Have you ever been to Vegas? I went once with my family. I was 14, I think. There’s not a lot in Vegas for a 14 year old on a family trip except for uncomfortable feelings and lots of questions you’d rather not ask your parents. If you haven’t been to Vegas, you’ve definitely heard Sin City’s brilliant slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” That’s a great slogan for Vegas. Unless you get an STD, it’s a slogan that makes sense for the city of hedonism. They have whores there. Legal ones. Lots of them.

My problem isn’t with Vegas, though. My problem is with all the morons out there that think it’s hilarious to apply that saying to any other city they’ve ever been to. First of all, it doesn’t make any sense. If you’re doing the things that you would do in Vegas while you’re in Springfield Missouri, well, let’s be honest – you’re a meth addict. Gambling and hanging out with professional sex machines in Vegas is just a weekend getaway for a white collar suburbanite. Doing that anywhere else is either some kind of mob situation, a drug den with a whole alphabet’s worth of Hepatitis, or some kind of swanky party at a Chicago politician’s house. Which I guess is another way of saying “mob,” but whatever.

Seriously, did you rent a Lamborghini, see Celine Dion for free because you were winning too much at the roulette table, and urinate on a miniature Eiffel Tower while you were visiting your in-laws in Maine? No you didn’t. What happens at your in-laws in Maine goes home with you and creates stress in your marriage at home. I know you wish it stayed there, just like Kent wishes he left his Irritable Bowel Syndrome (also called “spastic colon” which is both 1000x more hilarious and a probable name for an indie rock band) here in Chicago when he left for California. But he didn’t. He’s still pooping his pants down in San Diego. What happens in Chicago either gets a pair of concrete boots and gets tossed in the river, or gets elected President of the United States.

What about when you went down to Cancun for SB2k8? Did your schwasted 2am grindfest at Senor Frog’s stay there? Did it keep the dance floor warm for you, waiting until next spring break? Nope. Those sorority chicks you met from Arizona State put pics up on Facebook and tagged you before you had a hangover the next day. Then, since Facebook decided that it needed to turn itself into a medium for inter-familial awkwardness, your Grandma saw those pics and has been buying you books about abstinence ever since.

Hell, thanks to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and every other tech trend nothing you do anywhere actually stays there. What happens in ____ gets tweeted and then pops up in someone’s news feed. I can’t rent a movie without my friends all over the world (yeah, I’m that popular) finding out about it on their iBerry or their blackPod. You’ve got Skype, Gchat, Webcams, phone cams, trash cams, stalker cams – there’s practically not a place in the world that still knows how to keep its business to itself. There are plenty of things that I want to stay in other places that just won’t do it.

Please people, if you’re going to keep anything in whatever city you just visited, make it your painfully unoriginal jokes. The last thing that stayed in Vegas was Mary Kate Olsen’s virginity, and if that’s true about Vegas, how much truer is it in other cities where there are still laws against buying shots for eight year olds and urinating off the roof of a moving police cruiser?