Thiefhunters in Paradise

“Bambi? In Las Vegas? Really? Are you a stripper? [Guffaw.]“

If your name is Bambi and you live in Las Vegas, these, apparently, are fair questions. I get them all the time. Sometimes they don’t ask, they just blacklist my email address. Bambi with a Vegas IP address could only be a certain you-know-what.

It’s no wonder, really: the Las Vegas phonebook has 110 pages of entertainers. And you know what I mean by entertainers. The naughty, discrete, spicy, barely legal, and exotic kind. They’re Swedish, Russian, Swiss, Vietnamese (twins!), Japanese, Korean, Thai, French, and Chinese. They’re sweet, new in town, and fiery. For years, my name was on the back of taxi cabs all over town, lasciviously illustrated with promises of bounty.

Being blacklisted is a pain but easily correctable. I communicate with quite a few police departments, and they’re the biggest offenders. So I do a fair bit of resending, while feeling like an illicit trifle, a forbidden floozy trying to regain her honor.

Here’s how introductions usually go:

Man: Really, Bambi? [[heh-heh] Like the deer?
Me: Yeah, right.
Man: And you live in Las Vegas? Are you a dancer? [read: stripper.]

or:

Woman: Bambi, cute. Is that your real name?
Me: It is, yes.
Woman: Where’s Thumper? [ha-ha] Just kidding.

According to my parents, I was not named after the Disney character, the one in the film made from Felix Salten’s 1923 book, Bambi, a Life in the Woods. My parents insist their inspiration was Bambi Lynn, a dancer best known for her appearance in the 1955 film Oklahoma!. But who was she named for?

As a kid, I had a few nicknames I dare not resurrect. None pleased or bothered me. None lingered, probably because I moved so many times. One move had me in a new school at the start of second grade. The teacher asked if anyone had a nickname or middle name she and the class should use. Aha, I thought, I do, and raised my hand. Lyn, I said. Sure, said the teacher. And all was well until I brought home my first paper. My mother said What’s this? That’s not the name we gave you! It was a meek and humiliated little girl who had to change her name in front of everybody the next day. Probably scarred me for life. Or made me shoulder my burden and bear it.

Two years ago, I was interviewed on television by a Thai woman named Flower. Bambi is Flower’s guest today. Sounds too cute. Most people probably switched channels at that point.

I think a lot about names, how people grow into them, or don’t; how people modify them, or don’t; the effect they have on the bearer and others; the significance or insignificance of them. And how people carry their own names. What they are called vs. what they like to be called.

Many people feel compelled to crack a joke about my name when they meet me. They think they’re being original. I haven’t heard a new one in decades. I don’t have any good comebacks, either. Have any suggestions? I realize how silly it might feel to use my name. I’ve known women named Ditty, Cheery, Bunny, and Honey, and I’ve cringed using their names. Then I remember that I have a toy name, too. A cartoon name.

I’m against middle names, like mine and my sisters’, chosen only for their sound. I like them to have some importance or meaning. I’ve convinced more than one woman to give her maiden name to her child as a middle name.

I like my last name. Not too common but still ordinary; easy to spell and pronounce around the world. A relief after my exotic first name. My mother and father were both Vincents, so I’m double-strength. Of course I couldn’t dump it for marriage. (Somehow, my three sisters had no problem ditching it, though.)

Despite the sound of this rant, I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t like a boring name like Linda or Kathy (sorry Linda and Kathy), or a funny name like Gladys (Happy-bottom). I’ve been amused by many a name: women named Wonder, Spratley, Greer, and Phelps. In South Africa, I knew a man named Lastborn and a woman named Surprise (Lastborn’s younger sister?). Having a name that amuses others is not so bad. Even I am amused when someone forgets my name. Something I imagine is so shiny and neon-colored and remarkable can be vin-ordinaire to some.

I did not intend to dwell on random negativity here, but when I came across this sign a few days ago, I took it as an open invitation. So here are a couple of gripes aimed against a new trend in corporate mentality.

1. “Yes, we owe our customers money, but make it difficult and they’ll go away.” This seems to be a growing, despicable, yet profitable attitude. Real examples:

a. Rebates. You send in all required forms and original box parts, but no rebate arrives. After many months, you are given endless runarounds, required to make endless phone calls, and send more letters re-documenting your claim. This has happened to us more than once. It really isn’t worth it. And who has time to fight for the principle?

b. Airlines. Due to mechanical problems, a flight is canceled and we are told to book a hotel. Send in the receipt with this form, and we will be reimbursed this (minimal) amount, and this (insufficient) sum for taxi. Took nine months of letters and phone calls to get our lousy $120.

c. Insurance. A mistake was made by a pharmacy, which resulted in the repeated denial of claims. Send in a form, document everything with originals etc., and the claims are denied again, except a check for $8.11, and instructions on how to appeal. Appeal. Denied. Write more letters, get another $150. Write more letters, get a promise of payment. This situation, ongoing for six months now, has not played itself out.

