Not So Fresh

So Kirsten and I are watching the New Year's eve festivities on NBC.

And Carson Daly, with his bowtie and matching satin scarf, looks like a douche. A huge, puffy-haired, self-satisfied douche.

Happy New Year!

A Hula Hoop, It Ain't

So for Christmas, my (awesome!) parents bought me Guitar (awesome!) Hero III for the Nintendo (Sold out! Awesome!) Wii.

Awesome.

Anyway, the game rawks my sawks, but I am unable to find either the blue or the orange buttons (notes 4 and 5). This means that I am able to kick ass at the easy-difficulty songs but suck big floppy donkey dick at the medium, hard, and legitimate musician difficulties.

But no matter. The game itself is awesome. And even if I suck, I still know that I will someday become awesome-r (or at least farther from sucky) by playing.

Best part?

I came home this evening with a friend who's hanging out with us before a birthday party, and we tried to let Kirsten know we were here. Her response?

"I CAN'T TALK RIGHT NOW!! I'M SUCKING AT GUITAR HERO!"

Awesome.

Good, Better, Best

So, yesterday I was totally That Married Guy. You know, the one who walks around in a cable-knit sweater, with a cup of tea in one hand and slippers on his feet (with socks)? Yeah, that one.

On the Vegas front, here are Kirsten's and my casino reviews, in no particular order:
1) Riviera: Crappy, slightly sleazy. However, the outside looks better in the day than at night, which defeats the purpose of all the neon lights that used to be in working order on the front. The mirrored effect is a nice touch. Surprise upside: Very few smokers in there, and they had a decent Chinese restaurant.

2) Treaure Island: Kirsten called it "classy," before seeing this motorcycle. Yes, that's right - the motorcycle has breasts. The pirate ship display was closed for the season while we were around, but it still looked pretty neat. Surprise upside: Tangerine, the wait-in-line-to-pay-a-cover club in Treasure Island, will have Kevin Federline as the New Year's Eve host.

3) Caesar's Palace: Apparently, this is the place for hookers to hang out. It's one of the original giant casino/hotels in the city, along with the Riviera and Circus Circus. It is built into the Forum Shops, one of the largest malls in Las Vegas, though, which is a bonus. Surprise upside: This is the place for hookers to hang out.

4) O'Shea's: this casino doesn't have a hotel, so it's totally dedicated to the sin that made Sin City Sin City. Plus, they have a strip poker room, which is great if the poker players look good. Surprise upside: Apparently, the Irish invented Baccarat. Not true.

5) The Wynn: Very nice, and they're adding on a second identical building called "Encore at The Wynn." They have their own golf course on site, which is very neat and, I'm sure, quite wasteful. However, in the interest of environmentalism (and cash savings), the entire grass front of the Casino isn't actually grass - it's close-cropped astroturf. When you're just walking past, you hardly notice. And it doesn't take an ounce of water, except to hose off the vomit. The interior has very tasteful marble - judicious enough to be understated, but obvious enough to be classy. Surprise upside: The Ferarri/Maserati dealership built into the casino.

6) The Bellagio: We didn't see much, although we went to Almond, the free club. "Free" is a very loose term, since both of us shelled out 15 bucks for our martinis, and the dancing was terrible. By "terrible," I mean "done by white guys." On the outside, though, it has that great water display every half hour. Surprise upside: It's really about the last casino you can see with any clarity from the Stratosphere observation deck, because of all of the other hotels in the way.

7) New York New York: We didn't even go into this one, but it has a great exterior - the hotel building is a streetscape of NYC. The exterior also has a half-size mockup of the Statue of Liberty, and it's got an ESPN zone. Stuart Scott could live there and never notice that people stopped paying attention to him in 2002. Surprise upside: Even in the pouring rain at midnight, it looks awesome, especially with the roller coaster.

8) Slots of Fun: A big box full of slot machines. Imagine a Target (or perhaps more appropriately, a K-Mart) with all that clothing and food crap ripped out and replaced with 1-dollar blackjack and 2-dollar poker tables. They're sketchy and shady-looking, and they know it. Add in the 50-cent hot dogs, and you can't go wrong. Surprise upside: there's no doors on the front, so you always know what the weather is, especially if you're at the front tables.

