Las Vegas Sayings Quotes

Very slowly using two fingers, Annabeth drew her dagger. Instead of dropping it, she tossed it as far as she could into the water. Octavian made a squeaking sound. "What was that for? I didn't say toss it! That could've been evidence. Or spoils of war!" Annabeth tried for a dumb-blonde smile, like: Oh, silly me. Nobody who knew her would have been fooled. But Octavian seemed to buy it. He huffed in exasperation. "You other two..." He pointed his blade a Hazel and Piper. "Put your weapons on the dock. No funny bus--" All around the Romans, Charleston Harbor erupted like a Las Vegas fountain putting on a show. When the wall of seawater subsided, the three Romans were in the bay, spluttering and frantically trying to stay afloat in their armor. Percy stood on the dock, holding Annabeth's dagger. "You dropped this," he said, totally poker-faced.

Jesus! Did I SAY that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious...

Very slowly, using only two fingers, Annabeth drew her dagger. Instead of dropping it, she tossed it as far as she could into the water. Octavian made a squeaking sound. “What was that for? I didn’t say toss it! That could’ve been evidence. Or spoils of war!” Annabeth tried for a dumb-blonde smile, like: Oh, silly me. Nobody who knew her would have been fooled. But Octavian seemed to buy it. He huffed in exasperation. “You other two…” He pointed his blade at Hazel and Piper. “Put your weapons on the dock. No funny bus—” All around the Romans, Charleston Harbor erupted like a Las Vegas fountain putting on a show. When the wall of seawater subsided, the three Romans were in the bay, spluttering and frantically trying to stay afloat in their armor. Percy stood on the dock, holding Annabeth’s dagger. “You dropped this,” he said, totally poker-faced. Annabeth threw her arms around him. “I love you!” “Guys,” Hazel interrupted. She had a little smile on her face. “We need to hurry.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

The people who say New York never sleeps must have never visited Las Vegas.

It’s nice to hear your voice…?” The statement came out sounding like a question, as though I were playing jeopardy and I’d chosen my category- ‘I’ll take ‘Charming Chit Chat’ for $200, Alex’ and behind the $200 read: ‘This is what you say to the hot guy- you abandoned- when he returns after you inexplicably leave him and his private jet in Las Vegas after having amazing and multiple occurrences of the hot sex.

Off To The Races" My old man is a bad man but I can't deny the way he holds my hand And he grabs me, he has me by my heart He doesn't mind I have a Las Vegas past He doesn't mind I have an LA crass way about me He loves me with every beat of his cocaine heart Swimming pool glimmering darling White bikini off with my red nail polish Watch me in the swimming pool bright blue ripples you Sitting sipping on your black Cristal Oh yeah Light of my life, fire of my loins Be a good baby, do what I want Light of my life, fire of my loins Give me them gold coins, gimme them coins And I'm off to the races, cases of Bacardi chasers Chasing me all over town Cause he knows I'm wasted, facing Time again at Riker's Island and I won't get out Because I'm crazy, baby I need you to come here and save me I'm your little scarlet, starlet singing in the garden Kiss me on my open mouth Ready for you My old man is a tough man but He's got a soul as sweet as blood red jam And he shows me, he knows me Every inch of my tar black soul He doesn't mind I have a flat broke down life In fact he says he thinks it's why he might like about me Admires me, the way I roll like a Rolling Stone Likes to watch me in the glass room bathroom, Chateau Marmont Slippin' on my red dress, puttin' on my makeup Glass film, perfume, cognac, lilac Fumes, says it feels like heaven to him Light of his life, fire of his loins Keep me forever, tell me you own me Light of your life, fire of your loins Tell me you own me, gimme them coins And I'm off to the races, cases of Bacardi chasers Chasing me all over town Cause he knows I'm wasted, facing Time again at Riker's Island and I won't get out Because I'm crazy, baby I need you to come here and save me I'm your little scarlet, starlet singing in the garden Kiss me on my open mouth Now I'm off to the races, laces Leather on my waist is tight and I am fallin' down I can see your face is shameless, Cipriani's basement Love you but I'm going down God I'm so crazy, baby, I'm sorry that I'm misbehaving I'm your little harlot, starlet, Queen of Coney Island Raising hell all over town Sorry 'bout it My old man is a thief and I'm gonna stay and pray with him 'til the end But I trust in the decision of the Lord to watch over us Take him when he may, if he may I'm not afraid to say that I'd die without him Who else is gonna put up with me this way? I need you, I breathe you, I never leave you They would rue the day I was alone without you You're lying with your gold chain on, cigar hanging from your lips I said "Hon' you never looked so beautiful as you do now, my man." And we're off to the races, places Ready, set the gate is down and now we're goin' in To Las Vegas chaos, Casino Oasis, honey it is time to spin Boy you're so crazy, baby, I love you forever not maybe You are my one true love, you are my one true love You are my one true love

The driver asked me where I wanted to go; I wanted to say Las Vegas but I didn’t think that would go over very well

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say...?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art.

Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.” Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: “Woodstock Über Alles!” We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

It's just, there's something compelling about very beautiful people. Especially strong-jawed men with stubble and intense eyes. You fall under their spell and believe anything they say.

I am still vaguely haunted by our hitchhiker’s remark about how he’d “never rode in a convertible before.” Here’s this poor geek living in a world of convertibles zipping past him on the highways all the time, and he’s never even ridden in one. It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West … and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. But this manic notion passed quickly. There was no point in getting this harmless kid locked up—and, besides, I had plans for this car. I was looking forward to flashing around Las Vegas in the bugger. Maybe do a bit of serious drag-racing on the Strip: Pull up to that big stoplight in front of the Flamingo and start screaming at the traffic: “Alright, you chickenshit wimps! You pansies! When this goddamn light flips green, I’m gonna stomp down on this thing and blow every one of you gutless punks off the road!” Right. Challenge the bastards on their own turf. Come screeching up to the crosswalk, bucking and skidding with a bottle of rum in one hand and jamming the horn to drown out the music … glazed eyes insanely dilated behind tiny black, gold-rimmed greaser shades, screaming gibberish … a genuinely dangerous drunk, reeking of ether and terminal psychosis. Revving the engine up to a terrible high-pitched chattering whine, waiting for the light to change … How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

After you told me the part about Las Vegas, you know how I said it was the stupidest story I had ever heard?” “You didn’t say that.” “Well, I was thinkin’ it. But I’ve decided I owe that Las Vegas story an apology because this last thing made that one look like The Grapes of Wrath.

