I’d been to Las Vegas before, but this was my first as a legal piece of meat, and in the eyes of business owners, I metamorphosed from a lowly bug that’s been ruining the shrubs and is generally bad for business, into a magical funnel that takes in large volumes of alcohol and turns it into currency. The last time I made an appearance in I was in high school, and I was nothing more than a liability to the Casinos, a walking infraction waiting to happen, so the whole gaming world wrote me off as the plague the Old Testament forgot to include, leaving me to wonder what the big deal is. But now, NOW I was the target market, and all of a sudden the city made sense to me, I was like Neo seeing the fabric of the matrix for the first time. The rooms are cheap so you will come and gamble, the food is cheap so you will play Keno, and the drinks are free to increase the house’s advantage at blackjack and to keep you playing slots when you should just walk away with your $6 of winnings at the nickel slots. When they say “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” they’re referring your ATM withdrawals.

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We got 50% off tickets to The Star Trek Experience at the Hilton through Tix4Tonight, which exceeded my expectations, but the best part about about the experience is Quark’s Bar And Restaurant, where I got to drink one of these, a Borg Sphere, which includes five ounces of liquor (Midori?) and dry ice for a bubbly, swampy effect. It was by far the most visually interesting drink I’ve ever seen, alcoholic or otherwise. Here’s Lauren with the remains of the collective:

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Question: Are there thousands of street walkers intermingling with normal casino-goers or is there something about Vegas that makes your average woman believe that vinyl is way attractive and chain link is an acceptable material for a shirt to be made out of.