2. Front desk stoneface. I don’t know this, but I believe there must be some sort of staff training program making the rounds which trains front desk and customer service employees how to be helpless. They do not have access to billing records, a supervisor is not available, they will pass along the complaint, etc. Worse, I believe they are taught to document everything in reports, in which they are told to include random generic character attacks, in order to cast aspersions and denigrate the customer, the better to CYA. I have fresh evidence of this theory, too. They try to sidestep responsibility by accusing the complainant of spurious, irrelevant minutia. What happened to “the customer is always right”?

A birthday invitation to my family and friends: please join me in opting out of the birthday-present tradition. Why do we deserve presents on our birthdays? If and when I find or think of the perfect gift for you, I want to give it to you right then and there, regardless of the date. Children, up to a certain age depending on the child, may get birthday presents. Then, after reaching an age of understanding, they should not. That’s my theory. But there’s more.

For many years, I have felt that only one birthday gift makes sense, and I’m embarrassed that it has taken me so long to implement the idea myself. On one’s birthday, the only person who deserves a present is one’s mother.

Birthday cards, calls, and emails are fine but not necessary. Personally, I like them, in both directions. Gifts on other occasions are fine. I’m not against gifts. I’ll accept them any time, even on my birthday. But I really wish that tradition would go away. Give me a gift when you find the perfect thing, or if I especially deserve one. Not just because the calendar flips to the anniversary of my birth.

I know why it’s taken me so long to actually do this: I’ve been chicken. It’s severely counterculture. I don’t want to be perceived as stingy, cheap, or uncaring. I don’t want to be the only one doing it. And I’m pretty sure this new practice will be an unpopular option.

But here I go. I’ll lead, and hope to start a new tradition. Who’ll join me? In whole or in part, in theory or in practice, scroll down a bit (or click here) and commit with a comment here, if you dare.

And the charges are: against him, breaking and entering; against his sister, poisoning by E.coli.

It started with a loud thud in the dead of night, immediately followed by heavy breathing. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window, but it was too dark to see a thing. The labored breath was right outside. I also heard a wet trickle.

Exactly one year ago, I spent a magical week in the Galapagos. My sister chartered the 14-passenger yacht Parranda for the family. Besides our two onboard naturalists, we were six adults and six teens. I was asleep in my stateroom when I heard the intruder. Our yacht was in motion, sailing from San Salvador Island to Bartolome Island, so I couldn’t fathom who could have come aboard, or how. The chef’s provisioner? The captain’s wife? Pirates of the Galapagos?

I learned in the morning that it had been an 800-pound sea lion that had launched itself aboard for a free ride. It wasn’t alone, either. Several other beasts had made the aft deck their lounge for the night. The crew hates their visits, as they leave quite a mess behind.

A few days later, snorkeling off the coast of Floreana Island, we were joined briefly by a penguin and a couple of sea turtles. Then a flock (pride? school?) of sea lions surrounded us, jetting playfully among us with speed and grace never betrayed on land.

Close, close encounters with wild animals are thrilling, and I’ve had more than my share. I held someone’s pet bat in Ponape. I wrestled with a pair of 14-week-old lion cubs in Johannesburg. I had my hand in a kangaroo’s pouch in Sydney. I swam with hammerhead sharks in Maui, stingrays in Cayman Islands, and giant clams in Palau. To visit wild animals in their own milieu, to feel a clumsy foreigner in their domain, like an interloper and a trespasser, is wondrous. Mind-blowing. Jaw-dropping.

Jaw-dropping. Joyous. Laughing while snorkeling gets one a mouthful of seawater. The giant sea lion was just inches away from Geri when it let loose an opaque cloud.

That night onboard, all six kids got seasick at once. By morning, they had all recovered except for Geri, who deteriorated slowly. It wasn’t until she saw her doctor back home that we realized she’d been poisoned ingesting sea lion turd.

As Bob and I travel the world in our role as thief-hunters, we hang with outlaws and shady characters. The Tiger Lillies sing songs about the underworld culture we study. I like their twisted take on taboo subjects, their lullabies of filth and scandal. Their genre is macabre cabaret: upside down ballads of misery and despair. Lots of songs about pimps, pushers, prostitutes, pickpockets, and other perps and perverts — but they’re sung disarmingly sweet and harmonic, with catchy rhythms.

