The Hammer is Down

Even though I don't leave for Las Vegas (or, as my new hip-hop posse will be named, cinSity) until Tuesday morning, the computer is about to get packed up. Only moments remain for me to write my last post from Minnesota. Moments indeed. Between me and a new life are 59.5 hours, 1,800 miles, and countless dollars of baksheesh to appease the greedy natives of Utah and Nebraska; the future is wide open.

I'll keep this short to avoid getting too maudlin, but I'm relying on all you Cold Weather Goons to keep the place in good order for me while I'm away. G-Money, The Kat, Marathon Man, and Muffin: the Sword is in the Stone. Don't lose faith in The Hunt; it will be dark for several days until we get our new high-speed connection over in the 702. But then... oh, but then... check back frequently for reports on the insanity (and poverty, moral or otherwise) that will no doubt envelope my life as soon as I am able to answer "Las Vegas" to anyone who asks me where I'm from.

Tally ho.

Iowa's Filthy Secret

Lean a little bit closer; I have an alarming secret to share with you about Iowa. It's such a filthy, disgusting secret that I'm almost afraid to put it in print here... but I bursting to tell somebody so it might as well be you. Are you ready? All right. Listen carefully, because I don't want to have to say it again.

Casino gambling is legal in certain Iowa cities.

Dear God, you have no idea how good it feels to get that off my chest! It's been bottled up inside for so long.... And now you know, because I just told you. But how do I know? Well, now, that's an interesting story.

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of celebrating the bachelorhood of one Muffin (along with The Madame, Nip-Nip, and Marathon Man) in Omaha's suburb across the river: Council Bluffs, Iowa. Council Bluffs has a number of fascinating tourist draws, including a zoo where primates are forced to solve puzzles in order to eat, one of only three surviving examples of a frontier jail where inmates ran on hamster-wheels to facilitate the guards' observation, and a dinky skyline. But were we there to see any of these things? No, we were not. We were there to stay at Harrah's Council Bluffs, a Vegas-style hotel-casino with table games, slot machines, and a dog track. Does this sound like a dirty secret yet?

Everything was going fine for our merry band as I drove our majestic yellow sports sedan down 35 and across 80 for six hours toward our destination. We found the hotel, pulled up, and arranged for the car to be valet parked, all without incident. I even managed to get to the front desk of the hotel and claim my reservation without any trouble of any kind, which is, in retrospect, rather jarring, since I had done all of these things without the benefit of having brought along my driver's license.

That's right. Fate and exhaustion had conspired behind my back to insure that I would arrive in a place where the only thing to do is hit the casino (provided you're over 21) without any way to prove my age. Needless to say, I gulped. What would happen? Would I be able to do anything other than sit by myself in our lavishly appointed hotel room and drink? Surely, I would not be allowed onto the riverboat casino or inside the dog track. Or maybe I would; after all, nobody ever checked for ID in Las Vegas, and since this place claimed to be a "Vegas-style hotel-casino," then maybe there'd be no problem. Maybe.

But, you see, Council Bluffs is not Las Vegas. No matter how it tries, it's still a little town stuck in west-central Iowa. Instead of delightful doors, the entrance to the casino was heavily barricaded with stainless-steel piping. Large security guards (who would later eject Muffin, Nip-Nip, and Marathon Man from the casino for drunkenness) hovered over turnstiles and carded every person who tried to come in. Without my ID, I thought, I was sunk.

But was I sunk? Hell no! There can be no sinking me and my beard, which has been saving me from being carded everywhere I've gone since I was fifteen. At the entrance to the casino, everyone in line besides me was carded. At the dog track, the guard chose to stop the line and start carding starting with Marathon Man, who was immediately behind me. I am invisible to those who want to check for ID. I am a god.

And how did the gambling go? Well, despite the fact that The Madame and myself were not quite as well bankrolled as our co-conspirators, we managed to make $2 at the dog track, largely due to a series of prudently placed "show" bets over the course of all fifteen races. I might add that we were the only team to make money on the venture, but that's another matter entirely.

