Sean is just some guy who lives in the Twin Cities. Updates to this blog are at random intervals.

18 December 2005 - I went to the public library the other day, and the library had taped up an 8½-by-11 sheet of paper to the entrance door, on it printed the library's truncated holiday schedule. And I noticed that someone, presumably a library patron, had taken a ballpoint pen and crossed out "Holiday Schedule" and wrote in "Christmas Schedule". And when I saw that, I realized that all the time, in my everyday life, I am encountering people that are idiots. And what's more, they probably aren't even aware that they are idiots. And since I have this forum available to me, and there's a chance that some of those people might be reading this blog, I've decided to write up a guide. If after reading the following you discover that you are indeed an idiot, I'd advise you to seek professional help as soon as possible. If for some reason you're unwilling to do that, at the very least, please stop voting. TOP TEN SIGNS THAT YOU ARE AN IDIOT 10. You are offended if somebody says "Happy Holidays" to you, instead of "Merry Christmas". 9. You watch an science segment on the news and you dismiss it because it was obviously just a report generated by those "global-warming scientists". (Or perhaps you never see any science segments because you only watch "Fox News".) 8. One of the main concerns of your life, one of your biggest problems, is that the NCAA Division IA football doesn't have a playoff system. 7. There are "liberals" that you denounce as "un-American" because they have voiced the fact that torturing people might be a bad idea. How else do you expect to fight terrorists?! (Now that I think about it, count this one if you have ever described someone as "un-American" for any reason whatsoever.) 6. You live in Minnesota, and on a snowy day while driving you pass ten cars that have spun out off the road, and then when it takes you twice as long to get wherever you're going, you gripe that "some people drive too slow". 5. You can't understand how public schools can teach evolution in science classes and not "Intelligent Design". Evolution is "just a theory," and there hasn't been a shred of evidence found to support it. (Count this one twice if you've ever used the phrase "Young Earth theory".) 4. You are convinced that NFL referees have made an organized, concerted effort to make your favorite team lose. Memos were written, meetings were held, payments were made. Your favorite team, whichever one it is. Also, NFL referees have also been paid to make sure that your team's biggest rival wins, whichever that one is. 3. The idea of "big government" really riles you. Social programs should be eliminated, taxes should be cut. (Huge spending deficits, as long as the money is spent on the military, is no problem, though.) The federal government should be so small that all they should be able to do is tell you what you can and can't do in your bedroom, whom you can and can't marry, whether you can or can't get an abortion, and if you're in a public school, whom you have to pray to. 2. You have dropped a note in your lunch cafeteria's suggestion box complaining that they don't serve any "Christ-centered meals". 1. George W. Bush? Best president ever. Astute readers of this guide may notice that many of the signs of being an idiot are associated with religious or right-wing causes. To that, all I can say is, "if the shoe fits..." 10 December 2005 - Today is a big day for me. It has been exactly twenty years since I last threw up. I'm on a 7305-day non-vomit streak. I've just been lucky that way, I think. I've never had enough to drink to cause me to throw up, and I've never had the stomach flu in the past twenty years. I remember the last time I had the stomach flu. It was the evening of December 10, 1985. I remember that it was that exact day because I was playing violin in an orchestra concert that night. I was in the eighth grade. Right before the concert, I had a weird feeling in my stomach, but I just attributed it to the usual butterflies that I always had before being in a concert. I made it through the performance fine, but afterwards the butterflies didn't go away like they usually did. And shortly after my parents drove me home from the performance, I ended up vomiting. It hadn't been butterflies at all; it was a touch of stomach flu. In retrospect, that I was extremely fortunate that I didn't throw up until after the concert. If I had gotten sick just two hours before, I surely would've missed being in it. Worse, if the flu had hit me just one hour earlier, I would've thrown up during it. I wonder if I would've had the sense to make it offstage in time. Even if I had, it still would've been pretty embarrassing to jump up in the middle of a piece and run off. And if I hadn't, well, the thought still strikes me with ex post facto horror. But anyway, that was the last time that I vomited. To end on a more pleasant note, I watched the Back to the Future trilogy on DVD this weekend. That's not related to my non-vomit streak at all, except for the fact that those movies also happened in 1985. I haven't seen them in awhile, and I'd forgotten how good they are. 9 December 2005 - So I got screwed over by Wal-mart today. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time we shop at Target, so normally I never even go to Wal-mart (the owners are Republicans, so we don't want to do anything to support them), but I was there, I needed the battery, so there you are. Wal-mart didn't have the battery. But as it happens, we also needed milk, cereal, and bread, and Wal-mart had all three, so I went ahead and got them. It came out to be about seven bucks. When I got home, the bread wasn't in the bag that they gave me. I'm not sure what happened. Obviously I didn't notice, but I'm guessing that the cashier forgot to put the bread in the bag (or, put it in a different bag, which she didn't give me), and she had already moved to the next person in line when I walked off without the bread. But basically it comes down to the fact that Wal-mart managed to lose 33.3 percent of my entire purchase, and I'm out for the cost of the loaf of bread. As far as I'm concerned, Wal-mart owes me that money. I'm not sure how I can recoup that. So, though I'm not sure how, next time I have the opportunity to screw over Wal-mart for $2, I'm going to do it. And I encourage everybody who reads this to do so as well. 27 November 2005 - I played Diplomacy all day Friday. Our friend Jerry, every Thanksgiving weekend, gets seven of us together, and we play all day. Here's the final board position, after the Winter 1910 adjustment phase, after about nine hours of play: I played the game as Turkey (yellow). France, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany were all eliminated. I was at war with Italy (Jerry, green) but once England (Jason, blue) once got to 12 supply centers, it was pretty clear that Jerry and I had to call off our war and unite, or otherwise England would easily get 18 supply centers and win outright. England did get two more to 14 in the final board position, and then conceded that he didn't think he could get any more against our united opposition. And neither Jerry nor I thought we could make any further progress against England, either, so we called it a draw. I'm not sure that this is a certain stalemate, mathematically. But if it isn't, it's close to one. It's certainly not clear to me if anyone has the upper hand. The Turkish fleet in the Norwegian sea is not a misprint. I actually got it out up there, though I had Italy's help to do so. By itself it couldn't make much real progress in gaining supply centers, but it was able to divert the forces a couple of England's fleets, which was purposeful enough. Interestingly, this game ended almost exactly the same this year as it did in our 2002 session, when Austria-Hungary (Cindy) and Turkey (me again) had to unite to prevent an England win (which had been Jason then, too). The game doesn't always end in a draw, by the way. If I recall correctly, Cindy won outright in 2003, while playing France. And she won outright again in 2004, playing Japan on the Colonial Diplomacy board, which uses an Asia map instead of Europe. 