First off, who has the better beard? Winner: Santa.

And who looks like they are having more fun? Yup.

Go ahead, chose one;  The jolly guy bringing gifts, or the skinny guy with anger management issues kicking over the lender’s tables  in front of the bank?

Santa is pretty simple, really.  Naughty or nice.   And he doesn’t go on and on about which is which because most of us already know the difference.

None of this ” no sleeping with the donkey of thy neighbor or you will be stoned to death” stuff.

Nice equals gift.  Naughty  equals no gift.

And is no gift really so bad?  Because even if Santa skips your house, there are always sales the next day.

Plus he lives at the North Pole.  So there is no fighting over his birthplace like in Jerusalem because no one wants to actually live at the North Pole.

And he has a wife.  Not that there is anything wrong with not having one, or anything. But you have to wonder a little about the other guy.

Plus, let’s compare their 12 man possess.

One posse has 11  drinking buddies and one snitch

The other posse has twelve singing reindeer! Way more fun. And even though one of them is  all lit up, he can still drive all night long!

And finally, I know some of you don’t believe in one or both of our contestants.

Sure, there is no actual proof for either one.

But one guy died then skipped town never to be seen again. The other at least has a Norad site every year to track his whereabouts in real time.

All I know is I put out the cookies and milk before i go to bed on christmas eve and in the morning they are gone.

Pretty convincing i’d say.

The same day, a 35 minute drive later i found this:

I know I should get out more, but what are you gonna do?

Anyhow, I usually go to a trade show in Las Vegas once a year, and it’s astounding how run down that town has become in the last couple of years.

OK, I stayed at a cheap place on the strip this time, but it was the same one I stayed at a couple of years ago.

Everything reeked of delayed maintenance and cost cutting. Dirty carpets and peeling paint.

There was no one manning the coffee shop so I had to go and find her  myself.

At the Karaoke bar, there were no waitresses or even a bartender behind the bar and the people had to walk up the stairs and then another 100 yards to find a drink. Exact same thing at the resort across the street.

I was chased down the hall by a desperate  russian lady who wanted me to buy her beauty products.

As if.

But the worst was the food.

I guess i’m a food snob to most americans. I eat the way most people ate here 50 years ago, but that  has become some kind of elitist thing. You know, mostly organic and homemade  stuff and like that.

But even taking that into consideration, the food I had this trip was a new category of bad. It just made me think of death.

In fact the whole trip made me contemplate mortality, which is the exact thing you go to Vegas to deny.

The return plane was 3 hours late, with no explanation from the airline. The airport was full of people from previously cancelled flights standing in endless lines trying to get on any flight back home.

One couple missed their flight because they got severe food poisoning.

When I finally got on my plane home, the stew handed me a cold coffee without making eye contact, asking me if I wanted cream, or even mumbling hi.

When we arrived, they couldn’t find anyone to drag the accordion thingy out to the plane, so we had to wait another half hour.

Three years into this recession, the wheels  are really starting to come off.

I fully expect to return to vegas  one of these times and find nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds.

UPDATE: I just couldn’t believe how shabby vegas is starting to look, so I did some reading when I got back.

The unemployment rate is over 14% and two-thirds of the houses are underwater.

Cities that have a more educated population are doing better in this recession, I read.

Las vegas, is almost dead last in per student spending.

Almost all the jobs  before the recession were either construction or working in the casinos. And for women, there were more degrading options as well.

Not that i’m a prude, but there is something crass about the way sex is comoddified there.

As far as the food, I remember about 7 years ago, they discovered the celebrity chef. Everyone was stumbling over one another to present the hippest food. These chefs had private planes bring in the best ingredients from all over.

And the prices were partially subsidized by the casinos.

It’s gotten steadily worse to the point where the staff at the casinos  no longer eat the free lunch and just bring a lunch from home, foregoing one of the few traditional perks that made the job tolerable.

The chamber of commerce floated this bloated pretentious scheme called “city center” which was planned before “the great recession”. It’s a huge mega block of A-list architects projects all jumbled together with useless “luxury” stuff financed mostly by middle east oil money.

They also made the fatal flaw of not connecting it to the casinos with a walkway. It’s really a ghost town.

In fact the number of street people seem to be increasing as the number of tourists falls.

