Jeez, I'm already behind

I go out and have a life for a couple days and look what happens--the blog just mildews. So here's the catch-up.

Friday was quite eventful for what was supposed to be a non-eventful day. Around 10:45, CNN broke that Sandra Day O'Connor was resigning from the Supreme Court. Everyone had been expecting a retirement, but Rehnquist more than her. So as Medill News Service's motto states ("When news breaks, we try to cover it.") we swung our dead horse into action. Or something. The White House announced the Prez was going to give a statement in about 45 minutes, so we started calling for permission to cover, which we got. Generally, we can get into anything at the White House with a little notice, since we're credentialed for the Capitol. And as my dad put it, "I guess if a gay Republican porn operative can get in, anybody can." So true.

In any case, we call ahead, they run a background check and uh oh, yes the background check took a little too long (the trip to Vegas perhaps?) and we got inside about 10 minutes before the presser started, which was about 10 minutes too late. For security and aesthetic reasons, everybody's got to be set up generally at least 15-20 minutes before W. comes out. So we watched the press conference from the briefing room, about 20 feet on the wrong side of a locked door from the Rose Garden.

On a completely different note, we here at the Desk of Rory B. Bellows would like to welcome a new member to the blogspot family--K-Moo lives!

There was something more funny and interesting that I was going to write about but it's slipped my mind. Gotta start writing this stuff down.

The end times...

The moment we all hoped would never come, but knew was inevitable has indeed come to pass.

My free cable has gone out.

Now that you've had a moment to recover from the shock of it all, we can go on. My apartment has been living high on the tv hog for about two years, when we just tried plugging the TV into the cable line running into the apartment. Since then, we've enjoyed the magic of free HBO and Showtime, all the while knowing that it could come to an end with one snip of the wire cutters...

But still we watched on, adding a Tivo to our TV family and blithely ignoring the "Missed You, Please Reschedule for Disconnection" notices that began showing up about 4 months ago. Maybe we thought everything would just be okay if we didn't say or do anything to bring attention to ourselves, that we could just go on forever like this, but no-it was not to be.

I knew instantly what had happened when I came home this afternoon and found the Tivo "unable to display live TV." I knew the good times had come to an end. (At least the free ones.) Sure, I watched a Tivo'ed episode of Entourage and the Daily Show just to get by--just one more time, to remember what it was like. But tomorrow comes the call to Comcast, (hopefully no awkward questions about why we called the day after our "non-existent" service was cut off) and a new era of paid cable. Maybe it'll be better--clearer? Digital? With On Demand? But it'll never be the same. Just me and the Tivo and the new Comcast bill, soon to come in the mail.

On a side note, I found a loophole today that allowed me to get a District parking pass without giving up my Ohio plates (and Ohio insurance rates). Guess the cosmos and I are even for the day...but I'd say I'm still pretty far in the hole for the last few months.

Auto Tech

Had an interesting day, as days go. I was dispatched by the grad students to shoot the AAA/Ford Student Auto Skills National Finals, held each year in DC, at least according to my media notes. The gist is that two high school juniors and seniors from each state come to show off their auto mechanic skillz. Good thing is, these were hardly the near-dropout slackers that may or may not have inhabited your local vocational school. These guys (and two girls) were the kind of mechanics you hope you have working on your car when you take it to the dealer. The kids have a 90 minutes to diagnose and fix one of 50 identically f*ed up cars, in this case not unsuprisingly, a 2005 Ford Focus. Somewhat surprisingly, the cars were not donated by Ford, but by Hertz. Which means after the cars were done being screwed up and ostensibly being "fixed," they were gonna be rented to some poor schmuck at Reagan National Airport who declined to upgrade from the Economy rental. Good luck when you go to use the windshield wipers and the airbag deploys.

On a tangent, the weather has officially reached "swamp-like" here in our fine capital. While running back and forth between the North Dakotan and Louisianian(?) teams at the Auto Skillz competition, I sweat profusely, despite it being cloudy and threatening rain. It's so muggy during summers in DC, you sweat simply standing still. (I believe Jenny will attest to this.) Now even though I'm not on camera, I still don't want to be dripping sweat onto some Senator's nice carpet when we go in for an interview after lugging the gear up to the Hill. So I'm left with the choice of wearing shorts and being (at least in my raised-properly-by-my-parents mind) disrespectful, but less sweaty, or wearing pants and looking like the Capitol Police opened a waterpark at the security checkpoint. Life's a struggle, people. And I'm a sweat-er.

The weekend that was

Not a bad weekend. The high- (and low-?) lights...

Friday: First week of Summer Quarter done and if things hold up, it should be a great one. It's great not only having one, but two friends working at Medill now. That's Lauren, whose recent resume includes stops as a Medill grad student, assistant photog, America's Most Wanted associate producer, and now Director of the Crimes of War project (housed in the DC newsroom's back closet); and her sig-other Ryan, filling his summer off from teaching US History at McKinley Tech HS in the District by working as the assistant photographer. They're always a heck of a lot of fun to be around and it more or less doubles the number of entertaining people at work, so it's pretty fantastic.

As it was Friday, I hit the Press Club with Ryan and Lauren and several of the grad students. For the uninitiated, the National Press Club is a bit like having a country club for journalists whose defining characteristic is that it serves cheap beer and free tacos on Friday nights. It actually does much more than that--you'll see a hell of a lot of important people come through the ballrooms downstairs to speak and make news (more on that in a second)--if you ever flip past C-SPAN, there's a good chance you'll see someone talking in front of the Press Club's background.

