I did, as usual, find myself a story to share with the Lower 48.

I caught a piece by Jeff Richardson of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner about a study by the University of Alaska at Fairbanks' Reindeer Research Program to determine whether consumers will buy reindeer as steak and at what prices. (See, Ms. Neff, there are many values to reading a printed newspaper that have nothing to do with who's up and down in an election.)


Important stuff? Probably not. But it did give me the unique opportunity to open my story with this:

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (Aug. 25) -- Ever watch "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and think, "I wonder what that little guy would taste like on the grill?"

I admit I did taste a little reindeer. No, not the cute ones I photographed from the UAF farm. They're still alive and well ... for now.

No, I spotted an egg dish with "reindeer sausage" on the menu of the diner we ate at the night we arrived in Fairbanks. While it was tasty and spicy, UAF researcher George Aguilar told me that kick probably was thanks to spices and not Prancer as "reindeer sausage" tends to have less than 10 percent reindeer meat. The rest of pork and beef, he said. He does, however, wax rhapsodic about the taste of a good Blitzen burger:

"It's a high-protein, low-fat, super-tender, high-mineral meat. As far as quality, it's tender, really tender. It's one of the most tender meats in the world. All the fat is on the outside of the animal, so you don't get marbling. It has a sweet taste. It doesn't have a gamey taste."

Mmmm. That and the fava bean puree at Alex sounds like a winner.

This story also took me inside the intriguing world of the reindeer-for-Christmas-events industry, which I suspect is a topic for The Petcast soon. They're apparently really nice pets for folks with a little property and Kyle Wilson of Rocky Hill Reindeer Leasing in Knoxville, Tenn., says he gets $3,000 each providing them for church groups or Christmas tree farms from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

Wilson doesn't see a big reindeer steak market anytime soon:

"More than anything else, it's not politically correct to eat Rudolph. We who have them, rent them or show them, we get the warm-and-fuzzy thing going on, and the furthest thing from your mind is eating one of them. In the Lower 48, we have it for Christmas, but we don't eat it for Christmas."

The New Dino Chronicles of Vegas

I'm not a big dinosaur guy, but yesterday's assignment for the Agence France-Presse to cover the attempted sale of the third-most-intact Tyrannosaurus Rex at a big natural artifacts auction put on by Bonhams & Butterfields at the Venetian was a surprisingly great deal of fun. The T. Rex, a female awkwardly named Samson, garnered a top bid of $3.6 million, but that wasn't enough so they didn't sell it.

Maybe it was the fact that it was my first assignment outing with my new iPhone since I've figured out the whole Twitter-Picture thing and so it was fun to show folks in real time via my Twitter feed images like this one of the cute kid vamping in front of the largest shark jaw ever found:

That didn't sell, by the way. The highest bid came in at around $550,000, but auctioneers decided that didn't hit the reserve price. There was a lot of that yesterday, reflecting that even millions-of-years-old fossils aren't immune to 2009's economic doldrums.

I met some colorful people. You think of expensive auction bidders as stuffy folks in suits or pantsuits probably representing some mysterious billionaire, but this guy...

...was just a rock musician named Damon Ranger of the Chicago-based band Blackbox who was considering buying something (but didn't) for the house in the $10k-$15k range.

This shlubby-looking fellow, however...

...is on the hook for about $1 million in total winning bids on a variety of items including the pair of tricertop-related dinosaurs behind him. He's Dr. Larry Lawson, 44, an oncologist from Big Lake, Alaska, quite near now-famous Wasilla. He claimed he's got a 501(c)3 non-profit called From The Vault that covers his collection of all sorts of dino-stuff because he opens it up to school groups, but he's got no website for it and I wasn't able to locate any such organization anywhere in the U.S., let alone Alaska, in the IRS's online database. Odd, that. At least this seems to confirm he's an oncologist.

Oh, and there was at least one mysterious billionaire, but he showed up in person with his wife:

That is, of course, Sheldon Adelson and wife Miriam in the front row with the appropriately numbered paddle No. 770 went on to buy about $142,000 worth of stuff, including blowing $67,000 on this:


It's a large opalescent ammonite from the late cretaceous period found in southern Alberta, Canada. They lived 71 million years ago and that color is natural. (Photo credit: Dolce Dreams blog).

