i never got a chance to join but the people in my beijing hockey league who'd travel for international tournaments always said it was incredible fun

gman, have you seen fury and on a scale of 1-10 how much does the ending piss you off?

Is The Bellagio worth $300/night more than Caesars? For context, traveling with wife and dogs to Vegas for my 40th. Caesars has minimal dog fee, and Bellagio is $300/night. I've never stayed at the Bellagio, but I would prefer to over what I've read about Caesars.

It's for my 40th, so I don't want to be cheap. skwid gave me advice years ago when I bought my road bike, "A year from now, will you give a shyt about the $$$?" But bikes >>>> hotels.

Happy soon 2 b 40th Donatello. For me the center strip former "top end" joints are all kind of the same. Bellagio is now 25+years old. You are going to sleep and shower there so if the beds are somewhat comfy, rooms are clean, and have a decent shower they are all in the same proximity. I cant justify dropping and extra 300/night. Id rather add it on a boondoggle meal or do something absolutely silly like driving a fast car on the race track. Thats just me.

I tell people to stay at Park MGM. It’s connected to Aria by a walkway and from there you can tram to Bellagio and then you are center strip.

Park is 75% cheaper per night than Aria.

Just looked into the racetrack. Wife and I can do Caesars + fancy cars for the same cost as Bellagio. This seals the deal for me.

ParkMGM is also completely non-smoking(from what I've read), which is a big plus. Thanks for the tip.

IYKYK.. and only two others itt will know.




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That’s a ton of $$ Turtle. Caesars rooms are still pretty good and so are the facilities. It’s a ****ing zoo in the evenings is the only challenge. I might pay $60 per night more for B but no more

Why are you bringing your dogs? Surely you have someone you can leave them with? Or get a house sitter?

I find the tougher cuts have more meat flavor, you just have to prepare them with that in mind. Below is top round (ass) marinated with soy-OJ and no oil.

Order me a torta, I'm on my way!!

All our family is back east. Historically, we've flown my mother out to dogsit. She is medically unable to handle that anymore. We don't board them, and I don't like putting friends out. Maybe it's silly, but I wouldn't trust a house-sitting service either.

I wouldn’t board my dog again but I think house sitting is great. If you can find a friend who’ll do it for free all the better.

We went to Europe for 3 weeks and had one of the wife’s work colleagues. She had just separated and loved having a big house to live in for 3 weeks. And out r pets got to stay at home and get walked etc

It would be different with strangers I guess.

Agree on the house sitting. It's been great when we've done it in the past. We're going to Portugal for our anniversary later this year, and my brother-in-law is coming out to dogsit. No luck for the Vegas trip, though.

I was lucky enough to go on a lot of tours with my rugby.

3 week tours to Canada and Texas with my college team and then

long weekends in Amsterdam (3x) Lisbon, Hong Kong, Dubai when I was playing 7 a side tournaments and also quite a few within the UK for my club.

all mainly paid for too which was great.

ironically, the only tour I ever turned down was Fiji and Samoa. It was a 10day tour with my club but my thinking was that playing against the world's biggest humans on rock solid fields was not ideal...particularly on hangovers. Plus....the world's biggest women!

It is, and as someone with asthma, it’s appreciated.

As soon as you walk into Aria from that way you’re right in the poker room. Perfect.

Have not seen. I understand that the tank is basically the star of the movie. Something about the tank being broken down, but they decide to stay in it and fight "because it's home," IIRC? Sounds pretty dumb.

I literally haven't seen a movie all the way through since Hidden Figures as a work function. Before that it was ?Rogue One?

I just don't sit still long enough for movies. I lose interest very quickly.

that's pretty much it, the preceding stuff i really loved, thought they did a great job portraying the starving populace and at the end nazis were tossing teengagers with panzerfausts at the tanks as well as highlighting the us strategy of "we don't need better tanks because we'll have 10x as many" and that all the european girls would bang you for a candy bar

up until the ending i really enjoyed it and found it really accurate as far as war films go

then there's a "there's an entire column heading down this road towards our broken down tank, it'll help out the war cause if we slow them down, let's just not care about living and instead slowing down this army for marginal and intangible gain, forget the fact that if we just setup some improvised mines and took a few potshots from the distant treeline before continuing to retreat on foot we could have accomplished pretty much the same delay

Military movies drive me nuts with their love of "tactics that all fit into the framed shot impressively, never mind that they are suicidal."