11 November 2005 - 'Arrested Development' gets the ax Dammit! In just three days, my web site delivers the kiss of death... Well, it's earned a spot on my DVD shelf. Just like "Sports Night", it proved to be a show that was too smart for most Americans to watch. I've heard a couple of people complain about it: "I just don't think that it's funny." Actually, it's the funniest show on television. But if a viewer is so unengaged to need a laugh track to figure out where the funny lines are, then I guess they'd have a problem with "Arrested Development". 8 November 2005 - This one is for those of you who watch Fox's "Arrested Development". (And if you don't, start watching right now. It's the best show on television. The writing is incredibly clever. I'll lend you the first- and second-season DVDs if you need.) I was stunned by last night's plot twist at the very end. I didn't expect it in the slightest. Thank God I still have recorded every episode from season three. Tonight I'm going to have to go back and re-watch every single one of them, this time looking for the signs. I've got no doubt that they are there--I'm sure that I just never noticed. And now I just looked at the Arrested Development Forum on the Television Without Pity website, and it turns out that some posters have known (or suspected) for weeks. I'm glad I never read the forum until now... 2 November 2005 - An e-mail I received just now: * * * * * From: Sandquist, Chad P. To: Sandquist, Sean Hey, do you know what Mom and Dad's middle names and birthdates are? I'm going to get a passport, in case I want to leave the country. Chad * * * * * First of all, apparently, my brother is thinking about the possibility of taking off on short notice, for no reason. I should probably find out what he's been up to. Secondly, he should not need to ask me what our parent's full names and birthdates are. My friend at work: "Tell him that he's probably too self-centered to be leaving the country." And this is from my smart brother... 8 October 2005 - So apparently my dad is a minor celebrity now. My hometown has just built a new hospital, and he was the one who got the very first surgery there. The newspaper interviewed him. He got to be on the local news. Fortunately for the hospital, he didn't die. That would've been a bad omen. 5 September 2005 - Zompist pretty much says everything that I would, except far more eloquently. (Make sure you read his entire entry.) Four years after 9/11— four years, the time it took for us to enter and win World War II— we've gotten a surprise test of what would happen in the case of a massive terrorist attack. And now we know: Bush and Cheney would go on vacation; the Speaker of the House would order the area bulldozed; tens of thousands of Americans would be left to misery and death. And that's how they treat red states. 22 August 2005 - Introducing my fantasy football team name and logo for 2005: And, on a slightly related note, check out Lore's newest entry on The Slumbering Lungfish. It's uncanny... 19 August 2005 - On my work PC I just did a mass purge of most of the icons sitting on my Desktop. There are now only 50. I don't know how many there were before (I didn't count), but a quick height times width calculation tells me that since the maximum number of icons that appear without overlapping is 221, that's about how many I must've had before. I used to use wallaper as my desktop background, but I got rid of it awhile ago. Not really any point... Needless to say, I use the Desktop a quick-and-easy place to put temporary files (it's even easier since I have mapped my Desktop to the B:\ drive) but once they've piled up after awhile, if you can't even find our new icon anymore, it's no longer quick-and-easy. Time for a purge. I still have 50 icons there, though, which I probably shouldn't get rid of. The last two people who have come by my cube both immediately exclaimed, "Wow, you've cleaned up your Desktop!" 15 August 2005 - No one will care about this except for me, but here are my fantasy football team names and logos over the past ten years... 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 Nevada Death Squad Evil Geniuses UFOs Unholy Alliance The Wrath of Sean Brain Trust Fighting Jesuses Master Control Program Kneel Before Zod! Church of the SubGenius I've never put too much thought into it before, but looking back it looks like I usually have a sinister-evil thing going on. Three of my team names are direct lifts from Illuminati cards. Three are from 80's movies (the antagonists), and three are pseudo-religious references. My 2005 team is coming soon... 8 August 2005 - I set a record yesterday. I put more than thirty dollars worth of gasoline in my car with one fill. Combine the currently high prices, plus the fact that we were in Wisconsin (where the gas tax is higher than Minnesota), plus the fact that Cindy glided us into the station while running on fumes. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure this won't be the last time. In any event, while I was filling up the tank, there was a McDonald's next to the station, and it had a billboard: INTRODUCING THREE NEW WAYS TO ENJOY CHICKEN I wonder what the other two ways are, other than by eating it. 30 July 2005 - So it looks like Bill Arnett's web site has a slightly new look... 29 July 2005 - I ޴ Unicode. If I hadn't declared a moratorium on buying myself any more T-shirts (I already have enough for my next two lifetimes), I'd buy this one. 27 July 2005 - I'm a Green Bay Packers shareholder, and my dad and I decided to go to the annual shareholders' meeting this Wednesday at 10:00 am. We arrived late for the meeting. We were in Green Bay in plenty of time but it took an extra half an hour due to traffic to get the last mile to the Lambeau Field parking lot. And then there was a long walk to the Resch Center where the shareholders' meeting actually was. Traffic was a lot heavier than anticipated. A lot more shareholders' came than in previous years because the Packers announced that there would be a practice to watch afterwards. I heard that the Resch Center holds 7,000 people, and 8,000 people actually showed up. We weren't one of the last thousand that didn't get in, but we did get pretty poor seats--as you can see, we were in the back and got to read everything in mirror-script. After all of the addresses, here is GM Ted Thompson taking questions and comments individually from fans. Most fans here are demanding that the Packers not accede to Javon Walker's threats of holding out with two years left on his