ohsostrange's Blog

I miss the height of contest-frenzy, when this place was jumping.  In a couple of weeks, I'm heading back to Vegas, and as usual I've discovered a couple of new things to do while I'm there.  But there hardly seems any point in posting about them, things are so slow around here.

I don't think the delays are "accidental" at all.  Every time I fly American with a connecting flight, the second flight is inevitably both "delayed" and overbooked.  They will always, but always announce that the plane is being worked on for "mechanical issues" and also that they need people to volunteer to be bumped to a later flight because they've overbooked. 

I'm convinced that the airline holds the...

So much to blog about, I hardly know where to start.  I walked for miles every day and wound up seeing more than I had planned to.  Toughened my feet up for walking all over Washington DC in September and Las Vegas in October.

This is the first time I ever left NYC not wishing I lived there, if only because when I went to the Tenement museum, my guide told me his two bedroom family apartment was no bigger than the ones in their preserved tenement...

This is my third trip to New York, and I've seen a lot of Manhattan, but nowhere near all of it.  What, besides museums and plays, are the must-sees?  Is there anything not as well known as the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty that's that a visitor should try to see?

So I finally decided to go to New York in August and try to go to London next February or March.  Because New York is a little cheaper in August, and it looks like package deals to London are a little cheaper in late winter.

So I'm researching what deals are out there for August, and I've noticed that different travel sites give different hotels radically different star ratings.  Marrakesh Hotel in Manhattan has three stars on lastminutetravel, when other places...

So my next trip turned out to be none of the places I was hoping to go.  Instead I had to go to Frankenmuth aka "Michigan's Little Bavaria" for the weekend with my sister and her kids.  The kids used to love that horrible little tourist trap, but now they're morphing into teenagers, and it seems that teens feel compelled to bitch and moan not only when they're not having a good time, but to camouflage the fact that they ARE...

I just got back from my most recent trip, and now I'm already planning for where I'll go in August for my birthday.  I've narrowed it down to either Boston, New York, or London.

I've never been out of the country before, but oh… to haunt the museums in London.  And see a play or two… 

But I'd have to take a package like at 

I discovered on this trip to Vegas that when somebody dies while playing Bingo, the game doesn't stop.

I'm sitting in the Plaza's Bingo Room, when this woman stands up and falls over backward—dead as a doornail.  The way I know she was dead and not injured is that two security guards swooped in and one picked her up by the arms and the other by the legs and they carted her off like a big lumpy sack of potatoes, which is not how you treat somebody...

Leaving in a few hours.  I can never sleep the night before I go someplace.  I'll be up all night and then I'll be too tired to have any fun tomorrow.

I have non-refundable plane tickets to Vegas next week.  Unfortunately, I also have a teensy weensy touch of pneumonia.  I wonder if it's possible to have fun when you're too sick to leave your hotel room.

I'm sitting here watching Boston Legal, and they have a storyline about a body on display as art, just like in Bodies the Exhibition showing at the Tropicana. 

At the Tropicana, in their exhibition space, they have not only Bodies, but a Titanic exhibit.  One of these exists to force the viewer to travel emotionally along with the Titanic passengers through the sinking and their unnecessary, painful deaths.  And it's very effective: surprisingly so. ...

I've been researching where to spend my five hundred dollar voucher-and boy are there a lotttttt of places I want to go.  It's kind of depressing to realize how many places I want to see but will probably never make it to.

On the other hand, I've also discovered that it's possible to go to Europe for a lot less money than I ever thought possible.  If you go via a group tour, you can pay less for the entire trip than you'd expect to have to...

According to "Stephen Colbert's Ballz for Kidz" the appeal of gambling is like that of drug addiction.  Which helps me understand it not at all, because when I take drugs like Vicodin, the only reaction I have (besides the intended dulling of pain) is constipation.

Much like losing money, I find constipation to have no entertainment value whatsoever.

So I am yet again going to Vegas just to stare at gaudy things, catch shows, and eat, while all around...