National Public Radio has a little segment in its Weekend America series called Weekend Soundtrack. Listeners submit a favorite song for weekend listening and talk about it on the radio.

Back in October, I submitted a song. I wanted to get The Tiger Lillies some good exposure, and I know how good NPR exposure can be. When we were on our book sales spiked and we got calls from media around the world.

A week after my submission, Michael Raphael, from AmericanPublicMedia.org, emailed:

Bambi, I would love to talk to you about your weekend soundtrack. When are you available?

I gave him some open windows but heard nothing back. I wrote him a few times and got replies like:

Sorry Bambi, I’ve been swamped. Are you in the US this week?

and later:

Sorry Bambi — it has been a mad scramble toward the end of the year hear [sic]. I will be out of town until 1/5. I hate to do this, but let’s try and pick this up the week of 1/7.

After that I gave up.

Shucks. I really wanted to do it. I’m surprised at the rude behavior of American Public Media, too. Screw ‘em, though.

When my “weekend” comes around, I like to play Souvenirs, by The Tiger Lillies. I like the body-twitching sound of it. I like the unusual voice of singer Martyn Jacques and — who would expect to love accordion as accompaniment? (Note to my techless loved ones: press the blue arrow to play the song, if you dare.)

The song is about someone who has a huge collection of souvenirs from around the world, but they’re all scars and sicknesses. Bob and I travel around the world about 250 days a year, so we have a lot of souvenirs, too. None as ghoulish, though. My collection is mostly intangible and made of memories, cultural experiences, and awareness of the wider world.

The character in the song now has a regular job — he works in a fairground — and he deals with people he has little in common with, people with ordinary lives and jobs. He has trouble relating to these people, and would rather find an excuse to tell about his travels. Being on the road and out of the U.S. so much for the past 15 years, I’m mostly out of touch with popular culture and can’t participate in conversations about television shows, celebrities, or sports.

For me, the “weekend” is really a trip-end, no matter the day of the week. Souvenirs is my unpacking song, as I sort the laundry from the unworn, put away things, and pull out my own souvenirs. Over the years we’ve brought home a lot. No diseases that we know about, and no serious injuries, as in the song.

The Tiger Lillies made a wonderful record based on unpublished poems given to them by Edward Gorey, recorded with the Kronos Quartet, called The Gorey End. My favorite Tiger Lillies songs are a bit too risque for radio: Maria, about a murdered woman, Trampled Lily, about a girl who gets sucked into a life of abuse and prostitution and dies young; Angel, and Pretty Lisa, both with similar themes, and Weeping Chandelier (the Gorey End version), which is a beautiful and haunting tango with Kronos Quartet. I guess their lyrics keep The Tiger Lillies off the radio, which is a terrible shame. Since I started listening to them only two years ago, I find other music rather boring. Lucky for me, the Tiger Lillies have more than 20 albums out.

Here are some of the souvenirs I’ve carried home:

• Lamps from Holland, South Africa, Spain,
  Germany, and Poland.
• Beaded necklaces from Kenya, Italy, South Africa,
  Peru, Tahiti, and Costa Rica. Amber from the Baltic,
  and old silver from India.
• Masks from Borneo, Indonesia, Thailand, Peru,
  Alaska, Papua New Guinea, and Panama.

I’d like to hear what you think of Souvenirs. Care to comment?

Terry, on a slow and controlled Orwell kick, quoted a couple of paragraphs on debauchery. I guess considering it was 1946, Orwell can be excused for excluding vegetarians from the pleasure. We can debauch as well as the rest of them. But to quote Terry quoting Orwell,

… vegetarians are always scandalized by this attitude. As they see it, the only rational objective is to avoid pain and to stay alive as long as possible. If you refrain from drinking alcohol, or eating meat, or whatever it is, you may expect to live an extra five years, while if you overeat or overdrink you will pay for it in acute physical pain on the following day.

Which made me think of the Danes. I can’t remember (or find) where I read this recently, but the article said that the Danes are among the happiest people in the EU, have the shortest life expectancy, and are among the biggest smokers. Their attitude? Live life to the max. Debauch! Who needs a few extra years?

A 1995 abstract (Institute of Risk Research, University of Waterloo, Canada) measured smoking in three principal dimensions and applied it to the Danes:

…Danish data on smoking; the cost for a typical pack-a-day habit is equivalent to a 57% reduction in personal income, 8.6 years loss of life expectancy, or a 4% drop in the Life Quality Index.

I’m going to have a glass or Ricard while I cook dinner now. Hmmm… think I’ll make a rich linguine with clam sauce, French provenςal baked butternut with tons of garlic and parsley, arugula and tiny sweet tomatoes, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and fresh mango for dessert. I’ll have my feast and five extra years, too.

