While Las Vegas Sleeps…

I screwed up last year. I slept on an opportunity to join a kickball team with some friends (some of which have since moved out of Vegas, as people tend to do, sometimes.) This year I didn’t hear anything about the league starting up amongst friends so, naturally, I did nothing.

For some, adults playing kickball might seem like a silly diversion from life in Sin City. Well, pfffft to that shit. Kickball was the second best physical education sport in school, second only to Dodgeball. Now, it’s true that Kickball doesn’t have the genius marketing team of Vince Vaughan and Ben Stiller on their side - “If you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball…” - but what Kickball lacks in marketing it makes up for with a decided lack of humiliation in front of your (superior) peers! Hmmm The only suggestion for a kickball slogan I’ve gotten so far is “If you can kick a cat you can kick a ball…” And that was from a vegetarian cabbie. We’re going to need to work on that…

Anyway, Rebecca Silverstein invited us out to cover the action on Labor Day Weekend in Las Vegas for the National Kickball Championship tournament. I’ll let her explain this event below:

More than sixty co-ed teams of adult kickballers from around the nation will be taking over Las Vegas over Labor Day weekend for the eleventh annual Founders Cup World Kickball Championship®.

The World Adult Kickball Association ® (WAKA) is one of the fastest growing community sports in America, with more than 275 divisions in 28 states, comprising over 2,100 teams nationwide. The participating teams are the best in the nation, traveling to Las Vegas from all corners of the country, hailing from 14 states and 39 unique kickball divisions ranging from New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between. Teams filled the tournament to capacity within a record breaking 12 minutes of registration opening; all of them striving to bring the coveted “Founder’s Cup” back home with them.

I’m almost surprised that I’m not already a member of an organization called WAKA, but that’s probably for the best *snicker* Sorry, Rebecca, I just couldn’t resist Seriously, though, if you have nothing going on on Saturday Labor Day Weekend, this is something different to do.. should be fun and good for some laughs. It starts at 3:30pm at Desert Breeze Park, which is located near 8275 Spring Mountain Road. You can also go to their website to register your team for the next season which is at Kickball.com. Maybe next year “While Las Vegas Sleeps…” will get its own motley crew of Las Vegans together to get the benefit of the home field advantage at this thing!

“If you can kick some ass you can kick some balls!” It’s all about the marketing, baby! Now, that leaves me with only one question… Can you bet on it?

Tags: Around Las Vegas, athletics, Desert Breeze Park, dodgeball, kickball, Las Vegas, Las Vegas outdoors, Las Vegas sports, Nevada, outdoors, parks, physical education, young at heart

For a few years now I’ve been reading the back of Starbucks cups… you know the ones - “The Way I See It #123″ or whatever, right? Well, usually I find myself going, “uhm, okay..” Tonight I finally got one that I thought was interesting.. There has to be a Las Vegas Life Lesson in here somewhere:

The Way I See It #112

If you’ve got a dollar and you spend twenty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve got seventy-one cents left. But if you’ve got seventeen grand and you spend twenty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve still got seventeen grand. There’s a math lesson for you.

-Steve Martin

Yeah. That’s Vegas math, baby! Math favors the big stacks. Don’t play close to the felt. Ever.

Tags: big stacks, felt, law of large numbers, life, mathematics, poker, random thoughts, tapping

The story of the actual party is for anyone brave enough to tell it. This came later:

It’s probably about four in the morning and I’m sitting at the bar in The Artisan Hotel off the Strip in Las Vegas with a self-proclaimed stripper and some guy that I just met a few hours ago. The girl says, “Seriously, my tits are fake. Look - you can see the scars.” She pulls herself almost completely out of her top to show me. The guy is on a mission to acquire some girl for what’s left of the night and the girl that I’m talking to doesn’t seem to be his flavor.

She’s not my flavor either, but even if I did have plans to capture her, I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking her back to my lair tonight. The main reason is because the queen of last night’s party allowed me to crash in the Master Suite that was rented out for the party…with the guy that I don’t know.

He’s currently drifting from girl to girl in the bar and under different circumstances I might be interested in what he’s saying to them, but right now I want another drink. I lost count about four drinks ago, so, if I retroactively do the math, this one must be somewhere around twelve or fourteen. [Editor's note: Definitely not thirteen, though?] At some point, much later, I think I fall asleep.

It must be checkout time because I just woke up to the housecleaning woman trying to get in the door. I sit up and put my shoes on. Wow. I must have gotten a solid six or eight minutes of sleep! I’ve never felt so refreshed. No, wait… this is the exact opposite of refreshed. I need to find someplace to die. As I walk out the door I hear the phone ring, but I don’t feel like interacting with anyone in my current state, and head straight for the elevator.

Now that I’m in the lobby I decide that I’m not quite ready to leave so I wander around a bit. The pool area is so incredibly bright that I don’t even want to get a closer look at the potentially cute girl in the black bikini. All I want is the cool embrace of darkness and the seven steps it takes to get back inside are almost too many. What was I thinking? I need a bed. And lots of water. And probably at least week of recovery.

I pass the cute bartendress from last night on my way to request a taxi from the front desk and think to myself, “is she really still here?”  The front deskoids assure me that a cab will be here in ten minutes and then I go to the bar to buy some water and get some change. It’s obvious that the girl behind the bar has not been here for more than twelve hours and I ask, “Have I really been drinking here long enough for you to get off work, go home, sleep and then come in for another shift?” Apparently I have.

Twenty or more minutes later my new favorite bartendress wanders back through the lobby and says, “You’re still here? Why don’t you come wait in the bar?” I don’t mention that I’m afraid I might not make it that far. (Or that I’ve been sitting there wishing that the Artisan didn’t look so nice because I want to die, but I don’t want my dead body to clutter the place up.) If I were in an alley in some metropolitan area then you wouldn’t be reading this - that would have been the end of my story.

The cab that eventually picks me up is the one that I called myself.

[Editors note: very nice of you to not die inside the Artisan Hotel. Of all the reasons to continue living, this is probably the most selfless I can think of! Good job, soldier.]

Tags: bars, bartendress, boutique hotels, cab, deskoid, hangover, Las Vegas Entertainment, party, poker, stripper, taxi, The Artisan Hotel, VIP

Today at 4pm at The Palms Hotel, Podcast-a-Palooza is going down featuring Five Hundy By Midnight, The Last Vegas Strip Podcast, and The Vegas Gang, as well as a special guest appearance by George Maloof.

I’m planning on going out and saying hello to everyone so hopefully we’ll see you there!

Tags: blog, blogging, Las Vegas, Palms Hotel, podcasts