Saturday, January 10, 2009

The Third in a Series of Digressions: No... More... Pie!

One of the windfalls of attending the Consumer Electronics Show has been meeting a bunch of Princeton Review folks I previously knew only by their email addresses. Every one of them is smart and capable and 'good folks,' and I'm not just saying that because some of them might read this. I was initially drawn to working with TPR many years ago because it attracted bright, creative, interesting people, and I'm glad to learn that, despite other changes at the company, this has remained a constant.

I've been dining with them every night and, like everything else in Vegas, the dinners have been extravagant. I suspect I've gained 5 pounds over the last 72 hours, but the meals have been great fun, the sort that encourages one to overindulge, and even under the most favorable circumstances I am incapable of saying no to a well-grilled steak, or a glass of wine, or a grappa. Still, I woke up this morning with a very clear plan in mind: a very small breakfast and a salad for lunch. I've stuck with that plan, and can happily report that it was a welcome return to normalcy.

Last night I gave back the rest of the $100 I won on Wednesday night, and I'm hoping I'll have the restraint to call it quits. Not losing is winning in this town, so I should be happy I had some free entertainment and count my blessings. A friend commented on an earlier post that I should leave the slots behind and check out the craps or blackjack tables. I'm sure his reasoning is solid but I'll decline all the same, and here's why: in Vegas there are games of skill and chance, and games of pure chance. My skills are nonexistent, so any game in which skill is a factor is one in which I am at an unnecessary disadvantage. At least with the slots I'm on an even plane with all the other suckers.

Yesterday I finally made my way over to the Las Vegas Convention Center, site of the main CES exhibits. I guess I am not a techy, because I just couldn't get excited about most of it. There are tons of large screen televisions on display, but I have a large screen television at home and it looks pretty good; these may look better, but if they do, I can't tell. There's also lots of audio equipment that will allow us to annoy fellow motorists with the bass rumbling from our cars even more in 2009 than we did in 2008, digital cameras that will send your pictures and video directly to your computer or pretty much anywhere else, all sorts of data storage do-hickies, and cell phones that do everything. I don't imagine I'm breaking any news in reporting that cell phones appear to have won the gadget wars, and they are now being redesigned to perform every function that the war's losers perform. I just saw one that monitors your blood pressure... cool but also a little unsettling. What won't my cell phone eventually know about me? Finally, stuff related to Guitar Hero or Guitar Hero-like video games is ubiquitous. I truly do not understand the game's appeal; to me it looks like a video-game version of Simon, but simpler. Of course, I also don't understand why people spend enough money on pornography to turn it into a multi-multi-billion dollar industry.

Speaking of which: Big boobs are everywhere. Tonight is their night, as the adult entertainment industry' Oscars, the AVN Awards, will commence in a few short hours here in the convention center we share. Like Las Vegas itself, the proximity of scantily clad porn stars has gone from seeming unimaginably bizarre to normal, even mundane, in a few short days. Indeed, I'm surprised at how quickly I've adapted to the weirdness of this city: the smell of cigarettes, the clang of one-armed bandits, and the thwack of the passes that accompanies every shill's entreaty to attend a particular "gentlemen's" club have all now become part of the landscape, all easily ignored. If there's a Hell and if as a result of some clerical error I'm sent there, this experience gives me hope that it won't seem all that bad after not too long a while.

So there you go.


No.... more.... pie!

2 comments:

Ginger72 said...

Intrepid Bachelor should follow intrepid-optimist.com

sm0ke potskididdy said...

Meltzer Twitter me @iamdawalrus. Hope all is well you mensch!
XOXOXOXOXOXO
sm0ke potskididdy

(always reinventing myself...)