The Buffet in the news
I actually hate doing press. I tape all my interviews, and so I already don't trust half my colleagues who don't engage in that practice. I mean, why wouldn't you tape an interview to make sure a quote is exactly right? Of course, you can't tape everything: much comes from conversations that you do not know are going to contain a quote you need. I text myself at once when that happens. Anyway, the real problem is that I am not very interesting outside what I write and, if all went well, I've already written it. Once a writer wanted to follow me for a day and I told him to feel free to pull up a chair: that day was all typing.
Anyway, I am actually grateful for the attention even if I don't sound like it. Vegas visitor counts are way down, and I am not so arrogant to believe that my stories of Vegas are always going to be of interest to people when they are coming here less often. So, thanks to everyone who took the time to reach out to me to request my opinion or thoughts about all things Vegas. I appreciate it. I also appreciate that the Movable Buffet was given one of the editor's choice awards for VegasTripping.com's annual Trippies as best blog.
I also appeared on the "Lunchtime with Ira" show and talked about covering Vegas. I seem to recall a lot of details about Teller of Penn & Teller that did not make my Weekly cover story on him.
Of course, the oddest item written about me is the plan by Vegas Rex to kidnap and deprogram me. Ice Cube looked different when I met him.
Anyway, I want to thank everyone who has helped bring attention to Movable Buffet. And I hope I earn your continued readership in 2009. I also hope to make it to the gym more if all these pictures and this footage of me is going to be coming out.
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Do I want to be Criss Angel?
I was not going to write about Criss Angel's taped interview on Larry King that aired earlier this week. But a number of people have asked me about Angel's quote that he "could care less about what critics think." Angel then continued, "Critics, in my opinion, are wannabes that have never -- will never be." He has more to say and seems sufficiently irritated by critics to undermine his proclaimed indifference. His girlfriend dismisses us as "haters."
So, let me put it out there: Not a single atom in this Richard Abowitz body has any desire to be Criss Angel or star in any Cirque show -- not even the good ones.
So, how does Angel explain the shows that this critic loves in Vegas, including a number of headliners such as Elton John, Penn & Teller and Wayne Brady? In fact, if I had to be any Strip headliner I would want to be Elton John, who decade after decade has created art that I admire, including his wonderful yet neglected disc "The Captain & the Kid" (2006). One of the things that is great about being a critic is to point out a neglected disc like "Captain & the Kid." Go check it out.
Still, there are limits. As much as I admire Elton John, I would never want to be in "The Red Piano." I just enjoy watching a great Vegas show. In fact, what critics are doing is not speaking to performers like Elton John or Angel at all, but writing for fellow potential audience members informing them about the quality of a show.
But for those in doubt here are some other reasons I do not want to be Criss Angel, off the top of my head:
1. An aversion to wearing jewelry.
2. I loved being a teenager, but I do not like spending time around them as an adult and, as a writer, I would have a hard time not feeling silly writing stuff meant to appeal to them in my 40s.
3. I dislike being recognized in public.
4. The Groundhog Day lifestyle of all those nights in casino nightclubs picking up B-list celebrities and getting trivial mentions in gossip columns.
5. If I am lucky, doing the same show night after night, and year after year for a decade.
I am not trying to be funny, just honest. The reality is that most of us who write about Vegas shows want the shows to be great. We have to see them a lot for work. We are also fans of great shows. That is why we do what we do. And the truth is that having to tell people when a show turns out as disastrously as "Criss Angel Believe" is one of the harder parts of my job.
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The Las Vegas economy rings my phone
Yesterday I was called by a robo-caller for Christopher that, after confirming that I was not he, asked me to go through a complex -- "If you think we have reached you in error, to be removed from this list press 2 now" -- system to be taken off the call list. It was a ruse. About 20 minutes later the only result of clicking, listening and waiting was another computer voice instructing me that no one was available to take my call. I was offered a reference number and instructions to call back -- though no office hours were given when a human would answer the phone. All those computers and this company had no voice mail or answering machine to let the company know I am not who they are trying to reach every single day.
Sometimes a human voice does call directly and will instruct me that the call is about a "personal business matter." They never believe I am not whom they are trying to reach. The people simply hang up on me as soon as I claim I am not who I am not. But then I will hear the same voice calling the next day asking for the same person. They are relentless in chasing this dead end.
