Stuff I Found Cleaning Out My Vegas Office

As you may have read in my acclaimed love-letter essay to Las Vegas and my life there in Las Vegas Weekly, I spent my final days in Nevada packing up a house and office stuffed to the gills with historical and peculiar Vegas stuff. There was a shelf in my office closet with at least a six-foot pile of press materials that proved akin to an archeological survey, newest to oldest layered upon one another like a geological formation.

The stuff I unearthed was Vegas in its most optimistic, boosterish form, such as the above document outlining the expansion plans for the airport. I also found this promo for CityCenter...

...which is technically true because, uh, the future always begins now. Duh.

I loved this relic...

...and made sure to put this piece of Frontier glass in a safe place.

I found this magnet from the late, great Dive at the Fashion Show Mall, where I used to take my little brother all the time for fries and to peer through the periscope that offered a Strip view. It was just last month that a listener of the podcast asked me something about this place:

I found these artifacts of the earlier days of our podcast...

We used to send CDs and thank-you notes to all our guests, and once we got this back from the amazing Paula Poundstone:

Here was one of the table centerpieces from the final performance of Siegfried & Roy, a fundraiser for Keep Memory Alive, the foundation that funds the Lou Ruvo Cleveland Clinic for Brain Health in Vegas:

I found it rather unsettling that I did not and still don't remember that I had actually been a patient in 2002 of the most infamous endoscopy doctor in America:

At the same time, I find it awesome beyond words that I found this, which my old R-J friend Natalie Patton sent to me in 2000 when I was about to depart for China:

And I have no idea whatsoever how I came into possession of this rather invaluable bit of family history...

...but I'm so glad I have it.

Pathetic Vegas

Associated Press reporter Kathleen Hennessey hit a big homer this week with this I-wish-I'd-done-that piece about lazy Vegas tourists renting those scooters usually used by really obese or frail people to get up and down the Strip rather than walking or taking the Monofail.

Wrote Hennessey: Michelle Bailey, a slender, apparently healthy 22-year-old, used a scooter to get around a pool tournament at the Riviera hotel-casino. "Four-inch heels," she explained with a laugh, pointing to her red pumps.

I do take issue to this part of her prose: "Forking over $40 and their pride..."

This assumes these people had pride to begin with. Can you imagine another city where people would do this? I'd like to see these folks slide backwards on some of San Francisco's steepest streets!

The worst part was Hennessey wasn't even doing this piece in the dead of summer, when it's 115 out and maybe, just maybe, there might be some justification for behaving like an invalid. No, not even then.

A Topsy-Turvy World

A few things on my mind today...

* Saturday's Review-Journal wrote this at the end of an editorial about a prominent congressman: "Three cheers for XXX. Now, if only 300 more members of Congress shared his line of thinking..." To whom, pray tell, does one of the most conservative newspaper editorial pages in the nation refer? You'll never believe it. I'll keep you in suspense for a few minutes while we ponder a few other things.

* Dear Abby on Saturday was asked by a Eugene, Ore., woman what to do about her garrulous mother-in-law who visits two weeks a year and never, ever shuts up. Does she recommend the hapless woman get her spineless husband to tell his mother to stuff it? Does she suggest perhaps they engage in activities such as the theater or a day at the spa that might give the battleax a hint she should zip the trap? Perhaps Abby (aka Jeanne Phillips) thinks the woman's best hope is to lock the miserable old bat in a closet? No! Abby's answer is thus: "Because her visits are so stressful, ask your doctor for advice on how to alleviate the stress." Translation: "Beats me. Go get yourself a fistful of Xanax. I think I'll have one right now, in fact!" Time was when Dear Abby was criticized for always shunting troubled writers off to therapy. New approach: Pimp for Pfizer.

* I rode the Las Vegas Monofail last week (at $1 a ride because I have a Nevada ID, something they do not promote and have nowhere on their website so far as I can tell, fyi) and was alarmed by how fictitious the stop legend was about what hotel-casinos are accessible. For example, in some cases it suggests the Wynn, New Frontier, Bellagio and Venetian are "accessible," even though they're not on the rail line and require epic walks. Especially specious is the suggestion that the Aladdin/Planet Hollywood (it still says Aladdin, understandably) is "accessible" from the Paris-Bally's stop. That's outrageous since it's one of the monofail's biggest teases; even though you can almost spit on the A/PH doors from the P-B stop platform, you are forced to trek through the circuitous Paris, out to the Strip and then into the front of the A/PH to get there. I get that A/PH didn't pay to be on the route and P-B put a substantial investment in the project, but then just leave them off the signage. Unsuspecting tourists really would think from the legend that these are reasonable walks. Anything that requires more than about a half-mile walk ought not be included.

* A sidebar to a Las Vegas Sun story by Sam Skolnik today on an Orthodox Jewish cop who isn't allowed to wear a beard or yarmulke indicates that the Los Angeles Police Department "also bans beards ... excet in cases of medical necessity." Who here has any idea what sort of medical necessity would require a beard? An allergy to shaving cream?

* The praiseworthy congressman? BARNEY FRANK. Yep. Probably one of the most liberal - and openly gay! But Barney earns praise nonetheless for wanting to toss out the legislation that essentially banned Internet gambling in America and to free up Americans to flush their money down whatever toilet they see fit. What's more, the Review-Journal notes that the law amounts to protectionism for the major U.S. casino companies, keeping people from spending their gambling money on off-shore sites so they can spend it right here. But wait! Aren't those the same big casino companies that drive the Vegas economy and fill up untold ad pages in the newspaper? That's pretty daring -- and consistent. And principled. Scary, huh?

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.