The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

In his latest “Rick’s Rant”, comedic new commenter Rick Mercer makes an important point about Toronto’s Peter Griffin-esque mayor, Rob Ford:

“Is he bad for Toronto’s reputation on the world stage? Not really, he makes us more interesting, and let’s face it, Toronto could use the help.”

“Rob Ford’s popularity has nothing to do with the man himself. He is a circus act, but his politics are very real, and they should not be written off just because he is about to be.”

Rick’s right. Rob Ford’s supporters, collectively called “Ford Nation”, don’t care so much about the crack-smoking, his consorting with shiftless criminals, drinking and driving, or his lapses into bigotry or bad taste. They want lower taxes, privatized garbage collection, the neutering of the unions that paralyzed the city during the strikes of the previous mayor’s era. Simply put, they want to pay less for living in Toronto, and they’ve been told that what’s holding them back and preventing them from being rich are all the freeloaders, windowlickers, and do-nothings who are stealing from them through tax-funded services. The purpose of the mayor, they believe, is to make things cheap. Or, as Mercer put it:

“We will vote for a gerbil if we get a dollar back.”

It’s something that candidates in the next mayoral election — which might be sooner than you think — will have to keep in mind.

Me doing my best Lion King impression over the Grand Canyon.
Click the photo to see it at full size.

I’m one of those guys who likes to celebrate his birthday for an entire month, and this year was no exception. I’ve been bouncing all over the continent, having spent each of the past four Saturdays on a plane. Here are a few shots from those trips…

Monterey and Pebble Beach

During the first week of November, The Girlfriend and I were in the San Francsico Bay and Monterey areas, visiting friends and family. We also managed to take in some of the sights, including the breathtaking 17 Mile Drive…

Click the photo to see it at full size.

…and checking out Pebble Beach:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Grand Canyon

At the start of the second week of November, before our week in Las Vegas, we stayed overnight at a lodge by the Grand Canyon’s south rim. I wasn’t able to convince the girlfriend to get closer to the edge, but I was able to convince her to take pictures of me as I did so (she insisted on taking the car keys from me first):

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

The Grand Canyon is really good for my zen. I’ve got to come back here and just zone out over the view:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Following up from an earlier post showing some slot machine themes I found amusing, here are more!

Any classic pre-copyright tale from the western tradition is fair game…

…as is history, or even historical fiction…

…or historical figures…

…or, if you’re trying to attract the Asian market, some tales from their traditions…

(The “Journey to the West” is the story of the Monkey King’s pilgrimage to India with his three friends, returning with Buddhism, which he brought to China. The anime series Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are very loosely based on it.)

Here’s a particularly nightmarish “attract screen” from the Alien slot machine:

I hear this slot machine dispenses unobtanium:

Role-play + Sex and the City + Slots = GOLD!

And not far from the Sex and the City slots, either physically or thematically, was the Cougar-Licious slot machine:

The Footloose slot machine uses images from  the Kevin Bacon original and thankfully not the the remake:

Childhood memories? Perfect for slots!

Here’s a slot machine you can’t refuse:

I’m not surprised at this one:

My…preciousssss…

Of course:

This one’s aimed squarely at smartphone and tablet gamers:

Once again, this one’s based on the original with Gene Wilder, and not the Johnny Depp remake:

This one’ll move you…

There are lots of oompa loompa song-and-dance numbers in this one:

Speaking of creators who are happy to sell out at the drop of a hat:

This one’s aimed at the people who grew up with Episodes IV, V, and VI, and not those newer, lesser movies:

“Inform Lord Vader that we’ve found the rebel bonus…”

Of course those most sell-outiest feature of the sell-outiest film in the Original Trilogy would get featured:

And finally…

It’s the Rob Ford slot machine!

