AWOL Me = Busy Bee (Sorry!)

I've been noticeably quiet this week. Sorry, folks. I've been nuclear busy—meaning I've been in constant motion, not in borderline-meltdown mode.

CinemaCon is in town, which means a lot of celebs are in Vegas—and these celebs need to be interviewed. There's also the Academy of Country Music Awards this weekend, and the Michael Jordan Celebrity Invitational golf tournament. Translation: Lots and lots 'o late nights for Us Weekly and OK!, and I'm not complaining.

I'm about half way through it, and realize that the past week or so may be the most star-studded seven or so days of my life.

It started on Friday March 25, with Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas. Then Saturday was Kendra Wilkinson-Baskett (famous for dating Hugh Hefner and being Holly Madison's co-star and frequent nemesis on the E! reality show The Girls Next Door) and three Twilight actors (Tinsel Korey, Kiowa Gordon and Bronson Pelletier).

That was a soft appetizer of sorts; a warm-up round for what was yet to come.

Things heated up on Tuesday, with the opening of the Mob Experience at the Tropicana. It was pretty fun(ny) to walk around—wander aimlessly, actually—with the likes of Pam Anderson. ("What did she look like?" a friend asked yesterday. My reply: "Oh, she looked the same as always—like a whore.") Yesterday was the first official press day for CinemaCon, and I had a 1-on-1 with Cameron Diaz for Us Weekly. Then, later that night I got to chat with Curb Your Enthusiasm visionary Larry David (he said he liked my glasses. My life is officially complete), and watch a colorful rainbow of all-star athletes parade down the same red carpet: Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky (and Chris Chelios and Brett Hull), Jerome Bettis and more. 

Mike Piazza's wife wasn't wearing a bra, which prompted me to snap a pic and post the following to Twitter:

  Today is the main event: A round of musical chairs-style 1-on-1 interviews with Russell Brand (eeek! He terrifies me; he's far too smart for his own good), Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Jason Momoa, Julianne Hough, Helen Mirren, Vin Diesel, and more. (As I'm sure you can tell, I'm, like, so excited for that last one.) Then, on Sunday, The ACMAs take hold, and country's megastars make my life miserable. (Thanks in advance, Taylor Swift.)

I actually love the ACMAs. Black Shelton is always good for a laugh, and I'm looking forward to meeting his beer drinkin', deer shootin', song singin' leadin' lady, Miranda Lambert. Reba, Carrie Underwood, Sara Underwood, Dierks Bentley, [my least favorite country singer of all time/frequent piece-of-shit human being] Toby Keith, Keith Urban, Alabama, the Zac Brown Band and James Taylor will be there, too. (And chances legends such as current Vegas headliner [and my #1 country man] Garth Brooks and last year's ACMA inductee George Strait will be there, too, among others.)

But it's not just country singers (or full-time country singers) who will be there: Reese Witherspoon, Twilight's Robert Patterson are among the presenters.

OK, all this name-dropping has made me tired. Back to work!

Keeping It In Vegas

Apparently everything that happens in Vegas can stay in Vegas, after all.

The Vegas Box is a new service that allows customers to keep their sins in Sin City. I first read about this in USA Today, but apparently it's been covered by Vegas Chatter, too.

Each 20"x17"x12" box holds about 70 lbs of remorse and embarrassment that you can't even think of taking back home with you. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for STDs (To quote The Hangover: "Remember what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Except for herpes. That shit'll come back with you.") or unwanted-yet-still-conceived children. Bebe mini-dresses that are four sizes too small and way too short to wear back home, and all those Ed Hardy knock-offs that you bought on Fremont Street, however, are more than welcome. As are unfinished bottles of booze (you paid $700 for that $35 bottle of vodka! You can't throw it out!).

The service is just $99 a year, which includes two pick-ups and drop-offs of your magic-filled box. (If you come to town more often, you can still access your box—they pick it up, and drop it off for you—for $20 a pop). The kind folks at The Vegas Box will also deliver your box 'o goodies elsewhere, in case you find yourself in Albuquerque and in desperate need of your beloved gambling supplies and/or stripper-oogling accessories.

Frequent Vegas visitors might actually find this service useful—and even economical.

