Ask Alex - April 27, 2018

Shoeless Alex Jackson

Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers.  Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.

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Lots of questions with shortish answers today. Daryl has wants to know about the gaming industry landscape in the northeast, and about that wacky professor in Fresno. I’m not going to answer that, but I am going to talk about Eddie Murphy. Then we'll talk shoe rotations with the rest of the Misfits before tackling a couple of vacation related queries from Simon and Jeff. Justin has a good question about naked lady cakes, and then we will talk about The Island of Misfit Tweeps with Adso of Melk and the consequences of divorce with Brownskin Dave.

Finally, Lady Jess needs some nail polish advice, and I want to take a moment to tell her how very proud I am of her!

Submitted by: Daryl
Do you think Wynn Boston Harbor will hurt the Foxwoods when it opens?

Yes. The rise and fall and rise again of Foxwoods makes for interesting reading...and, in fact, it has been written! For the uninitiated, Foxwoods is the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere, a truly mammoth Southeastern Connecticut mega-facility with more floor space than the Pentagon and more employees than any other private entity in Connecticut besides United Technologies and Yale.

Opened in 1992, it was the first resort casino north and east of Atlantic City, and the most attractive destination gaming option for somewhere on the order of 25 million people, including much of metro New York and all of metro Boston. Even after a smaller competitor, Mohegan Sun, opened in 1996, Foxwoods was a money machine enriching the State of Connecticut and the casino’s owners, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and its partners.

A bunch of things happened after that. First, competitors sprouted up quickly in upstate New York, Pennsylvania (which has a much bigger impact on Atlantic City than on Connecticut, but still drew customers from New York) and even Rhode Island. As other states saw the revenues generated for the state treasury in Connecticut, they raced to legalize gaming of their own in order to cash in. Even stodgy old Massachusetts finally gave in, authorizing several resort casinos about 20 years after it may have been a good idea (it may never have been a good idea...it certainly wasn’t by 2011 when we finally got around to it.)

Foxwoods also borrowed heavily to expand aggressively, building a new casino and hotel tower in the mid 2000’s, right before the economy collapsed and tourism dried up. As a result, by 2013, Foxwoods was negotiating with bond holders to pay them pennies on the dollar for some $2.3 billion in debt related to expansion. With that passed, however, and tourism thriving, the casino seems to be on pretty solid footing now, even if it doesn’t swim in profitability the way it once did.

BUT...as Daryl has noted, and as I just mentioned, Massachusetts licensed two resort casinos in 2011 that will compete directly with Foxwoods and threaten to capture all of the gaming business from Greater Boston and northern New England. MGM Springfield (MGM is also an investor in Foxwoods) is set to open this September, promising to bring only wealth and glamour to historical, charming Springfield.

LOL...just kidding! Springfield is more of less a giant heroin den, and this is just going to make it a heroin den with more illegal prostitution, loan sharking and a shiny glass hotel. It is hard to imagine a place in America that is more of a shithole than Atlantic City, but Springfield is going to give that a run for its money.

The second facility, Wynn Boston Harbor {Breaking: for reasons to be noted momentarily, the new name is Encore Boston Harbor}, is slated to open in May of 2019 in Everett, although it faces at least some slight bit of uncertainty as a result of the longtime lecherous behavior of the company’s namesake, Steve Wynn. That is undoubtedly a more valuable property (it’s five miles from Boston and within an hour’s drive of about 4.5 million people) and there are competing interests that would absolutely love to strip Wynn of the license and re-open the bidding. But, assuming that doesn’t happen, the facility should open in about a year, doing for Everett exactly what MGM will do for Springfield! (I’m actually not sure of that...this one has a much higher likelihood of bringing real revitalization to the area because of its location, but it will still have to fight the natural tendency of casinos to ruin places).

And, yes, it will absolutely hurt Foxwoods. A lot.

Do you think Fresno State’s Nutty Professor drank the serum that transformed her into Buddy Love?

Let’s talk about Eddie Murphy, shall we? Cuz I have an assertion to make.

First of all, let’s start with what Eddie Murphy was, up until about the year 2000: a bankable, hilarious, often brilliant, innovative and daring comic in several formats. He is on the short list of most important and funniest cast members in Saturday Night Live history, producing a series incredibly funny bits: Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, everything by Velvet Jones, James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub, Buckwheat. His stand-up specials were massive commercial hits even if his foray into music is unintentionally funnier than almost anything else he has done.

