Las Vegas, St. Louis, & Home

First, a Vegas round-up:

DH and Ms. Moo did very well in the HTA semi-finals, but not good enough to advance. Their googlers, me and Mr. Moo, did an excellent job…we tracked down all sorts of fun clues for them.

We stayed at Planet Hollywood at first, which was awesome, because I’d never stayed there. (DH and the Moos had flown out earlier in the week than I did.) It was also convenient for us because that’s where the HTA race was starting from. Below is the view from our room at Planet Hollywood. The room itself was unremarkable. It was decorated with memorabilia from the movie Volcano (somewhat ironic since I’d just blogged about Dante’s Peak). The buildings in progress are the MGM City Center.

On Saturday, we moved into a room at the Palazzo, which is technically a separate casino from the Venetian, though it feels like an extension of the Venetian. This was another hotel that was new to me, and our room was definitely deserving of photography:

We had an amazing view of the Wynn golf course. In the picture above, you can also see the convention center in the upper left. The convention being hosted was for amusement park ride attraction creators and operators.

DH had recently achieved Seven Stars status with Harrah’s, which has many benefits. One of the benefits is a giant comp for a “celebration dinner”. So, on Saturday night, we had our celebration dinner at Bradley Ogden at Caesar’s, with the Moos. We had decided to go somewhere nice but not necessarily opulent, because we wanted to be able to drink our way through our comp. The restaurant was excellent. I definitely recommend it. They have an amazing (seasonal) drink menu of fun ‘tinis. Toward the end of our evening, we still hadn’t used up our comp, so we all got fancy desserts and drinks. I decided to try one of the latest trends: ice wine. It was delicious, like biting into a fresh and perfectly sweet grape. But, it’s definitely a wine that you want to have in small doses as it’s sweeter than any wine I’ve ever had before.

After that, we saw Peepshow at Planet Hollywood as a group. DH, who has seen this show many times, told us that we had the second string cast and seemed to be missing a character, but we probably wouldn’t have noticed. The show had cute music and dance numbers, with plenty of opportunities to see flesh.

We went clubbing afterwards, to take advantage of another Seven Stars benefit: front of line access. That was AWESOME. This was Saturday night, mind you, and on a fight night, so the lines were insane. One club we went to had to have had at least a hundred people in line, as well as separate “VIP” lines and “single women” lines. DH flashed his card to a bouncer, and our group got escorted into the club directly…no waiting, no line. Awesome. One guy in line tried to like flirt with me to get me to take him in with me. Ha.

But, the bad part was that the clubs were really crowded, and I’m getting old, I guess. I just wasn’t enjoying it much. I saw a fistfight nearly break out between two guys, which kind of freaked me out. And, I felt like these clubs just aren’t that fun. They make you pay for bottle service if you want to be able to sit down anywhere, and the dance floor is totally minimized to make room for more bottle service areas. When there was a dance floor, it was packed, so you could barely move without running into people. But, cutting through lines was so much fun that we did it three times.

The Moos went home the next day. We hung out in Vegas for one more day. We ended up not doing much of note. I had a cupcake from a bakery in the Palazzo, and we had lunch at the Grand Luxe Cafe one day, which meant I got to have duo creme brulee (one dish of chocolate creme brulee, one dish of vanilla creme brulee…and sorry, I’m not looking up the ascii for an accent aigu). Then, we flew to St. Louis, where we were picked up from the airport in a sweet limo. We had an awesome suite at the casino there.

We also visited the St. Louis arch and the City Museum. The arch is really cool. To get up to the top, you have to crawl inside these little tiny pods. They ascend you up to the top of the arch, INSIDE the arch! They’ve been in the arch since when it was originally built…they were invented just for the St. Louis arch! The doors to get inside the pod are only four feet tall, and the pods can seat five people at most. Fortunately, it was not very crowded on a rainy Wednesday, so we got a pod to ourselves.

(Click the thumbnail to view all pictures from St. Louis.)

The City Museum is a museum that is more like a giant playground. You just kind of wander around and play with things. DH went on a slide that was ten stories tall (it was a spiral slide so you wouldn’t go too fast) and lots of slides that were 1-2 stories tall. I did not go on any slides, but I did play in the ball pit. The museum also has a big outdoor area that you can climb through, but it was closed because of the rain.

That night, we flew home. That’s when I started feeling sick. It turned out that I had a flu, and DH caught it about two days later. I ended up working at home through Thanksgiving mostly. We’ve been watching lots of movies with RiffTrax, including Twilight and Star Trek.

