A little bullsh!t on "Bullsh!t"

One of the few nice things about my crappy little downtown apartment is that the in-house cable system includes Showtime at no charge. So I faithfully watch Penn and Teller's show about the flim-flam that is all around us.

This week's episode was kind of a strange one, about companies that hawk things to help relieve insomnia. One story line they followed was a guy with chronic sleep problems coming to a convention in Vegas, showing all the things he does wrong that interfere with his chances of getting a good night of sleep. Naturally, he is staying at the Rio, where P&T perform.

As one example of the guy's poor decisions, they show him gorging himself at the Rio's buffet. In a voiceover, Penn mentions that the buffet is only about 50 yards from the Penn and Teller theater.

Huh?

If you've ever been to the Rio, you know that it is an enormous property. North to south, it covers all the way from Flamingo to Spring Mountain Road, which is nearly a mile. Much of that is parking lots and empty space, but still. I'm confident that the trek from the buffet, which is sort of in the southwest corner, very near the poker room, to the P&T theater, toward the north end, is closer to 500 yards than 50. You would not be completely crazy to get in your car and drive around to the north end of the property to get from the buffet to the theater if you were running late for the show after lingering too long over dinner.

I can't figure out any reason for this little lie. P&T often throw in false facts, disclosed as such later in the show, to keep you alert and to reinforce their pervasive message that you shouldn't trust things you hear as necessarily truthful. But there doesn't seem to be any of that motivation here.

Maybe the show's writers, who are more likely based in Los Angeles than Vegas, simply have no idea where the Rio buffet is in relation to the theater. But surely Penn knows the truth--why would he just go ahead with the script as written, rather than say, "Hey, you guys screwed up something here"?

There was no story-related reason to even mention the theater, so it was obviously just a little throw-away plug. Fine, I have no grudge against that. But they could have said that the buffet was "not too far" from the P&T theater, or something vague like that, rather than giving a specific--and egregiously erroneous--distance.

I remain puzzled by this.

(The chip above, incidentally, is one I picked up on a recent visit to the Rio poker room. It was issued some time within the last few months. Kind of unusual to find in general circulation a numbered, limited-edition chip with a sequence as low as 35, since those low numbers tend to be scooped up by chip collectors and dealers on the first day of issue.)