contract. Here's me in the new Lambeau Field Atrium. The stadium upgrade has proved to be a huge financial success. Here's me waiting with all of the other shareholders for the practice to begin. While we waited the Packers served free pop, chips, and hot dogs and bratwursts to all of the shareholders. The Vikings have something similar to this. It's a blank wall on the side of the Metrodome. Head coach Mike Sherman showed up shortly after the practice began and signed autographs for fans for about twenty minutes. Here's a picture from the practice. It's mostly rookie and first-year players, though quarterbacks J.T. O'Sullivan and Craig Nall were there. LB Nick Barnett also showed up for awhile and signed some autographs. Here's a picture of the outside of Lambeau Field that we took on our way out back to the parking lot. 21 July 2005 - On CNN today: Scientists: Humans cause global warming In other news: the Lindbergh baby has been kidnapped! It's kind of sad that this stuff has to even make the front page anymore. But then again, the people that still need to be told this (and some of them are people that I've worked with, so you'd think that they'd be better educated) are the same people that actually still believe the world is only about 6000 years old. I've actually heard this statement out loud: "I'm a proponent of the 'Young Earth' theory of geology." 9 July 2005 - Occasionally I take a look at Raymond Chen's web log, looking for occasional insight at what some of these Windows designers were thinking when they created the OS. And last month I came upon a huge whopper. Chen was griping about how some users use the "Date/Time Properties" control to look up dates. Unaware of its design, people have been using the Date/Time control panel as if it were a calendar, not realizing that it was doing all sorts of scary things behind the scenes. I have always done this myself (you double-click the clock), and on occasion I noticed that the date on my PC would be screwed up, until I figured out for myself what I had been inadvertently doing. But the designers don't have any right to complain. There's no alternative--if I need to look at a calendar while working on my PC, there's no other way to get one! Even Windows 3.1, if I recall correctly, came installed with a little calendar app. But obviously nowadays they just want us to be compelled to purchase Office ($339.99). I'm not alone in this opinion. The fifty other users who responded to Chen's original post clearly had the exact same thoughts that I did. One poster: I'd rephrase this: "Unaware of its users' habits, Microsoft has designed the Date/Time control panel ignoring that people typically use it as a calendar, not realizing that it caused users all sorts of scary problems behind the scenes. 6 July 2005 - New York eliminated in voting for 2012 Olympics Since 2001, an incredible amount of international goodwill for New York, completely squandered, in just four years. Thanks, George! 5 July 2005 - I've had my online journal running here since 1998, and I haven't really improved the technology too much since then. It's just straight HTML that I write with a text editor, and I don't have any facility for online feedback or anything, other than e-mail. Hell, I don't even have broadband access from home--we still use dial-up. I'm Amish that way. Nevertheless, I'm trying something new...an RSS feed. Whenever I update the site, I'll update the XML. So if you have an RSS reader (the one I've started using is AmphetaDesk, which I picked more or less at random) you can find out that way whenever I've added a new entry. We'll see if it works out. 7 June 2005 - New Vikings owner wants outdoor stadium I'm totally for this. When Minnesota games on TV start getting blacked out again due to lack of attendance, they always show Green Bay games instead... 2 June 2005 - So I'm at Target looking at a wedding registry, and one of the items listed is "Net and Post System". It's about the right price, so I head over to sporting goods to find out exactly what it is. It turns out to be a volleyball net, which is logical enough, but I look at the large box carefully and conspicuously absent on it is any mention of the word "volleyball". Or "badminton", or any other sport that the net could conceivably be used for. For some reason, the marketers of this item clearly don't want to specify what exactly this "Net and Post System" is for. But why not? Is it for some legal reason, that they don't want to get sued? Or maybe is it that they don't want to turn away potential badminton net buyers by calling it a volleyball net? And vice versa? The box even has a picture of a man and the net in action. There's the net, and an athletic-looking guy behind the net, just looking vaguely up at the sky. He has no volleyball, he has no badminton racquet. The sport he's playing could just as easily be "who can stare at the sun for the longest." Presumably the net is there so he can grab onto it after he goes blind. So I bought the Net and Post System. I sure hope that after they come back from their honeymoon they can still see. 30 May 2005 - Ever since I learned I was diabetic, I am careful to limit how much sugary foods I eat. Fruits are generally okay, but bananas in particular are very sweet. So a lot of the time whenever I eat a banana, I eat only half and give the other half to Cindy. So, for those other people who heard her in the Festival Foods produce department today: When Cindy saw a display of a bunch of new "miniature" bananas, and she pointed and exclaimed "Look! They're Sean-sized bananas!", that's what she meant. 22 May 2005 - We are staying at Cindy's parents' house for the weekend. I wake up Sunday morning and go to the living room, where Cindy and her father are watching TV. ME: Hey, what's going on? MY FATHER-IN-LAW: [who has the remote] Cindy is complaining at me because we're not watching what she wants to watch. She says that what I'm watching is "crap". ME: Why? What is it that you want to watch, Cindy? CINDY: "Fright Night." [pause] "Part II." 20 May 2005 - I like looking up game reviews on the web. For example, Cindy and I just recently played a new game, called Bootleggers, that we think we like. Players are mobsters during Prohibition, and they run an business of operating stills, trucking hooch to speakeasies, and ordering hits on each other, trying to make as much money as possible. It's pretty fun, though so far we've only played once. (Though due the setting, in the back of my mind I kept wondering, "Where's Cthulhu? Is there a Cthulhu card? It's the twenties—that means Cthulhu has to be somewhere!") But anyway, as I was perusing reviews of other games, I ran across this review from GameSpot about a new massively-multiplayer game that has come out. Looks interesting. 9 May 2005 - May arrives, and right on schedule, I start to see articles like this in the local media: Diluted Pack makes border battle boring I've been listening to Minnesota fans for the past month or two now, and I'm a little confused. Why are we even having a football season? Wouldn't the NFL save a whole lot of time and effort if they just gave the Lombardi Trophy to the Vikings right now? Of course, I seem to recall hearing exactly this same kind of talk over the past three years... 29 April 2005 - Happy birthday to me--I'm 33 today. Now I'm the exact same age that lots of famous people have died. Like Alexander the Great. And Jesus. And Chris Farley. 