There but for the grace of the gods goes a Jackass?

So my friend JP posts about Ryan Dunn, who got famous doing the “Jackass” series of films.

Honestly the films looked so pointlessly stupid that I’ve never seen one. Nor did I know who Dunn was until he was drawn to my attention by my friend’s post. In essence my friend said:

“So Ryan Dunn crashed his car and killed himself. The good news is that it was a single-vehicle accident. I have no sympathy. You drink, you drive, you deserve to die. It could have been somebody else he killed.”

And I’m pissed. This friend would probably refer to herself as a Christian woman. Yet here she is stopping a hair’s breadth short of celebrating someone’s death.

Me, I find the death of people in stupid self-inflicted ways to be little different from all the other ways people die, possibly excepting old age.

I have no idea if Ryan Dunn has any kids. But if one of them had died in the car and he’d lived, would my friend be so smugly, self-righteously cavalier?

Would that punishment be “appropriate” because Dunn was putting other’s kids’ lives at risk?

Should we include his passenger (who also died) in our celebrations? He must have known the risks he was taking, riding with a drinking driver?

No. The only appropriate description is “tragedy.”

Would I feel differently had he actually taken someone out? Possibly, but intellectually I understand that that’s no less tragic. Death isn’t a mathematical quantity. If one villain dies, and two heroes die, the world doesn’t get more evil.

A man died.

I want to ask my friend: “Would you look into his mother’s eyes and tell her ‘Your dead son is not worth mourning?’”

Return of the Zombie Blogger II

I’m like the zombie blogger these days, aren’t I? Just when you’re sure I’m dead and gone, I pop back up and someone has to saw my head off. I hate it when that happens.

The good news (if you like this blog at all) is that I’m hoping for a small life change soon–Employment stuff. We’re still talking, and I can’t be entirely open about it yet, but it should help refocus my mind, and a change in my hours will likely leave me more time for either internet poker or blogging. Though the lack of change in pay will probably mean I’ll go with option b. It’s cheaper.

Hiiiitsssss! Hiiii-iiiits!

So what’ve you been up to lately? Really? No kidding? Well that’s fascinating, now let me tell you about my life.

I’m glad we’re currently kidless. I have no idea what I’d have to do for spare time if the hours I do have were occupied with parenting.

Garbage: Still hard at it. After a slump post-Christmas, which is only expected, my company was daft enough to let go four drivers. Naturally, most of those drivers were roll-off bin pushers. This makes some sense, as the big bins are mostly used in construction, and guess what doesn’t go on a lot around here in mid-winter.

At the same time it was dumb. Short-sighted at least. Business has started to pick up again. In my own little fief (where I’m the sole bin runner for an area roughly the size of … well, something damn big), I’ve delivered half-a-dozen bins in the past month. However, they’re short drivers in the bigger fief to the north, and I’ve had to take on a share of that work as well. My weeks have shot from about twenty-five hours to forty-plus.

So I work. At the same time, I got involved in another stage production, Many Hats Theatre Company’s “Rope’s End.” I’ll post more about that on the acting blog.

And furthermore, I’ve been keeping my hand in with professional editing work. I’m working with a guy who wants to break into the self-help-motivational-public-speaking field. I feel the sector is a bit over-subscribed, but that he has great passion for what he wants to do. So I’m happy to help him put together his particular package and slant on the issues of the modern workplace, and how to secure your place in it.

Last month, between rehearsals, work, and editing, I was working eighty or so hours per week. Time to blog? I had to brush my teeth in shifts.

Summer’s on its way. The spring so far has been largely chilly and damp, but the promise is ahead. I’m attempting to put together a motor scooter for summer transport. I plan on taking the summer off from theatre. It’s heartbreaking, but I want to do a few things: Hone my craft, fix my scoot, get on with some projects around the sadly-neglected house, and hopefully learn to blog regularly.

Telephonic Useability

Useability is one of a number of terms that cause all sorts of wrangling in the writing, particularly technical writing, community.

The definition is simple enough: It refers to how easy something is to use and learn. But within those simple words are manifest permutations.

I tend to feel that, as the judge said about pornography–”I know it when I see it.” And I saw a rotten example and a great example this weekend.

For several reasons, my wife Lori and I decided to buy new phones this weekend–We’ve tried replacing the batteries in our old Motorola, but it hasn’t helped.

