Not quite non-fiction

I just finished reading Bringing Down The House, the story of how a bunch of students from M.I.T. who, working as a team, counted cards and learned how to beat blackjack, taking Vegas for millions over the course of a few years. It's all Heidi's fault that I picked it up in the first place - we've been watching more Vegas movies than you can shake a stick at. We just finished a 10 episode series that we picked up at Wal-Mart for 5 bucks called Vegas: The City The Mob Made which taught us more about Vegas than we ever thought there was to know. The other thing we learned from this series is that there is more than one way to interview people rather than just having them look at the camera. One guy was photographed from below, focusing on his jowls, and another guy was always shot in a Streisand-esque profile, hiding the other side of his face. As near as I can tell, he is disfigured on that side from a nasty chemical burn.

So all this Vegas stuff has really piqued my own interest in it. I picked up Bringing Down The House because the movie based on the book (21) is in the watch-instantly Netflix queue. I know one thing for certain, it was a fast read. It started out a bit on the slow side, but wasted no time in getting to the action. After that, it read so quickly that it took me less than a week to finish it. And what was even better was that it was all true.

Or was it?

As it turns out, great literary license has been taken with the story. While it is based on "true events," the story told in the book is not strictly true, with some parts heavily embellished and other parts completely fabricated. Much like The Amityville Horror, a book debunking THAT supposedly true story I just finished reading, Bringing Down The House would not pass a polygraph test.

I don't have a problem with a little bit of literary license. Who among us is not guilty of adding little bits to a story to make it better? I've done it many times, but the difference is that when I have done it, I have not completely made up whole sections of the story and then tried to pass it off as true. To do this and then proceed to market it as non-fiction is misrepresentation at best and outright deception at worst. I suppose the reasoning behind the embellishment is to improve the narrative flow or to make the story more interesting, but if you're going to do that, please label it as a novel or other work of fiction. A similar argument was used in the marketing of The Amityville Horror ("who wants to read a book about a non-haunted house?") But if you make shit up or combine characters or change the order of things, you can no longer call it a "true story."

While I enjoyed the book, I found myself a bit mad at it for its dishonesty. Hidden in Bringing Down The House is an intriguing story, but you just don't know what to believe. That was distracting and made the book less than recommendable. I'm curious to see what is changed in the movie version - perhaps that version will be more accurate and true-to-life, but I'm not holding my breath.

The mister's Vegas mug

Heidi recently did a post on the coffee mug that is seeing her through NaNoWriMo. It's a Las Vegas mug with her name on it that my folks bought for her on one of their many trips to Vegas. I remember asking them to bring a couple back in 2006 after I had the epic fail of not buying one on my first trip to Vegas in May of 06 to see Madonna (seriously, we just barely made our flight as it was without me hemming and hawing over which mug to buy.) So over the years, they've purchased us several different Las Vegas mugs - my favorite being one that condensed the Las Vegas Strip onto one mug, highlighting the most famous hotels and landmarks on the Strip.

This summer, during our very brief stopover in Vegas, I found one that I liked better.

Here's the thing. When we went on our trip out west this summer, I knew that I was going to buy several mugs. It's kind of my thing - I buy one from just about every place I go. I still miss the mammoth mug of the U.S. Capitol that we bought when we went to D.C. in 2000. (I accidentally dropped it on a cement floor and watched it break. Jesus wept.) But what I knew we did not need were more Vegas mugs so if we were to stop there, I would not be buying one. We already have to cycle mugs out of the cupboard to keep them from overflowing.

However, I saw this and could not pass it up.

As you might expect, I hemmed and hawed over it even though it was fantastically cheap (it was certainly no more than 4 bucks.) What eventually tipped the scales in favor of purchasing it was how fabulously retro it is, down to the red dice and iconic Vegas sign. So many of the mugs in Vegas are trashy and gaudy and gross, this one was kind of cute. It was like the little mug that could.

So I purchased it. And it has slowly found its way into my most favored mugs. It's small which necessitates more frequent trips to the kitchen, but I kind of like its smallness. So many mugs are just monstrous nowadays and it's nice to see ones that don't take half the pot of coffee when you fill them.

It's Vegas, baby!

No sooner has Heidi got one book sold and another submitted for consideration, she's prepping for another one that she's going to tackle during National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short). And even though the actual writing of it doesn't start until November 1st, she's already knee deep in research. This one is set in Las Vegas, a town which we only blew through during our trip out west this summer, and deals specifically with the game of poker, which she knew literally nothing about other than it was played with cards.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to educate yourself on these kinds of things, and one of the ways she's been doing it is watching a shitload of movies set in Las Vegas. The tricky thing is that it has to be current Las Vegas, not the Vegas of the 50s or even the Vegas of the 70s. There was some VERY brief talk of taking a quick trip out there over our anniversary weekend, and obviously since we're just finishing up that weekend, we didn't do it. In hindsight, it was a very wise decision considering all that's happened with the car and some other behind-the-scenes stuff I won't get into here. But anyway, short of actually going to Vegas, watching movies set in Vegas is kind of the next best thing. So last night we watched The Cooler and Lucky You. Both were subpar overall but what we really enjoyed was the depiction of Las Vegas. Vegas is almost a character in the movie itself - especially in The Cooler.

Las Vegas is not a city that we ever thought we would want to visit, it was kind of an afterthought on our vacation this summer. The only reason we really went there was because we were looking for some place to stop between L.A. and Glenwood Springs, CO. Truthfully, we should have stopped somewhere in Utah, but it worked out as getting stuck in L.A. rush hour traffic made getting out of L.A. a 2+ hour endeavor on its own, causing us to pull into Vegas at 10pm. Seriously, the drive into Vegas on I-15 after dark, seeing the lights of the Strip in the distance - one of my favorite memories of the trip. I vividly remember that "I Love New York" was playing at that time and although it wasn't New York, it seemed appropriate driving music.

Heidi was pleasantly surprised by Las Vegas. She had never been sold on Vegas, fearing it to be a bigger version of Reno, a city she really hated. My folks have a time share in Vegas and keep trying to get us to go out for a week, and she has never wanted to. But after spending some time there - I think we were there for about 12 hours, which was just about the same amount of time Jeff and I were there for the Confessions Tour - she began to see the draw. And now that she's writing a book set there, well, let's just say that she really wants to get out there.

I have to say that I both understand and don't understand the draw of Vegas. In an attempt to replicate a Vegas experience this weekend, we headed down to Prairie Meadows casino in Altoona, IA, where we lost 20 bucks in under 5 minutes on the roulette wheel. I will admit to having fantasies of hitting it big and coming home with thousands of dollars, but I probably have as much likelihood of winning the lottery that I never play. Mostly because of the financial craziness that is such an omnipresent part of my life, that would be an easy way to fix that. But trust me, my mother's first child is no dummy and I realize the folly of thinking that. The house always wins. Always. And the only way out from under financial craziness is hard work and discipline, not hoping for a miracle that will never come.

But let me tell you, if Kylie sets up residency in Vegas as is rumored right now, I'll figure out a way to get there. Because, as Kylie says, it's Vegas baby!