28 April 2005 - OK, it was fun while it lasted. Actually, I can't believe it took this long. It's been more than a month already, after all... NL CENTRAL STANDINGS Team W L W% GB Cardinals 14 5 .737 - Cubs 11 10 .524 4.0 Reds 10 11 .476 5.0 Astros 8 12 .400 6.5 Pirates 8 12 .400 6.5 Brewers 7 13 .350 7.5 9 April 2005 - Hey, they're 3-0, baby! Only 159 more games to go... 5 April 2005 - Not that you've asked, but in case you're interested, here's a log of a trip to Las Vegas that Cindy and I went on a couple of weeks ago... Tuesday, 22 March We took America West from Minneapolis/St. Paul to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. This is my third trip to Las Vegas; it's Cindy's first. We've booked a room at the Flamingo; we chose there because it was part of a deal through Expedia.com. Also that particular hotel is centrally located on the Strip, making it easy to walk to other Strip locations. (In past years I've stayed at the downtown Plaza, perfectly okay but inconvenient if you want to visit a lot of Strip casinos, and the Riviera, which is on the Strip but on the north end and certainly not centrally located.) We are unhappy to find out that America West does not offer a free in-flight meal; you have to pay $2 for a cheap snack box, or $5 for a cheap meal. Moreover, to watch the in-flight movie they charge $5 for a headphone rental. On past flights, with Northwest, they only charged $1 for headphones, and you got to keep it afterward. We still have two sets of headphones from a Northwest flight a couple of years ago, and on future flights I'll have to remember to bring them along. However, the in-flight movie is Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, making the problem moot anyway. When we get to McCarran we catch an airport shuttle to the Flamingo. To our surprise, our room is ready even though it's only 11am, several hours before standard check-in time. The Flamingo turns out to be huge; we have trouble navigating the casino to find the Margaritaville restaurant where we have lunch, and again navigating to the elevator bank which will lead to our room. The hotel directory maps do not have "You are here" indicators on them, making them somewhat useless. The Flamingo is probably too huge...in addition to making it kind of hard to find your way around, once we get to our floor it takes literally a couple of minutes to walk from the elevator bank all the way to our room. Our room number actually has five digits, making it non-trivial to remember. Non-trivial enough that I accidentally stop in front of the wrong room at first and discover that my key card doesn't seem to work. Cindy: "Uh...through the peephole I can see someone wandering around in there." I take a second look at our room number and quickly, quietly, grab the card and back away. Finally I manage to find our proper destination. Here's the view out our window. The weather forecast is for rain the entire duration of our trip. The first time I was in Las Vegas it actually snowed; this time we'll probably get rain? Isn't this supposed to be a friggin' desert?! We have booked three shows during our trip here. The first is "Jubilee!" at Bally's tonight, which is right next door. Because of that, and the threatening weather, we decide to stay relatively close to home on this first day. We go to the neighboring Barbary Coast casino and play a little craps. I walk up to the table and throw down a $5 come bet which wins immediately when a seven is rolled. I cheer out loud and quickly stifle it when I realize that most everyone else at the table has just lost. I decide to play at least until it's my turn to throw the dice, and currently the dice are halfway around the table. The next two shooters, both women, throw extremely hot and keep the dice for many points, passing every time. Won't be awhile until it's my turn, but that's perfectly fine with me as it means that my pass-line bets are continuing to win. Several times the point is an unlikely 4 or a 10 but the point is still made, netting me 2:1 on my $10 odds bet. Soon I'm up about $150. Cindy, who has spent the whole time watching: "This game is great!" Eventually the two women shooters both seven-out and the table grows cold. The next few shooters lose almost immediately and finally it's my turn. I offer to let Cindy roll the dice for me, but she demurs; my first point is a 9, and I seven-out before a nine comes up. My $150 in winnings have diminished to $100 by the time I am done with the dice, but that's okay. Time to quit. I shouldn'tve worried about getting a chance to roll and instead quit when I was further ahead, but never mind. I'm happy with a C-note for profit. We decide to try the Imperial Palace on the other side of the Flamingo. Here, I try some blackjack, but it's frustrating. I get a dozen aces but incredibly never get paired with a face card. Finally, at long last, an ace and a queen--but the dealer's card is an ace and sure enough, my only blackjack ties with the dealer's. The whole session turns out to be a wash--I walk away with $60 in chips; the same amount that I put in. We decide to try another place, but the rain has started, and the casino is filling up with people from outside trying to get away from the weather. So we're stuck in the Imperial Palace for a couple hours while waiting for the Bally's show to begin. Foolishly we pay $3 each for beers at the bar while Cindy plays Video Blackjack for 25 cents a hand; what we should've done is find a Blackjack machine on the floor and drink for free. But Cindy wins $5, paying for most of the beer. It's still raining and it's still a couple of hours until our show, so Cindy suggests craps again here, since it was so profitable at Barbary Coast. Fat chance. Here at the Imperial Palace, practically every point loses and we lose $70 very quickly. Cindy: "I don't like this game anymore." I decide to try a new game, at least, new for me, Pai Gow Poker. Pai Gow Poker turns out to be relatively fun and definitely non-volatile; unlike Blackjack, it takes a couple of minutes to play each hand and even then, 40% of the hands are pushes. So you can play a long time for a little money. Nevertheless, at the $10 minimum table, I slowly lose $30, the remaining $30 of our craps winnings. Cindy, who has never heard of the game before, has watched me the entire time and has now figured out the game by observation. She's getting impatient and is eager to either go to see another casino, or, to sit down and try play herself. But it's stopped raining so it's time to go. We go over to the Mirage so Cindy can see the volcano erupt out front and then it's to Bally's to see "Jubilee!" "Jubilee!" is an old-fashioned, Vegas-style showgirl show. It's also topless, something that was unbeknownst to Cindy when she picked it as one of the shows to go see. "Jubilee!" is okay. The dancers and the music and the choreography is pretty impressive, as are the tumblers and the acrobats and the jugglers. When the show finishes it's 12:30 am (2:30am Central Time) and it's cold outside and pouring rain. Despite the short distance it's quite a long walk back to the Flamingo. Gambling results for Tuesday: up $5. Wednesday, 23 March The weather is much better the following day; breezy, but despite the previous weather forecasts it doesn't rain again for the rest of our trip. So it's safe to do some outside