His talents translated brilliantly to movies, and he delivered a string of commercially and critically successful films, starting with the buddy-cop-genre-inventing 48 Hrs in 1982. After that came a series of comedies that remain relevant, watchable and quotable today: Trading Places (1983), Beverly Hill Cop (1984) and Coming to America (1988). As actors tend to do, Murphy then sought to branch out a bit and began making different kinds of movies that required different kinds of performances, including the more nuanced Boomerang and a couple of family-friendly animated movies (Mulan and Shrek).

The movie Daryl references above, The Nutty Professor, and Dr. Doolittle both served as validation that Eddie Murphy could please family audiences without the stream of F-Bombs that marked his earlier movies. While neither was the critical success that Beverly Hill Cop was, they combined to gross nearly $600 million on budgets of a combined $124 million. Basically, everything that Eddie Murphy touched (without singing about) was successful.

And then a really weird thing happened...The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Not only have there been very, very few movies to flop as colossally as this one, but very few have ever done so as unexpectedly and, to my working assertion, with more dramatic effects on its star. Costing $120 million and grossing an almost hilariously bad $7 million worldwide, they film not only destroyed $113 million of the studios’ money, but it absolutely ruined Eddie Murphy. Other than continuing entries in the Shrek franchise and banging a transvestite hooker, his career has been basically invisible since then.

Even an award-winning performance in a very serious role in Dreamgirls hasn’t been enough to relaunch Murphy’s career, and he has spent the last 10 years being little more than “The guy who made Charlie Murphy famous enough to appear in Chappelle Show skits”. Murphy is certainly not the first actor to be punished for a bad movie (“You know, I was in stuff before Waterworld” says Kevin Costner…) but I can’t think of another example of someone who lost more industry goodwill in one single movie…

Also, he knocked up a Spice Girl, which seems important, although I don't know why.

Submitted by: Dan, CDP and the rest of the Misfits
My favorite shoes fell apart and I had to throw them out. This makes me sad.

So, this came up in a Misfits discussion as Dan lamented the demise of his favorite pair of shoes, and I asked whether or not he had started to work a similar new pair into his shoe rotation. This was met with an awkward silence as Dan and CDP struggled with the concept of owning more than one pair of the same kind of shoes at the same time.

I know I have given out a lot of men’s fashion advice this week (mentions, ruined) but this really seemed to be pretty self-evident to me: if you never want to be forced to wear stiff new shoes at a bad time, then you start to break in the new pair before the old ones fall apart. Tiger Woods probably doesn’t want to put on a brand spanking new pair of blister-inducing shoes right before he walks a seven mile round of golf, but he also doesn’t want to wear old shoes. The solution? You wear a new pair for half an hour on the practice range or the putting green a couple of times before you wear them out onto the course.

Actually, Tiger probably pays a village full of Nigerien (as opposed to Nigerian) schoolchildren to massage the shoes and read them traditional Hausa poetry in both its original language and French to prepare them for play. But, for us regulars, just wearing them in is probably the best bet.

CDP asserts that straight guys don’t have shoe rotations, but my non-scientific survey says that he is wrong about this. Every guy I asked uses some kind of a rotation, although at least some of them apply it really only to running shoes. The guys in my office (we are a business professional office - all suits, all the time) all have 2-3 pairs of black and/or brown dress shoes that they rotate through at any given time, throwing out the old ones when they wear out and working new pairs in.

That isn’t even CDP’s most ridiculous claim, as he also reports that he owns like four pairs of shoes - sandals, tennis shoes, dress shoes and golf shoes - which I find staggering. As I write this, I have nine pairs of shoes in my office, including seven that pretty much live here, one that I didn’t mean to leave here earlier this week, and the sneakers that I walked to work in. I threw out a pair with a broken heel that weren’t worth fixing about two weeks ago.

Which reminds me, Southerners, tennis shoes are for playing the sport of tennis...most “tennis shoes” are not actual tennis shoes. William Tecumseh Sherman didn’t burn Georgia so that you’d still be calling footwear by its wrong name 163 years later. (Too soon?)

Finally, something of an admission: I am a shoe girl. I don’t spend a ton of time or money on clothes, certainly not as compared to my peers, but I could look at shoes forever. The same applies to coats (as CDP, Daryl, Dan, Rex and Marc about the coat porn that breaks out every once in a while). I don’t spend that much time on jeans or sweaters or dresses or anything else - I mean, my most notable article of clothing is a men’s hooded sweater from Banana Republic - but you can ALWAYS get me if we are talking shoes and coats...

Submitted by: Simon
How many dollars should one take out in cash to keep for the next holiday? And how many euros?