Very slowly using two fingers, Annabeth drew her dagger. Instead of dropping it, she tossed it as far as she could into the water. Octavian made a squeaking sound. "What was that for? I didn't say toss it! That could've been evidence. Or spoils of war!" Annabeth tried for a dumb-blonde smile, like: Oh, silly me. Nobody who knew her would have been fooled. But Octavian seemed to buy it. He huffed in exasperation. "You other two..." He pointed his blade a Hazel and Piper. "Put your weapons on the dock. No funny bus--" All around the Romans, Charleston Harbor erupted like a Las Vegas fountain putting on a show. When the wall of seawater subsided, the three Romans were in the bay, spluttering and frantically trying to stay afloat in their armor. Percy stood on the dock, holding Annabeth's dagger. "You dropped this," he said, totally poker-faced. -Heroes of Olympus

It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West … and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. But this manic notion passed quickly.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

About five miles back I had a brush with the CHP. Not stopped or pulled over: nothing routine. I always drive properly. A bit fast, perhaps, but always with consummate skill and a natural feel for the road that even cops recognize. No cop was ever born who isn't a sucker for a finely-executed hi-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those cloverleaf freeway interchanges. Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him ... and then he will start apologizing, begging for mercy. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. The thing to do – when you're running along about 100 or so and you suddenly find a red-flashing CHP-tracker on your tail – what you want to do then is accelerate. Never pull over with the first siren-howl. Mash it down and make the bastard chase you at speeds up to 120 all the way to the next exit. He will follow. But he won't know what to make of your blinker-signal that says you're about to turn right. This is to let him know you're looking for a proper place to pull off and talk ... keep signaling and hope for an off-ramp, one of those uphill side-loops with a sign saying "Max Speed 25" ... and the trick, at this point, is to suddenly leave the freeway and take him into the chute at no less than 100 miles an hour. He will lock his brakes about the same time you lock yours, but it will take him a moment to realize that he's about to make a 180-degree turn at this speed ... but you will be ready for it, braced for the Gs and the fast heel-toe work, and with any luck at all you will have come to a complete stop off the road at the top of the turn and be standing beside your automobile by the time he catches up. He will not be reasonable at first ... but no matter. Let him calm down. He will want the first word. Let him have it. His brain will be in a turmoil: he may begin jabbering, or even pull his gun. Let him unwind; keep smiling. The idea is to show him that you were always in total control of yourself and your vehicle – while he lost control of everything.

I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

My mother left us when I was twelve. She found a man who was not as parsimonious as my father and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada which is two thousand five hundred miles away. She doesn't visit. She doesn’t call. She sends me a card on my birthday with fifty dollars in it, which my father nags me about until I finally go to the bank and deposit it. And so, for all six years she’s been gone, I have $337 to show for having a mother. Dad says that thirty-seven bucks is good interest. He doesn't see the irony in that. He doesn't see the word interest as anything not connected to money because he’s an accountant and to him, everything is a number. I think $37 and no other and no visits or phone calls is shitty interest.

The wine would be copious, the conversation scintillating, and the amenities deluxe. How could he say no? The answer, as always: money, money, money. Lewis relayed the cost, all inclusive, and, though the amount was staggering (Less checked twice to be sure it was not in Moroccan dirhams), he was, as always, already too much in love. Bedouin music was already playing in his ears; camels were already grunting in the darkness; he was already standing up from embroidered pillows and walking out into the desert night, champagne in hand, to let the floury Sahara warm his toes as, above him, the Milky Way glowed with his birthday candles. For it was somewhere in the Sahara that Arthur Less would turn fifty. He swore he would not be alone. Memories of his fortieth, wandering the broad avenues of Las Vegas, still came to him in worser moments. He would not be alone.

THE FIRST THING you need to do to get a man to elope with you is to challenge him to go to Las Vegas. You do this by being out at an L.A. club and having a few drinks together. You ignore the impulse to roll your eyes at how eager he is to have his picture taken with you. You recognize that everyone is playing everyone else. It’s only fair that he’s playing you at the same time as you’re playing him. You reconcile these facts by realizing that what you both want from each other is complementary. You want a scandal. He wants the world to know he screwed you. The two things are one and the same. You consider laying it out for him, explaining what you want, explaining what you’re willing to give him. But you’ve been famous long enough to know that you never tell anyone anything more than you have to. So instead of saying I’d like us to make tomorrow’s papers, you say, “Mick, have you ever been to Vegas?

As members of the Church, there are things you cannot do. For one, you cannot take a Las Vegas-style vacation. I do not know whether you all knew that. You cannot gamble, bet on the horses, or play with playing cards. You cannot be "loose," immoral, or violent. . . . Other such questions are solved by straight thinking. My father often met the test that farmers generally undergo of "whether I should haul my hay on Sunday because it's about to rain." That was quite a test once upon a time. My father answered it by saying, "Let it rain. I don't care if it rains on the hay; I don't have to eat hay.

His own dragon roared in turmoil in his head: protect her, crush her. Her kind is evil. Protect your mate. Slippery is the water dragon. His dragon roared the ancient saying, and the tips of his wings pushed again at his back. You are starting to piss me off, he said to her.

my professor got to his punch lines. In the end, Job heaves a big sigh and says, “Okay, you win. You are bigger than I am. I give up!” And then the Devil catches Job’s eye and winks at him. And Job winks back. They both know the answer now: Humor the Big Bully. UNDERSTANDING THE DIVINE SILENCE

But it isn’t the fun of DIY invention, urban exploration, physical danger, and civil disorder that the Z-Boys enjoyed in 1976. It is fun within serious limits, and for all of its thrills it is (by contrast) scripted. And rather obedient. The fact that there are public skateparks and high-performance skateboards signals progress: America has embraced this sport, as it did bicycles in the nineteenth century. Towns want to make skating safe and acceptable. The economy has more opportunity to grow. America is better off for all of this. Yet such government and commercial intervention in a sport that was born of radical liberty means that the fun itself has changed; it has become mediated. For the skaters who take pride in their flashy store-bought equipment have already missed the Z-Boys’ joke: Skating is a guerrilla activity. It’s the fun of beating, not supporting, the system. P. T. Barnum said it himself: all of business is humbug. How else could business turn a profit, if it didn’t trick you with advertising? If it didn’t hook you with its product? This particular brand of humbug was perfected in the late 1960s, when merchandise was developed and marketed and sold to make Americans feel like rebels. Now, as then, customers always pay for this privilege, and purveyors keep it safe (and generally clean) to curb their liability. They can’t afford customers taking real risks. Plus it’s bad for business to encourage real rebellion. And yet, marketers know Americans love fun—they have known this for centuries. And they know that Americans, especially kids, crave autonomy and participation, so they simulate the DIY experience at franchises like the Build-A-Bear “workshops,” where kids construct teddy bears from limited options, or “DIY” restaurants, where customers pay to grill their own steaks, fry their own pancakes, make their own Bloody Marys. These pay-to-play stores and restaurants are, in a sense, more active, more “fun,” than their traditional competition: that’s their big selling point. But in both cases (as Barnum knew) the joke is still on you: the personalized bear is a standardized mishmash, the personalized food is often inedible. As Las Vegas knows, the house always wins. In the history of radical American fun, pleasure comes from resistance, risk, and participation—the same virtues celebrated in the “Port Huron Statement” and the Digger Papers, in the flapper’s slang and the Pinkster Ode. In the history of commercial amusement, most pleasures for sale are by necessity passive. They curtail creativity and they limit participation (as they do, say, in a laser-tag arena) to a narrow range of calculated surprises, often amplified by dazzling technology. To this extent, TV and computer screens, from the tiny to the colossal, have become the scourge of American fun. The ubiquity of TV screens in public spaces (even in taxicabs and elevators) shows that such viewing isn’t amusement at all but rather an aggressive, ubiquitous distraction. Although a punky insurgency of heedless satire has stung the airwaves in recent decades—from equal-opportunity offenders like The Simpsons and South Park to Comedy Central’s rabble-rousing pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert—the prevailing “fun” of commercial amusement puts minimal demands on citizens, besides their time and money. TV’s inherent ease seems to be its appeal, but it also sends a sobering, Jumbotron-sized message about the health of the public sphere.