So off goes I to The Bay. Which is pretty much as cheap as Wal-Mart these days, but sells far better stuff.

I purchased a General Electric three-handset phone (both offices and the garage), which came with an answering machine. We don’t need the answering machine, ours is part of our VOIP service, but it did come with the unit. The phone was selling off of a clearance table. Regular price $110 or so, clearance price $64.

The box had to be opened on three sides simultaneously. So that the contents pretty much immediately spilled across the table in a jumble. There was no packing list in evidence.

The manual was a map-folded piece of oversized paper which unfolded like some origami explanation of string theory and extruded as far as a small neighbouring dimension.

Weirdly, the information in the manual was divided into above-the-mid-fold and below-the-mid-fold sections. So the instructions on how to set the thing up abruptly ended at the fold, where the instructions for running the answering machine started. There was no visible division, so the instructions were confusing initially.

Having puzzled through the first quarter-page I abruptly discovered that the batteries needed to be charged for sixteen hours prior to first use. Good thing I read instructions.

Not that it helped. Some eighteen hours later I made and received our first calls, only to discover that the little display screen which is apparently so necessary on phones these days didn’t work.

So after some reverse origami and muttered bad language I forced the box closed again and lumbered it, now slightly bulging and distorted, back to The Bay.

The people at The Bay were just excellent. They had no similar GE phones, but in the meantime they’d put a new sign on the clearance table where I bought the first: “Save an additional 20% on last stickered price!”

I discovered a Panasonic unit with FOUR handsets (living room, both offices, and garage). Formerly priced at about $140, it was on for $76, minus the 20% … I got a net refund of some three bucks, and a better phone that, as events had it, worked perfectly.

But the real treat was the packaging. I wish I’d taken photos of it: The box opened with a flap on the top. Immediately beneath it was a diagram of how to re-pack the phone should it be necessary. With arrows. And numbers. I like arrows and numbers most times.

The four handsets rested on top in a little tray. Once they were removed, a large, friendly, red-and-yellow label read: ATTENTION.

Such a label rather demands reading, and so I did. It instructed me that FIRST I must INSTALL AAA batteries and charge for eight hours. And it showed me where in the package to find them (which was right next to the handsets in plain sight). The manual is an old-fashioned book type.

So which of the two phones would one tend to find more useable?

I find the phone quite generally usable without having read the manual, so far. But honestly, they had such smart and simple ideas that I’m saving it for when I next need something entertaining to read, because I’m sure it will be a prose delight.

Submerged

As raincoaster wrote below, I’ve been writing infrequently. Which is a charitable term for “not at all,” lately.

I can explain. Briefly:
The Importance of Being Earnest
I played the minor role of Doctor Chasuble. I doubt I have anything new to say about Oscar Wilde.

Nuncrackers
See my acting blog for more on this.

Work
Did you know I was driving garbage trucks? Ah, yes, of course. You’re a Regular Reader. Well a while ago one of my co-workers was injured in such a fashion that he had to take six weeks off. Normally I work a Tuesday-Saturday shift, and he a Monday-to-Friday.

For a number of reasons it’s easier for the local guy to drive the front-end run. So for the past six weeks I’ve been doing that while someone has come from up the valley to handle my work. Naturally I have to do my Saturday as well, so it’s been six days per week for too long.

Writing
Well I haven’t even been updating my blog. I’ve done a wee bit of editing work, and lately I’ve been having fun mucking about with some speech-to-text software. Of the latter, I’ve learned that if I don’t get a faster computer I might as well stick to typing.

I’ve also been completely immersed in the everyday: Rebuilding bathrooms, painting, supporting my wife in the four major projects she’s into just now.

In short I’m busy and generally happy. Hope you are too.
And I hope to get into the habit of blogging again.

Love, war, and ninjas

Okay, so I fell off the edge of the world for a bit there. I have the usual sheaf of excuses: Life got on top of me, the dandelions and I went mano a mano and I lost, I was in the studio with Elvis, only it wasn’t Elvis at all and the court proceedings are taking up all my time … You know the stuff.

But I have rumbled out of my torpor to tell you about a book. It’s called The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway.