I loved the book Starship Troopers, so I was very excited when the movie came out and saw it opening day. What a disappointment. Some Heinlein fans hated the propaganda in the movie version, but I can see how folks could read the book and get that feel for the society Heinlein was depicting. I think it was over the top, but meh. Others hated the lack of the powered armor suits from the book, but I can see how expensive that would get to film, and how it would have been hard to depict the actors' emotions etc. Still more hated the dumb love-triangle that the movie threw in for no reason except perhaps an excuse to show some breasts, but hey, breasts. No, the part that pissed me off was the horrible and dumb tactics. These guys are supposed to be the best trained high tech infantry of all time, and here we see them wildly charging towards a giant unarmed monster firing their assault rifles from the hip. Because everyone knows that missile weapons only work from within hand-to-hand range of a beast that couldn't harm you at all if you stayed back a few hundred feet and shot at it. :eyeroll:

Was flipping the channels last night and came upon a rugby match from Allegiant stadium last night. Two Aussie teams (chickens vs bunnies?) came over for a game.

Looked like a ton of fun, even though I didn't know what was going on. Seemed like the offensive team would go down the field quite a way, then kick it away when they were close-ish.

I believe one of those teams was Feely's beloved Roosters.

Sports movies which ignore basic rules infuriate me. A big one I have seen in multiple football movies is a team recovers a fumble and they have to take a time out to stop the clock. Change of possession mother ****ers! Learn it!

my favorite is most of the world actually believe medieval combat was literally just thousands of people running around as individuals swinging swords at whomever in battle with no formations

The Lone Survivor flick is not one of those situations. By most accounts (including Taliban footage taken at the time) it was over very quickly, if not as quickly as a well-executed ambush with belt-fed machine guns v men moving in the open should've been. Luttrell survived because he literally fell off the mountain, on the correct side of the ridge, and basically tumbled down to Gulab's front doorstep (the Pashtun who aided him).

A better Afghanistan story to read about---it's not been filmed by Hollywood, though various drone footage like this exists---for a one man fight many against incredible odds, is the story of Master Sergeant John Chapman.

Anyway, acronyms. QRF = Quick Reaction Force. Reinforcements able to assist another, usually smaller group asking for help.
USMC = Marine Corps. It was a Marine operation that required additional helicopters during planning, and the only group with helicopters to spare was JSOC, who insisted their personnel also take part along with the helicopters.
JSOC = Joint Special Operations Command. United States umbrella organization to ensure that all of the other armed services' special operations personnel (for example, Delta Force, now CAG, the Navy's Sea Air And Land "operators", the Air Force's Joint Tactical Air Controllers, like John Chapman, etc...) talk to each other under a unified chain of command.
Cf = A legal abbreviation that escapes me at the moment, but basically means, "Look at this thing, which isn't an exact example of what I mean, or evidence directly supporting it, but is still useful for understanding." Jessica Lynch's unit in Iraq got lost several tens of miles behind Iraqi lines, was attacked, destroyed, and she was taken prisoner. Initially, and after she was later rescued, a narrative was started that she fought to the last magazine, killed a bunch of Iraqis, got bonked on the head, and became a prisoner of war. To her credit, she disclaimed all of that heroic storytelling. The wiki about Ms. Lynch discusses it in more detail.
Her fellow soldiers, Donald Walters and Patrick Miller who did fight bravely, are mostly forgotten. This newspaper account goes into more detail about Walters. He fought until he ran out of ammunition, was captured, then executed.

I've never seen any other style depicted in a movie.

Seems believable when you also read/watch things like the british 2-rank formation. Which seems pretty stupid in a projectile fight.

God’s team the Sydney Roosters won the second game

You only get 6 plays to score on each possession before the opposition gets the ball back. So generally you kick for field position or to attack the opposition’s line on the 6th play

And we played extremely well. Was an awesome start to the season