Life on the green and in the rough

Another slow news day, so today I'd like to talk about AstroTurf.  While there are a few places (a couple parks, golf courses and luxury communities) that boast real grass, AstroTurf is the way to go out here.  Perpetually green and no water required, it's a low maintenance marvel.

Supposedly, it's also hideously expensive, which explains why front yards are diminutive.

As you can see, it does collect real bits of debris.  Pam says it can be vacuumed.  I have yet to see anyone vacuuming his yard.  Rest assured, dear reader, my camera will be ready if someone does whip out a Kirby near the curb.  

The backyard is also diminutive.  You can lay out on the grass if you can arrange yourself comfortably within 300 square feet.  It's a good thing the pool takes up most of the yard.

As a matter of etiquette to you out-of-towners, one isn't supposed to call it AstroTurf.  "Artificial turf" has a less declasse sound to it, so I'm told.  Ha!

Linguistic moment!  The term AstroTurf may have a declasse ring to it, but consider how amazing it is when a company has such market dominance that its brand name becomes synonymous with the generic product.  Other examples include:  "I need to make a Xerox of that form," or "Do you have a Kleenex?"

Other randomness I just thought of!  The surface surrounding the pool is called cool rock...or something like that.  It doesn't matter how hot it is outside; one can always walk on the stuff barefoot.  Not so for the rest of the paving stone.  Pam was cleaning up the humming bird feeders and flicked some invader ants onto the paving stones.  They immediately cooked on the paving stones resulting in little bits of burnt bug bits.  Intense.

Bootlicker....err, Bootlegger

Monday night is open mic night at Bootlegger, a famed restaurant/bar on the boulevard, just south of the strip.  It felt a lot like the Italian America Club, which is to say that I have my doubts as to the Snow White cleanliness of the startup cash for the place.  Several things struck me as odd about the joint,  For one thing, besides the emcee, all of the staff members were male and none of them wore glasses.  (Okay, the musical director wore sunglasses....)

The picture below is dark, but understand that the place itself is dark.

The food was excellent.  The entertainment was hit or miss, but I suppose that's the risk you take when you have an open mic.  The weekly emcee, Kelly Clinton, didn't just introduce acts--she's an engaging performer in her own right.

The acts are anything that the performers want them to be.  There was a great a cappella group, a solo guitarist, a recent high school grad with dreams of Broadway stardom, some improv jazz singers, a quartet that somehow escaped The Lawrence Welk Show, an aging thespian puffing out Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes, a country singer (accompanied by Mark Miers from Unkle Kracker), and a truly embarrassing act by a guy whom I swear was the love child of Truman Capote and Carmen Miranda.  So Kelly informed us, the cozy table stage right was populated by entertainment big wigs, whom I suppose must scope out the clubs constantly for new talent.  While there are lot of decent singers, I've been consistently struck by how good the musicians are who provide back-up music for the performers.  Singers walk up there and tell them what they want the three or four piece band to do, and these guys deliver.  It's impressive.  I think the musical director last night was formerly a star on "Starsky and Hutch."  As I've said before, everyone seems to skirt the outer regions of fame without actually being famous.  

There's special love at our table for Lisa Gay (former back-up singer for The Fifth Dimension).  I've seen her perform a handful of times already, and she always joins us at our table for dinner.  She's an extremely personable lady with a great lounge/jazz sound.  

We stayed until after midnight, which means that Pam and I missed the latest installment of "The Bachelorette."  What a terrible show.  What a must see on On Demand tonight!

Down and Dirty

Never one to waste an educational opportunity, I sat out in the garage today with Dennis and learned how to change brake pads on his truck.  I don't think he believed me, but I really enjoyed it.  He had some really clever ways of loosening bolts that I'll store away in my memory bank for future reference.  I'm also glad that I got to loosen the lug nuts to see just how hard it would be to change a flat tire.  (With the right tools, it wasn't so bad.  Now trying to do it with the cheap tools that came with my truck would probably be a different story.  I don't rate my ability to get the spare tire off of the bottom the truck very high either should the need arise, but I'm taking baby steps with this whole DIY car repair.)  An empowering afternoon!

Good Show!

Dennis scored Pammy and me some free tickets to Mariah Carey's show for Sunday evening.  Neither Pammy nor I are huge fans, but free entertainment is free entertainment.  The theme of the show was a performance of her eighteen #1 hits, sung chronologically.  That was good news for me since I don't remember liking any of her songs since 1997 and don't think she's had more than a handful of hits in the past fifteen years.

Since Pam has confessed her fear of driving outside of her suburban southwest Vegas surroundings, it has fallen to me do the metro driving when Dennis isn't around.  (He was working the show this evening and couldn't take us.)  For the record, I'd like to say that I did a fabulous job navigating I-15 and the backroads of the strip and getting us where we needed to park.  No problemo.

The Colosseum at Caesar's Palace isn't a bad little venue.  Not too big, but not too small.  As with the rest of Vegas, the people watching is top notch.  There were the extremely tall, middle-aged farm boys in striped polo shirts and red heels.  Dennis tells me they made out in the third row the whole night.  There was the Chinese tour group with lanterns on their shirts....that is, lanterns with hundreds of actual bulbs.  Those dudes were bright, literally.  There were lots of ladies in party dresses.  Since some of them were so silly looking, I might dare to call them prom dresses.  I powdered my nose for Ms. Mariah, but that was about as far as I went.

Mariah started 20 minutes late, but when the show was ready to start, it started in a hurry.  Lights went down and the curtain went up in a quick 20 seconds.  The girls behind me immediately began to scream and swoon.  "Oh my God, I love her....I've been waiting for this my whole life....I'm crying you guys!  I can't stop crying!"  And on and on it went...for the whole night...much to Pammy's irritation.  It didn't bother me so much.  I must have been in one of my rare moods in which I tolerate tween behavior.