Adelson was quite friendly. In fact, his wife initially gave me a no-comment, but as we chatted some more Sheldon actually said, "It's OK, he's been good to us." Which is funny because some on his PR team don't feel so warm about me. The couple explained they would put some of the items in their home -- "we bought some tchotchkes for the house" -- and for the Adelson high school they fund.

He seemed to be in terrific spirits, actually, and walking a lot better than the last time I saw him in person in January 2008. I noted to him that his stock is back up a bit -- it was below $2 in March but closed Friday at $16.13 -- to which he replied, "It's only beginning to rise again." He expressed pleasure in the upswing they're seeing in Macau and referenced his coming Hong Kong IPO.

With the T. Rex unsold and available for about $5 million, I wondered why Adelson didn't buy it. He had seen first-hand how popular an exhibit it was when it drew 15,000 to view the free auction preview in the Guggenheim space. My Las Vegas Weekly editor, Ken Miller, had fantasized about Samson staying in Vegas in this week's issue, in fact, and while I don't think Ken's idea of standing it next to the Welcome sign is feasible, I sure do think that someone should take note of the immense popularity not just of the preview but also of Sue, the most intact T. Rex ever found, which has drawn mobs for going on 10 years at Chicago's Field Museum.

I quizzed Adelson on why he didn't buy it and he said, bafflingly, "It's huge, where would I put something that big?" Seeing how we were just a doorway from the immense Venetian's Grand Hall, I thought of a few places. Seemed to me that he could easily draw a million people to pay $5 each to see the thing somewhere at the Venetian or Palazzo to cover the cost of buying it. He's a billionaire, though, and I'm not, so I stifled myself.

I do find it strange that I was the only reporter to cover the Adelson angle here. The Las Vegas Sun didn't, the L.A. Times didn't and the Associated Press didn't mainly because they oddly covered the auction fron Reno owing to the fact that the Vegas bureau no longer has staff on the weekends. (The R-J ran the AP story which means the largest local paper ceded a significant scientific and economic event to the wires only to end up with something written from 450 miles away.)

It's not as though Adelson was difficult to spot...

...or that he's that obscure a personality or business figure. He may have fallen from the lofty heights of 3rd richest American, but he's still the 26th wealthiest American and first richest Las Vegan, according to the latest Forbes list.

Yet my favorite was the Huffington Post, which long has boasted the most consistently banal, obvious, cliched coverage of Vegas of any major site on the Web. Here's a screenshot of their little preview of the auction:


The text there reads: "Only in Vegas would they... auction off dinosaur bones?"

Well, no. There have been dinosaur bone and fossil auctions all over the world since man started finding the things. But someone thought this counts as clever writing.

Why Wasilla May Seem Familiar To You

Longtime readers of this blog recall that Miles and I honeymooned in Alaska in March 2007. After Friday's shocker pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, much has been made of the years she spent as mayor of Wasilla, a town with a population smaller than most New York City blocks.

That town name, despite, its obscurity, might've sounded familiar to some of you and you've been trying to recall why. Well, here's an extremely amusing refresher:

Yes! That wacky mattress salesman was one of Gov. Palin's few constituents! Here's a different version:

What a great dance, huh?

While we're on the Palin topic, the minute McCain picked her I said to Miles, "Oh, the editorial cartoonists are going to have a field day with this." And, indeed, Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index came through as always with a growing round-up. Many were funny, this one from a cartoonist for the Calgary Sun was probably beyond the pale:



Take a look for yourself at several of them here.

One Legislator's Loony Lot Lust

Meet Rep. David Guttenberg, D-Fairbanks. We didn't, but we feel like we know him and his mustache. But let's start from the beginning.

We pull up to the Alaska State Capitol in a frigid downpour shortly after noon today and it’s confusing where to park and where to enter. The place is pretty quiet since it’s Sunday, so we pull into a back lot for legislators which is, by and large, empty, as you can see in these pictures.

Figuring we’d only be a few minutes – the Alaska statehouse rivals the strangely phallic Tallahassee one as the least attractive and most architecturally dull of any of the 30-odd that I’ve seen in my Capitol-loving travels – so we pull into a spot labeled “Guttenberg.”

