The Weekend of Foolish Attention
DATELINE: Saturday, April 9, 2022
I spent Thursday afternoon sitting in the Sportsbook at Paris Casino editing a nonfiction memoir about being an ER doctor in Baghdad during the Iraq war. My wife was in a ballroom adjacent being paid to lie on a table while other doctors demonstrated a new ultrasound machine so I took the opportunity to do something that feels so very Vegas.
First, I’m making money editing the book and that’s always a plus.
Second, the ability to work on the stripping down of language and storytelling, providing notes for improvement, and then taking a quick break to drop $20 in a slot machine amidst the noise and clangs of working in a casino is a bit surreal. Sort of like building a computer hard drive in a circus performance. The best part? The comp beer I received for playing.
Third, as I spend more time here (it’s just over three years we’ve been in Nevada) I’m finding a genuine small town holiness to the place that is in direct contrast with the one big street most frequently associated with the name ‘Las Vegas.’
Following that, the wife and I headed over to Rebar on Main Street to grab an after work cocktail and check out a local artist’s hybrid back patio show. Pierson Brown was one of the first cats we ran into in the Arts District here in Vegas. He performed a bunch of times for the limited-due-to-COVID run of BUGHOUSE! Now he’s organizing a live art thing at Rebar every Thursday night. A band, five or six artists painting in real time and selling their completed works. It felt very Logan Square.
Las Vegas Locally
In the spirit of all things Las Vegas and also a push for less national punditry and the dick sword fighting that most national journalism has devolved into, Sonja Swanson is heading up a new thing: City Cast Las Vegas.
There’s a daily newsletter that Scott Dickensheets (yes, his real name) writes that covers local shit—from unusual news around town to a list of interesting events going on—and while it feels a little bit like those local news channels that focus on high school soccer scores, it’s kind of exactly what I need these days. Just news. No heavy ideology being shucked and jived. Specific to Vegas.
There’s also a podcast associated hosted by Dayvid Figler that covered the BTS invasion, the pollen count, and rising housing prices in the area. Kind of perfect, guys. Well done.
Murder, She Wrote
Via Literate Ape Press, we recently edited and formatted a new science fiction novel entitled The Achilles Battle Fleet: Book One: Mei-Ling Lee by Brendan Wilson. On the ApeCast, David and I talked to Wilson and it seemed very apparent that while he’d never been on a starship, his vast experience in the military and with martial arts came to play in the writing of the book.
In that same vein, I think I’m going to buy a copy of Nancy Crampton-Brophy’s book once she expands on her essay on ‘How to Murder Your Husband.’ Apparently, she wrote the essay then, well, murdered her husband.
An author who once wrote an essay called 'How to murder your husband' has gone on trial accused of murdering her husband in the United States.
The murder trial got underway on Tuesday, April 5, in Oregon with Nancy Crampton-Brophy, 71, accused of fatally shooting her husband of 26 years, chef Daniel Brophy, in June 2018 to gain more than $1.5m.
Multnomah County senior deputy district attorney Shawn Overstreet told jurors that Ms Crampton-Brophy was motivated by greed during the opening statements of the trial, Oregon Live reports.
He said that she “executed what she perhaps believed to be the perfect plan" when she allegedly followed her husband to work and shot him in the back, piercing his spine and heart, before firing again as he lay sprawled on the floor.
This has me thinking. I’m going to start two books this afternoon: How to Make a Living Binging Marvel Movies and How to Not Be Murdered by My Wife Who Hates Marvel Movies. I’ll let you know how that goes …
I Was Born There But I’m Happy to Not Have a Child There
My birthplace was Millington, TN. Despite my high school experience in Kansas, my college years in Arkansas, my thirty years in Chicago, and my current residence in Playland, America, I’m a Southern kid from the roots down.
It is then a bit embarrassing to see elected officials in the state of Tennessee embrace their white trash archival footage in response to, I don’t know, a latent pedophilia?
Tennessee Republicans have introduced a bill that would eliminate the age requirement for marriage in the state. The current minimum age to get married is 17.
Democrats opposed the bill, saying it will legalize child sex abuse.
The bill's sponsor Tom Leatherwood (R-Arlington) says "there is not an explicit age limit" written in the bill. In other words, Leatherwood's bill would allow a 50-year-old to marry a 10-year-old.
I taught thirteen-year-old kids back in the 90s and my experience was that kids aren’t fully baked at that age and smell funny. I suppose Leatherwood (yeah, that’s his real name) spends a lot of time on TikTok and OnlyFans where looking at pictures of not-quite-adult girls dressed as prostitutes so the next best step for him is to gateway his ancient, wrinkly pud into some underage chicks.
My only surprise is that they didn’t come up with this in Florida first.
Start Up Failures Are Everywhere, Man
The world of social media entrepreneurship is filled with the tragic stories of big money propping up great ideas only to fall flat like a plastic bag filled with hot, wet poop. Out of a certain empathetic framework, we should at least feel a little bad for these hustlers but sometimes the glee over the cliff-dive into oblivion is just too tasty.
Since its launch in February, TruthSocial has seemed far more like vaporware than a serious competitor to Twitter or Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of users apparently remain on the waiting list to get in—despite the fact that last week it was reported that new downloads of the platform had fallen 93 percent from its launch, to just 60,000 per week. Hardly anyone wants to get on TruthSocial, and many of those who do want to apparently can’t. When they do get on, there’s very little content. Trump himself has “truthed” just once, back in February, in a short message promising he’d be there more often.
I’m not one with Trump Derangement Syndrome, breathing fire and heaving like a vomiting zombie every time I hear the man’s name (I had Bush Jr. Derangement Syndrome and realized how much of a waste of time that was) but I can enjoy a bit of schadenfreude over his flailing attempt at relevancy.
He shouldn’t worry, though. With Elon Musk hopping into the governing body of Twitter, Trump should have his tweets back in force in no time. Just in time for the 2024 presidential election. I suppose the TDS is justified a little.
Why Aren’t They Lowering the Age of Marriage for Boys?
Oh. Because they’re fucking stupid.
A Clark County School District student arrested in a targeted robbery and killing at a southwest Las Vegas home left his school homework in a car that police say was used to carry out the crime, according to a newly released arrest report in the case.
High school student Kamari Oliver, 18, has been charged with murder, robbery, burglary and kidnapping in the March 25 slaying of Natalie Manduley, 24, of Las Vegas, at a home near South Torrey Pines Drive and West Robindale Road. An arrest report for Oliver indicates he was taken into custody at a Las Vegas Valley high school on March 28.
The name of the school where Oliver was taken into custody was redacted from Oliver’s arrest report. The school district said Monday in an email it would not release the name of the school Oliver attended and that they would not “confirm nor deny a student by that name.”
It’s OK, though. Oliver is a student of the Las Vegas public schools which means he’s only just a bit less educated than the kids in Tennessee. On the other hand, I’ll bet they make him watch The Big Lewbowski over and over again in prison.
Hey, have a great weekend! If you’re in Vegas, check out anything Pierson Brown is doing, grab some grub at Vickie’s Diner (my favorite diner in town), and subscribe to Scott’s newsletter.
And maybe do some office work in a casino. It’ll change your entire perspective on going ‘back to the office’ and maybe encourage you to write How to Make Your 9-to-5 Office Bring In a Craps Table.
Be good.