Submitted by: Jeff
Is there a too late to wake up while on vacation? If you stay up until 5am and have a drink at 4am, is that drinking at night or in the morning?

These questions aren’t entirely related, but since they are both about vacation, I am combining them into one. And the answers are kind of the same: there should be no rules on vacation. That is, in fact, a major part of a vacation...not being bound by rules. You should try to wear as little clothing as is necessary and, despite what I wrote about above, should eschew shoes whenever possible. Included in this is an elimination of the stigma against drinking in the morning, so you are free to classify it however you would like.

I rarely carry any cash, and I think that should go double for vacation...if you are in touristy places, you are more likely to be robbed, or to drop or otherwise lose any cash you are carrying without any means to recover it. But I can assure that whatever cash I am carrying is almost certainly going to be, you know, the actual unit of currency used in that particular place. The correct number of Euros to carry in Mexico, for example, is exactly zero;-).

Basically, when I am traveling, I charge everything...which is really no different than the way I operate at home, I guess. Credit cards are more convenient, they come with a 1%-2% rebate on everything you buy, they are pretty well-protected against fraud and if you look around a bit, you will find one with pretty minimal international transaction fees (or none at all) and the foreign exchange will be done at favorable rates.

Mastercard is very much the global currency, and I am not just saying that because of the shares I have owned since about 2010 even if I would be remiss in not pointing out that it has been a very lucrative investment…

It seems like sort of a waste to sleep all day on vacation when you can do that at home for less money, but again, if that is how you want to spend your time, then knock yourself out. Hiking the Mayan ruins isn’t going to be fun if you don’t wanna do it, and the ultimate goal of a vacation is to enjoy yourself. And while sleeping in a hotel room all day seems like a waste, I have no problem laying on a beach all day and that doesn’t seem all that different, really. Save for the skin cancer.

While I am on this subject...why do all hotel pillows suck?! They’re about as sturdy as a souffle and they squish down into unsupportive, pancake-flat shapeless lumps of uselessnesses after you lay on them for like five minutes. Who wants pillows like that?! We were away with the kids last week and I needed to use FOUR pillows to sit up in bed so I could do a couple hours worth of work, which meant we needed a whole bunch of extra pillows in an already cramped room.

I also needed them to bring me both a white wine glass and a red wine glass, but that is a different story entirely...

Submitted by: Justin
Where do you stand on erotic cakes?

On the one hand, I love cake...so I am basically in favor of all cakes. Especially chocolate ones.

But I could do without giant penis shaped baked goods...I find it to be kitschy and unappetizing. Also, not to get too judgmental and pander to stereotypes, but I find the women who get really excited by the idea of erotic cakes to be super annoying. It just seems like, I dunno, trying too hard.

Mostly, it’s a fucking cake and I plan on eating it because I eat cake. Let’s not pretend that we are being scandalous, risque women because the cake has balls on it. The same goes for the little penis straws that show up at really lame bachelorette parties, or sex toy demonstrations or even trip to Chippendales or the like. None of those are remotely sexy, and none of them are an assault on societal gender norms. It's just a bunch of lame chicks doing things that they don't even realize won't make them any less lame.

Part of my negative feelings about erotic cakes are clearly a result of the small number of people that I know who have ordered them for events I have been at. They are not, to put it kindly, my coolest friends. In fact, the Venn Diagram of “People that are amused by erotic cakes” and “Rodan and Fields reps” is one worth exploring...I suspect we will find significant crossover.

Submitted by: Adso of Melk
Can you rescue me from the Island of Misfit Tweeps?

No, I can’t rescue you from the Island of Misfit Tweeps because I live squarely in the center of the Island and I have no interest in leaving! And why would you want to leave? It is the Twitter equivalent of Tortolla...it’s basically perfect. Wait, I know, it’s Daryl, isn’t it. The Dad jokes and Mo nicknames can be a little much, but that is just the price you pay for endless Boston trivia and insight into Apache helicopters. That seems like a fair price, no?

I have heard from some anonymous sources that I can run people off of the Island, though, which is flattering even if it is wildly untrue. I have some pretty spectacular powers, but the few people that shot their way out of Misfits did so over quarrels that were totally unrelated to me. We had one who left, loudly, to be a Trumpkin, and another who left on pretty good terms and is now either completely insane or a certifiable genius (it’s a fine line).