As it happened, the inside of this Capitol held our interest for about 20 minutes, largely because an energetic, somewhat flamboyant security guard charmed us into taking interest in a few bits, namely a state seal made of locally mined gold, that we would have otherwise overlooked.

Miles went back to the car first as I insisted on reading absolutely everything. Again, this took us 20 minutes and snapping the picture here on the right (taken a little later when we returned after the rain calmed down) was the central purpose of our stop in Juneau. (It looks nice from this angle, but those marble pillars are the biggest enhancement in what otherwise looks like an insurance building.)

When I emerged, I noticed a wet piece of paper on the back window. It fell apart when I tried to pick it off to see what it said. But we have a pretty good idea what it was – based on these other two notes Miles had already found on the car. To your left, see the handwritten one by Minority Whip Rep. David Guttenberg of D-Fairbanks.

To the right, see the printed out one. Click on them to make them bigger if you can't see it this way.

Let’s take just a moment to point out the obvious here. There was a lot full of empty spaces. And yes, we acknowledge that we shouldn’t have parked there, but we couldn’t have known that we'd displace a deranged legislator. And not just any deranged legislator but one so proprietary about his parking space that he first stands in the rain and writes a note to the offender who forced him to park a few paces away on a dead afternoon. And then, perhaps worried that the rain would wash away that missive, Rep. Guttenberg went to his office (apparently on the fourth floor, according to the state's website) to print out another note about his parking crisis and, probably, a third, although it fell apart in my fingers so thank GOD he covered his bases with the others. One shudders to ask oneself what important piece of state business wasn't getting done while Rep. Guttenberg plotted his maniacal revenge over this injustice!

Alaska, we love you. You’ve been nothing but terrific to us. We even picked out an adorable two-bedroom with hardwood floors and killer glacier views in Palmer we'd move into in a heartbeat if only your media market was big enough for either of us. We loved our visit and, as weird as this makes us, your weather so much.

But Rep. Guttenberg, get a life.

You Know Juneau?

Everyone told us not to bother with Juneau, that there was nothing there, but I'm a state capital aficionado, so we spent an extra 25,000 frequent flier miles to arrange for a stop here before we return to the "Lower 48" on Monday.

Well, it's a truly, truly charming spot. I hadn't realized it, but it's a rain forest. They get 220 days of rain or snow a year. And it's raining here now -- some sort of a heat wave has brought the mercury up to 36. It was 5, by the way, when we got in the car in Anchorage from the motel heading to the airport.

Our camera battery is exhausted, so in lieu of pictures with this post, a few wry observations:

* The first billboard you see heading to baggage is a cryptic political message from Planned Parenthood of Juneau saying: "We're pro-child, pro-choice, pro-something else, pro-privacy." Hmm. Welcome, everyone and abortion-seekers!

* Juneau happens to be the largest state capital by square mile.

* In among the literature about the statehouse, the glacier tours and so on was a tri-fold brochure for the Refenstein Dialysis center. In fact, it's also on this Tourism Juneau website, complete with a "add to favorites" link should anyone possibly want one. There are pretty pictures of mountains, glaciers and bears. And testimonials like: "Having the Reifenstein Dialysis clinic open in Juneau enabled me to stay in my hometown. I have also had the opportunity to visit my son in Hawaii." Huh? Anyone want to unpack that one for me?

Off to the statehouse now...

The driven snow

I am a lousy driver. Terrible. I don't even try to pretend otherwise. We make a (half)-joke about it around our house; Miles would probably insist on driving us instead of me even if his feet were gnawed off by lynxes. I'm not really sure why I'm so bad other than, as my father told me my entire teenage life, my head is always in the clouds. It's why I can't listen to books on tape - a funny-looking person will walk across the street and I'll spend the next 15 minutes thinking about him and next thing I know, I have no idea what the author is talking about. I'm the one who drove my dad's Mercedes through a fence around the corner of our house eight days after I got my license. That was the start of a brilliant career.

