Sweaty Palms Motel
SweatyPalmsMotel.com: sleazy, cheap and indiscreet. Since 2004, your
1-stopdestination for the juiciest rumors, half-truths and outright lies in Cactus Country.
Hot Enough For Ya? If this is your first visit to the Coachella (ko
For example, when a weatherman reports that today's high was a hundred and sixty-two degrees, you'd normally expect him to add something like: "Holy crap, what a scorcher!"
Instead, he moves smoothly along—without skipping a beat—to the 5
Too much is never enough. This blog is hereby commandeered as a clearinghouse for gossip at the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films (Aug. 31-Sept. 6).
I feel a certain sympathy for the underdog filmmakers groveling around town these days: ABC-TV's Max Headroom needed a lot of convincing (okay, butt-kissing) to purchase my first student short, widely hailed as "the most uncommercial piece of ____ in Michigan State's history."
The Desert Sun has a nice PSIFSF overview, but we also need a view from the dugout, so eMail your steamiest tidbits to:
HotTip [at] Gmail.com (swap @ for anti-spam [at]).
Volunteers. It seemed like a good idea at the time: we'd be getting a chance to peek behind the scenes of an Oscar®-qualifying film festival. First, a group of us stuffed coupons and key chains into gift bags. Piece o' cake.
Next, Anikó and I were dispatched to move some wine: 22 boxes, each weighing 45 pounds and containing a dozen bottles, had to be wrestled out of a wine shop's tiny back room, past display racks of extremely breakable merchandise, down a curving esplanade and across a blistering plaza. According to the thermometer on a nearby bank, it was 111°F.
Then we lifted each box into the back of our SUV. At the other end, the process was reversed. It added up to nearly a ton of wine: ½
A guy goes into a bar, orders a drink, and begins complaining to the bartender: "This circus gig is a nightmare. Every day, I shovel elephant turds... piles and piles of pachyderm poop. What a terrible way to make a living."
The bartender replies: "If you hate the job so much, why don't you quit?"
The guy is shocked: "What? And leave Showbiz?!"
Have you designed an entry for Palm Desert's upcoming Golf Cart Parade?
Better hurry. November 7 will be here before you know it.
[For some reason, this event flashed me back to the first time I ever glimpsed those windmills out on the Sonny Bono Memorial Freeway: I strongly suspected they were part of a weird Brobdingnagian miniature golf course. Did anyone else feel that way, or was it just me?]
On a dark desert highway / cool wind in my hair / warm smell of colitas / rising up through the air.
[This month's top desert music: America's A Horse With No Name, U2's The Joshua Tree (including Where The Streets Have No Name) and Ray Stevens' delightfully un-P.C. Ahab, The Arab ("...he saw Fatima laying on a Zebra skin rug / Wearing rings on her fingers and bells on her toes / And a bone in her nose ho, ho...").]Sziasztok (in February, The Edward Society was the first to unveil my Heat-Gene Theory):
"Sziasztok" is one of the few words I know in Magyar. When my wife's twentysomething children visited us from Budapest last summer, they often used this group greeting, roughly equivalent to "Howdy, y'all!"
Anita and Jenő desperately wanted to see Las Vegas, even though August at our home in L.A. was pretty darn hot. The Nevada deserts, of course, were even warmer: Hoover Dam's outdoor thermometer registered 136° in the shade. My stepkids loved the inhuman heat and their mom, Anikó, ate it up with a spoon. I was usually dazed by the scorching weather, but I'm pretty sure I referred to all of them as "crazy Hungarians" more than once.
This summer, after my lovely bride suggested a trip to Death Valley, I began to detect a pattern. Much like swallows returning to Capistrano, Hungarians seem to have an inbred need to experience blistering heat at certain times of the year. When I hinted this might be the early warning sign of a severe genetic flaw, Anikó simply packed more beers into the cooler.
Lone Pine was our staging area. In the shadow of 14,491-foot Mt. Whitney (highest spot in the continental U.S.), we sipped our brewskis at sunset and watched four separate storms, each hurling thunderbolts and torrential rain onto the trackless waste just south of us. I shuddered while recalling some of the place names on our map: Desolation Canyon, Funeral Mountain, Devil's Cornfield, Stovepipe Wells, Furnace Creek. I was convinced we were heading into the maw of hell.
Much to my surprise, we survived the first day. In fact, we enjoyed a late-afternoon beer at the Forty Niner Cafe, a funky bistro in the middle of nowhere. They served up ice-cold Mojave Red, a tasty brew created by the same folks who make Sidewinder Missile Ale and Lobotomy Bock.
But during our sundown trek in the superheated air to nearby Zabriskie Point, it seemed strange that the other tourists used only foreign languages while gasping for breath. We heard no words in English, not even discouraging ones. I seriously considered revising my Hungarian Heat-Gene Theory to include several other nationalities.
The ground temperature never cooled down that night, so our shoes still stuck to the pavement the next morning, when we emerged from the car after a couple hours of driving. "Badwater," I read aloud from our guidebook. "At 282 feet below sea level, this salt flat is the lowest point in the western hemisphere." Despite the sheer cliff next to the road, there was no echo. The shimmering heat had sucked the words right out of my mouth.
We walked down the ramp in front of our car, onto a small wharf with ropes and posts, which steered visitors over to a solid part of the salty white ground. Anikó and I squinted at each other, feeling like explorers on the first expedition to a distant planet. We hadn't seen another soul on the road for nearly an hour, and the nearest stop was Dante's View, one mile straight up. But then, just as we started back to the ramp, another car pulled into the tiny parking lot. A young couple got out, and the guy glanced at our rear bumper, with its two oval country stickers: "USA" and "H." When we passed him, he greeted us with a casual "Sziasztok."
Of COURSE he was Hungarian. It made perfect sense to me. And I still believe this bizarre heat-seeking behavior involves some sort of genetic imperative.
Quasi-Celebrity News Flash: Nicky Hilton and her new hubby may be ensconced chez SPM very soon. E! Online reports the couple (wed in Vegas this week) "will not honeymoon until the fall," and we just received an eMail reservation for our Honeymoon Video Suite (a/k/a "The Rabbit Hutch") in the name of "Paris Hilton's sister + 1".
You do the math.
Raison d'être - desert place names: Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Twentynine Palms.
So why not dub a dish-the-dirt gossip blog "Sweaty Palms"?
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