I want to know who I can trust." "Las Vegas says we're shore in for it now." "Roy, what do you think?

There happens to be a coffee bar in the lobby of the hotel. One afternoon while on a business trip in Las Vegas, I went to buy myself a cup of coffee. The barista working that day was a young man named Noah. Noah was funny and engaging. It was because of Noah that I enjoyed buying that cup of coffee more than I generally enjoy buying a cup of coffee. After standing and chatting for a while, I finally asked him, “Do you like your job?” Without skipping a beat Noah immediately replied, “I love my job!” Now, for someone in my line of business, that’s a significant response. He didn’t say, “I like my job,” he said, “I love my job.” That’s a big difference. “Like” is rational. We like the people we work with. We like the challenge. We like the work. But “love,” love is emotional. Love is something harder to quantify. It’s like asking someone “Do you love your spouse,” and they respond, “I like my spouse a lot.” It’s a very different answer. You get my point, love is a higher standard. So when Noah said, “I love my job,” I perked up. From that one response, I knew Noah felt an emotional connection to the Four Seasons that was bigger than the money he made and the job he performs. Immediately, I asked Noah a follow-up question. “Tell me specifically what the Four Seasons is doing that you would say to me that you love your job.” Again without skipping a beat, Noah replied, “Throughout the day, managers will walk past me and ask me how I’m doing, ask me if there is anything I need, anything they can do to help. Not just my manager … any manager. I also work for [another hotel],” he continued. He went on to explain that at his other job the managers walk past and try to catch people doing things wrong. At the other hotel, Noah lamented, “I keep my head below the radar. I just want to get through the day and get my paycheck. Only at the Four Seasons,” Noah said, “do I feel I can be myself.” Noah gives his best when he’s at the Four Seasons. Which is what every leader wants from their people. So it makes sense why so many leaders, even some of the best-intentioned ones, often ask, “How do I get the most out of my people?” This is a flawed question, however. It’s not a question about how to help our people grow stronger, it’s about extracting more output from them. People are not like wet towels to be wrung out. They are not objects from which we can squeeze every last drop of performance. The answers to such a question might yield more output for a time, but it often comes at a cost of our people and to the culture in the longer term. Such an approach will never generate the feelings of love and commitment that Noah has for the Four Seasons. A better question to ask is, “How do I create an environment in which my people can work to their natural best?

Elvis starts to sing “Viva Las Vegas” as Sam and I walk side by side down the aisle. I cover my mouth and laugh. “I want you to repeat after me, Sam,” Elvis says. He lifts one corner of his lip in that classic snarl. “I, Sam, promise you, Peck, never to step on your blue suede shoes. I promise never to leave you at Heartbreak Hotel. I promise to be your hunka-hunka burning love, forever and ever, amen.” “Wait,” Sam says. “That’s Randy Travis. Not Elvis.” “Close enough,” Elvis says. Sam rolls his hips like Elvis did when he repeats the words. I can’t stop laughing. I laugh so hard that I have to wipe tears from my eyes. But I don’t feel bad, because Emily is doing the same thing. And the rest of the brothers and their wives are laughing it up too. “Now you, Peck,” Elvis says. He swivels his hips and someone does a rim shot on a set of drums. “I, Peck, solemnly swear to love you tender for the rest of my life, and never leave you with a suspicious mind.” I repeat the words. I barely stutter, and it warms my heart when I realize that. Suddenly, Elvis gets serious. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…” Sam’s eyes meet mine, and he takes my hands. I pass my flowers to one of my sisters and look up at him. We recite the official vows, and I have to blink hard to get through them, particularly when I look at the TV screen and see Marta crying into her handkerchief. “Who gives this woman to be married?” Elvis asks. Emilio’s voice rings out. “Her mother and I.” This time, a hot tear tracks down my cheek and Sam very gently wipes it away. “You okay?” he whispers. “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” Elvis declares. “Now let’s have a little less conversation and a really big kiss.” He swivels his hips again and I laugh through my tears. Sam

Elvis starts to sing “Viva Las Vegas” as Sam and I walk side by side down the aisle. I cover my mouth and laugh. “I want you to repeat after me, Sam,” Elvis says. He lifts one corner of his lip in that classic snarl. “I, Sam, promise you, Peck, never to step on your blue suede shoes. I promise never to leave you at Heartbreak Hotel. I promise to be your hunka-hunka burning love, forever and ever, amen.” “Wait,” Sam says. “That’s Randy Travis. Not Elvis.” “Close enough,” Elvis says. Sam rolls his hips like Elvis did when he repeats the words. I can’t stop laughing. I laugh so hard that I have to wipe tears from my eyes. But I don’t feel bad, because Emily is doing the same thing. And the rest of the brothers and their wives are laughing it up too. “Now you, Peck,” Elvis says. He swivels his hips and someone does a rim shot on a set of drums. “I, Peck, solemnly swear to love you tender for the rest of my life, and never leave you with a suspicious mind.” I

Personally?” “I’m assuming that Mr. Knox told you to be candid.” “I didn’t actually speak to Mr. Knox. George Hall called me – he’s my boss. Mr. Knox called him. George didn’t say anything about personal. I thought this was more of a professional reference kind of thing.” “So do I need to call my friend in China, so he can call Mr. Knox, so Mr. Knox can call Mr. Hall, and Mr. Hall can call you back to tell you to give me what I want?