So imagine everyone's surprise when it turns out that I could really handle a Ski-doo snowmachine through the tundra! It was rocky for all of us at first, inching along at 15 or 20 mph for a while, but by the time Miles, our friend/innkeeper Karen and I were through with our 65-mile roundtrip jaunt, I was booking at 50+ mph in some spots and even FLYING over bumps just for effect. (Random Vegas connection: Ski-doos are manufactured by Bombardier, the same folks who built the parts-shedding Las Vegas Monorail. Nothing fell off on our trip.)

It wasn't just exhilarating -- and, for some reason, body-tiring -- but sensationally beautiful. In the winter, the massive rivers north of Anchorage are like wide open, white highways of thick ice. It was mind-bending to imagine that in a couple of months, the rivers will be back. I did have a close call with a wooden post, but otherwise we came through it all intact. We drove out 30 miles to a little cabin where a family out of Deliverance lives and served us up a delicious little meal of burgers, though we're not real sure what sort of meat it was. The house could only be reached by boat, snowmobile or small planes that land on the frozen river. The family out there even had a foster son, a teenager. I'm trying to imagine how the caseworker even got to this place for the home visit. No threat of the kid going bad out here, tho.

Sadly, we've worn out our camera battery and didn't bring the charger. So the Nikon did not cooperate when we saw two majestic bald eagles perched on a branch along the route. Our guide, Craig, from Alaska Backcountry Adventure Tours, told Miles to take the battery out of the camera and put it somewhere warm -- a pant pocket or something -- and it would get a little charge back. He was right, so we got just these couple of shots shown here.

The other bad news is that despite nearly a week in Alaska, somehow the ubiquitous moose have eluded us. We've seen loads of moose tracks -- or at least that's what they tell us they are -- but no moose. Another thing we haven't -- and won't -- see... igloos! Except in today's newspaper, where this appeared, appropriately:


Today's a quiet day after Thurs and Fri were big-adventure days. Sunday, we fly to Juneau so I can see the state capitol, one of my obsessions. Hopefully we can put that battery somewhere, uh, warm, so we can get enough juice to snap my image there. Yes, I'm a dork.

...But it's a DRY cold...except all this snow...

Today was probably the highlight of our Alaskan adventure: We rode on dog sleds and then hopped into a Cessna to fly around Mount McKinley. It was quite cold out -- high in the mid-20s and, in fact, we clocked -5 F while we were up there in the air. We wore those long johns I still can't remember why we Las Vegans own in the first place.

The top picture is me and Miles in flight, which is remarkable because Miles hates to fly and really, really had to psyche himself up for the ride. But the folks at Talkeetna Air Taxi were so comforting and encouraging, and he rolled with it. We were so glad we did, however, to be able to snap such sensational views as this one to your right. That wing you see is our plane. Also joining us was Karen Harris, the proprietor of the Garden Gate B&B where we're staying and an old friend of mine.

It was quite a beautiful -- and chilly -- flight, and we heard from our pilot, Danielle, that global warming is very much in evidence up here in shrinking glaciers and such. Hard to imagine as you look out at all that snow and ice -- rivers so frozen over they appear to be made of marshmallow Fluff. But surely they know of which they speak.

Earlier in the day, we went to Dream a Dream Dog Farm in Willow, where Iditarod veteran Vern Halter explained the ins and outs of professional and competitive dog sledding. Then Vern and one of his handlers took each of us on an 8-mile dog-mushing jaunt through the frozen wilderness. To your left is Miles on his dog sled. Each sled had 10 big dogs. One of my dogs was pregnant. Vern was so great that I'm bringing him on The Petcast in a few weeks to discuss the whole business of raising and training these dogs. There was no question in my mind that these dogs, while being asked to work hard, clearly enjoy their work and are not tortured or prodded into pulling the haul.

Will write more later. We're tired. Tomorrow we go snowmachining. Not snowmobiling... that's apparently the passe term.

The Congresswoman Sends Her Love

We awaken in a lovely suite at the Garden Gate B&B in Palmer, Alaska, with views of glaciers and a gas fireplace and the sense that everything is perfect. We are together, we are happy, we are marveling over our beautiful Tiffany Atlas wedding bands.

And then, a little more icing: A voice message left this morning by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. She was calling in from her Washington D.C. office to congratulate us on our wedding and to say that she had read my piece in CityLife all about our difficult search for a rabbi.