wandering. We are seeing the "Tournament of Kings" show at the Excalibur tonight, way at the south end of the Strip, so we're going to spend the day slowly working our way down there. We go to Caesar's Palace first, mostly just to look around, as it's one of the nicer hotels, just across the street from the Flamingo, and also has the fancy Forum shopping center. We don't gamble at all, as it's relatively early and few if any table games have dealers. (Neither Cindy nor I care for slot machines at all, and we'll settle for video poker only when we don't feel like playing a table game.) And even if they did, the table minimums at Caesar's are likely going to be too high for our taste. Even the Flamingo's minimums are higher than we care for, and in the end it turns out that we never actually gamble at the hotel/casino that we're staying in. We have lunch at Planet Hollywood, and then head towards Excalibur. On our way there we pass the Boardwalk casino, which seems a little more low-brow than the other extravagant places on this south end of the Strip, and in fact a sign in the window advertises low minimums and favorable playing conditions. We've been walking for awhile and this is a good excuse for a break; Cindy and I give blackjack a try there. We find a table with two open seats, and our dealer is very friendly, as are the three other women who are playing there. We have a good time, and I actually get two or three blackjacks this time, but nevertheless it doesn't translate into playing success; Cindy loses all but $10 of her original $40 stake and I'm down to $15. So we leave Boardwalk down $55 for the day. We get to Excalibur several hours before the show starts, but that's fine since we need to pick up our tickets to the show ahead of time. We wait in line and the couple ahead of us is informed that all of the shows today are sold out and they are out of luck. Fortunately, we bought our tickets through LasVegas.com a couple of weeks before, so once it's our turn in line I tell the ticket agent my name and ask for our tickets that they should be holding. But my name's not on her list. She hunts around the computer for several minutes without finding anything. She asks if I bought the tickets this morning, and I say no, it was at least two weeks ago, and I'm wondering if we've gotten screwed, when I happen to mention that I got the tickets through a website. Oh! She accesses the computer again finds our tickets immediately. Don't know how long has the clerk has been working the Excalibur box office but apparently I'm the first person that's ever purchased tickets through a third-party broker before. Tickets in hand, we settle down at the Excalibur casino to do a little gambling. Blackjack is not so appealing anymore, so both Cindy and I decide to try video poker. I try to find a video poker machine that pays 6 coins for a flush and 9 for a full house (which is a fair pay table), but there are none available; all seem to pay 5/8 (or less) instead of 6/9. We play anyway, putting $5 each in some 25-cent machines. Cindy's $5 credits slowly diminishes to $4, and then towards $3. I stay about even for awhile, but then I get daring and try the 5-coin button, and have the good luck to get presented with a flush. I continue playing 5 coins for a bit and my run of good luck continues. I point out my credit count to Cindy while she struggles to get her count back up to $4.00; mine is up to $20.00. We play for a little longer. Cindy manages to get her sum back up to $5.00, breaking even, while I play my $20.00 until it goes down to $15 and cash out. Ten dollars profit! Emboldened, I try another new game for me, "Let It Ride". Let It Ride is a table game where you get a five-card stud poker hand, and you start with three chips but you can pull some of your stake back if you suspect you won't end up with a pair of 10s, which is the lowest winning hand. Higher hands than pairs have better than 1:1 payouts. The casino advantage is higher than I'd prefer, but the game seems interesting and I want to try it anyway. I get $60 in chips and put three chips on the table, and my first hand is lucky: my first three cards have a pair of kings so I can leave my $15 on the table and win 1:1 immediately. I'm able to play Let It Ride for a little while, betting mostly with my winnings, and maintaining at about $10 or $15 ahead. But when I get several nothing-hands in a row, my stake goes down to my original $60 and I decide to quit before actually losing anything. The dealer has been paying attention--when I ask to get colored up she comments that I've ended up even. Cindy has never seen the neighboring Luxor, and the glossy black pyramid is kind impressive if you've never seen it before, so we spend some time looking around there. And I want to see Mandalay Bay, one of the fancier casinos that I've never yet been to. We spend some time in the Mandalay Bay sports book, watching some horse races, and I turn over the $10 that a co-worker gave me to bet on the Twins on the 2005 World Series. The Twins winning the Series has 18-to-one odds on it. While I'm there, I make the same bet, for myself, on the Brewers winning the Series. Milwaukee, by contrast, has 200-to-1 odds, so that's potentially $2000 for me come October. Not that I plan to spend that money. Cindy: "You just pissed away ten dollars". I also put $10 on the Badgers to win the NCAA tournament at 30:1 odds, but I lose that in a few days after Wisconsin beats N.C. State but falls to North Carolina, the eventual champion. (Interestingly enough, I see a lot of other people wearing "Wisconsin" T-shirts and sweatshirts all throughout our trip; I am definitely not alone. Of all the collegiate attire that I see, Wisconsin is easily the most represented. I theorize that this week must happen to also be UW-Madison's spring break week, and I later confirm that this is indeed the case.) Mandalay Bay and Luxor and Excalibur, apparently all owned by the same corporation, have their own little monorail running between the three. The ratio of people going from Excalibur to Mandalay Bay, to people going from Mandalay Bay to Excalibur, appears to be about 1:20. I never learn an explanation for this imbalance, and I can only speculate that perhaps a side business of Mandalay Bay is manufacturing people. In any event, we get to the "Tournament of Kings" show and it's pretty good. This is another show that Cindy chose to go to, and she definitely has a good time, going to the trouble of buying a fancy drink in a souvenir Excalibur flagon with the meal that comes with the show. It's nighttime when the show is over and we start the long walk back to the Flamingo. On the way we pass the fancy Bellagio with its musical fountains. Gambling results for Wednesday: down $65. Overall: down $60. Thursday, 24 March Thursday night we have tickets to see Penn & Teller at the Rio; this is the show that I wanted to go to. But first we both want to see "Star Trek: The Experience" at the Las Vegas Hilton. The Las Vegas Hilton is slightly off the Strip, on the north end of it, so it would be another long walk. Except the new Las Vegas Monorail goes directly from the Flamingo to the Hilton. We spend $6 to take the monorail and get to the Hilton at a quarter to eleven in the morning, only to find out that the exhibit doesn't open until 11 and the first ride doesn't start until 11:30. So we look around the casino (which