But that's not really why we go. DC can be one expensive place to go out in, and when a drink bill for ten people usually ends up being under 50 bucks AND you can gorge yourself on the taco buffet, you keep going back there. On this fine evening, it so happened that the Iraqi Prime Minister was delivering a speech downstairs during Happy Hour, so we had to endure a Secret Service pat/wand down to get our drink on. Only in DC.

Later, the show moved to Adams Morgan. DC has a few distinctive neighborhoods to go out in. One is Georgetown, where you can go out on the waterfront with your polo collar flipped up and mingle with well-to-do summer interns and 20-somethings looking for a date--a good time actually, if you're in the mood for it--or completely aggravating if you're not. Then there's Adams Morgan. Mix together a few hole-in-the-wall bars, restaurants, jumbo slice take-outs and ethnic cafes with a few upscale nightclubs and eateries and you've got mass chaos on a Friday night. And in the middle of it all is my favorite dive bar in the city, the Toledo Lounge. This is a place that used to offer $1 PBR cans on Sunday nights and still offers $1 drafts when it rains. One of the few unpretentious places in Washington, the bar's namesake, Toledo (that's Ohio, not Spain) has inspired the decor of old copies of the Toledo Blade, Mud Hens' pennants and pictures of the Mayor Daley of Toledo, Carty Finkbeiner. Maybe it's the old-school Pac-Man upstairs, or the TV that's usually tuned to a re-run of Seinfeld, but somehow it pulls it all off without being trashy, even with the ripped vinyl seats.

Anyway, that ended up being the last stop of the night--wandering home at closing and somehow managing to pass up a chili half-smoke at Ben's Chili Bowl (that's another post entirely).

Without getting too long here, Saturday night was rooftop night--first my friend Shweta's 27th? 29th? birthday on the roof of an aparment building in Dupont Circle and then a good-bye party for my friend Katie H, heading to U of Ill. Law School. The thing about rooftops in DC is that they're really not all that tall. The height restriction (can't have anything taller than the Capitol) means that depending on where you are in the city, 5-10 stories up will give you a view of the entire city and MD and VA. A good time at both parties, thanks in part to roommate Erica agreeing to be company for the evening, and despite the crush of bodies at Katie's party on the roof at area hip establishment Local 16. Nothing like a sweaty Guido telling me, "Hey Bro (note that it comes out like "bra") move outta the way, move, bro." and then sliding on past (using his sweat as lubricant) that makes me want to chug my $5 cup of Miller Light and hit the showers.

Onto the magic

Let's begin, shall we?

Brian Nemo has posted several of the highlights of the trip to Las Vegas for his "surprise" bachelor party this past weekend and I won't attempt to relate them any better than he already has. A better time could not have been had...here's the gist of the trip from my end...

Since I had the week off between Spring and Summer quarters at NU, I caught an earlier flight and got into Vegas several hours before anybody else and was standing at the front desk at the Luxor by 11 AM. (the Luxor was comfortable...broken in, perhaps?...without being worn out.) After wandering the casino floor and getting disoriented only once, I headed straight for the Luxor's pool to try to do something about my awful, awful tan. (The sight of which would earn me the nickname Patch(es) for the balls-to-the-wall Saturday night. Use your imagination. Or, rather, don't.)

The defining characteristic of the Luxor's pool seemed to be the enormous amount of crap that was flying around everywhere. It was windy and every five seconds empty margarita cups and other pool-side refuse came blowing through getting stuck on the lounger. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though, since it was so windy that one of the lifeguard chairs actually blew sideways about 3 feet, scaring the bejesus out of the poor girl manning it. Also, my tan still looks awful.

Finally, Nemo et al. arrived and the fun began--here's the cliffs note version:

The Wynn was by far the nicest casino (I guess that's what $2.2 billion will get you), the Excalibur the worst we visited. Think Medieval Times mixed with the gaudiness of a County Fair and slots thrown in for good measure.

Chilling at the various sportsbooks in the casino was fantastic. The Wynn's, again, was the nicest--leather chairs, personal plasma screens at each seat and an enormous electronic odds board with even more enormous projection screens with games on them. The Luxor's, while being the crappiest and smallest, also gave us the most drinks (all free!) and was probably the most fun. On a side note, when I went to buy a muffin on Tuesday morning back in DC, I opened my wallet and decided to pay with the $5, because "I'd need the singles later to tip the cocktail waitress." Reality bites.

I had the luck of the Irish when it came to the limited table games I played. I won the first three hands of pai gow (think blackjack at a leisurely pace where everyone at the table, including the dealer, wants to help you out) that I played and then Sunday, after everyone had already left, I hit my jackpot. I called my friend Stacey (no, not THAT Stacey) for her birthday and offered up a spin on the roulette wheel. She picked Red 25 and one 5 minimum bet and a spin of the wheel later, I was $175 richer. Stacey's also looking forward to getting her half of that, I would think.

And then to cap it off, I took the red eye flight back to DC. Left Vegas at midnight Sunday/Monday, got into DC at 8:00 am Monday. Whatever the hell I was thinking when I booked it, I don't know. First time flying Independence Air--thumbs up. In this case, cheaper than Southwest, with nicer service, and on the ride out to Vegas, a personal video player (for 10 bucks, not bad) loaded with 6 or 7 movies, several music videos (although Elton John? Really?) and tv shows like the Simpsons, Friends, ER, etc. Considering I get antsy on the 50 minute flight to Cleveland from DC, it was worth the 10 bucks to not even notice the 5 hours to Vegas. Plus it kept my mind off the man next to me who ordered 3 bloody mary's (at 10 AM!) and whose farts smelled like stale tacos.

In the beginning...

What the hell. I decided to give this a go. I figure if Jenny can do it, so can I. I pledge to try to pass Nemo's probationary period with blogs to spare and to be at least half as witty.