So, you ask, what is Iowa's Filthy Secret anyway? If you ever go to Council Bluffs, you will know: Iowa has gambling, but clearly does not want gambling. Every effort is made by Harrah's to ensure that its casino maintains a squeaky-clean Midwest Image in Council Bluffs. If you are drunk, you may not enter the casino. While inside the casino, you will pay for the drinks that are served to you as you gamble. All people will be carded as they clunk through the entries to the houses of ill-repute. See, this is one of the reasons why I like Las Vegas. The casinos there know that drunk people lose more money, so they serve free drinks. They know that people get bugged when they have to show ID at the door, so they don't ask. Here's my analysis of the Council Bluffs situation: some state legislator once decided that it would be good to allow riverboat gambling in Iowa, and, because it would make money for the state, the measure passed, all the while flying in the face of public opinion. Now that it's there, it makes so much money for the state that it can't reasonably be banned, but the people still hate it. Hence all the measures to make gambling seem dirty and sad.

There's nothing sad about how I put that system in a head-lock and pounded its teeth into the curb until its face bled, though. I am moved to quote Ice Cube: "Pimping ain't easy, but it's necessary." Truer words were never spoken.

Purgatorio

It's a difficult thing, to be waiting in the library on the Minneapolis campus of St. Thomas, killing time before the low-level functionary returns from lunch. I came down here today to withdraw from the licensure program, which I waited this long to do because I was hoping to hear back from UNLV first... but that's not in the cards. UNLV is still waiting on the asshats over at ETS to send them my PRAXIS scores. Let me tell you this: if I have to write any more acronyms in this post, I may start eating this handsome, flat-screen monitor out of spite.

Spite, do you hear?

Never mind that now. This weekend, it's a mad dash South of the Border to Council Bluffs, Iowa for Muffin's bachelor party. I lined up the bottles of liquor that constitute mine and The Madame's contribution to the debauch on the kitchen counter last night, and was seized by a desire to watch the drug collection bit from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas one more time. Let's just say that when you're locked in a serious [liquor] collection, there's a tendency to take it as far as possible. Besides, there will be five of us. All those bottles -- along with those supplied by Marathon Man and Nip-Nip -- will be enough to keep us all deeply submerged in a haze of distilled Strangeness for forty-eight hours. Lost weekend indeed.

And now, it has turned over to 1:00, and I'm headed upstairs to sign a form that severs my relationship with this university. When you're pitching headlong into the abyss of the unknown, there's a tendency to hesitate. Hold fast, sailor. Here we go again.

Map My Big Package

Two brief things today, as I come to you from the depths of Rolvaag Memorial Library, which is a place that emits extremely menacing vibrations in the summertime. Where are the crazed undergrads committing elicit sex acts away from the prying eyes of their roommates? Where is the Knife Man? The scholars hunting in vain for a book that will give them The Perfect Quote for their next paper?

They are all gone, and it makes the place feel like a bookbarn. Anyway, two things: first, a bit of inadvertent humor from the Prince of Monotone, Gary Eichten. His quote in re the failure of our state legislature to pass a bill that funds transit:

"It seems like everyone was in agreement; business, labor, government, voters... everybody wanted a big package this session, and we got the same one we had last year. And that one was pretty dinky."

Right you are, Gary. Everyone wants a big package, but it turns out that you can't always trust politicians to give you the package you're looking for. Sometimes, a poorly-hung system of roads and bridges is all the legislature can manage to get up. It's important to point out these shortcomings on the radio whenever you can.

Secondly, if you're running a PC with XP (and provided you have Dank Nuttz of 3.5Ghz or higher), then do yourself a favor and download Google Earth. Satellite pictures. The whole world searchable by address. The Grand Canyon in stunning HD detail. You have to experience it to believe what a cool, geeky thrill it is, but it's well worth all those hulking la crosse types not sitting with you at lunch. Trust me on this one.

The Village Goat

It's remarkable what a small world the internet really is. Really. Here we all are, going along, believing that our conversations here are going on essentially unnoticed by the larger community, only to be reminded from time to time that blogs are actually a very public forum for the expression of personal opinion. If I had to guess, for example, I would say that the readership of The Hunt is probably somewhere under ten people, and that's being generous. Maybe, when G-Money and I start rapping about Our Generation, the readership goes up to fifteen or so because of interlinked entries and such, but that's probably it.

