Copyright © 2002, 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
The week before Thanksgiving, I actually did some rovin'--to Las Vegas, and although I did not realistically expect to come home with a suitcase full of money (and I didn't), I did expect to have a notebook full of ideas for columns. As the friend I was traveling with walked down The Strip with me one evening, he paused across the street from Caesars Palace (no apostrophe) said, "One thing you learn from Las Vegas. All that glitters… glitters." His one sentence pretty well covered everything I would have said about "Glitzburg."
But, I can combine a column in response to Las Vegas (not about Las Vegas) with a Thanksgiving column, to communicate with you my gratitude for being a part of the Peanut.org community and for the richness that we can find on the Internet. So, since I couldn’t take everyone along rovin’ to Las Vegas, you can join me for some rovin’ (and even some ravin’) on sites related to that city and my trip.
The flights made as much of an impression on me as Bugsy Siegal’s dream did. You can, by the way, view "Bugsy’s Lair":
http://www.lvol.com/lvoleg/press/pics/fh-lair.html
It had been eight years since I had flown, and since then, it seems that the gray Samsonite® luggage that so many of us always carried, sometimes carrying each other's luggage by mistake, had disappeared from the airline terminals, but not from the Internet:
Now, we all grab each other's soft black luggage instead. If you have flown lately, you know that you need a sense of humor to get through the trip. Here is a wealth of jokes, perhaps some you would like to print out before your next trip:
http://www.landings.com/_landings/pages/jokes.html
I must warn you that I cannot vouch for the sanitation of all of these; unfortunately, links to "clean humor" and "airline humor" did not connect. On the Internet, you can even find an airplane song, "Leaving on a Jet Plane":
www.nizam.com/firecoma/songs/jetplane.html
Las Vegas is a very strange place, and I know that that is an understatement. But, to get the official view, check the City of Las Vegas Home Page:
http://www.ci.las-vegas.nv.us/
Whenever I go to a new city, even if I just connect flights through a city, I relish the newspapers. But, the whole time I was in Las Vegas, I never saw a newspaper rack. Once I got home, I found that I could read Las Vegas newspapers--you guessed it--on line. Here, for instance, is the Las Vegas Sun:
I also had trouble finding post cards. Perhaps it is more lucrative to have a slot machine in the space that a postcard rack would take up, but here are some photos of Las Vegas that will do quite well:
http://members.tripod.com/SAGMEMS/lasvegas/index.html
My first day out walking, I noticed that at the fountains of Caesars Palace, plans were being made for a wedding. That night on the television news (remember, I never saw a newspaper), I heard that motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel (who has jumped the fountains at Caesars) got married there that day. (Gee, the guy does make dangerous leaps, doesn't he?) Learn more about him and the hotel where he got married:
The new Bellagio hotel/casino, which reportedly cost over a billion dollars, has a small but impressive gallery of art you can visit in cyberspace and also read about:
www.bellagiolasvegas.com/gallery
www.laweekly.com/ink/99/22/art%2Dvallance.shtml
I enjoyed my visit to the gallery, but I did grumble a little. Twelve dollars for twenty-four paintings? One soon develops a Vegas mentality. Twenty-four paintings equal twenty-four chances at the fifty-cent slots? A day trip to the Grand Canyon equals an evening with Tommy Tune, the chorus boy who looks as if he has been elongated by El Greco:
www.mgmgrand.com/lv/ent%2Defx.html
www.americansouthwest.net/arizona/grand_canyon/national_park.html
Or, about 1800 opportunities to throw away nickels in the cheap slot machines. Besides the Grand Canyon, you can ante up to Lake Mead and Hoover Dam in the vicinity:
www.americansouthwest.net/arizona/lake_mead/hoover_dam.html
Caesars Palace, the Flamingo… I did not stay in one of the legendary Vegas hotels, but the one I stayed in should be a legend, the Alexis Park:
