Vegas

I know, I know. Mardi Gras, then Vegas. I know. Trust me, I'm completely viced out. It's refreshing to have it be actually dark out at night. But I'm getting ahead of myself...Vegas.

So my frisbee team, the ever-debaucherous Carleton Gods of Plastic (GOP), flew out of Minneapolis airport last Thursday night towards sunny Las Vegas for the annual Trouble in Vegas frisbee tournament. You know you're in Vegas when the second you step off the plane you can see over 20 slot machines glittering neatly outside your gate. Speaking as a first-time visitor, I think a pretty good characterization of Vegas is that every part of the city is trying to have sex with every orifice on your body at all times. We waited by the baggage claim tossing discs around as our eyes and ears were assault by the whirring of slot machines, neon lights, and sensationalized advertisements trying to draw customers to see Tony Danza gawk his way through The Producers or "Comedian of the Year" Carrot Top. Welcome to Vegas.

So we got to our hotel which was The Plaza, a landmark of the old strip with the Las Vegas Club and Binion's and the like. We got in around 2 AM and we were hungry as shit, so we forayed into the seedy underbelly of Thursday night Vegas and ended up at the restaurant in the basement of Binion's for a $4 breakfast special that was only served from midnight to 7 AM. We were a huge group, so our order took an understandably long time. Then our proprieters made the mistake of having the first thing they served 15 ravenous college students be not pancakes, not eggs, but about 50 tubs of freshly whipped butter.

It gets better. We play this game on tournament weekends called Ultimate Loser. The Ultimate Loser has to do whatever stupid shit a returning member of the team tells them to or they can challenge someone to a Beer Shotgunning contest of which the loser is the new Ultimate Loser. So I've never been Ultimate Loser, but this night the Ultimate Loser had already gone to bed, so I stood up to the team's sadistic appetites.

Within a minute I was dizzy from the force it took to suck butter through a straw. Butter didn't actually reach my mouth for a good 5 minutes, but by that time I was already feeling light-headed, and when the butter finally reached my mouth and my saliva started to taste like Denny's I nearly dry-heaved. Seeing my difficulty, the night manager of the place disappeared momentarily and returned with a shotglass of melted butter. I couldn't refuse his kindness. I had to throw back the butter shot. Through the straw was worse, I thought. Afterwards we headed back to our 3 hotel rooms for all 23 of us. Yep, rookies sleep on the floor.

We woke up the next day for some exciting W pool frisbee play. No joke, ABCDEF...W pool. We were ranked 75th of 80 teams when some teams we beat at Mardi Gras were in the 20's and 30's. So it goes. So we played our three games against Shippensberg, UCSB-B, and BYU-Idaho campus. I know. What a lineup. We defeated the first two teams pretty handily, but actually had some trouble with BYU Idaho, who would throw garbage throws and hucks and continually make amazing catches to score. Then we tightened up the D and shut them down in the second half.

Then it was time to heckle the CUT- Hodags game. CUT is the other team at Carleton. They're better than us, but we're not their B-team because we have some players that could be on CUT. They play to win Nationals, we like to drink and not be as serious. So we have something of a playful rivalry. So CUT and the Madison Hodags were two of the best teams at the tournament and tensions were high at the game. Then we landsharked. See the Mardi Gras article for an explanation of landsharking if you don't know, but just imagine a 5'3" naked leprechaun (The Ultimate Loser) zooming across an intense sports match with a frisbee in his ass carried by four goofballs in hawaiian shirts. I had his left leg.

The highlight of Friday night was the ridiculous Buffet at the Rio. It costs $23 and you have to wait in line for half an hour, but it's all kickass from there. The theme is foods of the world, so right of the bat I ate 30 pieces of sushi 10 crab legs. Having earned back my $23, i proceeded to binge on tacos, pizza, vietnamese pho, cajun shrimp, mac & cheese, rice, key lime pie, and gelato. With full bellies we cruised around the strip, lost money at the Bellagio, saw the fountains, and went back to the hotel.

Saturday was another wake up and play frisbee day. I'm not sure if there is such thing as a food hangover, but I had one. Our first game was against APU, a decent team, but one that we let score too many points. They took it to universe point when we got a Callahan (defensive catch in the other team's endzone) for the win. We took all the momentum from that game and squandered it away into a mediocre loss to the University of Vermont, a better team, but still well within our capacity of defeat. After a three-hour break we played Montana State and lost a close game and then trampled the University of Miami. Record so far: 5-2.

This brings me to Saturday night. February 9th. The 40th day of the year. 40 day. Fast forward to all of us drinking 40s of Colt 45 while three motorcyclists rode around in hectic zig-zags and loops inside a metal sphere. Only in Vegas. Also in the theme of 40 day, my buddy that looks like a leprechaun...we'll call him Leprechaun from now on, anyway Leprechaun was still the Ultimate Loser so he had to take his picture with some Chippendales dancers for the low low price of $40. I hope those pictures make it on the internet somehow.

Anyways, from there we hopped on a bus to the strip because no one wanted to DD. As is the tendency for long drunken bus rides, some crazy shit happened. One of my team mates, Dance Machine (you should see him), offered to sleep with a prostitute if we paid for it, and so began a night of bargain shopping that would ultimately yield no result...yet. The long bus ride also ended with an anxious peeing in an empty 40 bottle because he couldn't hold it any longer.

So let me tell you about the Trouble in Vegas tournament party. It was one of the most ridiculous and simultaneously well run parties I've ever experienced. It was a moving party to avoid the cops, with the stops at abandoned lots near major casinos, i.e. The lot a block east of the Luxor, or the abandoned field behind the Tropicana. It was ridiculous. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people were roaming around from lot to lot as guys with huge coolers dispensed punch and U-hauls full of booze drove around bestowing bottles of champagne on members of the crowd. I've really never experienced a party of such critical mass. There were cops and casino security, but they just couldn't stop us. We were too many people. I remember guzzling a mix of punch and champagne, then carrying one of my landsharking teammates, and my favorite memory, drunkenly talking in near-perfect Japanese to this cute japanese girl i met at the party for over an hour. This is the part of the night where my memory gets patchy, but i remember being in a taxi and someone handing my a Mcdonalds bag to boot in, which I did. Except, ha ha, jokes on me, there was a hole in the bottom, completely owning my favorite pair of jeans. As soon as we got to the hotel I wiped the vomit off my lap, threw $5 at the driver and escaped into the elevator before anyone was the wiser.

Then I woke up. Early. And we played and won our last two games against Shippensberg (again) and Virginia Tech. I strained my quad at some point during these games, so I guess I'll have to stay off it for a while. Then we headed over to watch the CUT Hodags rematch in the semifinals. We drank some brews and did some hilarious drunken heckling, such as counting the number of calls (40 in the first half). I believe the final score was 12-10 Madison, but they won on the cap. CUT actually scored the last point, and they had some momentum, but time ran out. Unfortunate.

That was the end of Trouble in Vegas for me and the GOP. We finished in 57th place out of 80, which is kind of bogus for a record of 7-2, but oh well. The tournament was really well run and the party was tight. Nice job Five Ultimate. We headed back to the slot-infested airport and I had a delicious Cinnabon before taking the plane home, arguably my favorite part of the weekend. I got back to Carleton at 8:45 AM, one hour before my first class and with no homework done. Thanks Vegas.