Wings Over the Pyre - January 6th, 2004

12:14 am - Attraction

Current Mood: amused

01:26 am - Robots in Disguise

Zamiel in Shoot on Cite

zamiel (Dennis Quaid) has seemingly run out of luck. After citing a blunder in the ballot design, his grip on the situation at hand is faltering, and tryptophan, his nextdoor neighbour (Lisa Kudrow), is behind the biggest coverup of the month. stellabambino (Nathan Lane) devises a game of corporate snakes and ladders. As it turns out, tryptophan is a robot in disguise. The discovery is made when she bites into an apple.

Produced by ianiceboy

Current Mood: mischievous

01:49 am - Glazed Vision

Original Glazed


What Kind of Krispy Kreme Doughnut Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I'm Krispy all over.

Current Mood: hungry

01:00 pm

Well, here I am again, back home in the old Squid lair. I realize that no one was really looking for me; very few people knew I was even out of town. And yet, I was.

I decided to take the Minions, throw them in the car, and head on up to Cherokee, North Carolina. Amusingly enough, sutilisfatalis and I both seem to have spent our young summers lurking in the same part of the world. In fact, in a perverse twist of fate, it's even possible that we were in the same campground at the same time at some point in my vast and disturbing history. The very concept is kind of creepy. Anyway, it was only a three hour drive in my car was already fueled and in good shape.

Now, there is one thing you need to know about Cherokee -- it's the home of the nearest modern casinos to the place I live. I'm not much of a gambler at heart -- my natural inclinations run far too much toward careful in logical progression forward rather than depending upon luck. Given the choice, I don't gamble at all. On anything. No, the Squid is all about being absolutely completely sure before moving forward. So gambling seems to be an aberration in any kind of prediction of my behavior.

Yet, there we were.

Harrah's is a really big place. I mean, really big. Unfortunately, what it looks like on the inside is entirely different than what I expected. I expected card tables, baccarat, people with a slight amount of style. What I got was slack-jawed old Southern women with frighteningly big hair pouring hundreds or thousands of dollars into disturbingly asynchronous digital gambling devices. On Saturday night, Harrah's was packed to the gills. Well, maybe not packed to the gills but certainly far busier than I was comfortable with.

Apparently, however, I seem that have some strange affinity with digital poker. While sutilisfatalis and stellabambino were doing all right, if on a slow spiral of decline, I actually managed to double my starting funds. Don't ask me how. Ultimately, I have no idea. I strongly suspect that I can chalk up my success to a clever strategy: play only $2.50 at a time, played Deuces Are Wild or Jacks Or Better, and play toward three of a kinds. I cashed out my finds every time that I hit $10 and managed to do fairly OK.

Sunday, we decided to wander around Cherokee proper. This was the beginning of the end as far as surreality went. There's nothing quite as strange as wandering around a place, driving yourself around a place, that you haven't actually been to in maybe a decade, and feeling the overlay of your memories that were never quite complete falling over the vision of what is actually there. Things have, of course, changed. Each of those changes felt like a strange left twist of reality. You never know quite how to deal with it. I'm still not sure I do. We wandered through the stores, ogled the tourist trap interests, and generally behave like people who hadn't been there in maybe a decade.

On the back side of town, we discovered that Sunday was the last day that many of the shops were going to be open until sometime in March -- shutting down during the dead time of the tourist season. There was a perverse kind of thrill at realizing the timing, at feeling this strange knife edge of the calendar underneath our feet.

Sometime Sunday afternoon, we decided to drop by the old KOA campground that, at some point, both of us had stayed in. We remembered it as a fairly simple camping space whose back open out onto the river that runs down through Cherokee. We remembered decent campsites, a fairly good pool, and a couple of video games in an upstairs rotunda. When we got there, we discover that things were not exactly as we remembered. While the campsites were still there, KOA had added cabins, of various qualities, a heated indoor pool, several more video games, and perhaps most disturbing of all, in an entire upstairs Internet Cafe with live network drops. All this for exactly as much as we were paying for our hotel room back in town which had far less accommodation.

We'll be staying at the KOA the next time we go back up.

In the end analysis, I think my feelings as I verbalized them on the first night were the most accurate -- this trip was very much like a convention without the convention. That is to say, there was no pressure to be anywhere at any given time, there was none of the trauma associated with having to deal with huge numbers of people trying to go the same direction, no distractions from your original focus save those that you wish to entertain, and actual sleep whenever you felt like it. It was a good time.

The trip home was only mildly eventful. I managed to get pulled over by the police for speeding -- of course, it was on a section of highway that went from speed limit 60 to speed limit 45 with a partially concealed sign. The Minions got to hear a voice that they don't often get to hear from the Squid -- the deferential one. Luckily, my particular lifestyle has trained me how to deal with the hands of the Executive Branch without much difficulty. The key is to smile, acknowledge your error, do not argue, and sound contrite. It doesn't hurt to have a full set of tentacles and big bulging red eyes either. The cop let us off with only a warning, and not even a particularly strong warning either. "Slow down. " I had no problem with that.

Once we returned to the Lair, we did some post-long-drive cleanup, then I needed to see to some personal grooming: I needed a pedicure in the worst way.

Yes, go ahead, mock my devotion to the arts of the pedicurist, but if having women kneel submissively before you, carefully caring for your toes, is good enough for Kings and Emperors, it's at least good enough for me. Besides, my nails were all ragged and nasty. I can't stand being in a state like that for very long.

Once finished there, it was off to the Asian food store, Harry's Farmers Market, which sutilisfatalis had never been to before (and thus demanded our attention and devotion), and head off to Marietta to see a friend of my Minions, who turned out to be reasonably cool and interesting.

Total grade for weekend: A +.

Hopefully, we'll have the photos put up somewhere, soon.

Current Mood: pleased