"Keeping your items in Vegas means no more checked luggage! Just one round trip for two can add up to one full year of The Vegas Box. 1 checked bag (avg.) = $25 x 2 people = $50 x 2 (round trip) = $100," the company explains on its website.

Jenna's Lost Her Marbles

I realize I'm slow on the uptake on this one, but better late than never.

This chick from Rhode Island is hilarious. Basically, she's every guy's dream girl: Funny as shit, crazy as hell, and with a wicked body. Well boys, meet Jenna Marbles. She's a go-go dancer by night (seriously) and witty blogger/vlogger by day. Honestly, I don't know why FunnyOrDie, SNL or Comedy Central haven't enlisted her help for their online projects. Clearly, it's just a matter of time.

Her R.I. accent is kind of gritty and annoying, but that's OK; she gets a pass, because what she's saying is, for the most part, brilliant. 

Her break-out gem was a video blog entitled "How to Trick People Into Thinking You're Good Looking." She posted it in July of last year, but it somehow (and tragically) failed to register on my radar... until now. Again: Better late than never.

OK, so that one is old, but it's good right? And I just stumbled upon it this past weekend. Since making this discovery, I've watched a lot of her stuff. Not all of it is good, but there are more diamonds in the rough.

Take this—a parody on The Biggest Loser called "The Biggest Blogger" wherein she plays a blog-pushing version of TBL's mildly psychotic trainer, Jillian Michaels. It's better than half the sketches on SNL.

I also dug her procrastinator tutorial, "Things To Do Instead of Cleaning Your Room," and guys will love all the ass-flaunting in her video response to her employer's canceling of their trip to Mexico, entitled "What I Would've Done in Cancun."

If you want to see more, check out herYouTube channel (JennaMarbles), or visit her blog, Stoollala.com.

Welcome to the World, Words

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) unleashed a new collection of words into the world today. Among them:

• Buzzkill, Cheeseball and Overthink:  all are one word! As I've maintained for years!! Take that, former copyeditors!
• Muffin Top: "A protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers (cf. spare tyre n., love handle n.), which may sometimes be attributed to an excessive appreciation for muffin tops in the literal sense.")
• Rub-a-dub Yesssss!
• Wassup Weren't those Budweiser commercials airing, like, 10 years ago?
  
• Smack-talking
• Suicide door
• LOL
• OMG: OMFG, however, did not make the cut.
  
• <3: As in ♥

OED also released a list of rejected words that, for the time being, will remain unofficial slang. There's a good list of them on AOL News, but most of them are head-scratchers. (Did someone really think nudenda—"An unhidden agenda," apparently—would make the cut?) Still, my favorite reject has to be "nonversation," which is described as being "a worthless conversation, wherein nothing is explained or otherwise elaborated upon."

I [Heart] Coquette

Coquette rules, and this is why:

Will I get married?
Sweetheart, I’m an advice columnist, not a Magic Eight Ball.

My wife says my shoes need to be put away. Do I have to do this?
What are you, 12? Go ahead and substitute the word “mommy” for the word “wife” in this ridiculous question. Notice how the tone didn’t change? Grow up, dude.

My favorite, however, has to be this one:

The tone of your advice is harsh and your column runs long. 
If your sensibilities are that delicate and your attention span that stunted, perhaps you should go read Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter.

For more, visit Coquette's latest entry in The Daily, or see the archive.

Hunting For Hipsters

The hipsters descended upon Austin, TX during SXSW, but now that the annual tech/film/music fest is over, the skinny jean-wearing set of self-obsessed self-loathers is left to find their way back home.

Anticipating the reverse migration, New York's  Jeff Greenspan and Hunter Fine are doing something about the infestation. They're setting hipster traps, and trying to control the Jersey Shore population.

Cardboard bear traps have been set up in hipster-dense areas, each baited with the quintessential hipster staples: Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, American Spirit cigarettes and neon faux Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Meanwhile, Greenspan and Fine have armed the tunnels and bridges connecting Manhattan to the rest of the world with bear traps designed to catch a whole different species: Jersey Shore type swine. Those traps are armed with spray tanner, hair gel, Drakkar Noir, a fake gold necklace, a LIRR schedules and PATH tickets.

