Sixteen Volts

Now that I have the pictures of our Vegas trip downloaded on this computer, I can post some of them here for my readers to enjoy, and list some other observations that I made in the glitzy city. While I was there, I wasn't in the blogging mood so that I could have taken photos of all things that would have made me go "Damn, that will be a funny post later". Which is a shame in retrospect. But I do what I can.

First, those ubiquitous ads for escort services. The sidewalks are littered with these little cards in which the hoo... escorts advertise themselves, and a bunch of minimum wage guys are passing them around. The boxes that around here contain free newspapers and renter magazines, in the Strip they contain nothing but escort service ads. Even though every taxicab carries ads for something, they didn't seem to be advertising escort services, but there are also these little trucks that do nothing but drive up and down the Strip with a big billboard on their backs. Once when such a truck with a billboard with a hot babe and promises of women who want to meet men, my wife asked me if men really believe these ads. In a sitcommy mood, I replied "I guess we just want to", but then tried to start a discussion about the equilibrium that advertising by various competing services will eventually necessarily reach, but was cut short by something more interesting that came up, can't remember what though.

Next, we can take a look at the photos we took at Mirage that used to have Siegfried and Roy and their amazing lions and tigers, until that one tiger remembered how it had just been peacefully sleeping in the jungle when Siegfried and Roy had arrived on their jeep and shot a tranq in its butt, and the next thing the tiger remembers what how he was riding a unicycle. Or something like that. Even though the show is on a permanent hiatus, Mirage still has the "Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat" that features a few tigers and lions, plus some other uninteresting animals that I already forgot. First, when you enter Mirage, there is a real live tiger in its little habitat safely behind plexiglass:

In the actual Habitat that you have to pay to get in, there are some whitish lions and tigers, held in segregated cages. The three male lions live together, and to the great amusement of the audience, one of them tried to mount and hump another one that was sleeping. The third one was just walking around in a pattern that made me wonder how simple automaton this mighty animal really is. At one point, this lion was looking straight at me, and when I moved, it kept following me, staring at me intently. Despite the chain link fence that separated us, the effect was somewhat disconcerting. This lasted for about ten seconds, after which it lost interest and moved on to something else. The male lions, when you look straight at them, actually have rather interesting faces, very much unlike what you see in pictures.

The whitish tigers were kept in another area. Over there, one of the tigers was walking around in a pattern that it repeated almost sphexishly, even doing the growls and the stares at the same position. Tommi once wrote that when he had observed real animals up close, he was surprised of how immensely stupid they are, and there is probably a quite lot of truth in that. Automata they are and not even that complex at that. And it's a good thing that animals aren't smart, because otherwise us humans would be in big trouble.

MGM Grand also has lions, in a plexiglassed area right inside the casino. These lions are females and they seem to be quite tame, almost like giant housecats, so that there were a couple of guys inside the area playing with them, scratching their necks and giving them balls to play with.

Inside the Venetian, in one of the faked streets there was a place that sold gelato. It looked pretty delicious.

Oh yeah, I'll ask that now before I forget: is there some deep technological reason that all kinds of card readers can't be made so that you could insert the card either way and it would still read it? Or if the card readers can't be made this way, could we use the "lateral thinking" solution that I read VW had successfully used in its car keys so that the card would be made totally symmetric? Or is the whole thing just a "screw you" from the manufacturers of these devices? But then again, once RFID really breaks through, the whole problem is a moot point.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 11:56 AM