A third blew up over perceived slights from one member I won't name (*cough* @marcannem96 *cough*) and a desire to always be recognized as the group leader. I’ll never forget seeing the ellipsis indicating he was typing for a solid 20 minutes before he punched “send” on three paragraphs of the dumbest insults I’ve ever seen and very dramatically left the room. Then he kinda tried to ask back in when he realized that no one was going to follow him, then started another Twitter account to follow some of us hoping we wouldn’t notice, then left entirely to “work on his marriage” (which needed work in the same sense that the Roman Coliseum needs work) and become a world famous chef.

Still another went to the mat on the moral correctness of a college football player slugging his girlfriend because she shoved him first. He felt like that was the proverbial hill he wanted to die on, which probably tells you all you need to know about him. Those last two marched right out of the DM and off of Twitter!

So, sad to say, there is no rescue from the Island of Misfit Tweeps...there is only spectacular meltdown, insults that are intended to be cutting but will really turn out to be years-long running jokes and then leaving Twitter in shame. On the plus side, any desire you have to be a celebrity chef will probably take off like wildfire immediately afterwards (one would assume).

Best to just enjoy your time here and not worry about trying to leave.

Submitted by: Brownskin Dave
Who is the most damaged party in a divorce? 1) Kids, 2) Husband, 3) Wife, or 4) The twitter counselor casting aspersions under the guise of dispensing unsolicited life coaching advice

Well this is kind of a dark questions, isn’t it?

Wait...am I the twitter counselor in this example? Cuz I give out a LOT of unsolicited life coaching advice, all of which is ignored and nearly all of which would have been beneficial if followed. There are a lot of single people on Twitter who are single primarily because they don’t listen to my dating advice!

I’m not totally sure who, in this example, the divorcee might be. I mean, there was that one guy whose wife got pregnant by another guy and they were planning on lying about the timing of conception, not telling the real father and raising the baby as their own. Since she seemed to be not all that regretful about the whole incident, I guess I felt like that maybe wasn’t a recipe for a really strong marriage and that he would probably be better getting out of it.

Usually, the kids are the party at greatest risk of damage in a divorce, especially if they are young. Husband and wife will both suffer because divorce is emotionally taxing and very, very expensive, but young children will end up absorbing the worst of the parents damage plus whatever emotional baggage they pick up on their own. They also have their routines disrupted, might see a drop in living standards, and often need to move and/or change schools. Eventually, they may need to start to deal with NewMom and NewDad and step-siblings, and that is all really challenging for a kid.

And that’s the thing about getting divorced with kids...it is the biggest, ugliest and worst thing you will ever go through, but you always have to remember that you’re not the most important participant. You are not blameless, even if you want to think you are the less faulty party, but your kids are almost certainly innocent of any wrongdoing.

Further, the very hardest part of all: you are separating from a person with whom you have shared the closest bond possible. You are angry and bitter and sad and you have all kinds of negative feelings about the person you are divorcing. You are, if there is even the slightest dispute over the terms of the divorce, opponents in legal proceedings that pit you against each other directly.

But, you are still on the same team, and you will be until your kids are grown. No matter how mad you get, and no matter how unfair you think the other person is being, you still need to work together in fulfilling your most important responsibility. The moment you lose that perspective, then the divorce represents failure.

Also, on this note, nobody wants to hear you trash your ex-spouse. I know you don’t like him/her. Obviously, it ended badly, and I am just going to assume that you blame them more than yourself. But no one thinks that you are a reliable source on this, and no one is going to be persuaded by your description of their terribleness. In fact, simply limiting your comments to “He/she is an excellent parent” will reflect more positively on your own character than you probably think it does.

Submitted by: The Lovely Fickleness of an April Jess
My grad robes are black. Should I get my nails done black or something more Summery? Still working out my dress.

I’d go summery! Graduation is a wonderful, exciting and joyous time, and too much black isn’t going to match the right mood for this very special occasion! Obviously, there isn’t anything you can do about the robes, so I think bright nails are a great way to add what little color you can. I assume that you are also aiming for a festive, vibrant dress, so the nails will match that better when you take the robes off.

Mostly, though, many, many congratulations! I know how much work you have put in, and some of the things you had to figure out beyond just your course load to get to this point. I am proud of you, as I am sure the rest of this little corner of the Internet is as well. You’ve done great work, and you should be proud of yourself, too!

On to the next adventure, which is a little scary but will be bigger and better and more challenging and more exciting and more fun and will be just the next piece in making you into the wonderful woman that we all know you will be (and already are!).

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Alex’s random old song of the week

Special for @annealexander70 With the news that ABBA is getting back together, I give you my favorite ABBA song.