has a science-fiction them to it) for several minutes, and head back to "Star Trek", only to find that, in the few minutes that we were gone, a long line has formed. Oh, well. We get in line and wait patiently as the line slowly moves forward. We have a short conversation with the people in line behind us. I can't remember exactly what the price of admission is, but I mention that I think that it's "around thirty or forty bucks." The couple behind us express their dismay, and suddenly they are not in line behind us any more. Weird that they went to the trouble of showing up early not having any idea what the cost was. The line slowly moves forward, and while we wait we meet a guy dressed up as a Ferengi (who is obviously employed by the hotel) who confirms that the cost to get in is $34.99. Once we pay the admission price we are allowed to go on the two rides all day as much as we want. The first ride turns out to be a motion simulator ride called "Klingon Encounter". The motion simulation is very good, and it actually makes me a little queasy. But I'm a lot more concerned about Cindy, whose tendency for motion-sickness is much, much greater than mine. Cindy somehow gets through the ride without throwing up. But, after we get off the elevator taking us back to the exhibit: "We need to sit down and not move for awhile." So we leave "Star Trek: The Experience" and go back to the main part of the casino to take a break before trying the second ride. Now seems like a good excuse to try Pai Gow Poker, me for the second time and Cindy for the first. We seat ourselves at a $10 table and as usual, the game goes very slowly, so it's easy to be able to relax and enjoy ourselves. Moreover, both of the Pai Gow Poker dealers that we play with are talkative and extremely friendly. We have enough fun that I end up tipping the dealers ten dollars, which is more than I usually tip. But the dealers here at the Hilton are a far cry from the stone-silent dealers that we encountered at other casinos the previous days. The session is successful as well; after an hour and a half of play both Cindy and I end up marginally ahead for a profit of thirty dollars or so. The second Star Trek ride, "Borg Invasion", is less of a motion-simulator ride (fortunately for Cindy) as it is a 3-D movie with the "Voyager" cast, and it's good, but we agree that it's not as good as the first Klingon ride, which was with the TNG cast. Since a leaflet that we picked up on the monorail mentions that if we show our monorail tickets we are entitled to a free drink at Quark's Bar, we head to Quark's. We show the leaflet to the bartender (who is not dressed up as an alien or anything) and display both of our monorail tickets. But the bartender demands two leaflets, even though the ad doesn't say anything about needing two leaflets (had we known we could've easily picked up a second leaflet on the monorail). That's okay--Cindy's drink is free and I just pay regular price for mine, that money coming directly out of the tip that the bartender no longer receives. Time to head over to the Rio to pick up our tickets for the show tonight. Rather than take the monorail back to the Flamingo and then walk for several blocks, under the Interstate, to the off-strip Rio, we save time by taking a taxi directly from the Hilton. The Rio box office immediately comes up with our P&T tickets, apparently having their act together much more so than the Excalibur. It's suppertime, and we take a look around the Rio briefly, but its restaurants (as well as its table games) are expensive, so we take a walk across the street to the Gold Coast casino. The Gold Coast casino is much less fancy, but it's also very packed and I get the impression that the Gold Coast is the type of casino that locals and more hardcore gamblers gravitate to. Even better, one of its restaurants advertises $7.99 and $8.99 steaks, so we head over there, and the inexpensive steak dinner that Cindy orders even comes with a beer. We don't miss the Rio at all. After dinner it's still a few hours before showtime, so we check out the tables at the Gold Coast. After having fun playing Pai Gow earlier that afternoon, we feel like trying it again, and amazingly we discover a $5 minimum Pai Gow Poker table. I didn't even think $5 Pai Gow could exist--considering that you can play about four blackjack hands in the same time it takes to play one Pai Gow hand, and also that most Pai Gow hands end in ties, a $5 Pai Gow table must make about as much money for the casino as a 75-cent blackjack table would. We sit ourselves down immediately and again have a great time. The dealers aren't as outgoing, but the Japanese guy sitting next to me makes up for it. When he notices that my luck seems to be better than his own, he starts making bets on my Pai Gow hand in addition to his. It seems weird to be betting $5 on my own play when the guy next to me is betting $20 on it. Lucky for him, my luck stays good (Cindy's too), and despite the fact that we are only betting $5 at a time, Cindy and I end up with a combined profit of about $25 when it's time to go. Our experience has been so positive that we make sure we go to the gift shop and get several Gold Coast decks of cards as souvenirs before we leave. We show up early at the Rio, as I heard that periodically the Rio runs a "Masquerade Show in the Sky" up on rails over the casino. We wait awhile and never see the sky show, though we do get a mini-parade with loud music on the casino floor. It's a little underwhelming, but I probably wouldn't have been impressed by the sky show, either. At 8:30 we head to the Penn & Teller theater. Penn & Teller turn out to be very good; the only down side is that I've been a Penn & Teller fan for awhile and because of this, a lot of their tricks aren't new to me; I've seen them on TV already. The entire show is new to Cindy, however, and she likes it. When previously reading about the show on some review sites, I noticed a lot of sharply negative comments, all from Christian zealots, criticizing Penn taking shots at religion during the performance. Unfortunately, Penn must've toned it down lately, and I miss out on any blasphemy. Anyway, one neat thing is that after the show both Teller and Penn are waiting in the lobby of the theater, meeting with fans, posing for pictures, and signing autographs. But the crowd around them is large, so we decide just to head home. We find out that the Rio runs a shuttle that goes directly to and from Harrah's, so they must be owned by the same corporation. Back to Harrah's and then home to the Flamingo which is right beside. Gambling results for Thursday: up $55. Overall: down $5. Friday, 25 March The last real day of our trip, as our flight back to Minnesota is at 11:30 am the next day so there's not much we'll be able to do Saturday morning before leaving. Today we've arranged to rent a car, planning to visit nearby Hoover Dam and Red Rock Canyon. We get to the Budget rent-a-car counter promptly at 9 am but once there we are chastened to find a long line. We wait half an hour before the clerks finally get to us. The couple that has waited just ahead of us is turned away immediately; apparently they did not make previous arrangements and had stood there for 30 minutes only to find out that there aren't any cars available. The car we get is a difficult-to-describe-silvery-green 2004 Ford Focus (I just checked the Ford