I’ve read enough to be jaded about jacket copy. Do you seriously read what The Daily Mail et al thought of the novel you’re holding? Of course not. You picked it up because of the pneumatic bird on the cover, let’s be honest … I rarely even bother reading jacket synopses. If they were going to tell you the story, they wouldn’t have room on the jacket flaps or at the back of the book, right? They’d have to make them hundreds of pages thick.

Besides, how many novels tell “the story of a man and a woman, two storm-tossed souls in a world gone mad!“?

Which of course is part of the story of The Gone-Away World. Another part involves a bomb, a new superweapon, a “clean” killing device that like most such carries consequences considerably beyond what the designers anticipated.

But some friends praised The Gone-Away World to the skies. And if I may stretch the bomb imagery to its limit, I was blown away. The writing is tight, every word serves the story. It’s like someone put Thompson, Heinlein, Forsythe, and possibly a dash of Pratchett or Amis to taste, into a massive blender (and I am not in any way suggesting that that would ever be a good idea) and poured the result out on paper.

The writing is brilliant, funny and very real. You find yourself recognizing moments when you’ve thought precisely the way the main character has, experienced similar disjointedness, and yet it will all be strange and new to you. Which is an odd coincidence, really … But you’ll learn why I say that once you’ve read it.

And that’s about all I can tell you. The novel is so intricately plotted that to tell you one bit is likely to spoil your enjoyment as the story unfolds. I will share with you only that I no longer look at mimes in quite the same way.

Part science fiction, part drama, part war story, The Gone Away World should delight all who read it. It is in fact particularly well-suited for people who say “Well I don’t really go for science fiction …”

Here’s another opinion. Disclosure: I know the blog’s author. But the fact that we have similarly magnificent taste in no way prejudices me.

It’s on cheap at Amazon, by the way. Just sayin’. We’ll doubtless be purchasing another copy, we’ve read ours to wrack and ruin.

In researching this blog post I have discovered Mr. Harkaway comes by his amazing talent honestly. He is the son of the man who writes under “John LeCarré,” another long-time favourite. Though I’ll tell you, their styles are radically different. I’d like to leave you with the author’s own words:

“It’s an adventure without the faintest attempt at realism. It’s a love story. It’s a serious novel. And it has ninjas in it.”

Geez there’s a lot going on

In my life and around the world.

In my own life I just auditioned for, and got, a small role in a Christmas musical (yes, they are casting a Christmas show in May). Family visits dominate summer at the moment. My new job follows close behind.

I really like the place where I work. It’s one of those sort of remote stations where the staff are more-or-less left alone to do their work without much interference from head office. One of my co-workers is on permanent disability and doesn’t leave the office. Another is in his late sixties and deaf–The reason he isn’t retired is due to a bad investment. The third is on productivity pay. This means that once he’s completed his day’s work, he can go home whether it’s four in the arvo or ten a.m..

As I wrote earlier I’ve been hired to run roll-off bins and front-end “cans” as we call dumpsters. I already had some experience, so the operating part isn’t too hard to get up to speed on. Right now I’m learning the stuff that you can only learn by doing the route.

Garbage is an odd collision at the vertex of the digital age. Electronics can be amazingly useful and/or equally useless.

A map could tell you where the stops are, for example. But a map won’t tell you whether you need a key to get into the enclosure where the dumpster is, or whether there’s a power line above the dumpster you need to watch.

On the other hand, a digital picture of an overflowing dumpster, or one that’s in an unsafe location, can be very useful.

The job itself is fairly straightforward: Drive around, pick up gype. But the devil is in the details. Just in my own roll-off specialty there are things I need to know: Is this a cardboard bin or garbage? Where is it going? Is it an “inside railer” or “outside railer”? Does it have a compactor built on?

That last point is important, as the hydraulic machinery that powers the packing rams is usually stationary and connected to the compacting bin by a pair of hydraulic hoses. And while, as my trainer pointed out “If you forget to unhook the hoses once you won’t forget ‘em twice,” I would prefer never to do it at all.

My training has been under a succession of instructors, each of whom tells me the same thing: What I learned from the previous instructor is invalid and shouldn’t be used. “Now watch me and see how I do it …”

In the wider world, Israel just stormed an aid convoy in international waters. My Prime Minister has expressed “regret” over the deaths. If these had been Somalis instead of Israelis we’d be mounting a punitive expedition and calling it “piracy.”

