(no subject)
My journal's been quiet for a while. Take out the link sausage and memes, and the lack of "real content" goes back even farther. Must remedy that more in April.
Mid-March, of course, featured the "Bingo, Donkey, Vegas Baby!" trip to Las Vegas to hook up "in real life" with a bunch of the mates from my Puzzle Pirates crowd. Most of the group went in together on renting a house off-Strip, although I got a hotel on the Strip (didn't want to keep folks crashing on couches anyway awake with the CPAP machine, and the hotel in question was only $5 a night or so more expensive than the cheapest I found online).
Memo for future: the Las Vegas Airport Budget Rent-a-Car? Worst rental EVAR. First, the line was huge. OK, that happens. Then, they didn't have the class of car I reserved - would I like to buy an upgrade? No, so the waiting game began, and (after far too long) I had to pull Mr. Grumpy Chris out and make vague noises about bait-and-switch, at which point they gave me the free upgrade maybe a little too quickly for innocence. Then, when returning, they did the usual paperwork at the car - but then made me go inside to finish anyway, where the guy was very confused because, by starting the paperwork outside, they locked his computer out of my record anyway. Isn't that a process you'd think they'd sort of have down?
Vegas, however, was great fun, by which I mean I did essentially no actual gambling whatsoever. We did check out a bunch of the free entertainment, like the fountains, butterfly garden and Chihuly lobby at the Bellagio, the lions at MGM, the Pirate show at Treasure Island... The last has apparently changed to the "Sirens of the Carribean" and features one ship of sultry babes in lingerie trying to lure the more mobile of the two ships (still crewed by pirates) to a come-up-and-see-me-some-time doom. Oddly enough, given the Vegas rep, sexing up the show seems to have made it less popular rather than more, according to the rumors I've heard.
We did the Dressy Dinner Out on Saturday night, hitting the (reportedly spiff) buffet at the Bellagio in a nod to our huge numbers and varied tastes. Several folks went to some of the shows (there was an expedition to now-Sir Tom Jones in one of his last shows as a mere commoner, and I heard talk of one of the Cirque shows) but I'd been in the group looking at Avenue Q, and we ended up passing when we discovered that they'd abridged the show in several places in a nod to Vegas Short Attention Span Syndrome. Vegas really does play to the "ooh, shiny" tendency to distraction, which often made herding a dozen or so cats Looterati along the Strip an adventure. Plus, of course, the whole way they have of engineering a completely fictional sense of scale to make huge distances look like "oh, just a block or two" to the untrained eye.
I was in the contingent that took off Monday night, although several folks were still hanging around until the next morning. So, Monday itself, several of us ventured out to Red Rocks to look at, well, the red rocks.
The following weekend, hiker_chick and I went to see the Seattle Shakespeare Company's token non-Shakespeare play for the season, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. It was a fairly traditional performance - no clever updating it to 1930s Chicago or some such - with a translation by resident classics professor and frequent on-stage minstrel Sean Patrick Taylor. Scott Coopwood, as Cyrano, very successfully achieved the role's powerful, meritocratic confidence and disdain for superficialities, balanced against an utter lack of romantic confidence that, handled without that level of energy, would just come off as inconsistent rather than tragic. The production also maintained the necessary energy very well itself. The final scene, in particular, is devilishly hard to produce for modern audiences - we quickly know what is happening and where it must go, but Rostand still has a great deal he wants to say with his central character's assistance and it's very easy to drag on to the point of melodrama, a fate they avoided much better than the (otherwise very good) Rappeneau/Depardieu Cyrano.
I've been trying to get out and explore again; I feel like I've been spending too much time the last few months trooping back and forth to the familiar in Seattle, rather than going on walkabout like when I first moved here. A few weeks ago, I hiked the bike trails from the waterfront north to Fisherman's Terminal at the far end of Magnolia. More recently, a couple weekends back, I concluded that I had to make an afternoon of working my way down the waterfront the other direction toward the ferry, and taking it over to Bainbridge for a while. Now that the weather's improving, I've plans to kill some sunny day wandering the UW campus a bit more, and will probably have to squeeze in a photo trip to the zoo before too long.
