Vegas, pt 2

Please, please read part 1 of this article first. Ok, done that? Good.

I didn't imagine that Vegas was perfect. In fact, I went knowing that it would be flawed, because there's no way that so much money can change hands without someone losing out. It was, as far as I could glean from the available media, a viper's nest of debauchery.

In some senses, I was proven utterly correct in this assumption. If, as requested, you have read part 1 of this twin article, you'll know that I was impressed by some parts of the city. However, there's plenty in Vegas for an anti-profligate such as myself to hate.

Wishful wastefulness is the catchphrase in the city. Why bother turning out the lights in your hotel room when doing so will only save a fraction of a thousandth of a billionth of the energy which gets wasted in the city every day? Of course, I believe in setting examples so I turned off the lights, but I was, I can assure you, in a significant minority.

Allied to this were two things which make the bile rise in me like nothing else - prostitution and destitution.

There were, I kid you not, men and women standing on every corner on the Strip wearing t-shirts and handing out flyers with the same slogan plastered across them - "Hot Girls To Your Room In 20 Minutes!". Don't even bother leaving your room, just give them a call and in 20 minutes you can be having your way with some poor girl who has to pretend to like your hairy, fat, pasty, BO-reeking body. Joys.

Let's not linger, though, there are far more enjoyable topics to discuss. Like poverty. Vegas is crawling with money. It flows through big pipes underground instead of water. It's the lifeblood of the city, it lubricates every cog in the great machine. And yet there is poverty all around you, both visible and invisible. The tramps on every street corner are an ever-present reminder of the fact that not everyone is here for a good time. But even worse that that was the run-down apartment block we passed in the shadow of one of the more impressive casinos.

We were being delivered home from an aborted trip to the Grand Canyon, and had been taken all around the houses by the driver in an attempt to avoid the Strip, the busiest place on earth. As we passed Stratosphere on one side, we also passed a run-down, dilapidated apartment block on the other side, straight out of the 1950s. Onto the balcony outside the front door of one of the apartments came a young boy, no older than ten years old, wearing what amounted to rags. In the midst of all of the money which was being spent there were children living in poverty.

I can neither understand nor stomach this discrepancy. In the world's wealthiest nation there is still room for poverty. What's worse, children living in poverty. How can the American public live with themselves when this is going on? Oh, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of work still to do in the UK, but at least we fucking try.

I've gone on too long already, and given my lead I'd go on for a lot longer. So I'll leave it there. Vegas has left me torn in two, impressed and disgusted, thankful I'd visited, even more so that I got out when I did. Now that's a trick...

Vegas, pt 1

I recently had the opportunity to visit Las Vegas, albeit relatively briefly. I've come to the conclusion that's rather a good thing, but more of that later. I'd been to America a couple of times before, but never visited the "Blackpool of the (wild) West".

Of course, it's so much more amazing than that grim northern British city. There are two sides to Vegas, and in this first of two articles I intend to write about it, I want to concentrate on the positives.

Let's not beat about the bush here, Vegas is an incredibly impressive place. It's a testament to the realisation of imagination in concrete and lightbulbs. No-one does this 'imagineering' in quite the same way as the Americans, and Vegas is redolent of an adult version of Disneyland, a playground for those who only vaguely remember how to play.

The structures which have been built, whilst they are clearly ripped off without a moment's thought for culture, have actually been lovingly recreated. All of Vegas is about taking money from your pocket, but my goodness they make you feel good about it. If nothing more, it's worth visiting for the sheer, breathtaking scale of the monuments on view. Ignore the gambling and the girls (more of that later), and go for the scene-setting, and maybe a show.

There's also an underlying level of actual class to the place. Oh yes, it's hidden behind a veil of debauchery, but some of the retail opportunities (let's not be so crass as to term them 'shops') really are of the highest calibre. My mother, gently enquiring about a rather attractive vase in one of the 'Miracle Mile' shops was mildly surprised to find the price tag running into five figures.

Of course, expensive doesn't mean high class, but there was, amongst all the fakery, a certain sense of rightness about things. I wasn't expecting it, and I was pleasantly surprised to be ambushed by it.

I had gone into Las Vegas a cynic, and come away genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed myself, and how quickly my opinion had been modified. Well done, Vegas, well done.

Autumn

A couple of images which mean autumn to me. One is entirely natural, the other somewhat more collaborative. 

The colours in this are genuine...

This GT-R is the same one which appeared in this edition of Car Park Bingo. 

A Very Important Picture

Subconscious Editing

It's funny the way the human brain works, isn't it? I mean, quite apart from the fact it appears to work on electricity (which is quite frankly ridiculous if you ask me...), it can do some pretty bizarre stuff at times.

Take, for instance, the way that it can recognise not only patterns, but also tiny incongruities in them. The patterns don't have to be numerical sequences or geometrical shapes, either. A pattern can be a block of text, written in a particular style. One word out of place - not misspelled, just unexpected - can leap right out of the page at you. 

The example which led me to blog about this is a recent experience with a word suddenly lodging itself in my mind. The word was 'blood'. Here I was, sitting at my desk with my email open on one screen and a fairly dry, technically worded document open on the other. Neither of which should contain the word 'blood'. At all. 

And yet... I scanned through the document a couple of times, and there it was, in the phrase 'the life blood of asset management planning'. In all of the text, in a place where it really had no reason to be, was my word. Of all the words on that page, my brain had honed in on 'blood'.

Why did this happen? And more importantly, are there wider implications here? I know that I have at least a partially photographic memory - I can remember numbers I've seen written down, such as license plates on cars. Not all the time, but way more than average. And I can remember visual patterns with surprising ease and accuracy. 

Could it be that as an extension of this is my brain scanned all of the words in the document and found this one out of place? Or was because it was so wrong in the context of the words written there that I couldn't help but spot it? Or was it just a fluke?

I don't have the answers. Sometimes I wish I'd done cognitive psychology, just to answer questions like this. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have liked to be like Derren Brown. Stupid man...

Darkness and light... and a bird

Look for the extra-special free gift of a bird flying through the frame. Joys.

It's morbid, but we must have answers...

When the queen dies - assuming she's succeeded by a male heir, which seems likely - do all the QCs automatically and instantly become KCs? Would that not be a really good time for a business card printing company to launch an advertising campaign to the members of the Bar? 

Real Man Test #87: Swarfega

Do you (a) know what Swarfega is, and (b) know how to use it properly?

This summer...

... bring the outdoors indoors!

We live in crazy skies

Plowed by mutant spacemen