BP has revealed that essentially they have not now, and never did have, a plan for capping an undersea gusher. Their damages are capped, while damages to the environment simply aren’t.

And the whole thing could have been prevented by a half-million-dollar acoustic “switch”–Which in Australia has been a mandatory requirement since the early nineties, when a similar spill drenched the coast.

One nice thing about working in garbage. It’s a bit less morally ambiguous than some other jobs … Heck, I could have wound up doing PR for BP.

On blogging in a small community

One of the more difficult aspects of this sort of blogging, I’m discovering, is the autobiographical nature of what you’re doing.

In conventional autobiography there’s a decent chance that many of the subjects you’ll be writing about will be safely dead by the time the book comes out. Or that you will.

For me this is a powerful element in writing for a blog. It makes me examine the stuff I write because I don’t want to make false statements about anyone, and I want to be completely honest in my assessment. So what can I do when my assessment may be perceived to be … unkind?

James Miller, editor of the local paper, intensely dislikes theatre reviews in small towns and doesn’t publish them if he can help it. He feels, and I tend to agree, that critique is rarely honest when the writer can get cold-shouldered out of the community, or when the impact of writing something negative may cost the subject of the critique work or community standing.

Theatre is a fairly tight community, if not in the Okanagan then more specifically here in town. If I unfairly criticize someone, then I run the risk of losing work myself, or for other people, and of alienating people in my community.

So interestingly, when I’m viewing my life as a bloggable subject, it makes me more self-aware in my relationships. I want to be as open, fair, and honest as possible with people.

Which is why it’s been difficult to write about “Tartuffe.” Though I’m working on it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s turning out to be a fine production, I feel. But the process of getting there has been a bit … fraught, and I’m still working on how to treat what I’ll eventually write about it.

In the meantime, why not pop over to my acting blog, where I’ve been trying to sum up what’s been happening in that sphere of my life?

Vegas on the cheap

So here we are a month later and I’m still talking about Vegas. People still ask me how it was, and I say there’s no experience like it, which is true. Vegas is like this vast gumball machine in the desert, pretty and glittery and everywhere you look–Ooh–shiny!

The second question is often to do with money: “So … How much’d ya lose?” or “But isn’t it expensive?” und so weiter.

So what follows is Ted’s Guide to Vegas on the Cheap, written in no particular order, with experiential notes for the edification of humankind.

1) Fly cheap.
First, find the best deal you can get on a flight. In our case we flew from our regional airport to Seattle, then to Vegas for $220 US apiece, all in. Check your travel sites often, and sign up for the newsletter. Your inbox could save you a bundle.

2) Fly light.
Most airlines now charge $15 or more for the dubious privilege of allowing them to lose your luggage. So go to the airline’s website and pack only cabin baggage that meets their specs. Horizon/Alaska allow “10″ H x 17″ W x 24″ L (25 x 43 x 61 cm) including wheels and handles, plus one personal item, such as a purse, briefcase or laptop computer.” But size specs aren’t always the same, and due to the size of aircraft on some routes, the rules may be different, so always check.

3) Have some idea of where you’re going once you’re on the ground, and how to get there.
Lori and I paid $7 or so each to take a hotel shuttle to The Strip. It turned out later that the cab fare was roughly the same price and we wouldn’t have had to wait half-an-hour for the bus to fill up.

One note: In Vegas there are two routes out of the airport. Make sure to ask the driver to take the most direct. The driver will often ask if you want to take “the scenic” or “the tunnel route,” or something. Just ask for the most direct, or for “the Swenson Avenue route.”

It’s actually illegal, punishable by a fine, for drivers to take the tunnel route, as I just learned over at Vegas.com.

And unless you specifically ask for it, only a driver who’s out to empty your wallet will drive you down the strip, where traffic slows to a crawl at about eight a.m. and just stays that way.

4) Stay cheap:
Hotels in Vegas usually offer some pretty sweet deals. The cheapest I saw (some seven miles off-Strip) was about $15 a night.

Also, most hotels will give you stinkin’ cheap rooms Monday through Thursday, then jack the rates up for Friday night, knowing you won’t feel like moving.

As I understand it, my parents often check out, check their baggage, then return in the evening to see if there’s a free room they can get for the same price they paid the rest of the week. On some occasions this has left them homeless on the final night of their stay. But in a town that never closes it’s not as though waiting up all night is that tough to do.