Where you may say, “I finally got my oil changed,” Turbo would say, “The day started with a dark cloud hovering over my rumbling vehicle. The check engine light flickered multiple times, but it never stayed on full. I knew something was amiss so I drove to town, only to get caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Time felt like it stopped. People were honking their horns and two men had stepped out of their cars to settle a dispute regarding the right to merge at the last second. The small guy won. The cops showed up and I got to the shop thirty minutes later. They checked every aspect of my car until finally determining that I needed an oil change.” I

They also adopted a notion we rejected, called VaR or “value at risk,” where they estimated the damage to their portfolio for, say, the worst events among the most likely 95 percent of future outcomes, neglecting the extreme 5 percent “tails,” then acted to reduce any unacceptably large risks. The defect of VaR alone is that it doesn’t fully account for the worst 5 percent of expected cases. But these extreme events are where ruin is to be found.

It dawns on him that he has crossed over the line that runs between maintaining alcoholic and sloppy, stupid, obnoxious drunk. But at least he is cognizant of it this time; he’ll try to ease off. “Oh, thank you, but I don’t think so. I’ll just finish my drink and go. I have to get up pretty early tomorrow,” she says. They get their drinks and both take long swallows. By now Ben is obscured from himself. He can no longer monitor his actions. He can’t edit himself. Later he will know, but right now he doesn’t, that this is not him. “I really wish that you’d come home with me,” he says, slurring and breaking his words. “Yourso cute, and I’m really good in bed… believe me… yousmell good too.” He stops and frowns. “No, okay,” he mutters into his glass. He swivels on his stool and his arms find the bar for support. She starts to speak and then doesn’t. Looking at him, she gets a look of great sadness in her eyes, sadness so intense that it goes beyond what her face has made you believe she could feel. Ben does not see it, but it is not wasted. It serves more purpose to her than it possibly could to him right now; she did not consciously author it, and she is surprised. “Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” she says. “I have to go. Thanks for the drink.” She gets up and walks quickly to the door. Her understatement seems to give him a spark. “Maybe I shouldn’t breathe so much, Teri!” he calls after her. “Ha! ha!” But she is gone. The bartender shakes his head and puts down the glass that he is washing. “Time to go, bud,” he says. “We’re closing up.

In its simplest form, investors sell losing stocks before the end of the current year, realizing losses that reduce the year’s income taxes. This behavior contributes to the so-called January effect where selling pressure in December further depresses the stock prices of the year’s losers, followed by a rebound and excessive performance in January. The impact is greater for smaller companies. Investors used to realize a tax loss by selling a loser and buying it back immediately, with little risk of economic loss (or gain). To inhibit this loss of tax revenue by making it risky, the US government introduced the “wash sale rule,” which says that anyone who sells a stock at a loss and buys it back within thirty-one days may not recognize the loss for tax purposes. The rule is worded also to thwart savvy investors inclined to swap into an “equivalent” stock to get around this. The flip side of tax-loss selling is tax-gain deferral, where an investor who wishes to sell a security with a large gain waits until after the end of the year, deferring the tax due on it by one year. The money can be used for an additional year before being turned over to the government.

Brian Wecht was born in New Jersey to an interfaith couple. His father ran an army-navy store and enjoyed going to Vegas to see Elvis and Sinatra. Brian loved school, especially math and science, but also loved jazz saxophone and piano. “A large part of my identity came from being a fat kid who was bullied through most of my childhood,” he said. “I remember just not having many friends.” Brian double majored in math and music and chose graduate school in jazz composition. But when his girlfriend moved to San Diego, he quit and enrolled in a theoretical physics program at UC San Diego. Six months later the relationship failed; six years later he earned a PhD. When he solved a longstanding open problem in string theory (“the exact superconformal R-symmetry of any 4d SCFT”), Brian became an international star and earned fellowships at MIT, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He secured an unimaginable job: a lifetime professorship in particle physics in London. He was set. Except. Brian never lost his interest in music. He met his wife while playing for an improv troupe. He started a comedic band with his friend Dan called Ninja Sex Party. “I was always afraid it was going to bite me in the ass during faculty interviews because I dressed up like a ninja and sang about dicks and boning.” By the time Brian got to London, the band’s videos were viral sensations. He cried on the phone with Dan: Should they try to turn their side gig into a living? Brian and his wife had a daughter by this point. The choice seemed absurd. “You can’t quit,” his physics adviser said. “You’re the only one of my students who got a job.” His wife was supportive but said she couldn’t decide for him. If I take the leap and it fails, he thought, I may be fucking up my entire future for this weird YouTube career. He also thought, If I don’t jump, I’ll look back when I’m seventy and say, “Fuck, I should have tried.” Finally, he decided: “I’d rather live with fear and failure than safety and regret.” Brian and his family moved to Los Angeles. When the band’s next album was released, Ninja Sex Party was featured on Conan, profiled in the Washington Post, and reached the top twenty-five on the Billboard charts. They went on a sold-out tour across the country, including the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas.

People work all their life to get recognized,” Linda said. “What they don’t realize is that once they get recognized, they’re not themselves anymore. Not in public. Not to anyone else. They’re someone else. And that’s what people recognize. That’s who everyone falls in love with. That’s who they want. People like Ann are constantly changing. But the world wants just that one incarnation of them, over and over again.” We didn’t say anything for a moment. Two hummingbirds fought a few feet from us. I thought about how much I wanted to enjoy the sunshine and the hummingbirds and the flowers. Enjoying life as it unfolded was always hard. Since Constance died it seemed physically impossible. It was all just a long, infinite, blacktop of things you’d regret not enjoying later. CHAPTER 9 THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP Las Vegas, 2011 Las Vegas was eighty-five degrees and as dry as the desert it was but inside Nero’s Inferno the air was cool and dark and almost damp, more like a cave than a royal domain. I