More pictures from our trip: Vegas-2009-11, StLouis-2009-11

Keep Out

Slate.com’s Culture Gabfest had a discussion about a DOE project regarding how to tell people/life/whatever 10,000 years from now that our nuclear waste is still very dangerous and should be avoided, as it will be dangerous for at least that long. The topic came up thanks to this article on Slate by Juliet Lapidos. But, for what it’s worth, the topic has been on several sites, including an equally informative article over at Salon.com.

The problem we’re facing is that we don’t know who these people (if they are people) will be, much less the language they will speak. A skull and crossbones is used for poison in the US, but it’s also a symbol of pirates (and could mean nearby treasure) and a symbol of the Day of the Dead (a Hispanic/Catholic celebration of ancestors). Think about how much language and symbolism has changed in the past few hundred years, much less the past thousand. Shakespeare was being positively scandalous when he coined euphemisms like the “the beast with two backs”, but even a simple word like fuck would not have been understood a mere thousand years ago, whereas most people could probably reason out the euphemism. This having been said, do you go with flowery euphemisms about sickening, wasting, rotting death?

The amazing part of this is that it goes to belief far more than science. What will our distant descendants fear? What will convince them to stay away? The most frequent idea is to build some kind of landscape feature (imaginative titles abound: Landscape of Thorns, Menacing Earthworks, Forbidding Blocks) and include text in every known language saying, essentially, you will die horribly if you dig this up.

Sound familiar? The Egyptians built pyramids with similarly morbid warnings: your ancestors will suffer, your flesh will rot, and our gods will strike you down. The pyramids were vast stone structures elaborately crafted to keep people out. That method didn’t work for Egypt; we can’t think it will work for us. The problem was that, by the time we found the pyramids, our entire belief structure had changed. We had the powers of science, and a whole new kind of god was on the rise, one that generally forgave and protected instead of striking. We had no reason to believe what the Egyptians had written.

I don’t have an answer to the problem, but it makes me wonder. What if Stonehenge isn’t some monument to an ancient god or time? What if it’s a marker for a dirty area that has now become clean with time? What if it was a disease-ridden zone, but our evolution allowed us immunity?

And that having been the case, will our 10,000-years-hence descendants be immune to radiation? Will this be a moot point?

Dante’s Peak

Okay, no one expects this movie to be the height of cinematic excellence, but it’s just cracking me up tonight:

• The USGS rep cautioning against putting the town on alert…well, of course, he dies later, because that’s what happens to wrong people in movies. But the whole idea that two people die in a hot spring and the town isn’t *already* on alert due to the news and media talking it up? ::eyeroll:: I mean, two people dying in a lake that suddenly became acid would surely warrant a blip or two on CNN, much less the state and Seattle (nearest urban area) news. And I’d credit a lack of news coverage in “ye olden days”, but the scene at the end of the rescue from the mine shaft is lit with at least twenty flash bulbs….so the two deaths in acidic hot springs didn’t warrant a blip, but the rescue of a USGS worker and a family that was idiotic enough to be still on the mountain does?
• Pierce Brosnan is so stoically British as they’re evacuating from Grandma Ruth’s house. “Rachel, Ruth, we really must go,” he says calmly as a fire erupts over one wall.
• The idiot kid who goes up the mountain for Grandma…has he not heard of a phone? And I can’t imagine that his mom had the town pull out and review evacuation plans but didn’t actually tell her kids a plan just in case…and the plan surely doesn’t involve driving up the mountain. Then again, this is a parent who simply tells her kids that the mine shaft “isn’t safe”, not grounding the kid for going in there and not telling him the reason why it’s not a good idea.
• Grandma Ruth wades through an acid lake to pull the family to safety…but the sad part is that if the adults were doing what Pierce Brosnan’s character did, wrapping their arms in fabric and rowing together, Grandma’s sacrifice wouldn’t have been necessary.
• Ridiculous dog rescue scene…but of course, we had to save the family dog. Grandma can be left to die on the mountain, but we have to risk the truck to save the family dog.
• Speaking of Grandma’s death, the special effects guys couldn’t manage to make her wounds look real in any sense of the word. The kids’ scrapes later on look far worse than Ruth’s legs from the wading through acid, and yet we get this super-dramatized scene where she just can’t go on.
• Pierce’s arm is supposedly visibly broken…we have a scene where he points a flashlight at a bone protrusion…but he still uses that arm to push himself up a half scene later, without even a mild moan of pain. Maybe shock has set in?
• We’ve got a really crappy national guard that a) crosses the town bridge when there’s clearly a giant mass of logs coming right at it and b) doesn’t tether the clearly ill-equipped minivan to one of the Hummers? Hell, I can’t imagine a National Guard that wouldn’t simply tell the USGS crew to abandon the minivan and get in the damn Hummer.

We Came, We Saw…