website and I think the color is "light tundra"). The car turns out to be perfectly fine, though, and we take the 45-minute drive out of the city to Lake Mead and Hoover Dam, again something that I've seen before, but Cindy hasn't. After we're done there we head out to Red Rock Canyon, just east of Las Vegas. The drive through the canyon is seven miles long, plus a 13-mile loop that we elect to take after paying the $5.00 fee to get in. The drive is a nice break from all the casinos that we've been visiting over the past several days. Once we're done with the canyon, and as long as we have a car, we decide to use the opportunity to go to downtown Las Vegas, which is at least a couple miles away from the Strip and not really within walking distance. We get to Downtown by mid-afternoon, and since we haven't had the opportunity to have lunch (we planned on stopping at some restaurant during our drive but we never found anywhere that looked good), we're both pretty hungry. So we go to the first hotel parking lot that we can find, which turns out to be the Plaza, where I stayed once before, and we immediately go in and see if they have a good steak place or anything like that. As we walk in, a sign advertises for the "Plaza Diner, open 24/7, $7.99 steak special". Sounds good to us. However, after ten minutes of walking around two floors of the hotel, we can't find the Plaza Diner anywhere, so we give up and ask a security guard, who points us in the right direction but mentions that the diner isn't open right now. Hmmm...wonder what "24/7" means then. So we resort to the Plaza's "Behind the Stage" buffet, which turns out to be the same price as the Flamingo's Paradise Garden buffet (where we ate a couple times for breakfast), but a lot smaller and with a lot less selection. The main selections turn out to be pizza (which I shouldn't eat) and seafood (which I really dislike) and Chinese food (which I settle for). The Plaza's buffet may be the only buffet in America where there's no form of chicken selection at all. But it's a Friday during Lent so maybe that has something to do with it. Despite my dissatisfaction, Cindy is pretty happy with her meal; she likes seafood even though I don't. My spirits go up when we start hearing the crooning of an Elvis impersonator from the nearby stage outside the restaurant. We've been in Las Vegas for four days and it wouldn't be a Vegas trip without an Elvis invoker; I'm glad we didn't miss out. Cindy's not happy, though, she hates Elvis. After we're done eating we head out to look at some of the downtown casinos. At this point, we're just interested in playing Pai Gow again. The Las Vegas Club has no Pai Gow tables at all; Binion's Horseshoe has just one, and it's full. We find an open $10 table at the Golden Nugget, though, and there we have our best session yet; the dealer is coming up with a lot of losers. After an hour of play, we're doing very well; I lean over to Cindy and whisper "Whenever you're ready to go, I am too. I'm eighty bucks ahead." Cindy, meanwhile, started with $60 and she's just about doubled it. We win a few more hands, but then start to lose a little bit; and that's our cue to leave. We both end up coloring up with black chips included, a combined profit of $120. We decide to go to the Nugget's sports book to relax and maybe watch a little bit of the Wisconsin vs. N.C. State game which has been going on for awhile and I've dimly been able to see via a TV monitor just barely visible from the Pai Gow table. But when we get to the sports book it's almost halftime and the Badgers are losing by ten. Perhaps not such a great game to watch after all--even if every other seat in the place isn't already being taken by other people watching the tournament. We end up briefly sitting at some nearby slot machines with the big screens in view, but it's not as satisfying as a table, and soon it's halftime anyway and we figure it's time to move on. Plus, one of the main reasons that we came to downtown was to see the Fremont Street Experience light show, and that's starting soon. (We don't see it, but the Badgers do come back and win the game, as I mentioned previously. Perhaps it was wise that we left--clearly they do better when I'm not watching.) Before the show starts, we do have some time to wander to some of the other downtown casinos, and Fitzgerald's catches my eye when it advertises having very loose slots and video poker machines. Curious, I see if I can find the elusive 6/9 machine that I haven't found anywhere so far. I check out some of the machines, but they all appear to be 5/8 or worse, just like every other casino. Then, when we are about to leave, I glance at the payout table on the middle machine of a bank of five and discover that this one is 6/9. The other four machines around it, however, are all 5/8. So Cindy and I can't even play side-by-side with decent payouts. Obviously the casino philosophy is to only have very few machines with decent payouts, hide them as well as possible, but still boast that they have them. Having finally found such a machine, I decide to play $5 on it, but the presence of a decent pay table turns out to be irrelevant--I never even see a flush or a full house, and my $5 is lost in short order. But it's time to go anyway, the Fremont Street show is almost ready to begin. I've seen it before, but Cindy hasn't, and it's pretty neat the first time you see it. When it's over, we've had enough of downtown, and Cindy wants to get back to the Strip to see Treasure Island's "Sirens Of TI" show that they have outside at least a couple of times every night. We take the rental car back to the Flamingo and immediately head out on foot to Treasure Island. We've noticed that on previous nights, the crowd had started gathering at Treasure Island easily forty-five minutes before the show starts, and this night proves to be the same. Luckily because we arrive early we get a pretty good vantage point. The show turns out to be lip-synching and dancing and pyrotechnics on two battling sailing ships, one with scantily-clad women, and the other with pirates. It's an okay show, kind of hokey but well worth the price (free), and much longer than I anticipated--I was expecting something like a five to ten minute show but it actually lasts close to half an hour. And then it's back to the Flamingo for the night; we have to leave early for the airport the next day. Gambling results for Friday: up $115. Overall: up $110. But that assumes that the Brewers do not win the World Series in 2005. If they do, then I'll be up $2110. (And as I write, Milwaukee is in first place in the NL Central, boasting a record of 1-0.) It was a good vacation. 