The Secret on How to Write Comedy In a fashionable context, comedy is a subjective element. Making humans funny is an incredibly difficult job and developing a chunk of comedy is even more difficult. If you are an aspiring comedy writer, there is loads to be found out and Filipino concert in Las Vegas( ticklemecomedy.com) in case you lack that writing skills, there's no way you may produce an excellent comedy piece. So how do you write stuff that is actually funny and will make everyone roll round in laughter? Are there definitely techniques on how to write comedy or steps with a view to decorate your comedic writing? Maybe these are the questions rambling around your thoughts now. Well, happily, there are some easy strategies on for writing humorous cloth. Tips on How to Write Comedy Like all different forms of writing, comedy writing is no one of a kind. It additionally takes exercise to get it right. Some comedic writers might also master the artwork of comedy writing with only a little exercise while a few conflict lots before getting Filipino show in Las Vegas to know it. With that being said, every person who wants to realize the secret to writing high-quality comedy need to consider some easy pointers. Whether you come to be being funny or no longer, the most essential element is which you have discovered how to excellent write comedic cloth and are capable of produce quality comedy pieces. To assist you emerge as a very good comedic writer, beneath are some guidelines. • Choose the type of comedy - One tip on how to write comedic portions is to pick out the type of humor you need to exhibit. There are various forms of comedy along with slapstick, parody, dark humor, edgy humor, own family humor, dry observational humor, and plenty of others. You simply need to select one in your comedy piece and paintings on it. Failure to consciousness on one sort of humor will end result on your audience being careworn. • Use warfare - Another golden rule is to discover the battle in anything and play on the boundaries. Professional comedic writers say that anger is frequently the middle of all comedy. But this doesn't suggest however that you need to be a raging psycho simply so one can realize the way to write comedy. This virtually approach that you got to have the ability to address a conflict in a humorous manner. • Carefully choose your words - Successful comedic playwrights realize nicely the way to maximize the comedic impact. Obviously, they are experts in finding the funniest in everything. Choose phrases that sound funny and discover ways to tweak your paintings to give you actual funny piece. • Know how and whilst to magnify - In comedy, "extra" is generally better. Think approximately conditions that might be funnier if things have been exaggerated a chunk. Something mildly humorous can quickly Las Vegas Filipino shows become hilarious with a little bit of embellishment. • Timing - In comedy, timing is the whole thing. It is a totally critical component in writing comedy. You want to inject the proper joke inside the proper location and in the right time. This is in which your punch traces ought to appear. This also manner understanding whilst to end. But take word that timing depends significantly at the sort of comedy you're pursuing. Practice makes best After being given these few hints on how to write comedy, you need to have a terrific begin composing fine, comedic work. But as the famous adage says "Practice makes best" so preserve to exercise and work at your stuff. You don't always want to be intrinsically humorous to study comedic writing but it'll help.

Before we had finished the third round of beers, little Johnny and I had been poisoned. Someone must have put something in his beer and mine, but not in his wife's. Imagine that. I was texting and crying with my head down, and they were kissing in love, so we didn't pay attention to who could have reached our bottles on our table. I don't remember how we got to Urgell while both of us were dying from poisoning. It was a couple of blocks away; uphill a few blocks and another few block left towards Plaza Espanya. I was blindly following the way my legs and muscle memory led me, and us, towards the store and Canale Vuo from Universitat. I cannot recall a single memory frame from Nevermind to the Urgell Store, as if I had been poisoned so badly I was literally blind and unable to see. Visual blackout. I remember the three of us, holding onto each other at every step of the way, grabbing each other's arms, squeezing a hand in pain. We must have resembled Benicio del Toro and Johnny Depp attempting to enter Circus Circus in the movie, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, under the influence of ether. Or as Hunter S. Thompson and his lawyer must have appeared in real life. Anything could have happened to us that night. His wife was as tiny and fragile as Sabrina; she was just a bit taller. Multiple times we almost fell on the ground as we stumbled through the streets, trying to find our balance as his wife tried to keep us both on our feet with limited success. Johnny's wife was between us, trying to hold both of us up and lead us where my legs were taking us. I was unsure if we would live long enough to see the next day. “Realllllly.” – as Adam would say. It was the first time I had ever met Johnny Maraudin and it was almost our last night in life. We got closer to each other one night, after less than three rounds of beers, than we were with his brother Adam, who’s only friend was Tomas, in need.

To control risk further, I replaced Bamberger’s segregation into industry groups by a statistical procedure called factor analysis. Factors are common tendencies shared by several, many, or all companies. The most important is called the market factor, which measures the tendency of each stock price to move up and down with the market. The daily returns on any stock can be expressed as a part that follows the market plus what’s left over, the so-called residual. Financial theorists and practitioners have identified a large number of such factors that help explain changes in securities prices. Some, like participation in a specified industry group or sector (say, oil or finance) mainly affect subgroups of stocks. Other factors, such as the market itself, the levels of short-term and long-term interest rates, and inflation, affect nearly all stocks. The beauty of a statistical arbitrage product is that it can be designed to offset the effects of as many of these factors as you desire. The portfolio is already market-neutral by constraining the relation between the long and short portfolios so that the tendency of the long side to follow the market is offset by an equal but opposite effect on the short side. The portfolio becomes inflation-neutral, oil-price-neutral, and so on, by doing the same thing individually with each of those factors. Of course, there is a trade-off: The reduction in risk is accompanied by limiting the choice of possible portfolios.

To do index arbitrage, PNP developed techniques in the mid-1980s for finding baskets of stocks that did a particularly good job of tracking an index. We used this very profitably the day after “Black Monday,” October 19, 1987, to capture a spread of over 10 percent between the S&P 500 Index and the futures contracts on it. Quants have honed this to a fine art and, through their trading, generally keep the price discrepancy very small. To cut taxes, start with a tracking basket and, each time a stock drops, say, 10 percent, sell the loser and reinvest the proceeds in another stock or stocks chosen so the new basket continues to track well. If you want only short-term losses, which is usually best, sell within a year of purchase. I advise anyone considering doing this in a serious way to study it first with simulations using historical databases.

Annabeth drew her dagger. Instead of dropping it, she tossed it as far as she could into the water. Octavian made a squeaking sound. ‘What was that for? I didn’t say toss it! That could’ve been evidence. Or spoils of war!’ Annabeth tried for a dumb-blonde smile, like: Oh, silly me. Nobody who knew her would have been fooled. But Octavian seemed to buy it. He huffed in exasperation. ‘You other two …’ He pointed his blade at Hazel and Piper. ‘Put your weapons on the dock. No funny bus–’ All around the Romans, Charleston Harbor erupted like a Las Vegas fountain putting on a show. When the wall of seawater subsided, the three Romans were in the bay, spluttering and frantically trying to stay afloat in their armour. Percy stood on the dock, holding Annabeth’s dagger. ‘You dropped this,’ he said, totally poker-faced. Annabeth threw her arms around him. ‘I love you!’ ‘Guys,’ Hazel interrupted. She had a little smile on her face. ‘We need to hurry.’ Down in the water, Octavian yelled, ‘Get me out of here! I’ll kill you!’ ‘Tempting,’ Percy called down. ‘What?’ Octavian shouted. He was holding on to one of his guards, who was having trouble keeping them both afloat. ‘Nothing!’ Percy shouted back. ‘Let’s go, guys.’ Hazel frowned. ‘We can’t let them drown, can we?’ ‘They won’t,’ Percy promised. ‘I’ve got the water circulating around their feet. As soon as we’re out of range, I’ll spit them ashore.’ Piper grinned. ‘Nice.

