Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers!

Props go out to the 12-time world champion Green Bay Packers on winning the NFC Central division title today, by beating up all over the stinking Raiduhs (Raiders)!  Start printing those playoff tickets, and bring on the Cowboys for a rematch!

 

As usual, ticket scalpers and greed are ruining the concert industry!

Yes, Garth Brooks is doing a special fundraiser concert for California fire victims and firefighters and sold all tickets for $38.50 (with ALL profits going to the charities).  As usual, however, ticket scalpers and greed are ruining the concert industry.  Wow, the show sold out in three minutes?  Wow, almost every ticket seems to now be for sale on eBay, and with other scalpers, for hundreds of dollars (or more).  I can assure you that almost none of the sellers are forwarding all of their profits (made from ripping off the Garth Brooks fans) will be going to the charities, just into these scalpers’ pockets.  How can we stop this?  I think Garth should cancel, and reschedule just to cause hassle to the scalpers.

 

Can we please have parking spots big enough for our normal-sized cars to fit in? Oh, and how about bringing back angled parking?

What is going on with parking lot designers these days?  I am beginning to think that they are using some cheap software program that appears to have been written using metric measurements or something!  And to boot, once their design is stenciled-out onto the parking lot, nobody does any real world testing to see if anything other than an old Yugo will fit into the spaces!  I’m sure you’ve noticed this trend as well.  You see a nicely restriped parking lot, and as you cruise into it you think to yourself “wow, it looks like they somehow have created more parking spots than they had before”!  Then, of course, when you try parking in one of these new parking spots, it all becomes clear.  EVEN IF you are careful and talented in parking your car, it doesn’t even fit into the space all of the way.  And that’s when you are driving an average sized car.  If by some chance you are driving a full sized truck, or an SUV of any time, you almost don’t even fit into two of these fabulous parking spaces!  I know, I know, some of the fault of this is due to some starry-eyed legislator who, in a deranged form of logic, thinks that if he or she forces businesses to make smaller “compact” parking spaces, then this will then force the American public to give up their trucks, their SUVs, their mid-sized cars, and even their smallish sports cars, and instead purchased one of those small toasters on wheels!….ALL SO THAT THEY CAN COMFORTABLY PARK WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THE “COMPACT” PARKING SPACES!  Unfortunately, reality sets in when nobody buys new cars to fit a parking space, and instead just parks as well as they possibly can, ends up getting door dings, and leaves the parking lot frustrated.  So, in a nutshell, due to these “compact” parking spaces, cars all across America are more door-dinged up than ever.  It’s a blight of our country that MUST BE STOPPED!  Please help!  Let’s find a way to bring back full sized parking spaces….or at least the gentle, elegant beauty of “angled parking!!!!!!!

 

Top 5 ways to make your house boating trip better (by a newbie):

5) Wi-fi access would be nice, or at least some cellular service!

 

4) And maybe some trees…obviously there aren’t any in the desert.

 

3) Find a houseboat that was designed for full size adults.  There was not much room for me (6′2″) to sleep, go up and down the stairs, shower, etc.

 

2) If the rental company boasts that the boat “sleeps twelve”, check to see how many actual beds.  It would be best then to only take 8 adults, and maybe three kids under 7 years old. 

 

1) Unless you are house boating in Canada, take your house boating trip in February, not in August when it’s 113 degrees (especially in Lake Mead).

 

Aquarius hotel/casino in Laughlin. Poor customer service and no management response.

Not long ago I received a very nice looking glossy full-page advertisement stuffed in with the Sunday paper’s ads. It was for the “new” Aquarius hotel and casino in Laughlin. Repeatedly in this high-gloss ad, it talked about the “new” hotel on the river in Laughlin. It sure looked nice, and the introductory room prices were good, so I called them up and made reservations. Well…as we pulled into the parking lot of the Aquarius, it was obvious that this was not a “new” hotel in any way, shape, or form. Even on the outside, it looked like a run down hotel and casino, with a shiny new Aquarius logo slapped on it. After parking, and lugging our bags into the casino, we were immediately hit with the smell of 20+ years of smoke and a VERY dated casino hotel lobby. Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?! However, the worse was yet to come. As I opened up the door to our “new hotel on the river” room, my first thought was “what a dump”! I could understand is they would have advertised this Aquarius as a “under new ownership” hotel/casino, but to make the advertising flier represent it as a “new hotel” was misleading at best. Heck, other than the signage out front, and new casino gaming tables and chairs, this hotel SHOULD NOT HAVE EVEN BEEN CONSIDERED AS A REMODEL! Remodeling of the rooms had not even been started. Truth be told, it didn’t appear that a clean up of any kind had been attempted. The chairs in our rooms had ill-fitting seat covers on them. There was a huge red stain on the dated and worn out carpet that looked like wine (or worse) had been spilled there ten years ago! Ughhh! The bathroom was so dated and had such low-quality items in it, that I think the Motel-6 would have seemed elite in comparison. After a couple days, it was time to check-out and head home. I filled out the room survey, and noted the improper advertising of the hotel as “new”, the bad upholstery cover-up attempt, the ridiculously disgusting red stain on the carpet, and that the hotel should not have opened until some remodeling had been done. At the check-out desk, I asked if I could see the manager to briefly go over the room survey with him/her. They were “unavailable”, and the desk clerk assured me that they would give the room survey to the manager. A business with any sort of customer service at all would have called me after reading of my poor image of their hotel/casino. I never received a phone call…not even a fax. A few days later, I received an automatically-generated email request for an online review of my stay at the Aquarius in Laughlin. I filled it out in the same manner as before….and just as before, nobody has ever contacted me to apologize for the poor room, offer any sort of discount….NOTHING. In summary, the Aquarius Hotel/Casino in Laughlin’s idea of customer service is the same….NOTHING! Do you have similar stories to share? I would love to read them.

Thanks, Wayne.