We decided to chill out around one of the three Alexis Park pools yesterday reading. (The Female Half is reading “The Path Between the Seas” by David McCullough, an account of the building of the Panama Canal. The Male Half is nearly finished with “Live From New York” by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, a history of Saturday Night Live.)

There were still some comics haunting the tropical courtyard complex. (It’s so hard to get out of Vegas on a Sunday!) So, we had some quality time with some of the WSOC combatants. It’s generally agreed that coming out to the contest was one of the better decisions they’d ever made. In addition to participating in the contest, they clumped together and surveyed the Vegas nightlife. Some of them even jiggled various connections and managed a guest set on one of the many comedy stages in town. (Hell, some of them had never even been to Vegas before this trip. Or, if they had, it was in a previous life or it was for a honeymoon or for a long ago family trip.)

And we’d like to thank the Alexis Park cats– dozens of them!– who came out at dusk and made the experience that much more surreal! (We have a suggestion for the WSOC next year– Bag a cat, win a week!– the person who can snag one of the AP cats gets a week at Goodnights! Great fun! Caution: Eligible cats must be turned in alive!)

We were jabbering with Kevin Kearney the other night, over the din of the jabbering comics at the Fryers Club gathering, when Kearney says that he had gotten a few emails (or phone calls?) from friends who spotted our posting on the World Series Of Comedy. (In it, we ran a pic of The Male Half holding up a sign bearing Kearney’s name– a reminder that Kearney was a no-show at the festival’s “Meet & Greet” session.)

The tenor of the messages that Kearney was getting was along the lines of “You shouldn’t let those Shecky people besmirch your good name like that.” Puh-leeze! We’ve known Kearney for about 20 years. And we’ve been busting his balls for about 19 years and six months. So… ease the fuck up, people– sometimes we aren’t engaging in any scorched-earth policy. Sometimes, it’s just a joke!

In fact, when The Female Half spotted him at the Fryers Club, she immediately told him that she sat behind his nameplate at the Meet & Greet and booked up his Sin City Comedy Club through all of 2011! Kearney replied, “Through March?” To which she replied, “NO! Through the whole year… Hey! Waitaminute– why would booking it through March be any different than booking it through all of 2011?”

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank WSOC organizer (and our host) Joe Lowers— he put on a sprawling contest and it went off with seemingly few hitches. And it was swell to have so much quality interaction with so many fans of the magazine. The WSOC afforded us the opportunity to meet some fine, upstanding comedians over the past six or seven days and re-connected with some that we’d known (but had not hung out with for some time).

A very special thanks to Charles Viracola, Scott Thompson, Geechy Guy, Todd Paul, Kathleen Dunbar and Brad Reeder for enabling us to have a blast outside the confines of the “sanctioned” WSOC events.