Las Vegas Now in Possession of Intergalactic Weapon

Las Vegas Death Ray - Yes, guests at Vdara hotel in Las Vegas now have something else to worry about: being burned alive by the glare of the building's "death ray."

…What the heck's a "death ray," you ask? Well, first off, it's not as deadly as it sounds, since no one has actually died from it -- at least not yet. But according to the U.K. Daily Mail, the powerful beams of Nevada sunlight reflecting off the glass hotel onto sections of the hotel's swimming pool area have burned some guests and have melted plastic bags.

I mean really? There weren’t enough things to worry about in Vegas already?  Avoiding angry Asian dealers, finding the right balance between sleep and Red Bull, dehydration and heat exhaustion, hustlers, pimps, loan sharks, and illegal cabbies, there’s now a casino actively abusing guests? 

Part of me knows the owners of Vdara did this on purpose.  These guys aren’t dumb, I’m sure they were aware of the effect a gigantic glass and metal mirror placed under the desert sun would have. 

And its our own fault, it’s a sickness, a disease akin to the wife who keeps coming back to her abusive husband.  They take our money, force alcohol and pure oxygen on us to render us incapable of rational thought, and now you can add physical harm to the analogy.  The battered wife will always down play how bad it is, and tell you things are going to change, just like everyone coming back from Vegas underplays how much they lost and believes that if they just had a few more hours at the tables everything would have been different.

Thanks to AJ for the link.

Career Switch?

I watched a show last night on the “big business of garbage,” blew my mind.  The base starting salary for NYC Sanitation Department garbage men is $70k!  Sure when their day is up they probably smell worse than your average homeless village in the middle of the summer but I think I could handle that.  Fresh air (somewhat), exercise, and the thing I crave the most in a job, the ability to just shut your mind off and zone out for a few hours.  I mean that’s what it’s all about, no stress, just pure uninterrupted day dreaming.

It occurred to me while I was still scrambling through excel sheets at 7:45 last night that I’m being taken for a sucker.   Here I am putting in overtime (that I’m not going to be paid for) trying to ignore the United Nations cleaning crew while they blow dust into my cube and vacuum my area despite the countless rows of empty cubes they could otherwise be cleaning, knowing that Garbage Man Joe is out there toasting with his fellow trash pickers on their fat paychecks laughing at the rest of us that went to college and are stuck working in cube farms for longer hours and less pay. 

And the kicker is it’s probably a better career prospect as well. Banks and Finance seem to be comfortably seated on the toilet reading their Wall Street Journals, and just about any other office job is easily moveable to India and their billion person cheap labor work force (Have some respect India, make some demands, did you learn nothing from British occupancy? Frigen Ghandi, the man did nothing but leave your country in 3^rd world status).  So that leaves manual labor.  We’re going to run out trees and yards to landscape soon enough, and that just leaves garbage.

Then again, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, “its probably a union thing.”

Fail Compilation Starting to Kick Off the Final 8 Hours

Nothing beats a great fail video, this is a great one.