New York Metro writer Nate Jones suggests other cliché traps to control the population density in other overpopulated areas:

Park Slope: One bushel of kale, one organic fair-trade childrens jumper.
Upper East Side: One pearl necklace, one gin & tonic, one pamphlet of yacht leasing information.
Fort Greene: One issue of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list, one unclaimed "Bored to Death" spec script.
Upper West Side: Two discount opera tickets, one copy of The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life.
Soho and Nolita: One pair of white trousers (unisex), one pair of enormous sunglasses (unisex), one striped sailor shirt (unisex)

The Big 0-5

Today is the 5th birthday of Twitter, a.k.a. the information superhighway's favorite phenomenon and microblogging site.

Twitter may top out at a speed of 140 characters per update, but the site is still flying high, with nearly 1 billion new tweets every week. If only they could make a BlackBerry app that'd work properly, so I could read them all... #FirstWorldProblem

App issues aside, Twitter is growing by leaps in bounds. Within the past year, the average number of tweets per day has exploded, going from 50 million to 140 million. Again, that's 140 million tweets every 24 hours, folks. (For more Twitter stats, check out #numbers, which was posted to the official Twitter Blog last week)

Site co-founder Biz Stone (@Biz) spewed some interesting stats in a celebratory bday blog entry earlier today:

"Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets," he said. "While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day."

To celebrate Twitter's 5th anniversary, I suggest you grab yourself a big slice of cake and check out the most recent edition of my Tweets of the Week column in Vegas Seven. :P But before that, I'll leave you with some food for thought, courtesy of our good friends at Wired:

7 in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world. Of the remainder, just 6% get re-tweeted, and 92% of those re-tweets occur within the 1st hour. In other words, fewer than 1 in 200 messages get re-tweeted after an hour. 

Moral of the story: You've got 140 characters. Make 'em count—today, especially.

American Idiots

Newsweek asked, and America answered... incorrectly. In fact, 39% of the 1,000 U.S. citizens polled failed the standard U.S. citizenship test.

According to Newsweek's poll:

• 29% of Americans don't know who their vice president is. (It's Joe Biden, in case you fall into that percentile.)
• 73% of Americans—that's roughly 3 out of 4 people, folks—aren't sure why the U.S. was involved in the Cold War. (Need a quick refresher? Here's a link to the Cold War Wikipedia entry.)
• 6% of Americans couldn’t circle Independence Day on a calendar. (That's the Fourth of July, helloooo!)
• Just 58% of Americans can identify the Taliban. Holland beat the U.S. by 10 points, scoring 68%. Meanwhile, Brittan beat that 75%, and Finland finished slightly ahead of them, with 76%.
• Most Americans think foreign aid represents 27% of the country's budget, and suggest cutting it to 13% of the budget. However, foreign aid represents less than 1% of the nation's budgetary spending. 

More than a quarter of the country doesn't know who's second to the throne in the Oval Office? Really?! And 3/4 of the nation doesn't know what the big deal about the Cold War was?That's almost as depressing as hearing 6% of Americans don't know what day to celebrate, um, America on—and it's a national holiday. With fireworks and BBQ. Even the dumbest drunken Nascar fans know when the Fourth of July is.

Where did they find these people?

"Hey there! Have you been living in a cave since 1963? Yes? Great! Come take this survey..."

"Howdy, ma'am. That's a nice bonnet you're wearing. Do you by chance live on a commune with no access to books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the internet, or any other contact with the outside world—other than this chance meeting with me, that is? You do? Great! Come take this survey..."

"Excuse me. Judging from your grizzly, bewildered appearance, it looks to me like you've been living in a remote cabin in the woods since childbirth. What's that? You were raised by wolves? That's incredible—and perfect! Come take this survey..."

... sadly, the people who responded to Newsweek's poll are card-carrying, flag-waving citizens of modern day America. They have access to news, politics and civic information; what they don't have is an excuse for their ignorance. (Think you can do better? Take the test for yourself.)

Details of the poll—and the implications of the results—are explored in Andrew Romano's story, "How Dumb Are We?" in this week's Newsweek. It's a short, snappy and fairly depressing read.

The piece finishes with a quote from Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker: “The problem is ignorance, not stupidity,” he says. To this, Romano aptly replies, "Whether that’s a treatable affliction or a terminal illness remains to be seen. But now’s the time to start searching for a cure."

