Back to Square One

You may remember from our Camping Basics class at REI (shameless self-hyperlink) back in January 2012 that Step 1 is NAVIGATION: know how to stay oriented.

For you Vegasphiles, I challenge you to identify the famous Las Vegas landmarks in the following photos from Top of the World:

1. 

2. 

3. 

4. 

I am proud that Amanda and I were able to identify directions and landmarks, and it only took us a combined total of 14 years of living here to be able to do so.

The views were fantastic, and the marketing was clever. The restaurant rotates, but the tower doesn't. So a cart of faux desserts sits on the tower and twice in an hour-long lunch, you rotate past the dessert cart. Here was the view of my dessert:

And for the entertainment of everyone involved...

No skyjumpers flew by during lunch. But we did get to wave to some riders on the Insanity.

For your further photographic love of Vegas, see Krista's interpretation of the Boneyard (another self-hyperlink) over on the Wannabe.

The Ongoing Conversation

Here we are, already six days past our human deadline, and I'm having trouble letting go of zombies and Mayans, although the one is just a currently-more-entertaining-but-arguably-less-interesting-than-vampires social commentary and the other is a unit I've already taught and won't look at again until November 2013, if then.

Good grief, if such a beast there be. I kind of miss the vampires. They're queerer than the zombies.

As I have spent the day scouring the local arts associations and Hallmark stores and trolling the internets for blog fodder, I have also downloaded my favorite ten-year-old's (formerly?) favorite book, I am Number Four, so I can give it a read really quick before New Year's.

Flashback to Halloween weekend, 2012 (shameless self-hyperlink warning), when I was composing my post entitled "Revisiting." Over the course of a few days, the 10-year-old watched the movie version of the book that he'd already read, on a loop, about 17 times. I am happy to say that sometime during that weekend, I too somehow got to see the film in its entirety. I never watched it start-to-finish, but I did see all parts of it in a nonlinear fashion.

My Kindle tells me I'm 15% done. As I read, I can find many things within the story that are relatable to me because they are, or were, high school archetypes: the letterman-jacket clothed bully, the nerdy kid, the pretty girl...and I wonder what it is that the ten-year-old finds relatable about I am Number Four. What do the intervening 25 years of existence add to, or take away from, the experience of the story? I would love to discuss this with him, but I suspect that he will have moved on to a new favorite story when I see him here in a few days.

Will I be able, at a vantage that perches happily just five years away from my retirement to Springdale, UT or Barcelona or Panajachel or really ANYWHERE except San Bernadino...be able to convince the now-10-then-35-year-old to reread this piece and tell me what he gets from it? I'll probably be too busy skiing or surfing or kayaking (after an offering to San Simon) that I will totally forget to bring it up.

Let us be happy that such a far-out future does indeed exist.

As you can see, the Memoir of Narrow Escape is going to be a useless stream-of-consciousness raving until such time as I can sit down over tapas with Krista, whose Wannabe, I am happy to announce, is far more successful than Single...Apocalypse was, and figure out a plan, a path, a direction. I do love wordle, by the way, good job Krista! I know the head is from a different type of word art software. Perhaps my next post, if indeed the signals will let me compose one from Weidman, will be a Wordle of Resolutions.

Until then, may you look quizzically at the ten year olds in your own life and wonder what the heck is swimming around inside those heads of theirs.

So close you can almost taste it...

...or so it would seem, what with my closest teaching neighbor constantly blathering about the dead bird that he soon intends to eat!

I'm just gonna say it once, because it's true, and then I'll drop it for the duration of the world's existence:

I am supposed to be in Peru right now, but I am not.

Lucky for us, Peru is still populated with tourists, and you can read about my friend's adventures there here, where she compare/contrasts independent and group travel. I have a preferred side of that fence, and I am hoping that by the end of her trip, she will be converted completely to my side. Let's keep tabs on her movements in Latin America.

Two more notes before we get down to business, both dealing with your Greater Chicagoland media. Please join me in impatient anticipation of Shiloh's new album by perusing this lite blurb in the Chicago Reader dealing with the record release which we will never get to experience due to pandemic/cataclysm/megaquake/polar reversal. Please ignore the bit about the puppets, and go to the Empty Bottle because I myself cannot, seeing as I have to teach the very next day in North Las Vegas.

And then, from our friends at the NWI Times via my dad:

Sometime over Fall Break, while riding through the corn fields having a fabulous time, I think I heard this song, which may be content-blocked for copyright reasons when you click on it, on a radio station that my clever friends tell their 10-year-old is Radio Disney.

Immediately, I knew that I would watch Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. And take notes. Here's the plot synopsis in case you forgot what an awesome year 1985 actually was.

(A saxophone will come in handy after nuclear annihilation.)

Max (12-year-old Mel Gibson with luxurious hair) wanders into Bartertown to retrieve his stolen car and makes a bad deal with Queen Tina Turner. At the last moment, he refuses to kill his opponent in the Thunderdome and is sentenced to gulag (ohhh, the 80s!). Halfway there, his horse collapses and is swallowed in a sandstorm, at which point he is rescued by his helper monkey.

He eventually collapses but is once again rescued, this time by a mysterious stranger who turns out to represent some happy people who live in the Narrows at Zion (though the movie was actually filmed in Australia). This canyon is filled with horribly noisy children and others who all believe that Max is their messiah. He handily destroys their worldview.

He punches a woman in the face and for some reason isn't immediately killed.

Of course she runs away anyway and a cohort of happies ends up back in Bartertown. They kidnap Bartertown's brain-person and the inevitable showdown in the middle of the desert ensues.

The good guys win, but Max ends up wandering around in the desert, and whose baby is that?

There you have it. You may now skip watching it, and you may thank me now or later. However, I recommend that you review it because Tina Turner will always be hott. Of course, I was looking forward to the appearance of Grace Jones at the end of the movie, but apparently I was confused, as she never showed up. I don't think I've ever seen Conan the Destroyer, nor do I think I ever want to, so I don't know what kind of short-circuit happened in my brain on that one. :/

This has been a movie review.

After I review the Last Thanksgiving Ever coming up before week's end, it will be time to turn my attention once again to young adult fiction.

This weekend is historically the busiest travel weekend in America. Be safe out there: make sure your apocalypse doesn't happen sooner than it has to.

Blah de Blog

1. The Thanksgiving trip to Peru with Krista (who has been busy finishing all sorts of projects you should read about) is canceled for me. I feel bad for flaking out on her, especially when it involves a place that would be so cool to see in advance of the apocalypse. I now have a more vested interest in hoping the Maya are wrong, so that I can live to get another stamp in my shiny new passport with the uncracked spine.

2. There was a big gnarly hurricane on the east coast a few days ago. I find it difficult to blog about the apocalypse with an actual one in progress for some people, while I am personally insulated from it in the mostly-loving embrace of the Mojave Desert, where I lectured today about our ancestral natives and how they used cliffs for their homes. I trust that the photos you'll see here on the Orlando Sentinel site are real, because I found the story from Tom Skilling's weather page.

3. I must keep this post short, as I have a date with the end of Going Bovine (read 2) right now.

She must have known that it was Tuesday, because Miss Gokey sent me the following quote in a text message this morning:

"The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning."

It is that thought with which I leave you on this fine evening, loyal readers.