However, Lori and I wound up at Circus Circus, home of the delightfully disturbing illuminated clown seen here:

Can't sleep, clown will eat me

Photo by Lori.

Circus had a deal going: Four nights for the price of three. It was also just $25 a night for the basic room.

Now I had wanted a room at the motor lodge (long story short, the motor lodge is half-a-mile from C-C proper) because they came with fridges. I envisioned eating brekky at the hotel before venturing out.

As it turned out, we didn’t get our fridge, but it worked out alright.

5) Supply your own coffee.
Vegas rooms contain nothing. Nada damn thing. The TVs don’t usually have more than basic cable. Which is okay, as you’ll find you don’t spend much time in the room anyway.

But if you simply must have a cup of coffee and a croissant upon arising, and the hotel doesn’t offer a complimentary breakfast (which didn’t seem common in Vegas), then you’ll want to bring a small kettle or even a portable coffee maker with you, along with the basics for food. Had I been alone I might have tried icing a small carton of milk in the room bucket and eating cereal in the mornings.

As it was, I wound up grabbing McMuffins at the South Strip McDonald’s–Possibly the world’s most inefficiently run. I’ll tell you sometime if you’re actually interested. Suffice it to say that out of three McMuffin breakfasts I ate there, two were wrong, two were misdelivered to the wrong till, and one was actually cold. Which leads us to lesson number six.

6) It’s a long walk to anywhere from your hotel room.

All the hotels are of course behind the casinos, whose job is to gently separate you from as much of your cash as possible before you can get to the street. Usually, you’ll also have to take up to three elevators. The length of your journey simply offers more opportunities for the hotel to pry some more shekels out of you as you pass the masseur/euse-s, nail groomers, shoe polishers, hairdressers, cruddy toy shops, doughnut salespersons and other merchants and mendicants who make up the actual working population of Las Vegas. Not to mention the slot machines and tables.

The good thing is that if you want something, you can always contact the hotel desk and find out if it’s in the hotel. I had already walked off the calories of my three breakfasts by trekking out to get them when I realized that there was a perfectly good McCafé in the hotel itself.

7) Sign up for a timeshare tour.
We had been in Vegas less than an hour when I encountered the first and most consistent “scam” in town. A blazered woman of middle years tugged at my elbow and asked “Excuse me, are you two a couple?”

We allowed the possibility, and she said “Are you here for a couple of days?”

When she learned the answer was “Yes,” she herded us to a nearby counter.
“What we’re offering today,” she said “Is the opportunity to get a $125 gift card.”

I was inclined to say no. I mean, if anyone offers me an empty pop bottle I tend to look for the catch.

$125? I figured it would be like those furniture stores where the three-piece suite which sells separately for $1400 is advertised as a package at $1000 under a blaze of “Save 40%.” Sure. Everyone knows the way to save is to spend more, right?

So I was about to shine her on, and got a bit sniffy when my wife apparently sucked in completely, and long story short, signed us up for “a presentation–Two hours at the most.”

Note: They don’t make the offer to singles. So if you’re flying solo you’ll have to make your own arrangements–Vegas is also known for its quick-’n'-easy wedding chapels, and of course its cocomittently easy divorces.

The next day we went to the presentation by limo to the Polo Towers, where we endured three hours of fairly hard sell. Due, apparently, to the large number of people enrolled, we were lumped in with a nice Hispanic couple from Nebraska who already owned a timeshare.

We’d already rehearsed our answer: “No.” And that’s the thing to keep in mind above all else. These people have lured you with the promise of goods to see their presentation. That’s all the obligation you are under. You can legitimately turn them down flat and you need no reason other than “We don’t feel like it.”

But they’re ready for your initial refusal. And your secondary and tertiary, and more. And they will hammer at you until you feel guilty that this poor salesperson won’t make their commission off of you. Don’t.

The initial deal we were offered started at$14,000 plus a thousand or so a year. After three refusals we had them down to $4,000. Eventually our saleslady, who was very nice, apparently recognized that we weren’t buying and said “Okay, well that’s it then. Now I just have to go and get the corporate guy to make sure you’ve been properly treated.”

Although our will had been somewhat worn down, the knowledge that we were about to get double-dipped reinforced my “No”-saying muscles.