Mid-March, of course, featured the "Bingo, Donkey, Vegas Baby!" trip to Las Vegas to hook up "in real life" with a bunch of the mates from my Puzzle Pirates crowd. Most of the group went in together on renting a house off-Strip, although I got a hotel on the Strip (didn't want to keep folks crashing on couches anyway awake with the CPAP machine, and the hotel in question was only $5 a night or so more expensive than the cheapest I found online).
Memo for future: the Las Vegas Airport Budget Rent-a-Car? Worst rental EVAR. First, the line was huge. OK, that happens. Then, they didn't have the class of car I reserved - would I like to buy an upgrade? No, so the waiting game began, and (after far too long) I had to pull Mr. Grumpy Chris out and make vague noises about bait-and-switch, at which point they gave me the free upgrade maybe a little too quickly for innocence. Then, when returning, they did the usual paperwork at the car - but then made me go inside to finish anyway, where the guy was very confused because, by starting the paperwork outside, they locked his computer out of my record anyway. Isn't that a process you'd think they'd sort of have down?
Vegas, however, was great fun, by which I mean I did essentially no actual gambling whatsoever. We did check out a bunch of the free entertainment, like the fountains, butterfly garden and Chihuly lobby at the Bellagio, the lions at MGM, the Pirate show at Treasure Island... The last has apparently changed to the "Sirens of the Carribean" and features one ship of sultry babes in lingerie trying to lure the more mobile of the two ships (still crewed by pirates) to a come-up-and-see-me-some-time doom. Oddly enough, given the Vegas rep, sexing up the show seems to have made it less popular rather than more, according to the rumors I've heard.
We did the Dressy Dinner Out on Saturday night, hitting the (reportedly spiff) buffet at the Bellagio in a nod to our huge numbers and varied tastes. Several folks went to some of the shows (there was an expedition to now-Sir Tom Jones in one of his last shows as a mere commoner, and I heard talk of one of the Cirque shows) but I'd been in the group looking at Avenue Q, and we ended up passing when we discovered that they'd abridged the show in several places in a nod to Vegas Short Attention Span Syndrome. Vegas really does play to the "ooh, shiny" tendency to distraction, which often made herding a dozen or so cats Looterati along the Strip an adventure. Plus, of course, the whole way they have of engineering a completely fictional sense of scale to make huge distances look like "oh, just a block or two" to the untrained eye.
I was in the contingent that took off Monday night, although several folks were still hanging around until the next morning. So, Monday itself, several of us ventured out to Red Rocks to look at, well, the red rocks.
The following weekend, hiker_chick and I went to see the Seattle Shakespeare Company's token non-Shakespeare play for the season, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. It was a fairly traditional performance - no clever updating it to 1930s Chicago or some such - with a translation by resident classics professor and frequent on-stage minstrel Sean Patrick Taylor. Scott Coopwood, as Cyrano, very successfully achieved the role's powerful, meritocratic confidence and disdain for superficialities, balanced against an utter lack of romantic confidence that, handled without that level of energy, would just come off as inconsistent rather than tragic. The production also maintained the necessary energy very well itself. The final scene, in particular, is devilishly hard to produce for modern audiences - we quickly know what is happening and where it must go, but Rostand still has a great deal he wants to say with his central character's assistance and it's very easy to drag on to the point of melodrama, a fate they avoided much better than the (otherwise very good) Rappeneau/Depardieu Cyrano.
I've been trying to get out and explore again; I feel like I've been spending too much time the last few months trooping back and forth to the familiar in Seattle, rather than going on walkabout like when I first moved here. A few weeks ago, I hiked the bike trails from the waterfront north to Fisherman's Terminal at the far end of Magnolia. More recently, a couple weekends back, I concluded that I had to make an afternoon of working my way down the waterfront the other direction toward the ferry, and taking it over to Bainbridge for a while. Now that the weather's improving, I've plans to kill some sunny day wandering the UW campus a bit more, and will probably have to squeeze in a photo trip to the zoo before too long.