Jil McIntosh: Rude, Lewd & Tattooed

And the Nobel prize goes to ...

... Greenies, the company that makes Pill Pockets. I'm serious. These folks deserve the Oscar, the Grammy, the Pulitzer, and whatever other prizes are available.

Some background: Puccini, that adorable little waif in the photo, is getting older, and her thyroid is starting to present some problems. The vet has prescribed pills. Now, getting Puccini to take a pill the conventional way would involve my local hospital, where I'd be going to get sewn up after she finally spit out the pill for the 15th time. When the vet said she's going to be on pills twice a day for the next month at least, my heart sank ... and I checked how much medical coverage I have.

Enter Pill Pockets. These are soft little chewy treats with a hole in the middle. You put the pill in, glump the treat around it, and present it to the pet. Puccini's sharp as a whip and can usually figure out if you're trying to pull a fast one, but the taste buds prevailed: Pill Pocket and pill disappeared in the blink of an eye, and she was begging for more.

Pill Pocket People, I can't thank you enough.

Good lord, people, it's only November!

A friend reported spotting one in his neighborhood three weeks ago, but on Friday, I spied my first Christmas tree. Fully decorated, blazing with lights, in the front window of a house down the road. Yes, on November 13.

In addition, there are at least a half-dozen houses in the area with Christmas lights already on, this early in the season.

At this point, isn't the tree just part of the decor, like the drapes or the pictures on the wall? How can it be special if it's been up for more than a month prior to the big day -- and, if some of the houses around here are any indication, for a month or more following it as well?

My late uncle told me that when he was a child, the house was completely empty right up to when he went to bed on Christmas Eve. Looking back on it, he marvelled at how much work his parents put into it, and finally understood why they were so tired on Christmas morning. When he got up the next morning, the house was completely decorated -- tree up, wreaths hung, stockings on the mantel, pine boughs over the door. Santa didn't just bring presents, he brought the whole damn thing.

Imagine how magical it must have been, to go to bed in a plain house and wake up the next morning to all of that. No wonder it takes a mountain of gifts to make children even understand that the day is special -- how else could it be, when Christmas has been around since before Remembrance Day?

Seafood -- Life is good!

Normally it's a one-day-a-year treat, but twice in one week I have had the heavenly experience of stone crab claws. The first was at Joe's Stone Crab, at its Las Vegas outpost.

The second was at Monty's Raw Bar in Miami, where I sat outside near the marina soaking up the beautiful weather and the beautiful crabs.

It's been worth all the hassle of flying just to get to places like those ...

The loonies gain a victory again ...

Maine failed to legalize gay marriage in a vote earlier this week. And of course, the loonies came out of the woodwork:

"Every time the citizens have voted on marriage, they have always sided with natural marriage," said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based Christian legal group.

Natural marriage? Goodness. Who ever expected that dressing a dozen of your friends in ugly matching dresses, pushing a piece of cake into your beloved's face, compiling a list of expensive gifts for your relatives to buy for you, dropping $1,000 on a dress you'll wear just once, getting plastered with your buddies the night before, and bankrupting your parents for the sake of a party is natural?

Fun with advertising!

I received an advertisement in the mail: the folks at the magazine Border Crossings want me to subscribe.

Why should I? Well, according to the flyer they sent, Border Crossings is renowned for it's in-depth conversations with artists.

More on Las Vegas and coming home ...

- If I'd had a pocket full of disposable cash, I would have bought them: blue-and-black real-snakeskin cowboy boots. Yeah, I know: me, in blue-and-black real-snakeskin cowboy boots. But they were gorgeous. No, really, they were. And they were $1,550, which is why you won't see me in blue-and-black real-snakeskin cowboy boots anytime soon.

- Why is it some people are smart enough to have a job that makes enough money that they can go to Vegas, but they're still dumb as stumps? Case in point: the young man whose seat was in the middle, beside my aisle seat. That's my seat, he said, and waited for me to get up and let him in. By standing in the aisle. Right in front of my seat, so the only way I could possibly have gotten around him to let him in would have been if my waist size was 12 inches around.

