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Republicans favor publicly-funded, socialized insurance
...for oil companies, that is.
Lovely people.
Better'n a sharp stick in the eye
So here's a little known fact about Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas: apparently, the glass countertops in the hotel rooms spontaneously explode.
At least, that's what we assumed was a feature of the room when this happened to us Friday morning as we were sleeping there. Well, I was sleeping there. My friend who actually booked the room got the bed. I got the couch in the living room - second tip, folks: when you go to Vegas, tip the desk guy $20 and you can often get a room that, well, has a living room - which was mere feet from the credenza with the minibar, ice bucket and of course, tempered glass countertop.
It should be repeated that this was a spontaneous explosion. We were all asleep when it happened. This isn't some kind of weird way to excuse us for doing something stupid. We're still wondering what combination of pressure, air temperature or other matter of science beyond our hungover capabilities at the time caused a countertop to, at about seven in the morning, suddenly burst into several thousand pieces of chipped glass and spread out all over the floor of the room. I work up to the sound of what I thought was the television falling off the wall.
Now, if this was a curiosity to us, it was even more of a curiosity to the entire staff of Caesar's Palace, who over the course of the next half hour ended up in our room. They appeared in hierarchal progression, like bosses in a video game. The front desk first sent, as they of course would when you called them and said part of your room exploded, the cleaning lady. We were quickly elevated to two cleaning ladies, followed by a cleaning lady who spoke English natively. This elevated to repair guy - he had a belt with things on them - who begat repair guy with radio, who used radio to summon security. Security was apparently low-tier security, as he came not with a gun but a camera to take pictures of the damage. Guns were, wisely so, deemed useless against suicide bomber tables.
Finally, we started getting the people who actually wore ties. Ties meant business, as these were the serious men who started asking the serious questions. Not to us, I mean. They were pretty much done with us at this point. No, now it was time to ask the questions of the building contractor, questions that were phrased as to be very clear about what the real issue here was but not actually addressing it. Questions like: "Has this ever happened before?" "Will this happen again?" and naturally the immediate follow up "Are these countertops in every room in this hotel?"
Somewhere after repair guy with flashlight but before first guy with tie, I got a quarter inch cut on my wrist from a shard of the glass. It wasn't a terrible cut, just the kind that bleeds a lot. So while everyone employed by the Harrah's Corporation was convening in our living room, I went to the bathroom to ruin a Caesar's Palace hand towel. What I was really scared about was that a guy with a tie was going to show up, flail wildly, and demand that I lose a day of my vacation doing something stupid like go to a hospital, and, well, no. So instead I felt the appropriate thing to do was to pour Dewar's on the wound to cauterize it and then ask for a band-aid. Oh, and of course then text my friends to tell them I did that.
And that was the second best part of his Vegas trip, he said, winking.