MAGIC         PORK

Subtitle: My generous uvula

After going to some of the aforementioned clubs Thursday night, I hit the sack. During the night I woke up and felt like I was choking on something. I could breathe okay, but something was in my throat, making me gag. So I went to the bathroom and tried to cough it up. I figured out that something seemed to be hanging from my uvula, that thing that hangs down at the back of your mouth. (see diagram)

(That doesn’t look comfortable - couldn’t they have just pulled the lips back with their fingers?)

I could feel it with my tongue and I tried pushing it up against the roof of my mouth to dislodge it. Eventually I realized… it was my uvula. My uvula had gotten immensely big and hung down really far into my throat, triggering my gag reflex. I had never experienced this before, nor heard of this type of thing. But after I realized what was happening, I managed to deal with the gagging okay and decided to just go back to sleep.

But around 8 AM, I woke up choking again. My throat was also sore. This time I said okay something weird’s going on here. (Yes, you would think I would have reached that conclusion the first time but I hadn’t gotten much sleep.) I called my doctor - he was out of the office but I got the doctor on duty. After describing the problem (except I couldn’t remember what that thing that hangs down was called) and answering a couple questions, conversation went like:

Her: (calmly) Okay, well how about you come in and we’ll take a look?

Me: I can’t come in, I’m in Las Vegas.

Her: (not too calmly) You’re in Las Vegas right now??!

Me: Yeah, I’m on vacation.

Her: (with very serious tone) OK you need to go to a hospital or clinic right away, within the next hour or two. No question.

Me: Uh… okay.

Her: No question.

So I took a cab to some emergency clinic that happened to be right down the street. After waiting about 90 minutes I finally got in to see the doctor and he said it was probably just a sore throat. He would normally do a culture but I was only in town for a short while so he gave me a prescription for antibiotics and said if it was still a problem when I got back home, see my doctor. (Coincidentally it turns out the doctor used to work at Strong Memorial here in Rochester.)

I was starting to think maybe I had been bitten by some weird desert insect or something the way the doctor had reacted over the phone, but she was probably just being really cautious. I still don’t know what the heck that was all about, but turns out a couple people I know have had that happen before so I won’t worry too much about it. The uvula went down in size over the next couple days and I managed to not let it or the sore throat ruin my weekend. Who’d have known that gin & tonics make good sore throat cures? (Don’t take medical advice from magicpork.com.)

Even though I was feeling better, a couple days after getting home I went to see my doctor and he said whatever it was, it was gone now. I swear my uvula is still not quite back to normal but maybe I’m just more aware of it now. My doctor said that it looked like I just had a “generous uvula”. I had to smile at that but refrained from saying “that’s what the ladies say”. He says my generous uvula probably contributed to the problem.

Not quite the Vegas post you were expecting huh? OK, how’s this.. I saw the comedian Bobby Slayton perform and he was really funny. Oh and we had some cab drivers say some amusing things which I absolutely can’t repeat here.

I met up with some college buddies in Las Vegas again. You can read about my previous trip here and here.

I got back into blackjack this time. Last time I didn’t play it much because I hadn’t refreshed my memory on the basic strategy. Well this time I didn’t prior to the trip either but I spent some time in the hotel room, enough to memorize it pretty well. I won some, lost some. But had a good time.

I also went to a couple of nightclubs there. Flew in on a Tuesday with my friend Joe. The others flew in later. We decided to check out Pure, in Caesar’s Palace. Supposedly it’s some hip place that celebrities occasionally go to. I went all out and wore a suit because - hey I was in Vegas. In Rochester if I went to a club in a suit, people would look at me like “what, did you just come from a wedding?” but in Vegas, it’s all good.

We figured on a Tuesday it would be dead but we had to wait in line for over an hour to get in there. We didn’t even want to get in that bad, we were just curious what the big deal was that people would wait so long - and didn’t have anything better to do just then. The reason it took so long is because there were all these people on a guest list in other lines and they’d be let in first then every once in a while they’d throw us a bone and let 5 or 6 from our “nobody” line in. We were still on Rochester time so we were tired. But we ended up hanging out there for a while and had a good time even though I didn’t see what was so special about that club.

On other days, we went to Body English inside Hard Rock, and Moon and ghostbar inside Palms. (Rain was closed that day.) Moon and ghostbar are at the top of the building and have an amazing view of the city. The music was pretty good too. Here’s a pic I grabbed from Moon’s website:

That’s the Strip you see in the background. The light beaming into the sky is the light from the top of the Luxor pyramid. Here’s one from ghostbar’s website:

I get a kick out of the descriptions on Moon and ghostbar’s websites. Here’s some snippets from ghostbar:

Indoors amid the seductive shadows, the sleek, chic ghostbar offers ultra lounging luxury among an ethereal color scheme of silver, white, greens and grays.

and

Behind the bar, shelves of premium spirits glow with the incandescence cast by backlit panels of acrylic-encased fabric.