The conclusion of that piece, of course, was that we discovered Rabbi Mel Hecht, who performed his first same-sex wedding on Sunday for us and spoke movingly during the ceremony about the epiphany that he had about the equality of gay and straight relationships.

The congresswoman told us in the message that she "wasn't surprised in the least" that Rabbi Hecht had done the ceremony and that "if you had called to ask me, he is the one I would have told you to get in touch with." I hadn't even considered asking the congresswoman for such advice, but she always has seemed to us to be a full-service representative!

Berkley concluded her exuberant (Berkley and exuberant are redundant terms, actually) message by saying she would be sending a donation to Temple Beth Am in our honor to show the rabbi her support for his decision to officiate our marriage.

Berkley, who has appeared for us at several fundraisers for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and came on "The Strip" podcast in February 2006 to speak openly about her cosmetic surgery among other matters, is a fascinatingly genuine politician in these days of phonies.

I do wonder, though, if Berkley's position on legalizing same-sex marriage has changed. In 2004, I quizzed her about it while we were standing around at the Democratic caucuses and she said she supported full rights for same-sex couples but not "marriage." I imagine that's a political hair-splitting thing that's sort of unlike her and that, sooner or later -- perhaps already -- she'd come over to the full-on marriage-rights side.

Signs of Spring in Alaska

So it's about 25 degrees for a high here in Anchorage and looks very much like this picture, which I ripped from somewhere else, of course. This is apparently a signal to every Walmart and Sears in town to dump the winter gear and explain to us that it's almost spring, dumbasses. We arrived as prepared as two fellows from the desert could be - we even had long johns, and I cannot recall why on earth we would have ever bought or worn them before - but we assumed we'd find some ear muffs and maybe a nice sweater or two up here. No dice. Will have to borrow some from the innkeeper at the Garden Gate B&B in Palmer, where we're staying.

Oh, did I mention that the innkeeper is an old, old friend, Karen Harris, who gave up a journalism career in Minneapolis to open a B&B in Alaska, a lifelong dream. I can't wait to see how that worked out for her.

We're now chilling at the Dark Horse Coffee Shop in Anchorage. It's cute, although Miles complains that his mocha-machiatto-whatever is a little too heavy on the whipped cream, light on the juice. Oh well. My hot chocolate looked sumptuous, but isn't really. Oh well again.

We had lunch at terrific trendy eatery called the Snow City Cafe that a college-campus feel to it. I had the "crabby omlette." Yum. And we're likely to go to some brew pub for dinner where Karen has advised they have the best salmon chowder in, uh, history or something.

I am forbidden on this trip from working, which is difficult when there are a few good stories up here I could so easily string for the Times. In the center of the state, the mayor is following a middle school social studies class' advice to repopulate and giving away 26 large land plots. The results have been fascinating. Plus, there's a dog-beating scandal in the Iditarod, which is wrapping up now.

OH! And one last thing I did today. I made Miles stop and let me browse a tourist trap called the Ulu Factory. Why? Because for years now I've been using the word "ulu" in Scrabble and I've never known what it meant. I just thought it was a clever way to dump unwanted vowels.

Wow.

Anyone out there who is married knows what's packed into that "Wow."

Wow, we stood up in front of all those people and said some unbearably intimate things and exchanged rings and kissed and are now married. Wow that the rabbi's speech was largely about how our evident devotion forced him to realize as he prepared for his first gay wedding that same-sex and straight relationships are equal in every important way. Wow that the SkyVilla at the Palms was the perfect setting for a totally non-cliche Vegas wedding. Wow that all the nifty little details we threw in -- my mother singing, the poker chips, laminates and yarmulkes with our names on it, the slideshow of pictures, the blown-up photo of us for everyone to sign the matting of -- all came off perfectly. Wow that we received such generous gifts, saw so many wonderful people in one place and actually had the chance to chat with pretty much everyone.

And wow, we're now in a hotel room in Anchorage about to take on our big week on our honeymoon! It's already so beautiful -- and s0 cold. Flying usually makes Miles cranky, but this time he grinned and grinned even as our suitcase took excruciatingly long to arrive.

Married life agrees with us!