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Crépes and Craps
Las Vegas. Apocalyptic, tasty, and weird. It's a place to go when you don't want to think about real estate deals gone bad, the fat or sugar content of your diet, how cold you always seem to be, or how to make your novel a complex and lovely thing.
If you want to learn to play craps, we recommend the noon lesson at Excalibur. The King-Arthur-meets-the King theme can't be beat, and they've got a Krispy Kreme in the food court. When you're ready to play for real, go to Bally's, where the dealers are old-school enough to make you feel cool, yet friendly enough to make you feel like slightly less than a dork when you do something stupid, which you will. I've never been more exhilarated watching money disappear.
The best hotels to just look around in, jaws agape, are Paris and Luxor. In the former, you'll see a surprising number of actual French people taking pictures of mock-Parisian artifacts. In the latter, Japanese tour groups are the rule among the faux-Egyptian amazements. It's all so fake, and yet so real.
My only regret is not trying out Mandalay Bay's surf-ready wave pool. We stayed at the Monte Carlo, where the waves top out at 3 feet and the craps tables pay excellent odds.
A Day at the Beach
J and I went down to Westport on Thursday for an afternoon of beach walking, reading, and surfing. We halfheartedly listened to Seattle radio stations until the turnoff onto Highway 8, when I remembered that I used to listen to a station called "Rock of the Coast" back when I worked in Grays Harbor a lot. We cruised around the dial, trying to find it, and stumbled upon a true FM marvel. It's called The Eagle, and it features only the best songs in the entire universe, one after the other (check your irony at the door). For now, there's no advertising, either, though I'm sure that will change soon. Anyway, it made our trip down truly awesome, with only one exception: Phil Collins.
Once in Westport, we found that the beach was overrun with the most horrid people ever to live. Child-abusing, monstrous people with no reason to live, much less to sully the beach. I got some tiny-wave surfing in (not like this--more like this) and Jen found a lovely green rock that is, I think, jadeite or jasper (like the green ones in this picture).
One of the highlights... well... one of the lights, anyway, of the day was our stroll through the grounds of the International Chainsaw Carving Competition. Here are a bunch of pictures from the 2000 event to give you an idea of the kinds of things we saw.
One of the carvers took a liking to J's pants. He said, "Hey! Where'd you get them pants?" and started following us. We walked faster.
Delicious... and Deadly
 He died. In a vat of chocolate.
For more pleasant reading, do check out the Exploratorium's online chocolate exhibit and Janet's Chocolate Medicinal Mousse Pie from Science News. Also note that Darigold has recalled its "Totally Chocolate" ice cream due to "undeclared walnuts."
"Destruction of the Polite Fiction"
Ali Davis, brilliant Chicago writer and sister of my Girl Gang associate Brangien, has been working in a video rental place that deals in a bucketload of porn. She's been keeping a diary of her experiences, some of which are hilarious and some hideous. You can read it on Improv Resource Center or listen to her read a cleaned-up version on Ira Glass's This American Life radio show archives.
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