Phew… is it hot in here? I feel like I need to take a cold shower after reading that. I bet you thought it was just a bar with a cool view, didn’t you?

Stay tuned for part two, where my Vegas trip takes a very strange twist. I guarantee whatever you’re thinking it is, it’s not. Well unless you’re one of the people I’ve talked to about it already.

About a month back, I was shopping in Marketplace Mall in Henrietta and I discovered that Thali of India has a booth in the food court there. This shows how often I go to Marketplace because from what I’ve read online, it’s been there since May. I usually shop at Eastview. But now that I know I can get Indian food in a mall I’ll go there more often. I repeat… Indian food in a mall!! I love America!

Eastview, you may be reigning supreme in Rochester-area malls right now, but I suggest you step it up and get an Indian restaurant in there. If you have to get rid of someone to make room, kick sbarro out.

It doesn’t have to be Thali that goes in there. A lot of people rave about their chicken makhani - it’s “award-winning” apparently - and sure it’s good, but they put honey in it which makes it sweeter than I prefer. Just get some Indian restaurant in there because otherwise Marketplace will be seeing more of my business.

I just noticed that both of those malls are owned by the same company, Wilmorite. So my threat won’t work. Fine then. Could you at least get rid of sbarro though? I got spaghetti and meatballs from them once and it was absolutely horrible. The spaghetti was burnt for crying out loud! I’m all for second chances but not this time. It’s a big chain. They can handle losing one location.

The “all black tonight” misunderstanding that I wrote about recently reminded me of another incident that happened a couple years back. I was with the same friend and we decided to stop into a club that we had never been in before. The bouncer was a middle-aged white woman. Conversation went something like:

Her: You know it’s Latin night?

Us: (Thinking maybe it was some special event) No… Does that mean we can’t go in?

Her: Oh no, you can go in.

Us: Is there an extra cover?

Her: No, there’s no cover.

Us: (Confused) OK… thanks…

OK so we didn’t actually talk in unison. That would be a little weird. I just can’t remember who said what.

We walked into the club and sure enough it was all Latin-American people and Latin-American music. OK so we stood out a bit, but still - the only apparent reason she told us it was Latin Night was because she saw two white boys and thought “I’d better warn these guys”.

They had a big screen playing funny clips of stuff. So we mostly watched the TV and the people salsa dancing, had a drink, and left. Got to my car and there were no hubcaps on it.

What?! I’m just saying I have aluminum alloy wheels and I don’t have hubcaps. What did you think I meant? Some people can be so racist!

This is unrelated, but I’m reminded of this kid from high school. I went to a junior/senior high school so it was 7th through 12th grade. I was a senior at the time. I got to lunch one day and there was this little 7th grade Latino kid sitting with my friends. He spoke English fine and everything so I think he grew up here but his parents were from Puerto Rico. BTW, I grew up in a small upstate NY town… not a lot of minorities there.

A tangent to a tangent: I was talking to someone once who asked about my hometown “not a lot of black people there huh?”. I gave a little fake chuckle because I thought he was just making a comment (albeit strange) on the lack of diversity in upstate NY. So I said “no” and before I could continue, he said, with a straight face, “good”. It was a little uncomfortable after that.

Anyway, I assumed the others knew this kid but after asking around, I don’t think anyone did. He was just sitting there and wouldn’t move when we showed up. We’d tell him to get lost because who wants some random 7th grader sitting at your table? But he’d just ignore us and stick around anyway, and none of us really cared so he just became part of our table. I guess he didn’t have friends and just felt cool hanging out with seniors - but someone should have told this guy we were the uncool senior table. His name was Paco. We’d still tell him to move all the time if he was in our seat but we weren’t mean about it. It was more of a playful thing. He knew we didn’t mind him being there, as long as we had a spot to sit.

Anyway I bring all this up because Paco wasn’t his real name. We just called him Paco and he seemed fine with that. There was some kid named Paco on 3-2-1 Contact, which we all used to watch when we were younger, and that’s where we got the name. I realize now that was a little culturally-insensitive. That would be like calling an Indian kid Apu. We didn’t mean anything by it, but it still wasn’t cool. I wonder where Paco is now. And what his real name is.

With all the talk about the new sitcom Cavemen - you know, the one about those cavemen from the Geico ads - I just had to watch it. I expected it to completely suck since I don’t even care for the ads but I figured I should see it for myself before passing judgment. So I TiVo’d it and last night I finally brought myself to watch it.