We were watching videos at night on her Samsung tablet or my company iPad. She showed me the Silvano Agosti 1983 Italian interview with a little Italian boy called “D'Amore si vive, We Live of Love.” The boy was so cute, and his thoughts seemed similar to mine and Martina's. I was so deeply in love with her. The boy on the interview was just like what our own child would be, and we agreed and laughed. “We Live of Love.” What a coincidence! Living. By: Love. I knew the interview from before and she was surprised at how I knew about it. I showed her on my Instagram a picture of the boy I had recently taken a screenshot of and posted. With the subtitle at the right moment under his face: “Descubrir a la vida.” To discover life. Together. With his one and only girlfriend, as the boy explains. I told her multiple times that I was still unsure if she was real, or if it was all a dream; if I had only dreamed of her one night in the dark; if Pinto and I had invented her in my mind. She was a big fan of space, but I thought she liked the mystery behind the endless space with all its questions and secrets for us humans. I thought she liked the sky and space because she recently flew from Argentina to land in my arms. Martina and I were obsessed with Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy; we both knew all their stand-up comedies by heart. We kept replaying the best moments or faces that Chris or Eddie made. We had so much fun watching the same videos over and over that I couldn't believe it. Nobody else ever found the same moments or the same stand-ups as funny as Martina and I did. Nobody before or after found it so amusing. If I showed it to someone, they didn't understand why I was so excited about it or why racist jokes were so funny for an hour from one black comedian to the next. We were obsessed the way Eddie spoke about the „Zebra-Bitch of his dreams, his dream-wife who doesn’t know the concept of money”, saying “she should have an afro, like Angela Davis goes 'God damn it.'“ We were laughing so much. Sometimes I tickled her flat belly or her ribs and she was laughing so sweetly and so much that she couldn't stop. She was begging me to stop tickling her when I barely touched her. She said “No, no, no, no” so many times so quickly and cutely that I had to stop and kiss her; I couldn't resist her lips or her person, I had to kiss and hug her. We laughed so much at particular parts of Chris Rock's stand-up comedies that we could barely stop, almost as if we were tickling each other. We were laughing when Chris Rock was mocking Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony for singing ‘Welfare chariots’ such as „The First of the Month” or when he explained that the government hates rappers, but „only the good rappers get gunned down. They could find Saddam Hussein in a cave in Iraq but couldn't arrest anyone related to Tupac Shakur’s assassination, which didn't happen in a cave in Iraq but in Las Vegas, on the Strip, not one of those side streets, but in front of Circus Circus, after a Mike Tyson fight. Now how many witnesses do you need, to arrest somebody?” We were fascinated with Eddie Murphy, Charlie Murphy, and Chris Rock, but when I showed her Richard Prior, Doug Stanhope, Aries Spears, or George Carlin, she was no longer so impressed for some reason. Her favorite part perhaps was when Chris Rock talked about love and relationships. He said that „you never really been in love unless you have contemplated murder; unless you have practiced your alibi in front of the mirror, staring at a can of rat poison for 45 minutes straight, you haven't been in love. And the only thing preventing you from killing your significant other was an episode of CSI.” He said that relationships are hard and that in order for them to work, both people need to have the same focus, which is all about: her.

We were watching videos at night on her Samsung tablet or my company iPad. She showed me the Silvano Agosti 1983 Italian interview with a little Italian boy called “D'Amore si vive, We Live of Love.” The boy was so cute, and his thoughts seemed similar to mine and Martina's. I was so deeply in love with her. The boy on the interview was just like what our own child would be, and we agreed and laughed. “We Live of Love.” What a coincidence! Living. By: Love. I knew the interview from before and she was surprised at how I knew about it. I showed her on my Instagram a picture of the boy I had recently taken a screenshot of and posted. With the subtitle at the right moment under his face: “Descubrir a la vida.” To discover life. Together. With his one and only girlfriend, as the boy explains. I told her multiple times that I was still unsure if she was real, or if it was all a dream; if I had only dreamed of her one night in the dark; if Pinto and I had invented her in my mind. She was a big fan of space, but I thought she liked the mystery behind the endless space with all its questions and secrets for us humans. I thought she liked the sky and space because she recently flew from Argentina to land in my arms. Martina and I were obsessed with Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy; we both knew all their stand-up comedies by heart. We kept replaying the best moments or faces that Chris or Eddie made. We had so much fun watching the same videos over and over that I couldn't believe it. Nobody else ever found the same moments or the same stand-ups as funny as Martina and I did. Nobody before or after found it so amusing. If I showed it to someone, they didn't understand why I was so excited about it or why racist jokes were so funny for an hour from one black comedian to the next. We were obsessed the way Eddie spoke about the „Zebra-Bitch of her dreams, her dream-wife who doesn’t know the concept of money”, saying “she should have an afro, like Angela Davis goes 'God damn it.'“ We were laughing so much. Sometimes I tickled her flat belly or her ribs and she was laughing so sweetly and so much that she couldn't stop. She was begging me to stop tickling her when I barely touched her. She said “No, no, no, no” so many times so quickly and cutely that I had to stop and kiss her; I couldn't resist her lips or her person, I had to kiss and hug her. We laughed so much at particular parts of Chris Rock's stand-up comedies that we could barely stop, almost as if we were tickling each other. We were laughing when Chris Rock was mocking Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony for singing ‘Welfare chariots’ such as „The First of the Month” or when he explained that the government hates rappers, but „only the good rappers get gunned down. They could find Saddam Hussein in a cave in Iraq but couldn't arrest anyone related to Tupac Shakur’s assassination, which didn't happen in a cave in Iraq but in Las Vegas, on the Strip, not one of those side streets, but in front of Circus Circus, after a Mike Tyson fight. Now how many witnesses do you need, to arrest somebody?” We were fascinated with Eddie Murphy, Charlie Murphy, and Chris Rock, but when I showed her Richard Prior, Doug Stanhope, Aries Spears, or George Carlin, she was no longer so impressed for some reason. Her favorite part perhaps was when Chris Rock talked about love and relationships. He said that „you never really been in love unless you have contemplated murder; unless you have practiced your alibi in front of the mirror, staring at a can of rat poison for 45 minutes straight, you haven't been in love. And the only thing preventing you from killing your significant other was an episode of CSI.” He said that relationships are hard and that in order for them to work, both people need to have the same focus, which is all about: her.

Then fire her,” I say, my voice deepening with my frustration. “On what grounds?” “Irreconcilable differences,” I throw out. Scotty rolls his eyes. “This isn’t a divorce.