It doesn’t help that there is a new  big casino in Macao. Also the number of Indian casinos grows and lots of states are allowing sports betting. Plus there is online betting.

Of course the whole idea of las vegas is preposterous starting with the fact that there is no water there and it has to be stolen from somewhere else.

While it used to have that disorienting quality where it was so  busy all the time that you didnt know what day it was, now the only signs of lifes are on weekends when kids drive in from LA to party. Grim.

Most people assumed his thing was an act,. And he did have a canny post Picasso sense of working the media and managing his image that he may have learned when he was a childhood art celbrity with his own TV show in LA.

Image aside, I think on some level he really was the abstract person he seemed to be.

In fact,  I wonder if he didn’t have ausbergers or something similar.

The dust blows forward and the dust blows back.

And not just me, apparently.

At the post series rally, an estimated one million folks turned out for the parade and ceremony.

The fans really connected with this group of oddballs. The team featured a hitter who wore a women’s thong underwear

Underneath his uniform for luck and a relief pitcher with a mohawk and shoe polish dyed ‘rally beard”.

Several of the other players grew beards, also.

The topper was one of the players  calling himself ‘ the machine” wearing a bondage leather mask and underwear and parading in the background during tv interviews.

Can’t see that flying in Texas.

In fact the difference between the two world cities cities was very much in evidence.  One team and it’s fans were fun loving and the other repressed.

In the endless  TV shots of the Rangers owner, Nolan Ryan. He looked like he swallowed a gopher.

I’m sure it ground his gears to watch the long haired, pot smoking,  F bomb dropping, Hapa kid with the slight frame and unorthodox delivery shut down his sluggers.

Kind of fitting his name is The Freak.

The inspiration for the ” fear the beard” slogan, Brian Wilson, made an appearance on Leno along with The Machine.

He apparently was so popular, that there is a huge write in campaign to have him host Saturday Night Live.

The whole team should be enjoying their 15 minutes as ” Americas Guest” .

Generally speaking, i have found the closer you get to pro athletes, the less likable they are.

After all, they are savants that have been rewarded their whole life for doing one thing well.

it’s  unrealistic to expect them to have any other interests or to be able to speak well.

That’s why i’m always taken aback when someone like Wilson opens his mouth and actually says something smart and funny.

Also a  big nod here to the series MVP Edgar Rentaria, for his work as a baseball ambassador in Colombia, spending

his own money and lots of time helping the kids.

I dont get all my self esteem from watching millionaire players play for billionaire owners, but it was nice to see all

the collective love expressed at the rally.

The usual context for big  public gatherings around here is something negative, like protests.

For one day, even if it didn’t really mean anything, people were happy.

#mce_temp_url#

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They can retire at 50 with 90% percent of their final pay.

They continue  to get free health care for life for them and their families.

When they die, even if  from old age, their widow and kids still get the pension.

All the firefighters I’ve met have a lucrative side career.

I’ve known many who are Plumbers, Lawyers, you name it.

But don’t they run into burning buildings?

OK, a ten year average shows 109 firefighters dying in the US every year.

Most of the fatalities are from volunteer firefighters.

More than half of the deaths are from heart attacks.

Most of the heart attacks are from firefighters that have previously had a heart attack or heart surgery.

And most are over 51.

So, they actually have an incredibly small chance of dying in a fire.

Compare that death/pay / benefits equation to serving in the armed forces.

So why are we always being asked to allocate more money for firefighters?

Because politicians know that firefighters have a strong emotional pull on folks.

What kind of person would say something bad about a firefighter, for Christ’s sake?

What, are you nuts?

Need a boost as the election nears, just ask for more firefighters. ( same goes for police)  Got to get that endorsement from the unions.

In the meantime, we are being hassled all the time for nuisance tickets, taxes, and fees because the city is broke and can’t afford to pay for  things like schools.

Same thing goes for police.

The last few months, i’ve seen ever increasing numbers of people being pulled over by police.

I drive all over my larger geo region, so i see state highway patrol and local police everywhere.

On a typical day, I see 10 pull overs.

Why?  Because the governments are using us as ATM’s.

So if police have all this time to just pull people over all day, and the crime rate continues to go down year after year, do we really need so many police?

I feel like I’m living in Mexico giving out bribe money all the time.

UPDATE: confirmation  here: #mce_temp_url#