2 February 2005 - So I've never put anything in the Suggestion Box before, but I'm getting a deli sandwich from my work's cafeteria and it occurs to me that it would be really nice if at least one of their four kinds of deli wraps had a low-carb tortilla. If you want, you can insert a suggestion anonymously, and they'll just post a response, so when I go to the box I happen to look at one of the recent postings: Suggestion: Is it possible to offer more "Christ-centered" meals? Uh...what exactly the heck are they asking for here? Communion wafers available in the lunch line? Hot-crossed buns? I looked down at the response portion of the note. Unsurprisingly the cafeteria's response was, paraphrased, "Uh...what exactly the heck are you asking for here?" Since the note was submitted anonymously, I'm wondering if somebody just meant it as some kind of joke. If not, and someone out there actually thinks that my work cafeteria's meals currently are somehow pointing me more towards the fires of Hell than Jesus, I'm thinking, then I really should be enjoying my turkey sandwiches a lot more than I have been. 1 February 2005 - I gave up on a book this week. A rare occurrence; at any given time I am usually in the middle of reading at least two and maybe three or more books. That way, one of the group is bound to be something that I feel like reading at the time, fiction or non-fiction, science, math, or history, SF or fantasy, whatever. I once read somewhere that the average American reads one book a year. Not me...I must read at least fifty. Granted, probably half of those might be books that I've read once already and are re-reading, but it still amounts to at least 25 completely new books every year. I know lots of people that pretty much gave up on recreational reading during college. I guess TV is their world now. Not me. I'd give up television before stopping reading books, and I wouldn't hesitate on the choice for a microsecond. Anyway, I did give up on a particular book though. Crichton's State of Fear got returned to the library, a third of the way through. Michael Crichton used to be one of my favorite writers. Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, and Disclosure are excellent novels. But the quality started going down with The Lost World. The Lost World is nowhere near as good as Jurassic Park, and for some reason Crichton moronically decided to bring back a character from the first book that he apparently forgot that he killed off. Airframe is no better, featuring an idiot plot (a couple of the characters withhold information crucial to the plot for no reason at all, but the plot of the book falls apart if they don't). Prey was completely stupid. Timeline isn't horrible, but it's almost all action, no brains, and reads more like a movie script than a Crichton novel. At this point I'm kind of embarrassed to have these books on my bookshelf at home, taking up space. Anyway, after how bad Prey was, at least I was smart enough to try getting State of Fear from the library this time, so I'm not stuck with it. One thing I've noticed since The Lost World is that his books have become more and more melodramatic, the villains in each work more and more unbelievable and more one-dimensional. If Crichton can't think of better antagonists than environmentalists, for Pete's sake, I'm not going to waste my money or time on him anymore. The same problem made me give up on Tom Clancy, and most critics agree with me. Clancy is also now way past his prime (and Clancy's insistence on inserting his ignorant politics into his books never made him that good to begin with). I just got done with Guns, Germs, and Steel, which a friend lent me several months ago and I just got around to finishing. It's anthropological and attributes the dominance of Western culture with geography. It's thought-provoking, but somewhat of an oversimplification (you can't compress 50,000 years of human culture into 400 pages). But this is nothing that the author denies, either. I also finished Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, which is probably one of the weirdest books that I've ever read. It's weird enough that I'm still not sure whether or not I liked it...actually I'm pretty sure that I like Vonnegut's other stuff (Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night) better. And now I'm in the middle of a book about nitrogen. And I have a bunch of books about ancient history that I need to get around to starting soon. So I'll read anything... 27 January 2005 - So, back from my business trip, I get the mail and another bill from Sprint is waiting for me. Plus a notification that the $5.35 that I didn't pay from last month is past due. 26 January 2005 - I knew it. That said, maybe the fact that Illinois was 19-0 and the Number One team in the country had a little more to do with it... But anyway, my recruiting trip went well. And I thought it was neat that the ID badge that I got to wear had a Bucky Badger sticker on it, which most people didn't get, because I am an alumnus. And they let me keep the UW-Madison clipboard that they gave me. 25 January 2005 - I am going to Madison on business today, and one of the people that I am going with lamented that we did not get tickets to the Badgers' home basketball game tonight against Illinois. I don't mind not going. I'm not a basketball guy really anyway, and besides, Wisconsin has a 38-game home winning streak. I'm sure Wisconsin would choose tonight to lose for no other reason that I decided to show up to the game. In fact, I'm afraid that they'll lose just because I'm coming to town. 9 January 2005 - Vikings 31, Packers 17 It's hard to be too upset. The Packers clearly got outplayed and did not deserve to win. I still had to laugh, though. I am just trying to imagine what Favre was thinking when he threw the forward pass into the end zone, four yards ahead of the line of scrimmage: "There's only 70,000 people here, maybe no one will notice." As for Moss, look whom we are talking about here. I'm just glad he didn't actually pull his pants down... 6 January 2005 - And again as usual, the inevitable annual idiotic declaration by somebody who actually thinks that some college team would be capable of beating an NFL team... 4 January 2005 - So, in October or November I get a little card from Sprint saying, in very small print, that they will start charging $3.95 per month per Sprint account. We switched our long distance phone service from Sprint a long, long time ago. However, at the time, I only switched our out-of-state long distance and inadvertently left out intra-state long distance calls, so technically our Minnesota long distance provider was still Sprint. But since all of the people we know in Minnesota also live in the Twin Cities, as far as I know, we have never made an intra-state long distance call. I haven't received a bill from Sprint in a long time. So the very day that I was mailed Sprint's little card, I contacted Qwest, our provider for everything else, and immediately made a change so that we also got our intra-state service from them. There's no point in paying Sprint $3.95 for absolutely nothing. Then, this weekend, I received a bill for $5.35 from Sprint. Sure enough, it was this $3.95 service fee, plus taxes and additional fees. On Monday morning when Sprint customer service actually started taking calls, I called Sprint asking what this charge was for. I know for a fact that I had successfully switched providers away from Sprint, because when I first talked to the phone computer, it stated that our phone number was not recognized as a Sprint customer, and when I did get to a representative, the first thing she asked me was if I was calling to request starting Sprint long distance service. It turns out that, although we received no services from Sprint whatsoever, we still had an "account" there and therefore were charged the fee. I had the representative remove us from Sprint's computer, and demanded that she credit us for the $5.35 "non-service" fee. Presumably this will take care of it and we won't get another Sprint bill next month. But I wouldn't bet on it.