Florence Nightingale here got the chance to escape the convalescing and now healthy patients for a weekend with good friends in Las Vegas. Now, I hate Vegas for myriad reasons, not the least of which is that you’re guaranteed to see someone smoking while wearing an oxygen tank and sitting at a slot machine. Everything in the suitcase needs laundering when you get back, and you’ve got a nagging cough that just wasn’t there before you inhaled a lifetime’s worth of secondary smoke in one weekend. But hey, good food and drink and good friends – it was worth it.
People-watching there is excellent, but I found more intriguing the billboards advertising legal services, like this one:
“Re-Defining Personal” indeed! If this ad isn’t targeted at women, with its pinkish tones and especially with the himbo on the left, I don’t know what is! We saw several other lawyer ads with the same type of glamorous headshots, but nothing like the open-collared gentleman in this ad!
Vegas is all about getting you intoxicated enough to do wild things and spend lots of money, as The Hangover movie franchise has deftly illustrated. Before the proprietor of a downtown liquor store yelled at me to stop taking photos, I snapped a photo of this candidate for the Drinking with my Ladybrain hall of fame:
According to the Crosby Lake Spirits Company, which makes Kinky, Kinky is a “naughty infusion of premium vodka” distilled with mango, blood orange liqueur, and passion fruit. The website? Well, its photos aren’t subtle. I’d say this drink is marketed to men trying to seduce women into doing something kinky. As I’ve still got a nearly-full bottle of Nuvo in my fridge, I think I’ll give Kinky a pass.
Finally, we saw some brand extension of what Nancy Friedman has called “the curse of strong drink”:
Now you can find not just Feckin Irish Whiskey but Feckin Spiced, presumably for a feckin good time. And I do like how they let you click to “Find a Feckin Stockist” on their site! This one seems like good-hearted vulgarity, and not just vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake (Suxx Vodka, I’m looking at you!)
So Vegas was a good time, and since it’s a great midpoint for getting together with friends from Seattle. And for classic kitsch if you’re headed that way: run, don’t walk to the Peppermill – the bygone “glamour” of its Fireside Lounge is not to be missed.
P.S. A thank you once again to Nancy for reminding me to get back on the ladybrain drinking/blogging horse!