There seems to be no way to stop the barrage of calls for Yolanda, Robert, Christopher and a handful of other people whom I do not know, have never met, and who do not have any connection to my phone number. The national "do not call register" does not apply to collection agencies chasing debtors. But debtors have better protections than I do. Apparently collection agencies are allowed to be wrong endlessly when it comes to someone who is not whom they are trying to reach. So, while carefully regulated creditor-debtor relations can result in a request to no longer be contacted by the creditor, the collection agencies seem capable of endlessly hassling people from whom they are not trying to collect money. Eliminating those errors is not a priority. Soon I am going to start promising to bring Yolanda, Christopher and Robert to the phone as soon as I find them and just go back to work. Maybe they will knock at the door and introduce themselves while the person holds. You never know.
Pet peeves: Often I answer my phone to hear a computer-generated voice with the still staggering message "Please hold." They call me to put me on hold! Or, I answer the phone and it is ringing yet to be answered by a person who is not looking for me and will hang up on me without a goodbye rather than waste a moment fixing an error. Sometimes if I keep working on a conversation long enough a person might promise to remove my name from the list, but that does not happen. The calls only increase. It is sort of amazing to me how much effort collection agencies spend at being this incompetent, not to mention annoying.
But that is what life in Las Vegas is like now. I am not special. All my friends with land lines are having the same problem. Too many people owe money in this 702 area code and so the mistaken calls have become an endless part of life in the Las Vegas valley.
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Taking a Vacation
When I started I could not have imagined how much fun this "job" has turned out to be: never a dull day. And, now I turn around and find I am reaching the end of my second full year of "blogging Vegas." So, let me say, thank you. I appreciate every reader, e-mail, comment and tip I have gotten from all of you.
Also, thank you to all the editors involved who allow me so much freedom while always providing fantastic guidance and judgment. Finally, I have to give a couple of special thanks that come matched to special apologies. Thank you to editor Richard Rushfield for conceiving, naming and hiring me to write Movable Buffet. I am so sorry I called you a few hours before your wedding to ask about a Vegas hooker story. That was bad.
Also, thanks to Sarah Gerke who has worked as the photographer on the Buffet since day one. And I am so sorry that day one stunk for you. Poor Sarah shot Wayne Newton in a photo the Buffet never even wound up using. So, Sarah, I am especially sorry that when "the Wayner" hugged you, he left you so heavily scented that I had to make fun of you for hours over the lingering odor of his cologne. Did it ever wash off what you were wearing that night, or did you retire the outfit?
So where am I going on my vacation? I am going to Vegas, of course. I plan to go to some parts of Vegas I never see like Mt. Charleston, Lake Mead and maybe even Imperial Palace. I have books from the library (yes, Las Vegas has libraries, I'll blog about them one day), and I even have a few pages of fiction I want to play around with organizing. I also have some friends I would like to see without deadlines on the horizon. My cats also think they can use more attention for a couple of weeks.
Thanks again for reading, commenting and making every day a pleasure.
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Turning 40 in Vegas
I remember going to Harry Morton's birthday party at the Hard Rock. I was not there as a guest, but as a reporter to cover Snoop playing the 21 year-old heir's birthday party. A rich businessman once even hired The Rolling Stones to play a private birthday concert at the Hard Rock. Rolling Stone, the magazine, wanted me to cover it and the president of the Hard Rock agreed to sneak me inside. I struck out. The businessman hired his own out of town security team.
I think my most memorable birthday in Vegas is when an editor assigned me to spend 24-hours in a topless bar. This turned into an endurance marathon because I was so sick. Happy 36! I am thinking less extreme this year. I am older now. Anyway, have a good holiday weekend everyone.
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New Home
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"Colorful History" at Palomino Turns Too Real
Most of us moved here. Lifers are rare finds in Las Vegas, and I always treasure meeting someone who grew up here and watched this town become a city.
But sometimes what many, including me, tend to dismiss or describe as our town's colorful history can still be real-time life for natives. The distant past is also not that distant in a city that just turned the century mark.
My Sunday Calendar column was on the Palomino Club and its colorful history. I touch on how a defense lawyer is now the new owner of the club by way of a fee paid by the previous owner in connection with a murder defense. Though I did not have space to go into it, this is the second murder connected to the Palomino, which has a truly colorful Vegas history. The first murder was in 2000 when an employee of the club was killed by Jack Perry, son of the club's founder.
Yesterday, the day my Sunday Calendar column came out, I went to the Sav-On to pick up a prescription. I have gone to this Sav-On since moving here and have had the same pharmacy technician, I think, the entire time. A mother with two kids, she is a very tolerant and decent and friendly person. Anyway, she became gripped by my Palomino coverage for reasons mysterious, since she doesn't seem the strip club sort. Then she explained: her father was the employee killed by Jack Perry. That death, she said, a barely remembered headline here or, even worse, as I thought of it, an addendum to the "colorful history" of the Palomino Club, left five kids without a father and 13 children now without a grandfather.
