Vegas

This week I was in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. This is the week Vegas is inundated with thousands of nerds showing products ranging from a living room lamp with a built in speaker to an R2D2 robot with a built-in projection TV so you can have it go from room to room beaming HDTV on your walls to impress your geeky friends.

This week Vegas also hosts the Adult Video conference. Coincidence? I think not. Not only does CES attract a large number of their target audience, it contains all the technology to record, distribute and watch skin flicks in increasingly life like detail and size.

The crowd pleasers on the floor are always the big TV's. This year everybody was showing TV's so large you actually have to stand in your neighbor's living room to watch them properly.

The TV's are so large watching them is like looking through a pane of glass at real life (only better). The people are "life size". I'm sure this conjures up interesting use cases for the nerds and sex people alike.

Speaking of sex, my company put us up at the Wynn hotel which is the sexiest place I have ever stayed in the world (and I have flown over a half million air miles, so I have seen some things).

The Wynn hotel is the masterpiece of Steve Wynn (good thing he wasn't born as Bob Lose... rimshot). At the Wynn, even the ugly people are attractive. This appears to be thanks to, at least in part, the extraordinary amounts of money they possess. Money, it seems, they can not wait to rid themselves of at the $25 minimum-and-up tables.

The only unattractive people allowed to roam the Wynn are the engineers in town for CES. These nerds are happy to go against convention and look bad; putting more value in brains than looks. They put the "glee" in ugly. God bless them.

Anyway, getting back to "sex", this seems to be a sensitive subject in our puritanical country (and especially the Bible banging 'hood in which I live). It seems people around here are either rebelling against their natural "evil" impulses or rebelling too hard against the forces of "good". I eschew both views.

As I exit the elevators at the Wynn to get my morning $4 cup of coffee, I pass a young Hispanic woman putting new roses in the huge vases standing at the doors. She delicately arranges dozens of brilliant red roses with heads as large as my two year old daughter's. As I pause to admire this, a smartly dressed black woman exits from the elevator sporting a tight spherical afro large enough to obscure the rose bunches as she struts by. Sexy. Not my "thing" perhaps, but sexy nonetheless.

I walk by the roulette table and hear the croupier plead with the lone elderly gentleman at the table, light blue sansabelt trousers sagging slightly as he bends arthritically to lean on the rail, "Sir, it is 7AM and your flight is at 9:30, you really have to leave now!". The man nervously waves him off and places another bet. Not sexy.

Later, as I was buying chips to put inside thank-you cards for my team (since most of us were there for the show I called a meeting for all day Thursday) I dropped a $5 bill on the floor. A guy had just walked up beside me at the counter and was greeted by the cashier with "Hey there again, I see you have chips this time". He noticed me retrieving my grounded cash and said, "In Vegas, people don't bend down for a $5 bill, man." I look at his slicked back black hair, nicotine stained teeth showing through his easy smirk and replied, "I'm not from Vegas" He nodded sardonically, "You're lucky, man... you're lucky."

Now I am back in Chicago, just arrived late this afternoon. I picked up my kids for the weekend and my son wanted to go to CiCi's pizza. This is a pizza buffet right next to my apartment complex. The pizza is shitty and the atmosphere is depressing, but my son subsists solely on plain Asiago cheese bagels and thin crust cheese pizza so my options are somewhat limited. CiCi's has his favorite kind of pie which is marinara (he doesn't like pizza sauce. Seriously).

The clientele at CiCi's pizza primarily consists of large families. And I mean large in a number of dimensions. The dress code calls for sweat pants and stretchy shirts, the non-athletic kind.

CiCi's pizza is the antithesis of sexy.

I'm signing off now and booking my tickets and Wynn reservations to return to Vegas with my Love immediately.



A view of the Strip from my room:

A sample of the decor at the Wynn: