Travelblog: STC goes to CES, part II

It's time to spin the wheel with me, the SPECIAL TRAVEL CORRESPONDENT. I was sent to Las Vegas for work to observe the Consumer Electronics Show. I stayed at the MGM Grand, a giant green hotel and casino at the sourthern end of the Strip. At the MGM, there is a slot machine everywhere a slot machine will fit and some places where it won't (awkwardly placed in the middle of busy hallways, right in front of the front desk, shoved next to the ice machine on the 14th floor). In this, the hotel wasn't any different from any other part of Vegas-- even McCarren Airport, from where I'm writing, is full of dinging, whistling machines.

Along with the slot machines, light shows, girlie shows, indoor smoking, and overpriced drinks, seems to be pretty much the same as every other casino in Vegas. But each of the big ones has a gimick-- the Flamingo is old, the Bellagio is artsy, the Venetian is, well, Venetian. The MGM has a gimick too, which seems to be some half-baked old Hollywood theme, but the only real evidence of this I saw was the giant photo of Cary Grant coyly holding a daisy above my bed. In my mind what really distinguishes the MGM is the family of lions who live in the casino. There is actually a three-story glass-caged lion habitat in between the roulette tables and the "high-end" slot machines ($100 and up only). The lions appear every day from 10 AM to 11 PM. I can't imagine this attracts guests or gamblers, but in Vegas everything that could be noble must be devalued as much as possible. I guess failing to enter the King of the Jungle in this race to the bottom would have been a major oversight.

The first day was mostly taken up by failing to get accostomed to my surroundings and playing with Juliette, who came to visit me from LA. I think I might have wandered off into the desert if she weren't there the first night. Because she was there, I got to cut out on the company party and have dinner with her at the casino. Then we went up to my hotel room, talked about relationships, did the crossword puzzle, and drank ginger ale. Vegas!

Juliette left the next morning and I spent the bulk of the day at the Consumer Electronics Show. There was a lot of walking, a giant, giant conference hall, throngs of jerks in ugly blazers, a million gadgets, and even more people saying the word "gadget." Other than this I have almost no recollection of the show. A lot of the convention was about cell phones-- cell phones that can post video directly to YouTube, cell phones that can project a photo onto a wall, cell phones with buttons that feel really good. In other words, a whole lot of nothing, most of it focused on user generated content. I hate the idea of user generated content (I know I'm blogging, but I'm pretending I'm not); it makes me feel like what's left of our culture is going to collapse and frey. Thanks to these fancy new phones, everyone will stop reading and thinking in favor of watching Internet videos of dogs running into windows. I suppose that's already happened.

Although I can't remember much about it, the conference was exhausting, but that night I had to go out with my company's delegation. We went to a party in the Four Seasons attended by DAVID CARUSO. I excitedly called the delegates attention to the fact that the star of Jade was standing directly behind them, but they promptly decided that he had a disappointing ass and wrote him off. Shortly thereafter, we moved on to the Emeril Lagasse Las Vegas Wine Bar to get smashed on their corporate cards.

So what did I take away from my trip? I learned some new things about slot machines. First, you don't have to pull the lever-- you have the option of pushing a button with a picture of a lever on it if you're too drunk, tired, depressed, or left-handed to muster up the energy reaching to the right of the machine. Second, they don't spit out money anymore; instead, you get a ticket with a bar code, which you redeem at a special ATM. In short, they've managed to identify the only two exciting things about slot machines and remove them. This didn't keep people from staying up all night playing. Seriously-- I walked passed a man at a machine near the elevator Monday night and saw that he was still there when set out for the conference on Tuesday morning. I also learned that there are new uses for cell phones. On the plane back to New York I'll figure out how this is supposed to apply to my work.