Baseball cards are an integral part of so many people's childhoods. I don't know about anyone else, but I love to nostalgically reminisce about tearing open the foil wrapper and seeing several pieces of low-quality cardboard emblazoned with the crappy statistics of some minor league-bound bums, who are so little-known that not even their teammates have heard of them, and a piece of razor-sharp gum left over from the Spanish-American War.

Well, much like my naive childhood notions of dignity, moral responsibility, justice, happiness and the belief that if you ate a whole bunch of Pop Rocks and then drank a bunch of soda you would literally explode, my fond memories of collecting baseball cards has been obliterated.

Last week seven fellow Advance-Titan staff members and I went to the Associated Collegiate Press newspaper conference in Las Vegas. I had heard several stories about how, along the Vegas strip, there are people who forcibly hand you fliers and handbills advertising escort services.

Escort services, which I'm sure we all know, are very well-run companies where a man in a purple velour suit and matching fedora sends someone teeming with disease to your hotel room so that you may [editor's note: this is below even the internet's sense of decency, sorry] and then if there's any cream cheese left over you can use it to treat the rope burns on your thighs.

I didn't think anything of this at the time, but, in retrospect, I think I should have started to worry when I saw that, every 15 feet, there was a row of newspaper vending machines, except the published works within were free, and instead of being newspapers they were pamphlets advertising various escorts and escort services.

These advertisements were usually accompanied with explicitly pornographic pictures, although sometimes these pictures were "censored" by placing a tiny lens flare over the genitals that, in proportion to the person they were supposed to be covering up, were about the size of a large raisin.

That means that the only thing stopping a small child in Las Vegas from walking a block in any direction and getting something about as pornographic as what is shown on Cinemax at 3 a.m. is a sticker saying "these materials are intended for persons over the age of 21 only." And I think that, as college students, we know how effective it is when somebody says not to do something until we're 21.

But those aren't too bad; at least if you don't want to look at it, you can choose not to open the newspaper vending machines and get one. However, you really don't have a choice when people start throwing them at you.

What I thought would be fliers or handbills were actually baseball card-sized advertisements for escorts. They each had a barely or not-at-all censored picture, as mentioned before, as well as a name that indicated what their gimmick was.

For example, if the card had a woman dressed like Daisy Duke from "The Dukes of Hazzard," then her name would invariably be along the lines of Charlotte Mae or Betty Sue. Or if the card had an Asian woman on it, her name would be the most stereotypical and offensive name possible-- something like "Mi So Horni."

On the back of these hooker trading cards were numbers to call to order an escort, as well as price listings (there were seriously special deals if you ordered more than one escort). Some cards had small manifestos supposedly written by the person on the card describing what kind of escort they are. For example, the limited edition Madame Trainer card (Madame Trainer is a dominatrix with a Doberman pinscher) states on the back "Because you need training you will bark like the dog you are and do what ever else I command." Apparently Madame Trainer herself needs some training in punctuation (rimshot!)

As surreal as it is to walk around in a city where there are baseball card-sized pornographic advertisements for “adult entertainers” stuck in every crack in every fence, light post, sidewalk and homeless person in the city, it’s even weirder when there are people passing them out.

There’s never just one person passing out prostitute trading cards; about every 50 feet there will be a group of about six people with enormous stacks of these cards. They always give out two cards at a time; I have absolutely no idea why. I can only assume that they’re offering a wide selection.

And as they’re passing these cards out they’re constantly slapping two cards against the entire stack, making a large snapping noise; again, I have no idea why they do that. Apparently they want to make sure that you know that they’re there, just in case you can’t see them when they get within six centimeters of you and are waving a card with a picture of Tatiana, the transvestite toe-sucker, in your face.

Actually, they don’t wave the cards in your face; they get as close to you as they possibly can and they will hold the cards right up to your hand. If your hands are in your pocket, they will hold the cards up to your pocket. If you’re telling a story and are gesturing with your hands, they will keep the cards a steady half-inch away from your hand and follow your gestures perfectly.

As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s actually a pretty good way to inform the consumer about your product. It doesn’t take long for you realize that it’s easier and less awkward to just take the damn cards, because it’s really uncomfortable to try and walk through and ignore a gauntlet of bums staring at you and trying to manually insert prostitute trading cards into your fists.

Those are all good reasons to not like hooker trading cards, but none of those are what ruined baseball cards for me. What really cheesed me off is that these hooker trading cards don’t have statistics on the back. Just like how I would like to know the batting average the previous six years of the back-up catcher for the Montreal Expos, I would like to know how many … you know what? Never mind.





And here's a completely unrelated side note: You know those commercials for Las Vegas that advertise that slogan "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas"? Yeah, ha ha, real clever. But it stops being clever real quick when you hear it a couple of trillion times over the course of a week.

And I don't just mean by people saying it to me after returning from Las Vegas. It's not their fault; to them, it seems like a real witty and topical thing to say. But what they don't know is that every single person in Las Vegas makes a point to say it at least seven times to every stranger they meet, as if parroting a phrase being peddled everywhere on cheap souvenir T-shirts is a hilarious and innovative joke in itself.

Anybody who repeats that insipid phrase to someone who is vacationing or has vacationed in Las Vegas and then looks at them with a smug, self-satisfied look on their face as if they deserve to be congratulated for remembering a commercial deserves to have their face repeatedly kicked until shards of broken teeth and jawbone fall into their windpipe and slash their lungs until they internally drown to death in their own blood-filled lungs.