I am pleased to report that the merger between Administration and Bunker Operations went off with nary a logistical hiccup. This was a monumental undertaking, considering all of the moving parts we had in play and all of the various curve balls that the Universal Machinery chose to fire at our guests as if they were inside a batting cage. We persevered, all of us, and managed to close the deal. Outstanding job, everyone! We salute you!
Vegas Notes
The urge to write a large travelogue is overwhelming, but my time is short, so instead, I’ll post a few notes and impressions of the long weekend.
The Graceland Wedding Chapel
This place is legendary. Also, small. And in a city full of little wedding chapels, this one has managed to stay out in front, relevant, and classy, walking right up to the kitsch line, but never quite stepping over it.
They work in 30-minute segments, on a regimented schedule. Within 30 minutes, you are fully photographed, and the ceremony is performed, and badda-bing, badda-boom, you’re done. Some nice pleasantries exchanged with Elvis and the staff, and then you’re off to your next stop, while the next group of people file into the chapel.
I’m assuming you’ve already watched the whole shebang, but just in case you didn’t, or you want to revisit the experience:
The Wedding Party Meat Shield
Our destination wedding went off without a hitch, mostly because our guests and attendees were presumably taking the fastballs meant for us. Our room at the Strat was nice, a newly-remodeled and timelessly hip room with a lot of space and plenty of amenities. The wedding itself happened on time and was incident-free. Flying in and out of Vegas was likewise not a problem. In order for that to happen, the following Karmic debts had to be paid off:
One set of guests checked into their hotel room to find it occupied with another couple—not of the wedding party. That took some sorting out.
Another set of guests walked into their hotel room, one of the older, not-yet-remodeled rooms, and noticed a bloodstain on the carpet. Out in the hallway, someone asked them if they wanted to buy cocaine. That also took some sorting out.
One guest had to stay behind due to complications that arose from an ingrown toenail surgery last week—it left her hospitalized, and they eventually performed an operation and removed part of the toe at the knuckle! The rest of her family came along, because they’d all canceled other plans to be at the wedding.
Another guest missed their flight to Vegas and had to spend the day in the airport, waiting for the next flight out, which included a layover and a plane change.
Another guest was having a bad reaction to some prescription meds, which made it hard to travel, but when they got to the hotel, he had an allergic reaction to the hotel’s soap! A bottle of Benadryl and some sleep later mostly straightened things out.
To all of you who fell on your traveling sword for us, we salute you!
A Smattering of Ubers
I like using Uber when I’m in a foreign city. I don’t know the economics of it, or what Taxi cabal isn’t getting their taste, or any of that stuff. What I do know is that you don’t have to wait more than five minutes for an Uber in any kind of big convention city, and the cars you ride in are cleaner, neater, and way less Scorsese-smelling than the cleanest taxi I ever rode in. Chitchat is optional, meaning you can opt out of it, if you want.
This is awesome, of course, until you’re in a place like The Metroplex, where you’re at the mercy of whomever is nearby at the time of night that you need a ride. That’s when things get...colorful.
Most people don’t know that there are two airports in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. DWF is in the middle of things, but there’s a second airport, Love Field, which is where Southwest flies out of. The area around DFW is quite shiny, full of corporate brands, stores and hotels you recognize, and pristine highways.
The roads to Love Field? Not so much. It’s much closer to how Dallas was in the late 1970s, at the end of the oil boom, but before the telecommunications market blew up. All of the businesses on that side of town on either side of I-635 are either industrial warehouse storage, propane tank rentals, or gentlemen’s entertainment cl—oh, to hell with it—strip clubs.
We started our Vegas trip with a 5 AM Uber ride to Love Field, through all of that, being driven by a guy in a car that looked like it had been in an episode of T.J. Hooker. He got out of the car to help us with the bags, and I swear to god, he had on cut off jean shorts, crocs, and wore a shirt with no material under the sleeves. His side boob was on full display, from his pecs to his pelvis. We got in his car and he had to turn off the podcast he’d been listening to about how to properly use Narcan.
In some ways, I’m glad it happened before we got to Vegas. Once in Sin City, the Ubers suddenly got a lot more classy. We rode in three, count ‘em, three different Telsas, and they were all like being shuttled around in an X-Wing Fighter. Talk about seriously cool cars.
Only one of the Uber drivers in Vegas gave us the creeps, and it was instant and immediate—we got in his car and he had some BPM music going on...no words, just Doom duhduh doom doom, Doom duhduh doom doom, Doom duhduh doom doom...with occasional interruptions of the droning, incessant beat by what sounded like an electric Moog moonshine jug, honking out a subwoofer Toodt...Tooodt...Toodt...Tooodt...
He didn’t speak to us the whole time we were in the car. Travis Bickle would have looked at him and said, “That guy gives me the creeps.” Then again, I guess you don’t need a personality for the job. Just a car and a GPS.
OmegaMart (Meow Wolf)
Meow Wolf is an artists collective out of Santa Fe, NM, interested in immersive experiences that start out seemingly normal and become more and more skewed as you explore them. Nothing is more that than their Las Vegas installation, OmegaMart. The premise is that OmegaMart is a grocery store that sells products they’ve made using a proprietary chemical that makes you happier. Walking through the store soon leads you into the employees only area, and a special key card gives you access to terminals so you can read memos and watch videos and put together exactly what the corporation is doing in the name of profits.