Dennis says that of all the shows he has worked, the Mariah Carey crowd is the rowdiest.  Tons of screaming and crying fans (of both sexes) and a lot of coming and going of the crowd did make for a rambunctious audience.  There was a serious security breach when a Jesus freak ran up on stage and asked Mariah to read a prayer.  It took security a surprisingly long amount of time to rescue her, but to her credit she did well with the guy.  She read the prayer and thanked him for it, all the while keeping a sharp lookout for when someone was going to appear to help her.  Like I said, she had a while to wait. 

Pam insists that Mariah was off-key for much of the night, but I thought she sang really well.  I'd forgotten just how many of her songs I like, and as a performer she didn't fail to amuse.  For one thing, she can't really walk.  Like a Barbie doll with feet too small to support her body, Mariah needed a handler for most of the show whenever she walked more than twenty feet.  She was wheeled in for the bulk of her songs and carried out after others.  A combination of some tight dresses and  high heels meant that the rest of the time she had to waddle about slowly on her own.  We all held our breath waiting for her to fall.

The greatest shock of the evening occurred at the very end when I looked at the screaming and swooning tweens behind Pam and me.  Turns out they weren't overheated teenagers; they were incredibly immature adult women.  Thank goodness I was deceived for the whole show.  Had I known how old they were I would have been ticked over the distracting ruckus they were kicking up.

At any rate, for an evening that started out with me not knowing if I even really wanted to go or not, I ended up being happy that I did.  Good show!
 

Some coin toss

In January 1942, Carole Lombard, wife of Clark Gable and a native of Fort Wayne, attended a war bond rally in Indiana.  She was originally scheduled to take the train back to L.A. from Indiana, but she was in a hurry to get home.  Her mother and Clark Gable's press agent, who were also traveling with her, weren't too keen on flying to get back to California, but Lombard was insistent.  They tossed a coin to decide if they would return by train or by plane.  Lombard won the coin toss.  After refueling in Las Vegas, the plane crashed a few miles later into Mount Potosi.  There were no survivors.

The search for the wreckage was based out of Good Springs, Nevada, about twenty minutes outside of Las Vegas.  Well after the search was over, Gable used to return to Good Springs to drink his pain away at the Pioneer Saloon.  That's where I went today.

The bar was built in 1913, and apart from the general store next to it, there isn't much else in Good Springs.  Back in its day, the bar was famed for its shootouts, and bullet holes still riddle the walls.  By the end of the 1940s, the bar top added Gable's cigarette burns to its dilapidated image.  Today the bar is a mixture of cowboy watering hole and leather biker bar.  Their specialty includes sandwiches topped with Ghost Sauce.  (The place is, of course, haunted by the many shooting victims through time.)  Ghost Sauce is some mighty tasty stuff and well worth the drive out of Las Vegas.

Smooth Operator

Today was a peaceful, do-nothing day filled with grocery shopping and sitting around the pool watching the sun set.  Because it was a slow news day, I figured I'd take this opportunity to tell you about my bed.

My bed is too tall for me.  I'd like to say I fell out of it the other night, but it's more accurate to say that I fell trying to get into it.  After returning from the bathroom late one night, it seems my jump didn't have enough spring in it to get me over the top.  Like Icarus, back down to earth I fell.  Thank goodness no one was around to witness my smooth moves.  But wait!  I can give you a silent movie visual so you can appreciate what kind of physical exertion I'm put through just to get into bed.  Really pushing my body to the limits, let me tell you! Watch.

Nelson?! Where's Nelson?

Another day of gorgeous weather.  Ninety degrees feels just right out here.  Being such a beautiful day, Pam, Dennis and I jumped in the car and drove to Nelson.  Nelson, apparently unknown even to most Vegas locals, is an old mining town once known for its huge gold and silver deposits as well as its concentration of rowdy Civil War deserters.  It's roughly 20 miles southeast(?) of Vegas, and it's a wonderful drive through the desert and into the mountains to get there.  The outskirts of the town are made up of trailer homes.  They look kept up, though we never actually saw any people.  Leave that behind and head further into the mountains.  That's where the fun begins.

After driving through a mountain pass, Nelson comes into view, looking very much like I imagine it did in 1861 when it was established.  

Okay, the metal roofs probably weren't around at the time,  And of course, upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that Nelson is filled with a bizarre collection of junk.

Apart from a handful of tourists, I'd venture to guess that the population of this part of Nelson was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5.  Two of those five work at a small shop, which is also filled with junk.  It was hard to tell what was for sale and what was out for decoration.  

Notice that the building below is called The Willard.  Every city needs a Willard, even the ghost towns.

After Nelson, we drove to Boulder City, home of the Hoover Dam.  There's a little bit of everything in Boulder City.  Parts of the place look like they date back to when cheap housing was put up quickly to house the Dam workers back in the 30s.  The main drag has been spruced up with lots of fun antique places and little restaurants.

There was also an Area 51 themed store, called Area 52, catering to all of your alien and anal probe needs.

I snapped a quick picture of my favorite of the antique stores.  Of the many I've seen since heading west, this one reminded me the most of Midland in Indy.  Certainly not as large, but they had some awesome furniture for cheap.  

My absolute favorite piece that I saw is the toreador pictured below.  He is missing his right arm, but if you looked at him at just the right angle, he looked like he's inconveniently adjusting his pants from behind.

Poor guy.  Will he never be comfortable in his pants?!