Hic sunt leones
In Las Vegas just after the new year for the HDTV Business Conference, I found once again that I always enjoy visiting Las Vegas even though I might not have been able to predict this if I had just heard of it for the first time.
I stayed at the MGM Grand hotel, which, in keeping with the theme of hotels on the strip trying to do bizarre and impressive things to outdo each other, has actual lions right in the middle of its casino floor, inside a "lion habitat" walled in with plexiglass. The MGM Grand was very grand indeed, and I managed to play DDR in its basement arcade (and later in another arcade on the strip, in both cases impressing people with some very poor performances because they had just never seen anybody play DDR before and because I could actually complete songs on Heavy difficulty).
Las Vegas is said to be very difficult for vegans. It is true that many of the restaurants I found there had zero vegan things on the menu instead of the one that is customary in San Francisco. At a sandwich restaurant called 'wichcraft, a nice woman decided that the way to game the system was to make me a "peanut butter and jelly with extra avocado, tomato, lettuce, and pepper, hold the peanut butter, hold the jelly" and it was actually very good and very cheap. I did manage to find this web page (there are some others I missed), which recommended an Ethiopian place and an Indian place, each of which I tracked down on successive evenings with great success.
I didn't get to see Cirque du Soleil's permanent shows, which was a big disappointment for me; I'd especially like to see O after hearing about it from people who've seen it before.
When I was walking around on the casino floor -- which of course you have to do to get from one part of the MGM Grand to another -- I thought of the lines
Sed in ludo qui morantur
ex his quidam denudantur,
quidam ibi vestiuntur,
quidam saccis induuntur.
I tried to put a dollar coin in a slot machine, but it wouldn't recognize it as money and just returned it to me. I accepted the omen and decided that if the casinos didn't even want my money, I wasn't going to give it to them.
The hospitality-oriented parts of Las Vegas are amazing because they follow the principle that any random expensive and impressive thing will eventually be tried and available somewhere. A case in point is indoor skydiving, and of course there are so many other instances. Las Vegas in general is experiencing a construction boom that reminds me, at least visually, of the South of Market Area during the Internet boom in 1999. I don't know whether the economic expansion will be longer-lasting than the Bay Area's during the Internet boom, but it certainly felt familiar to see the buildings going up and hear about the seller's job market and the influx of optimistic people.
I remain sad that the extremely spontaneous September 11 shrine at the Statue of Liberty replica at New York, New York has been taken away and replaced with a somewhat tacky semi-official September 11 memorial, which includes somewhat mismatched inspirational quotations and a musical soundtrack. I myself contributed to the shrine, as I'm sure I've mentioned here, when I visited Las Vegas after the September 11 attacks, by leaving an LNX-BBC disc dedicated to Christoffer. I was amazed to find myself confident that, in a city with a reputation for making fake things, the shrine that appeared at the fake Statue of Liberty near the fake Brooklyn Bridge was every bit as authentic as the street shrines that appear here in the Mission to commemorate the dead with candles and offerings. Now it has been replaced with something suitably artificial and hotel-made.
I did miss CES by the narrowest possible margin, but in my experience I like conferences better than expos anyway.