I’m talking about people who live in some of our most affluent cities,’ says O’Casey, ‘but they’re driven to live below the earth. People who—for whatever reason—aren’t welcome on the surface: homeless people, addicts, the HIV positive. There are subterranean communities all over the world, in catacombs, sewers and abandoned metros. The Tunnel People in Las Vegas, the Empire of the Dead in Paris, the Rat Tribe in Beijing. A lot of them are proper societies, with electricity and phone lines, even churches and restaurants sometimes. The Rat Tribe in Beijing are mostly migrant workers, some of them brought in to build for the Olympics. The only place they can afford to live is underground, in tunnels and old air-raid shelters.

Card counters formed informal networks and developed new and improved techniques. Beat the Dealer had introduced the idea of a team. Suppose several players, say five, each with a $10,000 bankroll, are playing separately, winning at an average rate of 1 percent or $100 an hour. Then the five players together will gain an average of $500 an hour. If instead they pool their money into one $50,000 bank, when one of them plays he can bet five times as much as he could safely risk on his own $10,000. Consequently he expects to win five times as much, namely, 1 percent of $50,000 or $500

To produce even steadier returns, we hedged the overall risk from our entire collection of hedges by neutralizing the impact on our portfolio of shifts in interest rates (across the spectrum of quality and maturity). We also offset the danger to the portfolio from sudden large shifts in overall stock market prices and in the volatility level of the market. From the 1980s on, some of these techniques came into usage by modern investment banks and hedge funds. They also adopted a notion we rejected, called VaR or “value at risk,” where they estimated the damage to their portfolio for, say, the worst events among the most likely 95 percent of future outcomes, neglecting the extreme 5 percent “tails,” then acted to reduce any unacceptably large risks. The defect of VaR alone is that it doesn’t fully account for the worst 5 percent of expected cases.

Bill Walden and I proved what we called the Fundamental Theorem of Card Counting, which says, in a precise mathematical way, that the advantage from card counting becomes better as more cards are seen. This means the best situations come toward the end. We found that even those were tiny and rare. The reason baccarat does not have enough opportunities is because the impact of removing one card from the pack in baccarat is about one-ninth what it is in blackjack, so the effect on the house edge is correspondingly smaller. Also, the house edge to be overcome is greater, being more than 1 percent.

front-page headline in The New York Times read “SEC Says Teenager Had After-School Hobby: Online Stock Fraud.” The fifteen-year-old New Jersey high school student collected $273,000 in eleven trades. He would first buy a block of stock in a thinly traded company, then flood Internet chat rooms with messages that, say, a $2 stock would be trading at $20 “very soon.” The text here was about as valuable as the message in a fortune cookie. Dr. EMH’s rational all-knowing investors promptly bid up the price, at which point young Mr. Lebed sold. He had opened his brokerage accounts in his father’s name. Lebed settled with the SEC, repaying $273,000 in profits plus $12,000 in interest. It’s not apparent from the stories that any of this money was used to compensate the defrauded investors, whose identity or degree of injury may in any case be impossible to determine. The father’s comment? “So they pick on a kid.

Why is statistical arbitrage so-called? Arbitrage originally meant a pair of offsetting positions that lock in a sure profit. An example might be selling gold in London at $300 an ounce while at the same time buying it at $290 in New York for a $10 gain. If the total cost to finance the deal and to insure and deliver the New York gold to London were $5, it would leave a $5 sure profit. That’s an arbitrage in its original usage. Later the term was expanded to describe investments where risks are expected to be largely offsetting, with a profit that is likely, if not certain. For instance, in what is called merger arbitrage, company A trading at $100 a share may offer to buy company B, trading at $70 a share, by exchanging one share of company A for each share of company B. The market reacts instantly and company A’s shares drop to, say, $88 while company B’s shares jump to $83. Merger arbitrageurs now step in, buying a share of B at $83 and selling short a share of A at $88.

If these legions of investors were easily gulled, often for decades, what does this swindle (and others) say about the academic theory that markets are “efficient,” with its claims that investors quickly and rationally incorporate all publicly available information into their selections?

The house opened up in every direction. A cream-colored, leather, sectional sofa and a flat-screened plasma TV taller than she was filled the left. To the right, a grand dining room boasted a polished oak table so long that if people sat at each end, they'd need cell phones to say, "Pass the salt.

Alvin is working in his store when he hears a booming voice from above that says, “Alvin, sell your business!” He ignores it. The voice goes on for days saying, “Alvin, sell your business for three million dollars!” After weeks of this, he relents and sells his store. The voice says, “Alvin, go to Las Vegas!” Alvin asks why. “Alvin, just take the three million dollars and go to Las Vegas.”Alvin obeys, goes to Las Vegas, and visits a casino. The voice says, “Alvin, go to the blackjack table and put it all down on one hand!” Alvin hesitates but gives in. He’s dealt an eighteen. The dealer has a six showing. “Alvin, take a card!” “What? The dealer has …” “Take a card!” Alvin tells the dealer to hit him, and gets an ace. Nineteen. He breathes easy. “Alvin, take another card.” “What?” “TAKE ANOTHER CARD!” Alvin asks for another card. It’s another ace. He has twenty. “Alvin, take another card!” the voice commands. “I have twenty!” Alvin shouts. “TAKE ANOTHER CARD!” booms the voice. “Hit me!” Alvin says. He gets another ace. Twenty-one! And the booming voice says, “Un-fucking-believable!” Hey,

Jesus never taught that David wrote Psalm 110, or that Daniel wrote the book of Daniel, or that the book of Jonah is historically accurate. At the very most, he assumed these things. But not even this is guaranteed. It is quite possible that by alluding to these traditions, Jesus was simply conceding to standard assumptions. He may have known better, he may not have. As I showed in chapter 1, perhaps Jesus was aware that Jonah was an example of a fictional short story. By alluding to the story, he does not commit himself to its historicity, any more than Evangelicals commit themselves to the historicity of the Chronicles of Narnia when they say, reverently, that “Aslan is not a tame lion.” A preacher may confess from the pulpit that after his visit to Las Vegas, he knows what Frodo must have felt like carrying that ring, but no one assumes the preacher has confused fantasy and reality. Factual theological claims are made all the time by reference to fictional narratives, and no one gets in trouble for it. Jesus may simply have been working within the assumptions of his tradition, even if he knew better. On the other hand, he may not have known better; in all likelihood, Jesus assumed the traditions with which he was raised.

How about you, Dan? What do you do for a living?” Well, Ben, until recently I was a hired wand for the biggest gang boss in Las Vegas, but we had a falling-out, so mostly I just run short cons and sometimes busk on Fremont Street doing sleight-of-hand tricks for spare change. I guess you could say I’m sort of a criminal bum. “I’m between jobs right now,” I told him. “The economy being what it is.