Ever the facilitators, Bob and I hosted dinner for a few security types the other night. Attending were Jo and Willy Allison, who put on the annual World Game Protection Conference in Las Vegas, at which Bob presented last month; Lieutenant Bob Sebby, who runs the quintessential fraud detail at LVMPD’s Financial/Property Crime Bureau; his wife, Cynde Beer, who is a mortgage fraud investigator; and LVMPD’s Detective Kim Thomas, an international authority on forgery. Kim’s also written a damn good book, Vegas: One Cop’s Journey. I reviewed it here.

Among us, we pretty much cover the gamut of theft. But on this night, the featured topic was how high-tech theft is moving into casinos. There’s nothing new about abusing credit cards, the magnetic data on them, shared-value cards, and washed or stolen checks. But bring those into the virtual money palace of a casino, and security-types begin to quake. With Eastern European organized crime gangs getting more sophisticated than ever, a cop’s gotta be well-fortified to stay on top. Or keep up. I’ve done my part:

Menu

• Neon cocktails (Campari, Aperol, Midori, Absinthe, Ricard)
• Aunt Diane’s special spinach salad
• Grilled snapper filet on sweet potato mash, with
• Orange-avocado-onion-cilantro-chili salsa
• Watercress
• Black rice
• Garlic broccoli salad
• Fresh melange of pomelo, pomegranate, jackfruit, mango,
  and strawberries, with jackfruit-flavored coconut milk

My Mac’s power cord is stretched taut. I’m on my patio on a glorious spring day. Just a little too windy for my taste, and it could be warmer. Careful what I wish for, right?

I’ve got a perfect view of the spaceship-like top of the Stratosphere Casino, with its fun-fair rides 900 feet above ground. I can also see a police helicopter hovering somewhere between the Stratosphere and me. Closer to me, of course. There are sirens to match, as usual.

A wild cat just landed behind me, jumping down from a tree. It must have come over my roof. It trotted quickly to my side gate, looked up toward the top of the five-and-a-half-foot wall, then glanced back at me. Did I appear threatening? Then it used its paw to pull open the heavy wooden gate the full three inches it gives without being unlatched, and slipped through. The cat’s obviously been doing this for some time.

In school, I didn’t pay much attention to geography. This pretty much fits the American selfcentric stereotype. I did eventually learn the difference between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though, and came to understand the hierarchy of United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England. When I started to travel, I got interested in maps. I still am. I can’t resist poring over them in airline magazines, and maps stop me whenever I come across them in newspapers. My computer desktop image is a map of the world.

My interest in maps extends further, though maybe not as far as my friend Terry’s, who has actually mapped the potential mutations of the influenza virus (or something like that), except he calls it antigenic cartography.

I also like words. And I especially like when the two come together, as in mapping words. This is done brilliantly at wefeelfine.org, which maps feelings. Specifically, it maps feelings revealed in blogs. You, the user, can specify the feeling you’d like to map, the age, gender, or location of the feeler, the date, and/or the weather the feeler is experiencing. “Mounds,” one way that wefeelfine maps feelings, are wonderful living hills of quivering colorful jelly that recoil from my curser. They tell me that 34,541 bloggers are feeling better now, 7,452 are feeling empty, 383 are queasy, and at the far right of the mound map, 20 are feeling grotesque.

The creators of wefeelfine.org also gave us wordcount.org, to show us our most- and least-used words, and everything in between. No surprise that Figueres is at the end of the scale, the 86,573rd most used word. By great coincidence, my sister Jamie and I spoke of Figueres just a couple of hours before I visited wordcount.org tonight, and looked at the end of the scale. There was Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dali.

Phylotaxis.com is marvelous, too, from it’s interactive opening page to its culture-meets-science representation of the news. Science stories are represented as perfect squares in an ordered grid. Stories on culture are round, messy, and can’t stay still. Verge back toward science and the round icons begin to behave, grow corners, and try to organize themselves.

On love-lines.com, which maps love and hate, I see that one person, just minutes ago, proclaimed “You all know I like my fics crackish and my pairings even crackier, as fickle as I am with them.” I have no idea what this means. Perhaps it’s pornographic.

Meanwhile, Rome is busy mapping the realtime density of citizens by their mobile phones. Or rather, MIT did the project, which mapped concentrations of urban activity moment to moment, graphically showing (glowing!) as about a million people gathered at Circus Maximus after Italy’s World Cup victory.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a nice world map, on paper, on the inside of my pantry door.

I’ll be on the road for a week.