9) Paris: Very simple, with an exterior consisting of Paris's Union Station combined, for some reason, with the Eiffel Tower (perhaps because people recognize the one and not the other). The floor of the casino is interrupted at several points by the Eiffel Tower's support structure, which is pretty cool, I think. Surprise upside: The exterior sign is a mockup of the Montgolfier Balloon, the next-to-last true high point in France's history.

10) Circus Circus: It looks so ugly and faded, day or night, that we didn't even go in. Surprise upside: I don't know if it smelled bad or not.

11) The Stratosphere: Well, it's got a 1000-foot observation deck, so that has to count for something. Plus the buffet is good enough that we ate there twice without complaint, and it's got a decent if slightly dated mall. The biggest complaint I had is that the entrance to the tower is about half a mile (no joke) from the ticket booth for the tower. Also, the hours to the tower deck aren't posted anywhere. It's like they want to force everyone to go in the middle of the day, when tourists are sure they'll be open. Stupid. Surprise upside: They have a leather and bondage shop in the mall. God bless Las Vegas.

And, in more important news, we ordered a replacement screen for Kirsten's camera.

City of (burnt-out) Lights

Kirsten and I went to Las Vegas last weekend, to celebrate my cousin's graduation from culinary school (He went to Le Cordon Bleu Las Vegas, a branch campus of what is apparently a very good culinary school). Anyway, wrapped around Steve's graduation were a couple of shows, some gambling, and some photo opportunities.

Or at least, there should have been.

In reality, it was a pretty miserable trip. At least, by comparison to what it should have/could have been.

When we landed in Vegas on Friday afternoon, the rain was pouring down. In buckets. Sheets. It had gone past cats and dogs to sheep and marmosets. And of course the luggage coming in wasn't covered, so our bags were pretty damp when we got onto the shuttle to travel to our hotel.

We stayed at the Riviera, which I think was a mistake. It was 80 dollars a night on the strip - and now I know why. Our room had a beautiful view of an elevator lobby across a gap...and it wasn't that nice of a lobby. Just below that were the HVAC pipes for, apparently, half of the building. Stacks and stacks of pipes. So we had a beautiful view of drunk people and infrastructure.

There was also a construction site across the way, but I won't complain about that, because it's progress. But damned if they didn't work all night - popping rivets, hammering, and apparently also forming a bad garage band, from the sound of things.

And it's not as if we were really able to catalogue this for your viewing displeasure - Kirsten's digital camera was damaged at some point in the trip. The viewscreen got crushed, which of course makes taking pictures harder, since it's nice to know what you're photographing. Kirsten was also crushed. She actually wept over it, since she of course wanted some photos from the trip. We wound up buying a disposable camera, and I made a try of using the digital (the lower lefthand corner of the viewscreen wasn't totally illegible). I'm not altogether whether the pictures would have come out better or not, but it was really a bummer.

But enough bitching. There were some good points to the trip. Enough that we weren't turned off to Vegas as a whole. Obviously seeing family was nice, and seeing Steve graduate was pretty cool (he's 26), since I think there was a legitimate worry among the family that he'd never make it beyond his high school diploma.

The shopping is pretty cool, even for guys. Dudes with women in their lives, I highly recommend Agent Provocateur. Kirsten also recommends it - apparently in addition to being ridiculously gloriously dirty stuff, she could barely tell she was wearing lingerie at all.

Guys without women in their lives, I highly recommend the newest Agent Provocateur catalogue, featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal. Rawr.

Anywho.

We did also see a couple of shows - first, we saw Ka by Cirque de Soleil (or as the guy in the seat next to me kept calling it, "Cirque So-lyle"), which was really good and probably worth the 200 bucks my mom spent on Kirsten's and my tickets (she bought herself and my grandmother tickets, too). I didn't think I'd like it because I usually connect CdS with things like dudes riding motorcycles in giant steel spheres, which of course gets old. But since it told a story and had swordfighting and electric guitars, it was all good.

We also saw Spamalot, the Monty Python musical. Awesome. Singing, dancing, Holy Grail, frenchmen, flying cows, blood-thirsty rabbits....nothing better. Best. Musical. Ever. Hands down.

I realize this is a ridiculously-long post, so I'll cut it off here. Part ][ will come soon - the casino reviews!