Sure enough, the corporate guy asked about how well we’d been looked after (no complaints–they really were very nice) and then asked “How about if I could offer you a super-saver package for $800 plus another $800 per year.”

At that point it was easy to say no. As we were walked to the front desk to claim our rewards, the sales lady said:
“I don’t usually do this anymore. I work in the office. But when they heard how many had signed up, they pulled me out to work today.”

We expressed some sympathy, and she continued. I was petrified she might break down crying and tell us about her six kids who each needed a life-saving operation and couldn’t we please, please, just buy the $400 Super-Duper-Extra-Bonus Saver Package?

Instead she said “That’s why I got you guys. Canadians never buy anything.”

I felt an obscure sort of nationalist pride. We walked away with $125 in Visa pre-loaded debit cards, and we ate on those cards for most of the time we were there.

{Out of curiosity I checked the numbers on our return home. We’d spent $128.35 or so. I keep expecting to get a dunning notice in the mail saying we have to go back for another ten-minute presentation.}

Once you’ve had one presentation, you’re not allowed to take another for a couple of months, so it would pay, I’d imagine, to shop around. They aren’t hard to spot. Everywhere you go nicely-dressed people will ask “Are you two a couple?” and “How long are you staying?”

Once you’ve had yours, of course, you can always a) tell them you’re not interested, b) tell them you’ve just come from one, or c) tell them you’re flying out in three hours’ time.

8) Eat cheap.
Vegas meals all seem overpriced. I’m a fast-food-and-noodle-counter kind of guy when I travel. At heart, I’d risk ptomaine rather than ptip. But Vegas charges a high price for the privilege of sitting down. The motto of Las Vegas is “TAANSTAFS”–There Ain’t Any Such Thing As a Free Seat. For example:

Free drinks
All casinos let players drink free. And why not? Between the server (usually a fadedly pretty middle-aged woman in a low-cut top that acts rather like a Jell-O mold) taking your order and delivering it you’ll have spent four times the cost of the most expensive house booze.

We found it cheaper to sit at the Sahara‘s main casino bar and drink $1 Miller Drafts (note: I never had a nice draught beer in Vegas–Drink from a bottle when possible) and $1 half-ounce shots. You can usually get a 44-ounce (1.3 litre) football-shaped container of beer for anything from $4.95 and up.

Free Show
By contrast, the drinks at the Bellagio‘s lounge were anything but free. Lori’s cocktail cost $14. My delicious Belgian beer cost $8. I chose the expensive beer because the “cheap” stuff was $7, which when you consider that retail bottled beer was going for $1.75 at our hotel, gives you some idea of how inflated it actually was.

The band, Dian Diaz rocked. Eight very accomplished musicians playing mostly eighties hits. But whether they were worth the $20 we wound up paying (drinks being a dollar each elsewhere, right?), considering we walked in just as the third and final set began is subject to discussion.

By contrast, the Freemont Street Illuminations are still free at the heart of Old Vegas. Lori hadn’t heard of it and was pleasantly surprised when suddenly every neon-drenched inch of the place went dark and the overhead screens lit up.

Another damn tourist on Freemont

Photo, again, by Lori.

Free Slot Play
Almost every casino/resort has a Player’s Club of some sort. Some of them are worth signing up for on principle. Most offer incentives such as free keychains, clothing, or casino cards, but the most common incentive is “free slot play.”

This usually comes in two forms: The honest and the scam. The honest is when the membership card comes pre-loaded with a set amount of money, say ten bucks. The deal is that you feed $10 of your own into the slot machine, then plug in the card. Once it’s validated (which usually requires you to enter a PIN), you play out the ten bucks and then you can cash out your own money and leave.

The scam is when you have to accumulate points to get the slot cash. We never managed it. It looked, from my back-of-the-envelope calculations, as though you had to blow about $100 at the Treasure Island casino to earn sufficient points to get the “free” cash.

But we never managed it at Circus Circus either, because of rule 10.

The worst scam we ran into was at the Hooters Casino, a joint we visited only because of the huge streetside banner reading “COME ON IN–$100 IN FREE SLOT PLAY!”

I have nothing against smiling girls in tight shorts and halter tops, but I dislike it being a condition of employment. Fortunately the girl at the counter was unhappy-looking, dressed in dumpy sweatshirt and jeans, and scowling. We got our “$100 gift card” and entered the casino.