According to the Review-Journal, her dad's killer "pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years to life in prison."
I've asked her to meet with me to talk about her dad and growing up here; she is thinking about doing so.
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'Gay Thieves Lives Behind Store'
For a fairly liberated area, Las Vegas has an amazing tolerance for homophobia. Example: taped up at the register of my corner store last night were printouts of security camera photos of two men who presumably helped themselves to the Sinclair gas station/mini-mart's items without paying. In handwriting on the sheets: "Gay Thieves Lives Behind Store."
Leaving the grammar aside, I am depressed enough about my neighborhood these days without the casual bigotry being tossed in as I buy my caffeine. When I complained to the manager he denied writing the word "gay" though he acknowledged doing the rest of it. Two other employees said he did write the word. And it all looks like the same pen as well as the same handwriting to me. But who wrote what was a point I was willing to leave alone. Rather, I suggested that the manager remove the printouts at once or cross out the snide, mocking use of "gay" as a slur. He agreed. But today it is still up. Oh, and I was told after making my complaint that no one meant to insult "you people." FYI, I am not gay; I am a heterosexual dateless loser.
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Pulling for Megabucks
I am winner! Yes, siree, I am what Las Vegas resorts wants you to know about. Yesterday, at Sunset Station I put $20 into a Megabucks machine. Megabucks is the only machine I play in Las Vegas and I don't play it that often. This may be the third time. I think of Megabucks as more like the lottery than casino gambling. It pools money from every casino in town that offers a Megabucks machine (which is almost all of them) into a giant and always growing jackpot. The always growing part comes from losers who hoped to win the Megabucks jackpot. Yesterday, when I played, the jackpot had reached more than $10 million.
There are a few things you should know about Megabucks. First off: The jackpot stays high because it is accumulating the money of everyone who loses. Winning is so rare that when it happens the triumph always makes the local news. But more often the news is not about winning; the story you usually see on the local news is that the jackpot has reached the stratosphere again because no one has won Megabucks for a really long time. That is when I usually head over to play a few pulls on it.
My friends who really get the math of gambling assure me that statistically my chances of winning Megabucks are so astronomically insignificant that it is among the poorest choices I could make in a casino. Not only that, but since the goal is to make the big number rise quickly and stay as massive as possible, less comes out in little jackpots along the way than other slot machines. The nastiest trick of Megabucks is that you can play for as little as $1 a pull but to be eligible for the big prize you have to put $3 into each pull.You can figure this out by studying the machine but if you are inexperienced you are likely to miss this tiny yet crucial detail. Get the magic combination of the nearly impossible Megabucks row after a $1 pull and you are only walking away with thousands and not millions.
Despite all these drawbacks, occasionally I want to enjoy the fantasy of winning millions and starting my Vegas version of the New Yorker (except that everything in my magazine is about Vegas and the editors return my calls). This idea makes no economic sense and so I play Megabucks as a fittingly pointless way to support my hopes for our local literary culture. It is also easy to play. I know so little about the game that I am not even sure what combination it takes to win.
Fortunately, even for this, no skill is involved nor is any knowledge required. You just push a button to make the wheels spin. If you win something there is lots of clanking and binging and flashing. Losing, of course, is always silent in Vegas. I lost my first two pulls. In seconds I was $6 down and yet I pulled for another chance and finally heard the cacophony of victory. Of course, I did not win the $10 million. But I did get $128, which put me $108 ahead of where I started with my $20. So, what did I do then? I cashed out. Because underneath all the math that makes Las Vegas hum is a simple unalterable truth: The longer you play, the more you will lose. My Las Vegas literary journal adventure will have to wait until the next time I play Megabucks. Anyway, I am now trying to decide what to do with my windfall $100. Any suggestions?
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Playing With E-mail
Beware slow days at the office: Hey, Pastor Wesley, I decided not to do a story on you as I mentioned before. I wrote your spam back during a slow week at the office. I wanted to do a story on your e-mail con and not be conned. But The New Yorker beat me to the punch with a fantastic story on Nigerians. Now this is really silly. I am not any next of kin to any dead persons. Seriously, and this is probably the crucial part from your end, I am never going to give you my bank information. You must be crazy in addition to dishonest. Yrs., Richard
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