Why Mars is like Vegas

Present: Jim, Ian, Lynne, Bill, Edgar, Ray (getting over 8 weeks in bed with a virus), Steve G, Bob Birchard, Will.

Maybe it was because it was the Monday before July 4, but we had a fairly small turnout of nine - no more than eight at any one time, because Will replaced Edgar - and the conversations took a while to get onto anything more than gas prices and the will they/won't they actors' strike.
Ray was a welcome returner after being away for a long time which turned out to be a virus that kept him in bed for eight weeks. He put it down to a diet of Mihares food washed down with copious Margharitas. Not exactly a balanced diet, but hardly deserving of eight weeks flat on his back. And next week Ray has to be off to Newark in Nottinghamshire, England, to play his special brand of rockabilly before an expected audience numbering 70,000. You can't knock the money that'll raise, even if the July weather in that part of the world is usually rubbish.
So, as a Brit I have to confess, are the breakfasts. The great British breakfast has been exported round the world but, like tennis, cricket, soccer and most other games we invented, it is done so much better in foreign lands.
The American diner and coffee shop are bywords for excellent reliable plain meals, especially breakfast. So why can't the Brits carry through on what they basically started? French and Italians have been making do with coffee, bread and jam, and northern Europe was starting the day with cold ham, cheese, salami and more bread - untoasted of course.
It has much to do with restrictions in the two world wars, designed to save light, encourage the workers to focus on the war effort and get everyone off the streets and tucked up in bed before the bombing raids started. But that's not the whole story, otherwise the standard would have risen as soon as the shackles were unlocked. Instead, many places quietly continued as if the wartime regulations were still in force, producing rubbish food and basically ordering consumers to buy when it suited the owners of shops, cafes, pubs and restaurants. British governments, too, were far too slow to scrap rules that were eventually half a century out of date.
Britain's volatile relationship with alcohol also discouraged a more liberal attitude, but the floodgates have been opened and the only answer is to avoid most shopping precincts and malls on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
America, meanwhile, produced McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Denny's, Carl's Jr Starbucks and many others (not forgetting Conrads, of course) that recognised the importance of reliability and repeatability.
Mind you, those qualities can be taken too far, and many of those fast-food chains are not to everyone's taste - nor, Jim pointed out, were crime series such as Perry Mason. But aren't all crime series formulaic, and all TV drama series, for that matter? There is a never-ending tension between the predictable framework that gets viewers into a hit series within minutes every week, and the conveyor belt nature of daytime soap operas.
Songs, too, go through periods when one or two formulas dominate - often, as Ian pointed out, related to particular nationalities such as the Italians in the 1950s. In the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese songs and dress were objects of great fascination in Europe and America, mainly because few westerners had been there so there was a great mystique attached to China.
Nowadays much of that mystique has been stripped away by cheap airfares. We can go just about anywhere now, and the reason that some areas are still remote is that they are not particularly attractive - the same could be said about the midwest, where few tourists venture.
Lynne said she was keen on a trip to Mars in the wake of the JPL Phoenix mission currently digging into the harsh, frozen northern soil. "Mars looks like Vegas before the hotels were built," Ray observed. I look forward to a branch of the Bellagio staffed with little green men with three heads: "I'm Brad, Brad and Brad and I'll be your waiter, waiter, waiter tonight."
Trips to Cuba may soon be on the agenda for left-leaning Americans after Fidel Castro stepped down and his brother started making conciliatory noises to Washington DC. Tales brought back to Europe by intrepid adventurers suggest it is a mixture of luxury and penury, which I suppose is the ideal blend for the champagne socialist with enough dosh to fly long-haul to Havana.
And we learned that during the Cuban middle crisis, Jim was on alert with the Marines - in North Carolina, though, so not really in the front line. I was at school and remember our chaplain getting all worked up about it as Kennedy and Krushchev played poker on a global scale.
Back in the realm of the day-to-day headache, Edgar told us about the unexpected complexities caused by the fact that his late father had transferred $80,000 to an annuity but died before finally signing it into action. That has created one of those legal limbos that lawyers love so much, though the odds are that it must happen to every annuity provider a few times a year, so it can hardly be impossible to sort out. As Edgar said, it certainly can be sorted out, but not without the go-betweens taking a little matter of $3,000 off the top for their trouble. And, as Edgar Snr was 82 already, the insurance company was onto a near-certain winner in return for saving the old fella the trouble of having to think about how best to invest such a tidy sum. For the sake of our heirs, may we all tidy up our financial compost heaps before we keel over.

CAUGHT ON THE BREEZE
My uncle had about 13 kids, all born in different countries
Barbara is the original earth mother
Reading a book is like going into that person's bedroom
The margharitas are weak but the flesh is strong
If you were told you'd get a 70,000 crowd at the north pole, you'd turn up all right
I've had my check but I've just noticed I haven't had my carrot cake. Sorree, Mister Jim, last piece just gone!