The Aunt I Never Knew I Had ... and Now Love

The Aunt Eeee I never knew I had

I don't subscribe to or read much of Elle, but an old column of "Ask E. Jean" was recently featured on the Daily Beast (my new guilty pleasure! Follow DB on Twitter!), so I read it and, surprisingly enough, I liked it.

I don't usually care for the fluffy, superficial and useless chatter in womens magazines, but this one was good. It was real, it was well-written, and it was useful—even though it was months old.

In the column, 17-year Elle veteran columnist Ms. Eeee outlines the 25 things every woman should know. (Read it! It won't take long, I promise.)

The crucial Cliff's Notes:

• Regarding men: "Tell him what you want him to do, reward him when he does it, and ignore him when he doesn’t do it."
• Do onto others as you'd do onto them. Ask yourself, "What would happen if everyone in the world believed this idea and behaved as I’m behaving now?" I.E.: "If you’re considering lying to your boss to save your job, imagine a universal law that says everyone must lie to his or her boss."
• Always choose action over words. She was referring to actions under the covers and pillow talk, but it applies beyond the bedroom, too.
• Don’t expect a man to give you multiple orgasms. "Indeed, you’ll live a more fulfilling life if you don’t expect a man to give you multiple anything."

Although it's chock-full of useful gems and cheeky wisdom shared, I didn't agree with everything dear Aunt Eeee had to say in her column—toward the end of the list, especially. For example, I firmly believe that grades do matter (#15), even though they aren't everything (if you want to work for Google, they will look at your college GPA—so it better be good). Also, I don't give money to panhandlers (#18) but, in my defense, I do offer to buy the occasional sandwich for someone who's truly hungry for lunch and not just another fix; I would never introduce a boyfriend as my fiancé, no matter how badly I wanted him to propose (#18); chasing men is not the highest purpose in life (#23), and I'm friends with nearly all my exes (#25) because they are great people and, while sure, things between us fizzled, that doesn't mean they can't be fun, interesting, smart friends.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a bed to prop up (#6)...

Air Canada: Take Off, Eh

Air Canada should stick to what it does best: flying airplanes.

Canada’s national airline is meddling in Canada’s national game, and it’s ridiculous. AC is a major sponsor of the NHL, but after witnessing Boston Bruins defenceman Zdeno Chara’s massive hit on on Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty, the airline says the game is getting too violent, and is threatening to pull their ad dollars.

“From a corporate social responsibility standpoint, it is becoming increasingly difficult to associate our brand with sports events which could lead to serious and irresponsible accidents,” Air Canada warned in the letter. (as reported by CBC.ca)

This is like Cover Girl calling up the editors of Cosmopolitan saying the stories are too sexy, so get more conservative or we’re pulling our ads. Hockey is a rough sport, and Cosmo is a saucy magazine. Get over it!

Now, let me be clear: I’m not saying Chara’s check was fair game; I’m saying advertisers have no place in league policy discussions.

Everyone knows Air Canada’s customers love hockey. If they didn’t, the airline wouldn’t be advertising with the NHL in the first place. And those same customers are still going to games and tuning in to Hockey Night in Canada—they love the game, violent as it may be. So if Air Canada wants to market their services to them, they should go right ahead—but stay out of the politics and inner workings of the game.

Final thought: Instead of wasting time trying to fix imaginary problems for the NHL, perhaps AC should address their own problems, starting with their notoriously bad customer service.

Victoria's Secret Revealed

Not a paradigm shift, per se, but a torso shift

Victoria, we know your secret—and it's brutal, heavy-handed airbrushing and digital re-imaging.

We're in the midst of a recession (or recovery), yet the hacks working in the Victoria's Secret graphic design department are still willfully employed—despite repeated, embarrassing flubs.

I'd think competition for graphic design positions at Victoria's Secret would be stiff—VS being the holy grail for [male] designers. (Imagine, being paid to stare at bikini and bra-clad supermodels all day.) Still, Vicky has some mighty shoddy designers on staff.

