I have now recovered from my weekend in Las Vegas, which included 12.5 hours of sleep between the time I boarded my plane in Boston at 6 pm on Friday and the time I got off a train in New York to ask some people for $175,000 on Monday morning. It is a good thing that I did not have access to the $175 grand over the weekend.

The weekend did not begin well. I walked up to an ATM machine in Logan Airport, pressed "New Transaction," and then, "Withdrawal," and then, "Checking Account," when I realized that I had not taken my card out of my pocket yet. I was on the verge of removing money from the account of whomever had just left the machine. Has this ever happened to anyone before? I am an honest man, though, and I hit the cancel button. When I did take out my wallet, I realized just how strange are the ways in which the fates work: apparently, I had lost my ATM card.

I headed West with $14 dollars in my pocket. The plane ride was the best I have ever had, counting first class trips. This was because Song Airlines, a small subsidiary of Delta, has satellite TV in each seat back, and we got to watch the Sox-Yankees game with a plane full of Bostonians, slowly becoming drunk. I wasn't becoming drunk, of course, because I had to save my money. But you haven't cheered for a baseball team until you've heard an entire terminal chanting, "Yankees Suck."

Vegas was its expected blur of free drinks, rigged games, fat Midwesterners, and the noise of slot machines. This is the worst noise in the entire world. The fat Midwesterners sound funny, too. One woman on my shuttle bus from the airport said, as we passed the Paris Resort, complete with Eiffel Tower and Gard de Nord, "My, isn't Paris breathtaking? I can't wait to see it." I didn't let on that the real Paris is in texas.

Vegas, I soon learned, as I wandered around looking for something to do that didn't require cash (answer: watching people lose cash), offers ATMs that take credit cards and don't require a pin. In other words, it's not your money. It's buying money on credit. It's a mechanical loan shark. I did not use this. I had visions of borrowing 50 bucks and winning so much money that I could finance my whole weekend on it, but I tend to lose money when I gamble, so that didn't happen. But, like I said, there are free drinks.

The low point of the trip - and not such a bad low point, considering where I was - came the next morning at 10:00. After 4 restful hours of sleeping, something in my head told me to watch Game 2 of the Sox-Yankees series. But it was blacked out. So I went to the sports betting room. I had pictured an attractive sportsbar where I could watch tv, order breakfast, and sit in a comfy booth. Instead it was a harshly lit cave with plastic chairs in front of rows of TVs. The game was blacked out, so I had to listen to it on a the radio amidst the rows of people cheering field goals in 22-6 football games.

On Sunday, the unthinkable almost happened. Owing to strong winds coming over the mountains, we were delayed leaving and almost missed our connection. Being stuck in Vegas on a Sunday afternoon would be a terrible thing: after 36 hours, getting out was all I wanted to do. But I'll always have Paris.

Jon, Laney, Carrie, Perry, and Leah, all dining in the dining room/place where we stick recycling in the corner.

My niece and nephew. Very hard to capture on camera.

melon? melon.

Last weekend, we got invited to some parties. We did not know, until after we accepted, that one of them was a John Kerry Party. Do you remember the Oakland Peace Gang from Fahrenheit 9/11, eating cookies and amiably chatting about...well, peace, and how we could all get some? This gathering made the Oaklanders look like a celebration from a 1978 Major League Baseball clubhouse.

At first, it was a sort of passively bad event. We walked up to a 2nd floor Somerville apartment and helped ourselves to some free cookies. There was no alcohol, so I had water and Leah enjoyed some orange juice. There were parents and other assorted old people, and we assiduously avoided them, because, who wants to talk to old people? There were signs on the wall on which we were encouraged to write Kerry talking points. On the "Civil Liberties" poster, for example, people had written things like, "More respect for personal freedoms," and "No harassing libraries," and "All of the above!!"

We were busy examining the cabinets that the landlord had seen fit to suspend from the ceiling in the middle of the kitchen, effectively cutting the room into two tiny parts, one of which had a view of the back of the stove, when we were called to order.