And it was funny.

I’m not being sarcastic. I laughed out loud. It was good from the start until the end. I couldn’t believe it but it was actually funny. It takes a lot of guts to tell the whole world that you loved a show that is getting almost universally panned but there you have it.

If you look around online you’ll see everyone saying how awful it was. I don’t know what show they were watching. Everyone has a different sense of humor so I can definitely see some people not liking it, but the way people are talking as if it’s the worst pile of filth to ever grace the screen makes me think that they were determined that they were going to hate it no matter what and are sticking with that.

You know I have a good sense of humor because you read magicpork.com so I won’t bother trying to qualify myself to you.

I don’t know if they’ll be able to make a whole series out of this however. I’m pretty sure they’ll milk every drop of humor they can out of the caveman setup - if they are even given enough time to before being yanked off the air. But the pilot episode? Great stuff.

Tell me I’m wrong if you wish - but only if you’ve actually watched the pilot. If you missed it, you can watch it on abc.com.

I have no problem with people stealing images from my site. Most of them I’ve stolen from other sites. However, when I steal an image, I copy it over to my server, so that it’s being pulled from magicpork.com. I don’t have the image link to another site. When you do that, you’re using up the bandwidth of the other site because even though it looks like the image is on your site, every time someone loads your site, it’s actually loading the image from the other site’s server.

Well there are plenty of other people that aren’t that considerate or else don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. I can bring up some statistics about my site so I know there are a bunch of sites referring to me that have no reason whatsoever to have a link to magicpork.com.

I first discovered this a long time ago when I posted an entry with a picture of the New Mexico flag - which of course I grabbed from somewhere else. I was wondering why someone’s MySpace page was linking to that image. Every time you post a comment on a friend’s MySpace page you can include an image with your profile and this guy was using the flag image and directly linking to my site every time he posted a comment! I contacted him and asked that he please just make a copy of the image so that he wasn’t using my bandwidth. I didn’t hear back from him and when I checked a few days later he hadn’t changed it yet. I didn’t check again and just gave up. It’s not like my site gets so many hits that it slows it down.

But now there’s a lot of people linking to my images. I look through the referrer list and scratch my head as to why a particular site would be linking to me. If it’s a legitimate link, like “hey check out this AWESOME website” then I have no problem with that. But no, it’s just someone stealing an image, probably after finding it through a Google Images search.

The most popular ones are without a doubt the pictures I took of toilet paper. Those I did take myself. Everything from a blog entry about what I was talking about, how to load the toilet paper - to some sports site saying “Orioles 6, Yankees 3″ and the caption “CRAP!” - to some Dutch site with the phrase “Doet me een beetje hier aan denken”, whatever that means - to a site saying “All Hail The New Currency In Jail”. People loooove the toilet paper.

Back when I was first starting MagicPork, I was talking with my friend Pat of patandfran.com and he was saying that people would do this to him. He said he was tempted to just change the image on them to something really raunchy so that it would show up on their site that way unless they stopped linking to it. Now I see his frustration.

That would be funny, but would also mean I’d have to change my site to not link to that image. Instead, what I’ve chosen to do is implement a little fix I read about online so that an external site can’t reference an image on my site. Apparently this isn’t a foolproof method, and some browsers may not handle this correctly. So if you have problems viewing the site, let me know. But it seems to work okay for me in Firefox and IE.

Speaking of “let me know”… I’ve never included an email address on magicpork.com. This was intentional because I didn’t want tons of spam. I also didn’t know why a stranger visiting my site would want to email me. But perhaps some people would want to give me feedback but don’t want to post a comment for everyone to see, or they just notice something broken with my site and want to alert me to it. Or you’re from Gillette and want to send me a check for my free advertising.

I already get a lot of spam so I’m just not that concerned any more. In fact most spam that I get now is the comment spam that I’ve talked about before. I should let you know that I delete comments to posts older than a couple months or so without even looking at them. I just delete it because most comment spam I get is to older posts and I get a lot of it. So if you had a legitimate comment to an older post that never made it to the site, that’s what happened.

But I still don’t want extra spam or my numerous obsessed stalker fans having my normal email address, so I’m listing a magicpork one. If you know my email address already, you may continue to use it. Everyone else, you can email me at the address listed on my updated About / Contact page. You’ll also find a picture I just took of myself in my bathroom. Hey, it was the best lighting I could find in my apartment. Oh and… you’re welcome.

Even if we’ve never met before, feel free to drop me an email and let me know what you think of my site. I appreciate feedback. Especially since I’m confident it will all be positive. And of course you can always post a comment - that is, if you’re not too much of a coward!