Models frequently are shown in brochures with their arms totally airbrushed off their bodies; their torsos (and legs and other limbs) shifted in atomically impossible ways, and more. There are several sites and news stories dedicated to pointing out these flubs, including this one (Brittan's Daily Mail) and this one (HuffPo). Yet somehow, the incompetent VS designers still have jobs.

May I carry that for you? On second thought,
let me delete your handbag altogether.

HackerFactor has a great page dedicated to breaking down the various manipulations in this photo (left), in which the model is holding what appears to be the remnants of a handbag strap in her right hand, but the rest of the bag is missing. Oops! Body By Victoria, indeed. And By "Victoria," we mean Photoshop.

Altered Reality

What happens when parallel realities collide? Apparently, roads look like fettuccine noodles, as bridges and overpasses droop down in a scene that looks like what you'd get if there was a Hot Wheels version of The Sims.

 This comes to us courtesy of Brooklyn-based artist-programmer Clement Valla, who studied "the intersection between art and computer programming" at the Rhode Island School of Design.

"My work focuses on socio-technical systems that raise a number of interesting questions about authorship and human/computer relationships. I explore digital technologies that are not simply new tools to create and distribute copies of things but that also enable new social relationships through which people produce multiples," he says on his website.


The warped images are the product of Valla's vast collection of Google Maps images, which he scraped from the search giant's mapping tool, as it attempts to transition from standard views to Google Earth's 3-D perspectives. Google Earth is good—even amazing at times—but, as Vallas collection shows us, it's not perfect.

The surreal images made HuffPo headlines earlier this week, and two of my favorites are here. Still, I highly recommend you click through the entire collection here.

Revisiting WWII

I love this: Russian photog Sergey Larenkov took images of modern day Europe, then photoshopped parts of WWII pics taken at the same locations on top of the newer ones. The results, as you can see, are both beautiful and powerful.

There is so much history in Europe, it just boggles my mind. Simply trying to try to grasp all the events that have happened at any one location a over the decades (or centuries) gives me a headache. Yet these photos transcend time, and in high, dramatic fashion.

A few of my favorites are below, but I highly suggest checking out the full collection here.

Death to Comic Sans

It's true: I'm a font snob. Go ahead, say it to my face. It's OK. (And I've been called far worse.) Sure, my snobbery isn't limited to typefaces alone: My snobbery extends to food (especially carrots, tomatoes, apples, bread, butter and pasta) and wine, and many other areas of life that I refuse to accept mediocrity. But fonts! They hold a special place in my heart.
 
As a proud, bonafide font snob, I judge people by the type of font they use, family members included. (Apologies in advance to any soon-to-be-relatives.) It's not that I'm all that passionate in the great serif or sans-serif debate; it's that I strongly believe the time has come for Comic Sans to die. I mean, really: For the love of god and all things holy, please, lord, make it stop.

Nobody likes a clown.
(A clown using Comic Sans, especially.)

In my ever-so-humble opinion, that font belongs in one place and one place only: elementary schools. If your audience reads at or above a sixth grade level, they should not be subjected to Comic Sans. Yet somehow, I see it everywhere. In professional e-mail signatures, community notices, business signage... it's nothing short of insane. I consider being forced to read it an insult to my intelligence. Suffice to say, I'd pull my teeth out before going to a dentist who writes his name in CS. (Would you let a third grader give you a filling? I think not.)

I'm not alone: Comic Sans Criminal is a very cute, clever and well-designed website dedicated to putting an end to the CS epidemic.

"The only appropriate uses for comic sans," it states, include "when your audience is under 11 years old (Writing to their parents in Comic Sans does not count), when you're designing a comic, [and] when your audience is dyslexic."

I admit, I probably got a little too much joy out of this cheeky little site, but it is what it is: Awesome.

So go forth and enjoy, dear readers—just please, promise me you'll never use Comic Sans ever again.

Japan: Before & After

This series by HuffPo's Mike Sparks is one of the coolest (and most useful) applications of multimedia I've seen so far regarding the ongoing disaster Japan.

Part of the reason I like it so much is because it's so simple. Sparks took images from Google Maps that were taken before the earthquake/tsunami, then layered images of the same terrain taken after the disaster over top.

As you mouse over the images, the before shot switches to the after shot. It's as cool as it is devastating.

Click here to see the entire collection on my beloved HuffPo.