This morning, however, Mme. Flamingo (who, for the record, is my wife) threw up a post about stay-at-home-mothers. The Madame, like myself, believed that her readership was entirely limited to people she knows. Apparently, she was wrong. If you check that link out and read the somewhat-anonymous response she got from somebody named Lex who thinks Mme. Flamingo is a single woman from Michigan, you'll see what I mean. And then, you can read all about how Lex found Mme. Flamingo's blog, what she thought about it, and how she rationalizes unleashing a shitstorm against The Madame's point of view as though the original column was a personal attack.

Now, I choose not to enter into this particular Hungarian Gang-Bang -- I won't even hypothesize about the kind of person who accuses others of being poor writers but who neglect to capitalize the personal pronoun... oops -- but I will say that even though we think nobody is paying attention to what we write, they may be just the same. This even gets back to The Kat's at-work issue (which I wrote about last time). The internet is indeed a global village.

But think about this: if the internet is a village, and if it takes a village to raise a child, then can we also assume that any village that raises a child should include frequent and scintillating mpegs of girl-on-girl-on-goat action? The harder-core the better? Now that's my kind of village. Flame on, flamers.

Paradigm Shift

There are a number of reasons why, at this point in my life, I feel the need to once again articulate my unshakeable belief in the value of the First Amendment. The Kat got busted for being less-than-totally-anonymous on her blog at work, and, I assume, underwent some unfortunate, blustering, and no doubt angry Administrative Disciplinary Action before moving her blog to a new space and scrubbing it so hard it reflects my bearded image back to me as I read it. Having recently undergone the same kind of nerve-racking ambush at my previous job for a similar (if not totally analogous) issue, I'd have to say that I sympathize deeply. People all over the country are getting busted at work for using their computers in a way that their employers had not intended... and I think I know why.

People our age -- yes, I am once again speaking of The Wandering Generation as an "us" and the people who employ us from Generation X or above as a "them" -- grew up with technology not only at our fingertips, but also in our schools, on our desks, and, now, in our coffee shops. We tend to see computers as a Complete Package, a Complete Package that offers not only work productivity, but also entertainment, excitement, and, often enough, a good way to get into harmless mischief. The people who hire us and who spend time writing acceptable use policies don't think about computers in quite this way. It's similar, but it's not the same. They tend to see computers as having separate identities depending on their context: a computer in an office is for work, a computer at home is for work, a computer at the library is for anonymously surfing for porn. Just kidding on that last one.

Normally, this sort of perception-shift isn't really a problem, but what if, like The Kat, it's your own computer that you've brought with you to a work environment? Is it a Work Computer all the time? What about when you're not on the clock? Or what about G-Money's company-issued laptop? This one's a little less gray, but still, when it's at home, is it still a Work Computer? Or what about smaller things, issued by a school district and colored purple, which are capable of holding Word documents and transported back and forth from home to school? When I plugged my Jump Drive into my home desktop, did that turn my Home Computer into a Work Computer? If you're a Them who thinks that a computer's function is based on physical context, then the answer to the first question is yes, the answer to the second is definitely, and the answer to the third is absolutely. But if you're an Us, then the answers are maybe, maybe, and maybe.

The plain truth is this: since The Kat wasn't being at all offensive or exposing proprietary information, they should have left her alone. A parent gets offended... well... I guess I have to say that one of the problems with most of the Thems in this society is not only that they're so easily offended, but also that they genuinely believe that they've somehow earned the right to go through life without ever being offended by anything. No wonder their children whine, cry, and scream at them while I'm trying to enjoy a quiet moment in every restaurant in town.

Maybe I'm being foolishly self-centered when I point out that it's not Us who need to revise our notions of what is and is not appropriate at work, but rather that They need to better accommodate Us. Maybe. But maybe not.

Fear & Loathing in Summerlin

Just a quick post from our room at the Hotel San Remo here in fabulous Las Vegas: we now have a new apartment over in Summerlin at a complex called Canyon Villas. They don't appear to havea website, but if you google "Canyon Villas Summerlin," you can find various websites that list the units. Good stuff.

Yes, it's around 105 here right now... but it's a Dry Heat, and the air conditioning works very well. That;s it for now from Sin City; myself and The Madame are off to find some Local Pizza down on West Sahara Avenue.