This already fits my narrative of the world, and so we made it a bachelor/ette party-slash-outing and it was jaw-droppingly cool. I cannot recommend it highly enough. And it would have been perfect if it hadn’t been for all of the people on hand doing...I don’t know what. They seemed to be bustling through, loudly, at a fast walk, trying to see everything and yet taking in nothing. There were puzzles to work out, and they would push a button, wait for something to happen, and then walk off, disgusted.
I wanted to ask these people what the hell they were doing there in the first place; these aren’t cheap tickets. The line is long, entry is limited, and it takes hours to get the full story.
Tiki Wonderland
I’m one of those people; a fifty-something year old aging hipster with the tastes and sensibilities of an 80-year old Korean War veteran. I also read books without pictures. Scandalous, I know.
There are several authentic Tiki bars in Vegas and twice-again-as-many “tiki” bars, meaning, “We have a rum drink on our cocktail menu.” We managed to pull a hat trick of Tiki bars, all of which had something to recommend it.
Frankie’s Tiki Room had the most “old Vegas” vibe to it; a small space, with limited seating. We ended up at the bar, sharing space with some video poker machines. But the drinks were stellar, really tasty, and the mugs they came with were divine.
Golden Tiki was in Vegas’ Chinatown and it had a more grown-up (that is to say, adult) ambiance. They leaned heavily into the pirate motif and had top notch décor and wonderful, expensive drinks that made my head feel like I’d come from the dentist’s office. We also ate a Pu-Pu Platter on a wooden surfboard, and I want to tell you, that food is all that may have saved me from alcohol poisoning. They were really strong drinks.
We started the odyssey at a fish house and tiki bar on Fremont Street, what the guidebook called a cross between an Irish pub and a Tiki bar. Uh, hello? I’m all in, gorgeous, where are we going? The place was called Mickey Finnz, I shit you not. How could we NOT eat there?
We came home with three tiki mugs, a variety of cool swizzle sticks, some scandalous wallpaper, a poster, and a monkey head carved out of a coconut. And we didn’t even make it to Red Dwarf, which, or the other Science Fiction-themed brewery.
Next year is the first anniversary: paper. Tickets? Money? Payout Vouchers? We could Vegas again, do everything different, and have a helluva time. The weekend we were there, they just opened up the Punk Rock Museum. Whaaaat? Your VIP Ticket package for the exhibit included a random laminated backstage pass and two warm beers. How punk is that?
A Brief Programming Note
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is one of those programs that runs hot or cold, and by that I mean, it’s either 1000 degrees Kelvin or Frostbite-inducing sub-arctic in temperature. This is largely a calculus that involves how worked up the writer’s room got that week divided over how many times John Oliver gets to talk about animals or other goofy pop culture stuff. This ratio is rarely, if ever, balanced, but every so often, like, once a season, we get the perfect storm. And this time, it was a two-fer.
The Sunday night LWT was about HOAs and how they are draconian, unregulated, and frequently screw people out of their homes with legal trickery and manipulation. In other words, his usual level of outrage—although, it should be noted, this was one of those times when his outrage and disbelief was pitch perfect.
But before he started in on “Adult Student Council” people telling you when you could take out your trash, he prefaced the segment with an apology to everyone under the age of 35, telling them that this is about home ownership and they’ll never ever be able to own their own home. Ouch! Instead, he’d prepared an alternate segment about Chuck E. Cheese, along with a link to where they could watch it.
It was a funny bit, if a little on-the-nose. But that alternate story, for the younger crowd? It’s real, and it’s gold. Solid gold. It’s this season’s breakout episode. Watch them both for yourself and see if you don’t agree with me.
Here is Last Week Tonight, and it’s all about Home Owners’ Associations and the shenanigans they get up to. Funny in that “laugh to keep from crying” kind of way.
And here’s Last Squeak Tonight, focusing on Chuck E. Cheese and the rags to riches to rags story of the restaurant franchise. Funny in that “aw-dropping, “where on EARTH did you dig THAT up?” kind of way.
The regular media report is quite large and will appear later this week. You have been warned. The guys in the Media Division have been working overtime to catch up.
Congrats again! This might be the first time I've seen a fez in a wedding, and I'm 100% here for it.
Also: A punk rock museum? Yes please!
As I child I visited Love field so we could sit in the viewing gallery to watch the planes take off (we were simple rural people back in the 60's). By high school DFW was built and the main terminal at Love was turned into an entertainment complex called LLove that featured a huge ice skating rink, smaller roller coaster rink, and 3 screen movieplex. I visited it several times then.
Are you into Tiki? I always liked the style, then really got into it when I started viewing Jayme Blaschke's youtube channel. Sadly Martha won't let me do Tiki in the new house, but I intend to sneak in a few items inside the new screened porch. I've yet to visit what I'd call a proper Tiki bar. The alleged Tiki bar at The Spot in Galveston barely qualifies. So I'm quite jealous of you.
And to be pedantic, you talk about Home Owner's Association but you mention HMO. Freudian slip? I think you meant HOA. We're in an HOA with our new place, for the first time, but so far it's been nice and the people are quite reasonable. It helps that one of the directors runs the robotics lab at A&M and is a big fan of Martha's books.