I'll Drink To That

 

Cheers to Pepsi Co., which announced today that it has developed the world's first plant-derived pop bottle. Although it doesn't look any different than the current plastic bottles the company uses, the new ones are made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and "other materials" (that we assume are plan-based but too obscure and perhaps gross-out worthy to mention.) Pepsi says it will use biproducts of its food business—including orange peels, oat hulls and potato scraps—to make the bottles, too.

The stuff inside the bottles, on the other hand, will continue to be a witch's brew composed primarily of "nasty chemicals" (to quote my mother, who says there's too much sugar [worse! corn syrup] in regular soda, and too much aspartame that'll give me cancer in diet versions.)

Despite my mother's concerns, I still drink a lot of diet Pepsi (deal with it!), and the new bottles are good news.

"PepsiCo plans to test the product in 2012 in a few hundred thousand bottles. Once the company is sure it can successfully produce the bottle at that scale, it will begin converting all its products over," reports the Huffington Post.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola Co., which makes bottles using 30% plant-derived materials, recently stated, rather erroneously, that it'd likely be several years before they could make a commercially viable, totally plant-based bottle. So much for that theory!

Pepsi already earned earth brownie points for creating the first compostable chip bag, for SunChips. Why they don't put all their chips in similar bags is beyond me ... but hey, it's a baby step in the right direction. And they did cut a lot of the plastic out of their Aqua-Fina bottles in 2009 (saves them money, saves the earth... everybody wins!). And according to the Huffington Post, Pepsi is in the midst of transitioning Naked Juice branded drinks into bottles made from 100% recycled plastic.

Boise? Really?

I hate losing, but I hate losing to Boise even more. But that's just what Las Vegas did, according to a  ranking of the most socially networked cities in the U.S.

The [bogus?] poll, released by Men's Health, claims to have considered Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Twitter, MySpace, Reddit and Digg usage, along with reported blog and chat room activity when compiling the list. (To do so, they depended heavily on data from NetProspex, Chitika and SimplyMap.)

While you night assume San Francisco would top the poll, the closest major city to Silicon Valley didn't even place within the top five. In fact, SF finished in sixth place—which is respectable, sure, but can someone please explain to be how Atlanta, Denver and Minneapolis out-teched SF?

As I told the friend who sent me a link to the story (via twitter, no less): " I smell another flawed algorithm."

"I thought you would have single-handidly brought Vegas to the top 5," he quipped. Alas, my rampant tweeting was not enough: Boise, Salt Lake, Wilmington and 21 other cities outranked Vegas; we finished in 25th place.

Washington D.C. was awarded first place, which wasn't all that surprising to me. I used to live there, and I recall fondly the abundance of smart, tech-savvy and totally-into-themselves people in that city. (My initial response to learning D.C.: "D.C. won b/c the city is full of narcissists who LOVE checking into 4sq & bragging about what congressman they just talked to."

Atlanta and Denver somehow followed the nation's capital, placing second and third, respectively. Rounding out the list of 100 cities were social network dunces Billings, Detroit, Bakersfild, Lubbock and, in last place, El Paso. Funny: Three of the four most unsavvy cities in terms of social networking were in Texas. Click here to see the full list—not that I think it's all that accurate.

Big Week

tweet tweet, tweak tweak

This week, my ever-so-popular Tweets of the Week column in Vegas Seven is different. It's usually a mish-mash of funny, timely and political rants, raves and random observations (kind of like this blog!), but this week, it's all about everyone's favorite celeb gone wrong, Charlie Sheen.

It's in the new issue that hit newsstands today, but if you haven't seen it, check out Tweets of the Week: The Charlie Sheen Edition online. Because, let's face it: We really haven't heard enough about winning, tiger blood, goddesses or warlocks from the former Two and a Half Men star.

Sheen recently set the world record for amassing the most Twitter followers in the least amount of time. He has more than 2.5 million followers (and counting...) yet follows just 31. Unsurprisingly, my Twitter account isn't one of them, but Vegas' very own Floyd Mayweather is, as is Jessie Waits (who runs Tryst and XS nightclubs, and was recently named one of Vegas' top 40 under 40 by InBusiness). Come to think of it, Waits just signed up for Twitter, too. Right around the same time Charlie did, come to think of it. Hmmm...