- Now here's something I've never had happen before: the plane parked on the wrong side of the terminal. Which meant that when we got off, instead of being funneled to the Canadian customs room, we were simply dumped into the domestic terminal, where several people with carry-on bags just walked out of the airport before any of the authorities caught on. And since this sort of thing normally doesn't happen, nobody knew what to do. We were finally herded together, taken through the emergency exit, walked up the down staircase to the customs booths, cleared, taken back past the guards to someone who came out to collect our customs forms, and finally allowed to leave. I heard someone say the airport and Air Canada are in for a hefty fine for this breach of security.

- And finally, my jaw dropped at this one. The boy involved couldn't have been more than fourteen years old. His mother had handed him the customs form, so he could fill out and sign his portion. When he gave it back to her, she looked at it and said, "What on earth did you buy for $500?" Hey, son, I hope it at least had snakeskin on it.

Things that always amaze me about Las Vegas ...

- The airport, where I just paid $10.25 for a container of raw vegetables and a bottle of orange juice, has free, works-flawlessly Internet access.

- That parents with small children will look at a casino, where people are drinking, smoking and gambling, half-nude hookers are walking through, and drunks are the norm, and think it's a great place to take said children. The number of morons who do this just boggles the mind.

- Every time I'm here, someone sticks a key card in my hotel door late at night. Okay, I've misread the room number and tried the wrong door once or twice, but this happens to me every single time (not counting the one visit when a man pounded on my door at 3 a.m., and when I told him it wasn't his room, he yelled at me that he knew it wasn't, and open this goddamn door right now!). Do people prowl the halls with found or stolen key cards, trying every door to see if they can get one to open?

- My attempt to order a yoghurt at the TCBY counter in the Flamingo. The picture showed a cup of yoghurt with fruit on top, for $3.79. Mine came sans fruit. I pointed to the picture. "The picture's wrong," the server said. "No, it doesn't work that way," I said. "The picture shows fruit, and I would like some fruit." She pointed to the sign over the cash register and said, "See, fruit costs extra." The sign over the cash register also showed fruit on the yoghurt, for $3.79, with no mention of any extra charge. She finally gave a huge sigh and put some strawberries in my cup. I felt like a jerk making a fuss over a spoonful of fruit, but dammit, I was in the mood for fruit, the picture showed fruit included, and I'd just finally had enough.

- The Hofbrauhaus, a recreation of the famous brew house in Munich, turned out to be amazingly good. Having been to the one in Germany, we went mostly to see how badly Las Vegas could screw it up. Turns out it's owned by the Munich company, and the beer and food comes in directly. The white sausages, pretzel, red cabbage and spatzle were as good as any I'd had over in the Fatherland.

- Only on the Las Vegas strip can you get stone crabs from Florida (and they were delicious), king crab from Alaska, kobe beef from Japan, and lamb from New Zealand ... but not a single vegetable other than deep-fried potatoes. I was getting so green-veggie-starved, the palm tree fronds were starting to look good.

- And what amazes me the most? I'm already looking forward to coming back. Go figure.

Breaking news we didn't expect ...

The info I have is sketchy, because it was on the overhead screen in the restaurant, but it seems that someone has killed seven people and wounded another 15 in a shooting in Texas.

And what was one of CNN's headlines? President Obama advised of fatal shooting.

Nothing gets past that man, I swear.

Lost in translation ...

I bought a little plastic protective screen that fits over the display on my digital camera. See if you can guess where it's made:

Attach long hours by product that can protect perfectly LCD of digital camera from external impact or dust scar and it is product that always can have preservation status such as new product even if use.

Use and produced highest grade polycarbonate quality of the material to be more stronger and keeps 100% transparency because become UV coating processing work for ultraviolent rays interception.

Use method

1. LCD Panel and surrounding to be attached clearly digital camera with clean cloth.

2. Confirm position of part that wish to attach taking out LCD Panel Guard.

3. Attach on sticking part after remove thin splice vinyl of LCD Panel Guard backside.

4. Establishment is completion if press surrounding firmly once more if attached exactly and remove vinyl of obverse.