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 So for the foreseeable future, it seems, Harrah's will have a knowingly out-of-date or misleading billboard on Bally's. Or maybe someone can get out there with a bucket of red paint and fix that "2"?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!

X-Rated Scrabble

Just took a quick break for some Scrabble on the site I play on, Internet Scrabble Club. I lost this game, but that's probably because I wasted that S from PENIS trying to amuse my opponent after the first few weird words. My only regret: I could've laid down VAGINAS vertically and made "SHAT", also a legal Scrabble word.

Back to work now.

Aria, Aria, Aria

To unwind, avoid deadlines or reward myself after a story has been filed, I like to log onto the Internet Scrabble Club and play head-to-head timed Scrabble games with strangers around the world. Why Scrabble has not shut this thing down as they did the Facebook thing I don't know, but I'm grateful.

Anyhow, look carefully at the above grid from a game about two weeks ago. Do you see it? Three. Three times the word "ARIA" is used on that board. And, get this, *I* had the red tiles in that round. Yeah. It wasn't me. My non-Vegas, non-CityCenter-obsessed opponent did that.

Weird, right? Well, after that in the past few weeks, I started noticing the word is coming up a LOT in games:


I swear I'm not doing it on purpose just for the sake of this blog post. In fact, I'm not usually even the one who's doing it. But this IS Aria Eve, so when better to blog this?

I do admit to having done this one, however, on purpose:


I'm Friesster on the ISC, btw. Challenge me if you dare.

STINKIER for 194!!!

Check it out. STINKIER for 194 on Scrabble thanks to landing a bingo on two triple-word scores in one move AND having the K (a 5-pt letter) on the double-letter score. That K alone is worth 60 points.

Yes, this is what I do when I'm sick. This opponent was pretty annoyed by losing 545-333 and challenged me again. In that round, I got a bingo with ZENITHS for 97 points and won 402-247.

I play, as I've said before, on the game through the Internet Scrabble Club.

Scrabble: PRISSING For 149!!!

Remember the thrill I got last year when one of my stories became a joke on NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me"? Well, here's another one: I just got 149 points on one Scrabble move.

Many of you know I'm a bit of a computer Scrabble nut. I don't play Scrabulous, the Indian site that could be offline by the time you read this because Mattel and Hasbro are after them. Instead, I found something called the Internet Scrabble Club, or ISC, and for a few years now Miles and I have played. Don't know why the companies aren't after them except that ISC is nonprofit and there's no advertising or fees. Who knows, we may be next.

I usually play a few times a day when I need a work break. We play fast games, with both sides getting about 3 or 4 minutes total, so the game doesn't usually take but 7 or 8 minutes. When I'm not playing Miles, I play random players with ratings close to mine, usually with minimal conversation. (I have, however, recruited two Petcast guests, a trainer and a vet student, from the ISC.)

Anyhow, I was playing tonight while editing our newest episode of "The Strip" podcast. And holy mother of God, I laid down the word "PRISSING," hit two triples at once and hit a jaw-dropping 149. I had been losing pretty badly at that point, but I did end up eking out a win 404-394. Here's the board:


This is actually the completed board after the game was over. I was wondering what exactly PRISSING meant, so I went to Scrabble.Com to look it up. It turns out to be, duh, the act of acting prissy." But I figured I'd provide that screenshot, too, since I've always wondered what a woman and a baby had to do with Scrabble.


In case you're curious, the known record for the most points in a single Scrabble move was QUIXOTRY, which landed a fellow in Lexington, Mass., a whopping 365 points en route to a record game score of 830. Read that fascinating tale (no, really, I found it fascinating!) by Stefan Fatsis here on Slate.Com.

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.