"Order," in this case, meant that the poor host gamely tried to get people to brainstorm (his word) ways to help Kerry win. It was quickly established that Kerry had already won Massachusetts. "Wait," said a fortyish woman sporting sandals, wool socks, and a fashionable middle part. "College campuses! There must be thousands of kids at Harvard from Ohio!" We did not debate whether this assertion was, in fact, a fact. Instead, a general murmuring began about how hard the Republican lackeys were making it to get absentee ballots.

"I think the deadline was last Friday," said a man who had regaled us with a tale of how, simply because he lives in New Hampshire, he was denied an absentee ballot in his home state of Ohio. The missing of the deadline did not stop us, and in fact people moved on the bigger and better goals.

As the host tried to get people to commit to "doing something tomorrow," his grandmother sabotaged the effort by decrying "Kerry's mealy message" and wondering if perhaps we could get together to make a commercial and send it to Mary Beth Cahill. He thanked his grandmother politely but was interrupted by a woman who said she had already "sent Mary Beth - and I know her real well, and I think she's good for John - reams of human resource studies showing a worker's crisis in America, because we need to affect the message!"

"No," said the host. Then, surprised at his own backbone, it seemed, he apologized and went on. "What I mean," he said, "is that Bill Clinton is changing the message. We can't. But we can register unregisted voters. So, who will go to Tufts? Who can go to BU?"

"I'm starting grad school at Brandeis next week," said someone else. "Maybe I could see if there's a Democratic Student Club." Right. While you're at it, see if there's a Jewish Student Club. I think they hold meetings together and call the club, "Brandeis."

The forces advocating actually convincing the Kerry campaign began, miraculously, to overwhelm the gang that wanted to register voters. We carefully gathered some bumper stickers to put on Republican friends' cars and slipped to the stairs. As we left, someone called out, "Is there a Kerry campaign office in Boston?" When we arrived at the next party, there was dancing and chicken wings.

Here you see a pile of shells. Did you know that in New Orleans one can purchase 12 oysters on the half shell for under 6 American dollars? One can. Crawdads are equally affordable but much more work. This dinner marks the first time in my entire life that I have seen oysters left on the table, but that's what happens when you go high roller and spend nearly 25 dollars per person to dine.

For that amount of money, one could purchase, if one worked where I worked, writing lessons. That's right, my boss has decided that, owing to the inability of a couple of people to write in English sentences, we're bringing in a writing teacher. Of those two misfits, one doesn't know how to use a semicolon, and the other writes emails along the lines of,

"To all employees: Given that our current vendor for staff meeting pizza and other lunch-related items, such as soft drinks, has recently increased its prices for delivery, we have elected to make a change. On a going forward basis, all food related items will be procured from Napoli Pizza. Please make the necessary adjustments and modifications to your Outlook Contacts and remove Two Brothers Deli. Thank you for your understanding."

Of the five resumes and cover letters I saw yesterday, responding to our ad for a writing teacher on Craig's List(!), four had typos.

In New Orleans, the horses roam about in the streets for all to feed. Here you can see Jay auditioning for The Simple Life '05. More pictures from down South to follow.

Cowboying Up in Japan

Courtesy of Adam...

You missed a heck of a Yakult Swallows game last night. They edged the visiting Hiroshima Carp 11-10 in 12 innings, a game which lasted 4.5 hours and featured 20 and 16 hits by the Swallows and Carp, respectively and I would say about 8 home runs. The stadium is tiny (about 15,00 capacity). You can bring all the food and beer you want. There's not a speck of trash on the ground and teenagers w/ kegs on their backs make the rounds to fill your cup w/ Sapporo or Kirin. The player who hit the winning hit was called to the middle of the field to address the crowd and then paraded around the outfield, escorted by the Yakult Swallow himself, throwing t-shirts to the adoring crowd. The bleacher bums are highly orchestrated, w/ conductors, flagbearers, trumpeteers and rank-and-file shouters screaming in perfect unison, and there's a choreographed home run dance/cheer featuring little green umbrellas. They travel w/ the team (the Carp had a very similar group of fans on their side -- even the same cheers) and get incentives -- free tickets, etc. -- based on their participation...