It's Not A Bender, It's A Lifestyle.

I've had terrible eating habits in Vegas. LV is pretty universally recognized as one of the true meccas of great food in the world. You can get anything from a $3 slice to an elegant world-class meal at Joel Robuchon at upwards of $1K  (that better be some DAMN fine French food, Joel). There are restaurants, pubs, cafes, brasseries, burger joints, and, yes, a food court or 12. I've been to Vegas 8 going on 9 times now, and I can count the quality meals I've sat down for there on one (mangled) hand. I've had great steaks at Gallagher's Steakhouse at NYNY over Xmas last year, and surprisingly at the Harley Davidson Cafe of all places on my first trip. I had a good, if under-cooked and overpriced filet at Red Square at Mandalay Bay. Don't think I would go back there, pretty sure I'm not their target audience as the boom-chik boom-chik music was WAY too loud and the place felt more like a nightclub, though I went in there at 6p. The Henry at Cosmopolitan...

I'm addicted to Vegas. In my life I've had most of the usual "guy" passions and vices; I went through the heavy metal phase, the Bruce Lee phase, I lusted after fast cars for a while and I HAD a fast motorcycle for a while. I've had passionate love affairs with playing tennis and golf at earlier periods in my life. I've been a devoted SF Giants fan since I moved to the Bay Area in 1985. I had my weed phase and a mostly short and very choppy coke phase and I've always loved attaining a good liquor buzz. I went through a couple year-long obsession with going out on weekends in San Francisco when I had not yet moved to the City. I had a streak of over a year in which I went to SF every weekend, usually getting a cheap hotel room and riding Caltrain up from the San Jose area. Pretty much just left all my friends and a fairly serious GF down there in the dust and rode that obsession until I ended up moving here. While the other guys I worked with were ...

News and musings as I'm a little over a month away from my 7/18 trip. Got a pretty good fever going for this one (as always). Adding the extra day and night will make it easily the longest trip I've done to Vegas. The first trip, over 4 years ago now (2/11) was a night and a day. I was in and out in a flash, I flew in on a Friday night about 10:30, had the one full day Saturday, then flew out mid-day Sunday. Not sure how I even had the time to get hooked on the place. I remember feeling sensory overloaded by the time I left, it was so out of the experience I had had for decades of sleepy Bay Area towns with nothing like the action of Vegas. It was almost another year before I went back again, and that trip hooked me. It's been 6 trips in 2 years since and I'm officially a junkie. This trip will be 5 nights, 4 days. I make a habit now (unlike the first couple trips) of having at least $1K per day of blowable cash. That's drinking, eating, and slots. I've h...

Vegas it is a changin', and not, in my opinion, for the the better. As I've stated here before, I go to Vegas mainly for the “Vegas-ness” of the place. I haven't done a ton of traveling, but from what I've seen Vegas is unlike any other city in the US. It traditionally was built around adult pleasure, a sort or slackening of the rules of normal US cities. You can smoke anywhere. You can drink anywhere. You can gamble anywhere. Normal moral codes are relaxed or done away with altogether. Hedonism, sloth, a sense of adventure and even a tinge of potential danger are encouraged and hinted at. You can find all these elements in other American cities, but not all in one place, and not as the established norm. You can GO to a seedy local strip club, you can GO to the one halfway decent non-chain restaurant in town, you can GO to an Indian Casino 20 miles out of town to gamble, you can hope a decent concert or show are coming to your town or the one across the way. Or y...

So, I DL'ed and played the MGM MyVegas Android and iOS game last week. I was...not impressed. The game itself is actually pretty engaging, it keeps you interested and you can fairly quickly advance to other slot-style games (some of them MGM themed) so you don't feel stagnated on one game. The graphics and especially the sound effects are very Vegas-esque, you feel a bit like you are playing a genuine slot machine, and you do feel genuine excitement as the reels spin. It's in the chips system and rewards that the game falls flat. You get a small kitty to begin with and winning at the start is pretty easy, I got from around 500 chips to over 40,000 on the first day, only to lose it ALL on the next day. I DL'ed the game separately on my Nexus 5 and my iPad Air, and both times the pattern was the same. Build you up, give you the illusion that the game will be easy then cut you down to size rather quickly. Accumulating chips allows you to continue playing and gaini...

So the plan on this trip is simple, and two-pronged. 1) See Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden. 2) Get to Mlife Platinum. NIN have become one of my top 3 bands over the last few years as I've belatedly discovered a lot of their back catalog. They are now in the Cocteau Twins/Radiohead level pantheon of All Time Favorites. I have also never seen them live. They appear, from the hundreds of YouTube vids I've watched, to be an amazing live band. Soundgarden too is among my top 20 or so best bands, especially for the album they'll be pushing, a re-issue of Superunknown. Limo Wreck is an amazing tune and I can't wait to see it live. That dual-headlining show is Saturday night and should be amazing. Then there's the matter of Mlife. Gotta hand it to MGM, they have sucked my ass in with this rewards program. I'm at just about the midway point between Gold, where I am now, and Platinum, where I want to be. I need 200,000 points to get to Platinum, I am at 92,000+....

http://www.vice.com/read/las-vegas-is-the-most-depressing-place-on-earth-to-be-alone?utm_source=vicetwitterus Couldn't disagree with the premise of this article enough, what a tired re-hash of the stereotypes of solo travelers. If you travel alone, you must somehow be broken, or sad, or depressed, or unlovable, or desperate. Just the mere suggestion that someone may actually CHOOSE to travel, or god forbid, LIVE alone is unthinkable to this writer. So condescending and shallow. Just like media and society portray single people over the age of 30 as damaged, or crazy, or surrounded by dozens of cats in a small apartment. Media and advertising naturally reinforce the "nuclear family" trope. Families buy a lot more useless shit than single people. Think about it. In my 8 trips, I've never once felt alone or lonely in Vegas...you're surrounded by, for the most part, friendly people of all ages and from all walks of life who typically are in town for a few days o...