This one’s got a quote for each major character in the series, so I had to snap ’em all…

For the past week and until last night, this was home:

It’s Mandalay Bay, a hotel at the southernmost end of the Las Vegas Strip, a four-mile-long stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard South lined with hotels, casinos, resorts, shops, and other tourist-focused places. I was there with The Girlfriend — she was attending a conference, and I was availing myself of the free hotel room, and a birthday change of scenery (my birthday was November 5th).

As soon as you walk into Mandalay Bay, you’re hit by the overpowering signature smell that they pump into their HVAC system. The scent, which is intended to “brand” Mandalay Bay as much as any logo, reminds me of having my head rammed into a humidor full of coconuts. A quick search for the perpetrator of this olfactory obnoxiousness yields conflicting results: ScentAir’s site claims culpability, and they say it’s called “Coconut Spice, while other reports including this 2010 article on Las Vegas hotel scent branding (even the guy who created those scents says the hotels are overdoing it) and this summer 2013 report on a lawsuit filed over the nasal assault names AromaSys as the guilty party. No matter who makes the smell, which I like to call the Mandastench (or Mandastank, if I’m feeling more “street” that day), it’s terrible, and it always make me make a beeline for the fresh air vents in the hotel room to let some outside air in and flush it out.

If they dialed it down a little so that it was subtle, like the way perfume should be worn, it might not be so bad. The way they pump it into the air right now, you’d think the hotel was a teenage boy slathering on the AXE.

By day, The Girlfriend attended her conference, while I did some work and research prepping for my new jobs (can’t talk about them now, but I will soon). When the sun went down — shockingly early since Vegas is on the easternmost edge of the Pacific Time Zone, which meant the sky was dark at 5 — we hit the restaurants and caught some Cirque du Soleil shows, which came at a deal because it was Cirque Week, the 20th anniversary of their shows on The Strip. Our package gave us Michael Jackson ONE, O, and Zumanity.

What smells nice, because Mother Nature doesn’t overdo her branding, are the gardens surrounding Mandalay Bay:

Meanwhile, across the street…

…things get considerably less expensive. I was just tagging along, which meant that my meals weren’t provided by the conference or covered by expense accounts, so the nearby cheap places that weren’t affiliated with hotels came in handy:

The hotels on this side of Las Vegas Boulevard don’t have all the glitz of the big resorts, but they do photograph well under the bright Nevada sun and have a charm all their own:

This could be the establishing shot for a Tarantino movie:

Or maybe Breaking Bad. The high-rent cars outside such a low-rent place scream “Rob Ford secret envelope exchange”, don’t they?

My friend Eldon took Rob Ford’s “I’ve got more than enough to eat at home” gaffe and turned it into this call for action for Toronto area food banks. It’s a good joke for a good cause, and hey, maybe the HoHoTO people should run with it!

A little while back, before the finale of the Breaking Bad series, this joke made the rounds on the internet:

Bryan Cranston seems to have run with an idea on those lines in this alternate version of the Breaking Bad finale:

Older readers who watched TV in the 1980s will recognize the reference to the May 1990 finale of the Newhart TV series, when the central character, hotel owner Dick Loudon (played by Bob Newhart) is hit in the head by a golf ball. In the next scene, he wakes up with a start in his previous TV series, The Bob Newhart Show, as psychiatrist Bob Hartley in bed with his wife Emily, where we discover that the entire Newhart series was just a dream:

From the Philippine Star:

In a very touching expression of support, the Empire State Building donned the blue, red and yellow colors of the Philippine flag on Friday night (Saturday morning in Manila). The Empire State Building tweeted the amazing display, which will be repeated on Saturday night (Sunday in Manila).

2nite & tmrw night, our lights shine in the color of the #Philippines flag 2 raise awareness of the #Haiyan tragedy. pic.twitter.com/L9FcKtvx9Y

— Empire State Bldg (@EmpireStateBldg) November 16, 2013

Thanks, guys! You’re amazing.

Want to help? One good organization to give to is the Philippine Red Cross.