Hello Kitty and the Grand Canyon Experience

When I left, he or she was busting a credible move to “Brick House” in the company of a shirtless man in a Guy Fawkes mask.

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I have found, when I travel, that I am not truly comfortable until I’ve had the opportunity to walk around for a while on my own, to go off the reservation a bit. This is harder than it should be in Vegas; the casinos are so desperate for attention, so grasping and flashy in their attempts to pull you deeper within, that it can actually be quite difficult to even find the exits once you’ve been sucked inside. The gilt and the pulsating lights aren’t even the biggest distraction for me; it’s the incredible wall of noise on the casino floor, made even more insufferable by the fact that I’m deaf in one ear and consequently lose all possible points of reference. Somewhere, my ear tells me, perhaps even everywhere, people are shouting to be heard over the sound of bells and buzzers.



Conventions and trade shows — especially the expo halls — are their own kind of desperate, of course. I’m always amused by the companies who seem to keep a Shannon or Lisa (and why they’re almost always named Shannon or Lisa, I don’t know) on their sales and marketing staff based on the fact that she looks breathtakingly amazing in a short black dress and is able to walk in three inch heels. Sometimes it’s fun to try to ask the hypothetical Shannon a technical question, especially if you’re open to being surprised by a knowledgeable answer now and then. The parallels to prostitution — or at least escorts, or burlesque — are offensive, of course, but Vegas seems to go out of its way to make them as obvious as, well, the prostitutes and escorts and burlesque shows here. In this new, almost family-friendly Vegas, it’s not as sordid as it used to be. It’s really just another way to hold eyeballs; I overheard a young boy, probably about eight or so, ask his mother if he could go with her to watch the naked ladies tonight, to which his mother replied that the show was after his bedtime. All the glass windows overlooking the pool are there to encourage passersby to ogle the bikini-clad sunbathers, and the sunbathers are there to be ogled — as are most of the people in the casinos who aren’t there to gamble; they’re there to be seen, and so they dress accordingly. The women in skintight, peekaboo dresses and stilettos, the men in costly tailored suits and alligator shoes, are really just variations on the slot machines adorned with lights (and, nowadays, 3D video and interactive storylines.)

Microsoft’s Visual Studio booth was decked out in a fin-de-siecle circus theme, complete with striped tents and caramels — and a cartoonishly lanky, almost Cirque-de-Soleilish “ringmaster” who, while cavorting around the expo hall, managed to give a couple of people some real moments of fright when he’d leap out at them and cackle (and then remind them to download the VS11 beta). Having seen it happen now, I’m cautiously in favor of providing opportunities for genuine terror at trade shows. At least seven booths were giving away tablets, and three were giving away Xboxes, and I got so many T-shirts (eleven, to be precise) that I actually started regifting them to the staff at other booths. They seemed to appreciate it — apparently no one gives them any swag — so I amused myself by hooking the Lisas up with appropriate trinkets.

I had resolved to make it out to an electronics store tonight to pick up a wireless AP, just in case the wired connection was any faster than the hotel’s terrible wireless. (Sadly, it is not; the slowness appears to be rooted in the very bones of the hotel’s connection to the Internet — in its tubes, if you will — and so I’m still struggling to videochat with my wife and connect over VPN to Edgewood to get some work done. It’s rather frustrating. I miss my family terribly — Sophie had a starring role in a class play today, which I missed — and not being able to even Skype with them is surprisingly heartbreaking.) The nearest store turned out to be a Fry’s about four miles south of the hotel on Tropicana, so I set out after the last session.

It’s hard to maintain a sense of scale in Vegas. The hotels are so enormous — it takes me nearly twenty minutes to cross the MGM Grand every morning — that you don’t realize how much ground you’re covering. And the mountains on the horizon (which make this Midwesterner’s heart just ache with longing; there is a part of me that desperately needs mountains in my life) don’t help. Neither does the fact that they put their airport in the center of town, meaning that I actually walked past the airstrips as the sidewalks ran out and the glitzy casinos turned into ramshackle motels and crumbling, decaying parking lots — and then gave way to signs of the real city: police stations and pumping stations and bagel shops and apartments and, finally, a sprawling “mall” with a Fry’s and a Staples and a Whole Foods.

Which is how I spent my second evening in Vegas: walking four miles into sprawl as the sun set and the Strip lit up, then eating a surprisingly good burrito from the Whole Foods deli while watching low-flying military jets roar between the airport across the street and the Air Force base a few miles north, leaving lacy pink contrails in their wake. Also: I provided free computer advice to a French girl dressed as Wonder Woman and her Chinese-speaking boyfriend (dressed, of course, as the Michael Bay version of Bumblebee), then danced outside the M&M store to Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive” with a mysterious figure disguised as Hello Kitty. When I left, he or she was busting a credible move to “Brick House” in the company of a shirtless man in a Guy Fawkes mask.

Also, interesting computer things.

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