The scam at Hooters is this: The cards were only good for a small section of roped-off machines which played at $10 per spin. Furthermore, the winning combinations were capped at $1000 on machines that normally would have paid out two hundred times that much had any of the broadly-spaced symbols on their dingy reels aligned.

Anyway, on to Rule 10.

Rule 10:
Don’t gamble
Look, the whole point to all the glitter, all the attractions, all the “freebies’ is to get you to engage in a mug’s game. Slot machines pay back up to 99% of what they take in. The problem is that they usually pay it back in a lump–to somebody else.

Of the other games it should suffice to say that, for example, if you play with the best possible strategy at blackjack in a single-deck, one-dollar game, you can probably manage to tilt the odds to about 49% in your favour.

Now try and find a single-deck one-dollar blackjack game in Vegas. You can do it. There’s probably one held in the toilet stall marked “Out of order” on the third floor of the Flamingo at four a.m. on alternate Tuesdays in months without an “R” in them. Elsewhere you’re playing a “shoe” of four to eight decks, and the table limit will be $5.

If you haven’t cracked a book on your vice of choice you shouldn’t be anywhere near the table. My father refers to a passage in Guerrila Gambling, a book he read in the eighties:

“It says that a winner is someone who goes into a casino and is offered a free pen. And he takes the pen and leaves.”

Me, I like poker. There has to be luck in poker, but a moderately skilled player can entertain himself for a while before that luck either kicks in or runs out. I played two tourneys and lost one through impatience, the other through bad luck. Perhaps I’ll tell you about that some other time.

If you insist on gambling in Vegas, my advice is to pre-determine how much you want to gamble, carry your gambling money in cash and never touch your credit or debit cards for anything to do with gambling.

Also, you and me, we’re peons. Stick to the low limit tables. The only exception to this, I think, based on the general advice of the Wizard of Odds, is slots, where higher limits mean better odds and payouts, BUT also eat your money much faster.

You likely won’t leave richer, but you’ll at least keep your gambling expenditure within your means.

One last word about free stuff.
There’s plenty of free entertainment in Vegas. You can catch the free evening entertainment outside the Mirage (volcano eruption), the Treasure Island (rather skanky pirate show), and the Bellagio (the famous fountains). You can watch the lions in their habitat at the MGM Grand. You can people-watch everywhere the whole live-long day and never get bored.

Where else can you see lions?

{Click here for the answer.}
Photo by … You guess. Honestly, did Lori do anything but take photos?

And there are plenty of other freebie possibilities I haven’t covered and am not as yet aware of. Take the time to look them up.

Conclusion:
Chance favours the prepared. It’s certainly possible to go to Vegas and end up hungover, broke, and disappointed, but it’s far more fun to go home richer for the experience.

For more and far better info than I’ve provided here, I recommend cracking a good guidebook. I’m personally fond of the Let’s Go travel series, but on this trip we carried a different guide, the Open Road.

There are more websites out there than I can count that will happily help you research Vegas. I suggest starting with this About.com page listing “The Best Free Things in Vegas,” and other features (there are several “Best of” lists on each page and no two are alike, so check around).

Have a good time, and drop a comment here when you get back, especially if you’ve found another way to save a little dough on the trip.

A funny thing happened on the way to Caesar’s Palace

I had two good flights. And another two on the way back.

About a month ago my father phoned me up:
“Fares to Las Vegas are going to be pretty cheap,” quoth he.
Now as he knows I’m a struggling writer barely able to afford my garret. So I wondered where this was going until he said:

“Your mum and I thought we might buy you each a ticket, for a sort of birthday present.”
I was speechless, but profoundly grateful.

So last Tuesday we flew to Las Vegas via Seattle. I want to thank the folks at Horizon Air and Alaska Airlines.

Have I explained that I hate flying? I was fine with it until 2000. Then I flew across the notorious Gulf of Carpenteria. On that flight the turbulence was such that the drinks cart and the “stew” pushing it both lifted off the floor. I came out with my nerves raw and my sense of mortality renewed, which was in no wise helped by the two-hour connector and 22-hour flight home a couple of weeks later. My next overseas flight was September tenth, 2001, arriving at Heathrow on the eleventh.