It’s not my name. It’s Lola Sinclair’s name. And right underneath, beside Groom . . . . “Peyton Manning?” I say, looking up at Nate in bewilderment. He nods. “The man is a fucking god. You can’t blame me for wanting to be him for one drunken night, even in a Las Vegas wedding chapel.

I would say it is because the striving and the power keep you from realizing just how helpless you really are. It protects you from facing the fact that others are manipulating you, that regardless of what you might claim, your philosophy is simply a way to rationalize what you do for others too afraid to do their own dirty work; that you are in a way also a victim of the apartheid state. You

After hearing the kids at the Ground discuss the Pro Tour, Finkel burned to compete. But the event was invite only. And who was going to invite a total unknown? Rather than sit by the side, he picked up the phone and called Wizards. “My name is Jon Finkel,” he loudly declared, “and I was wondering if I could come to the Pro Tour.” What the hell, the staff at Wizards thought, if the kid had the balls to call up and ask for an invitation, how could they say no? Careful

You’ve got to have the emotional understanding that you can make the right play time and time again,” he would say, “but you can still lose. And even if you lose four times in a row, you’re still supposed to make the same play the fifth time. It’s a very easy concept in theory, but in practice it’s much harder, especially when you see people making bad moves and they win. You have to do the right move all the time.” Once

you are not one of these men, do not wear a V-neck. Douchebags (especially in Las Vegas and New Jersey) seem to gravitate toward a V, sometimes even a deep V. You look like a tool. No woman wants that V-neck guy. When I see your deep V, I know who you are without you having to say a word. I know that you are someone who is single and isn’t a great date—though you believe you are, just as you also believe that you’re dynamite in the sack.

When I first started showing the “Indra’s Jewels” work, I had people coming out of the woodwork saying “Who is this guy? What is he doing? Who does he think he is doing this stuff?” and the more they’d find out they’d go “Oh, he was a painter? He taught for more than decade on the university level? He knows what he’s talking about? Oh, well let’s look at it a little closer.

I walked out into the parking lot and found the space he’d written on the rental folder.  I frowned at the bright yellow and black machine that sat there waiting for me.  What is that?  A riding lawnmower?  “This can’t be right,” I said to no one.  I was the only one out there, so I don’t know who I thought I was talking to, but having a thousand conversations in my head over the last twenty-four hours was making me question my own sanity.  Probably talking out loud to myself wasn’t any better, but what the hell … might as well change up the crazy every once in a while to keep it fresh. I pressed the button on the key ring and the headlights flashed on once, proving this was not a mistake.  “A Smart Car?  Are you kidding me?”  It looked like a giant, wasp-yellow roller skate.  Maybe not even a giant one; maybe just a large-ish roller skate.  Surely looking like a giant wasp flying down a country road was a bad idea for a girl with a sting-allergy… I debated in my head whether I should go and argue for one of the other fifty full-sized cars on the lot, but then gave up on the idea five seconds later.  “Screw it,” I said, annoyed as hell.  “Might as well get eight hundred miles to the gallon, right?!”  The tone of my voice had drifted a little over to the hysterical side, but there was nothing I could do about it.  I was barely hanging on, the stress almost enough to send me to the looney bin.  I just kept picturing Bradley saying, “You got married?  To a complete stranger?  In Las Vegas?  When you were drunk?  By a guy named Elvis?”  It was too horrible to fully fathom.  He’d dump me just for humiliating him in front of all his clients and his frat brothers and his parents.  There were so many people expecting me to be the perfect fiancée. I threw my overnight bag in the passenger seat and drove off the lot, wishing I could peel out and really express my anger in a satisfyingly loud and obnoxious way.  But I quickly learned that a Smart Car doesn’t know how to peel out; it’s not equipped to do much with its lawn-mower sized engine.  It just knows how to deliver me from Point A to Point B on a very small amount of gas with almost zero elbow room.  I felt like a clown buzzing around in her little circus car.  The only things missing were a little face paint and some floppy shoes.  At first I thought I was also missing one of those brass honky-horns that clowns carry around, but then I pressed on the steering wheel and found out differently.  Yes, it’s true.  The Smart Car comes equipped with a clown honky-horn.

do you think you're going?" he says. "I'm going to Las Vegas. You can earn $400 for a blow job there, and I figured that I might as well earn money for what I do to you free." The husband thinks for a moment, goes upstairs, and comes back down, with his suitcase packed as well. "Where do you think you going?" the wife asks. "I'm coming with you...I want to see how you survive on $800 a year!!!" 27 A police officer was patrolling the highway when he sees a guy tied up to a tree, crying.

Of course I’ll be your girlfriend.” Gage lights up like the city of Las Vegas at night, a gigantic, gum-showing smile pushing back his cheeks, dotting dimples, and forming complementary eye crinkles. He pumps his fist into the air. “You said yes! Oh my God. I can’t believe…” He stops himself after he notices the absolute bewilderment on my face, and then he clears his throat and lowers his arm. “I mean, I knew you were going to say yes.” “You’re an idiot,” I laugh, but the excitement in his voice is like a soothing balm on the scars of my heart. He’s the one shining halo of sunlight breaking through an everlasting tempest, allowing me a circle of dryness amongst an unrelenting downpour. “Yeah, but I’m your idiot now,” he emphasizes. “Hear that, everyone? Gage Arlington is officially off the market! And he’s in love with Calista Cadwell!

since it is the experience that gives traveling its value and not the traveling unto itself, you may want to focus on having adventures instead of just merely travel.  For example, I have individually “traveled” to: The Wind River mountain range in Lander, Wyoming. Dinosaur National Monument in Vernal, Utah. Canyonlands National Park in Moab, Utah. The Grand Canyon outside Williams, Arizona. And The Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas, Nevada. And each individual visit was fun and enjoyable in its own regard. But what I really want to do is raft the Green and Colorado Rivers, which connect all those locations above.  This will not only send me through the Flaming Gorge of Utah, but the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers in the canyons of Dinosaur Park, the heart of Canyonlands National Park, Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon, and inevitably a long paddle across Lake Meade to the Hoover Dam.  It will be a genuine, epic, Indiana Jones adventure that very few, if any people, have ever done.  And instead of a mere picture of the Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon comfortably taken from a paved road, when my little nieces ask me, “What did you do, Uncle Aaron” I won't say, “I went to Paris and sat at a cafe.” I will say, “Uncle Aaron kayaked the whole damn Green and Colorado rivers from Wyoming to the Hoover Dam!”  This doesn't mean we all have to become Larry Ellison, sailing around the world or racing in regattas.  But having adventures as opposed to mere site seeing will add an inordinate amount of purpose and meaning to your life, not to mention a lot of fun.