Oceans Apart: Las Vegas and East Las Vegas
Posted on January 27, 2010
I had a dream that the Grand Lisboa tower, a hotel-casino that now dominates the skyline of Macau, came alive one night, pulled itself from its mooring, marched across China’s Pearl River Delta and, like Godzilla, tossed trolley cars around Hong Kong.
Ka-Ching? (a Chinese expression?)
Like Vegas in the 90s, this former Portuguese backwater colony, now called East Las Vegas, has gone over-the-top.
I think about my week in Macau last year as I walk the strip in Las Vegas, past rubble-strewn lots that look like some lizard of mass destruction had just swung through. Past construction cranes that have not moved an inch since my last visit a year ago. Past women stuffed in short tight skirts like shrimp in sushi rolls, alone or in pairs, peering at their mobiles. This is not the Las Vegas of the mid-century when Mo Dalitz and his pals ruled and in the words of a longtime restaurateur, “knew how to take care of people.” This is not the Vegas of the 90s when the Steve Winns and corporate poobahs built palaces and faux New Yorks and Venices and “family values” was the motto. This is the Now Las Vegas: down and a bit dirtier, but not out.
Oceans Apart: Las Vegas and East Las Vegas on connectedtraveler.com
» Filed Under Macau | Leave a Comment
Eight Tiny Reinyak: Audio Story
Posted on December 23, 2009
A few years ago I took a night before the night before Christmas helicopter ride to where the spirits are high and the air is thin. This is a short excerpt from “Gone Astray” an audio book of my stories that will be released by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange on iTunes and on CD early next year and distributed public radio stations.
Eight Tiny Reinyak [4:04m]: » Filed Under Holiday | Leave a Comment
Cold Turkey in Heidelberg: Audio Story
Posted on December 17, 2009
Heidelberg Castle ©Russell Johnson
What do you do when you are alone during a holiday, stuck in a place that doesn’t celebrate it? A few years ago I flew to Germany the day before Thanksgiving for a 1/2 hour business meeting. The meeting was a bust and alone, in a foul mood on a bone-chilling afternoon, I boarded a train for Heidelberg where the Student Prince was alive and quite drunk. This is excerpt from an audio book of my stories that will be released by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange on iTunes and on CD early next year.
» Filed Under Audio, Germany, Holiday | Leave a Comment
Go Do It With Goby
Posted on November 21, 2009
Sometimes I feel like a little kid on weekend: “Mom, I’m bored, what can I do?” Often my wife and I pore over the broadsheets or dive into our dogeared hiking guides. Sometimes we sail off into the uncharted bitstreams of Google, clicking through page after page of irrelevant links. Point is, we sometimes waste so much time looking for something to do that it becomes too late to do it.
Goby is not so much a search engine as a “do” engine. It works on the forehead-slapping premise that people often go to the net to make decisions not just to access a pile of poorly-sorted data. With Goby, you simply type in what you want to do, where and when. I keyed in “hike” and my location and immediately got eleven pages of nearby treks, complete with maps.
Too nice a day to be at a computer. I’m outta here. http://www.goby.com
» Filed Under Misc., Tech & Science | Leave a Comment
Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
Posted on November 14, 2009
Here is an interview we did with our friend author Kurt Beyer, who has just published “Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age” (MIT Press www.admiralgracehopper.com). It is the story of a woman who broke the glass ceiling in the 1940s as second in charge of the room-sized top secret computer at Harvard that designed the atom bomb while establishing the notion that computers weren’t single-purpose devices for calculating weapons trajectories, but could be taught languages to do everything from accounting to predicting election returns. She proved the latter at Remington Rand in the 50s when UNIVAC predicted the 1952 presidential election. Hopper retired, then returned to the Navy and became a minor celebrity in the 1980s after appearances on 60 Minutes and the David Letterman Show as the cranky/brilliant world’s oldest Admiral.
Grace Hopper broke through gender and corporate barriers and inspired a new generation of technology developers and entrepreneurs.
» Filed Under Video, Tech & Science | Leave a Comment