My home in Las Vegas, strangely but comfortably, has no gambling and is a couple of blocks from The Strip (but across the street from the Hard Rock Casino). It has a quiet dignity that I don’t think you’ll find even in the famous hotels. By the way, two friends and I roughed it there with five telephones, three bathrooms, three television sets, two fireplaces, and just one hot tub in our suite. For one site that gives information on Las Vegas hotels and availability of rooms, look at:
http://las.vegas.hotelguide.net
It is amazing how much folklore has accumulated around Las Vegas in its short history, a history you can learn more about at:
www.lvol.com/lvoleg/hist/lvhist.html
Certainly, nowadays, movies are part of our folklore. To see how many movies have references to Las Vegas in their titles, check the listing at the Internet Movie Data Base:
http://us.imdb.com/Tsearch?vegas
On a more serious note, if you do plan a trip to Vegas, do yourself a favor and answer these "Twenty Questions" first:
www.gamblersanonymous.org/20questions.html
Even with the very little bit of money I flushed down the slot machines, I found myself grasping for some pattern in machines, numbers of times I played, possible lucky coincidences? But, is there really something to the idea of luck? Here are two explanations, one Buddhist, the other Jungian:
www.cia.com.au/buddhanet/ans53.htm
www.wellmedia.com/news/week51/unexmir.html
I didn't win any great topics for an article in Las Vegas, and I surely didn't win any money, but in other ways I was a winner. I had spent some very quality time with good friends, exploring an unusual city. Coming and going, I had a layover in Cleveland. When I stopped in Cleveland—no, no, I’m not going to give you URLs for the history and hotels of Cleveland, just for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which I purchased as I dragged my black fabric luggage from a gate at one end of the terminal to a gate at the other:
www.cleveland.com/pd/buffer.ssf
I was to get onto an airplane that had just come in from Atlanta. A number of people, loud, almost shining, and carrying white crosses with Hispanic names on them, names of people who had been killed in Latin America, got off the plane. They were coming from the yearly protest at the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia. It was a strange jolt of politics and spirituality, in fact, of reality, at the end of my visit to the fantastic capital of American hedonism. It gives me an excuse to let you rave about the controversial school with its official home page, as well as the home page of the School of the Americas Watch, which is its most vocal critic:
www.benning.army.mil/usarsa/main.htm
When I got home, I had an e-mail message that I had finally found a copy of the last film that Marlene Dietrich appeared in, Just a Gigolo. Even though David Bowie stars in it, it is one of the very few of Dietrich's English-language films that is out of print on video. For more about the film and its two notorious stars:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0079867
I also had a message from my Spanish professor, and that reminds me. What does Las Vegas mean? I could tell you, but I hope you'll find out yourself at the Human Languages page, where you can find a Spanish dictionary, as well as all kinds of resources, from lessons to dictionaries, for some languages that you may have never heard of:
From that page, you can eventually reach the Vox dictionary of English and Spanish:
In the spirit of the holiday, I’ll go ahead and tell you that the word vega means fertile plain or meadow.
Perhaps, though, my best surprise, the real win, was that the neighbor who had agreed to come by to visit with, care for, and possibly give therapy to the cats had cleaned out the litter box, something I could not have asked him to do. And, if you are not fortunate enough to have cats, you can experience a live litter box web-cam:
You saw it here first. So, keep your feet dry, your quarters in your pockets, your heart full of noble thoughts, and--if you do have a cat--the litterbox clean.
This will be posted Thanksgiving week. I certainly am including in my "to-give-thanks-for" list this year the opportunity to have a part in the community life of Peanut.org. To give you a couple of Thanksgiving links, useful, even though they are late:
www.readersdigest.com/features/thanksgiving
Don’t bother checking ideas for left over turkey. Just give me a call. Too much turkey is never a problem for me, which may be why, as Fred Allen said about rival radio comic Jack Benny's shows, my columns sometimes sprout feathers.