Choices at the Pump

You can either laugh or cry.

Damning the Manning

Usually this blog is a happy place for sharing happy links and videos and other random, cool stuff. Well, this post is different.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 6 months, you probably know what Wikileaks is. Yes, it's controversial, but I think, by in large, that it's fantastic. Sure, you can argue that it puts national security at risk, but if you do, your argument is weak at best. I have yet to see a single thing come out of Wikileaks that put an American life at risk—other than Bradley Manning's.

Manning is the 23-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst who leaked a bunch of classified information to Wikileaks, which in turn made the information (cables) public. He's since been arrested and is currently being held in solitary confinement in Virginia. He's spent more than 200 days in a 6 x 12' cell, and is let out (into a larger room, goodie) just one hour per day.

Imagine having essentially no human contact for 6+ months. Just try to wrap your head around that. And, remember, he has yet to be convicted. If convicted, he could face the death penalty... even though he didn't kill anyone, and his actions didn't result in a single death or injury. The U.S. Army sustained a few bruises to its ego, but that's it.

As the poster that I every-so-gingerly copied and pasted at the bottom of this post states:

"Manning faces decades in prison [or death] for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed 11 civilians and wounded 2 children in Baghdad, Iraq. The army covered up the evidence and declared the war crime justified, now they claim that exposing the massacre is criminal.

This is a massive human rights issue. As this column, published in The Guardian, points out:

"The US condemns human rights abuses abroad yet appears to be allowing the psychological torture of Bradley Manning."

The piece is a quick, informative read—so read it! And, as a citizen of the world, it is your civic duty to keep up with this story. Still, I can already tell you the lesser moral, here: Don't enlist in the U.S. Army. (Look what happened to Pat Tillman. Get The Tillman Story on Netflix ... it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year, is narrated by Josh Brolan, and will scare the shit out of you.) Mark my words: Years from now, Manning will heralded as a hero. A martyr, perhaps, but a hero nonetheless.

Have You Seen This Man?

This blew up the Twittersphere and jammed my inbox (ie, went super viral) today, but in case you didn't see it:

I really, really wish there was a phone number at the bottom, instead of Lionel Ritchie lyrics... but the lyrics are pretty awesome on their own.

Are You a Winner?

Thanks to Esquire for this gem, which comes to us by way of Alyssa Kelly, who tweeted/shared this w me. (I call it teamwork, but we can all call it #winning)

As Esquire's Foster Kamer said,  "Go forth, and try not to melt your face off."

 

National Pancake Week

Du-Par's pancakes: $7.75 for 3, or $8.75
for 5. Either way, money (and a week's
worth of calories) well-spent

It's National Pancake Week, apparently, which means we all have a reason to go to IHOP, the Original Pancake House and indulge in the best pancakes in town, at Du-Par's in the Golden Gate (see photo of said deliciousness on the right). 

Or, go for broke, and try the Illegal Chocolate Chocolate Pancakes at Max Brenner at the Forum Shops at Caesars. Those poppies incorporate 60% dark chocolate truffle cream, milk chocolate shavings, spiced pecans and caramelized bananas. Or try the Royal Berries pancakes, which come with a crown of candied blueberries and blood orange maple syrup—those are sure to blow your diet, too, in one super-sweet-and-totally-worth-it sitting. 

If you experience any pangs of guilt or diner's remorse this week, remember: It's a national holiday. It's your patriotic duty to indulge. Anything else would be... unAmerican. And every time someone orders a granola parfait, the terrorists win. 

When I think pancakes, I think of my great gramma's amazing french pancakes, which were super thin and fluffy, thanks to stiff egg whites that were folded into the batter. Granny's "French pancakes" were her signature dish, even though she wasn't French, and made amazing shortbread, too. She made them for us whenever we visited her, and served them with sugar and lemon juice instead of syrup. Sounds gross, but try it. Delicious!

The second thing I think about when I hear "pancakes" is Jim Gaffigan. He does a hilarious take on the health benefits of cake—fried breakfast cake included—in his very funny DVD, "Beyond the Pale."

Here's a clip, And happy holidays.

Jim Gaffigan 2013 Cake 2013 Beyond the Pale - Watch more Funny  Videos