Don’t look at me like that. I KNOW it’s irrational. I KNOW the odds are far greater that I’ll be killed driving to the airport (Only they aren’t, because I’m a damn good driver). I KNOW that a modern airframe can withstand stresses that would cause the wingtips to meet under the belly of the aircraft (not that it helps one eensy weensy bit to visualize that).

I have taken a couple of flights since. Mine is not the paralyzing terror that leaves its victim a helpless pile of goo in the airport lounge.

Mine is the gnawing unease that starts a couple of days ahead, forcing you to deny what you’re about to do, and culminating in a jangling moment in the boarding tube, followed by a clenched ride curled into your seat, afraid to move and continually visualizing scenarios in which the words “flaming wreckage” feature heavily.

So yes, I KNOW it’s stupid; but nonetheless real for all that. And this time I was determined not to be that way. So I did some reading. One of the most helpful items I read was this piece from the Georgia Straight. From this I learned two important things:

1) Aircraft are an exercise in redundancy. There are spares of pretty much everything: Electrical systems, pilots … everything except actual wings and fuselages.

2) Turbulence doesn’t cause plane crashes, not by itself at any rate. All turbulence is is the movement of air against your aircraft. It’s similar to wind pressure on the fairing of your motorcycle or car windshield.

Did I not know these things before? Certainly not about turbulence. But unfortunately I had read the Veritas Airlines safety briefing. Google it if you want to know more than you ever wanted to know about air safety.

So last Tuesday I had my customary panic attack in the boarding tube, and refused to give in to it. I would the-hell stay strong. And I did, save for a few nervous tics that Lori, knowing me as well as she does, clearly recognized.

The Horizon connector was a Bombardier Q400 turboprop. It’s odd, but I trust turboprops a smidgen more than jet planes. Maybe it’s because you can actually see the blades flogging the air, as opposed to a jet turbine, where you have to take for granted that the vanes are whirling away in there? Seat 8A (Lori considerately offered me the window seat) was right by the prop, adding the comfort that should anything go catastrophically wrong, I was first in line to receive a facefull of whirling aluminum and carbon fibre, which I found macabre-ly comforting.

But as I tried to calm myself, there was definitely a … flicker of eagerness? Yes. It was a sensation I hadn’t felt in a decade and more. The engines roared, the cabin plastic vibrated, and we were thrown joyfully into the air.

Aside from flashes of jagged nervousness, and mental repetitions of “it’s just turbulence” the flight was terrific. The later flight via Alaska Airlines to Las Vegas was even better in a Boeing 737, and the return flights were better still.

Which is all I want to say about them aside from a very big, repeated “thank you” to the cabin staff and flight crew of Horizon/Alaska airlines.

We touched down easily in Seattle and went forth to be harassed by bureaucratic security functionaries, or so I thought. But years have passed, and the process seems to have become more streamlined.

I had two moments I considered annoying on the way out: Once when I was told by a Canadian air traffic security operative, without explanation, to step in front of what I belatedly realized was clearly a small body mass scanner.

The second was the US representative who ordered me to remove my shoes at one of the Las Vegas outbound checkpoints, even though the announcement coming over the tannoy clearly said “Shoes containing metal” had to be removed, not rubber hikers such as I was wearing.

But besides those two incidents, the entire process in both directions was efficient. And while it was a bit intrusive (suitcase searches are apparently the minimum nowadays), it was impersonal and quick, rather like the whole “turn and cough” business at the doctor’s. The people were generally pleasant.

I’d also like to say that I was very impressed at seeing several Muslim women who, heads covered, were working in TSA uniforms. I like to see the responsible agency clearly demonstrating their trust in people so many air travellers may be thinking of as “the other.”

Altogether, the most important element in a series of pleasant flights for a nervous passenger turned out to be people just doing their jobs.

I’ve had four good flights this week, and my confidence is higher than it’s been in ages. So thanks, everyone. More about our trip in a day or two.

File under “U” for “Uh-oh”

Take a letter, please, Miss Jones.

Dear Panasonic corporation:
May I ask your permission to use your installation instructions for a tech writing seminar?

Upon installing the voice recognition software that came with the RR-US450 recording device, I was greeted with this:

My new seminar will be about how not to inspire consumer confidence.

Sorry about the picture quality. Some of us are editors, and others are graphic artists. Guess which one I am?