1) Eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles while watching "Las Vegas" on TV in my pajamas on a Friday night.
2) Ignoring phone calls from friends and SO as "Las Vegas" is strangely riveting.
3) Reading for pleasure for three hours straight. (You can do that if you're at home with a nasty head cold, like me.)
4 Looking around the Web and reading different blogs. For hours. Again, something you can do if you're home alone on a work day. Discovery: There are A TON of boring and badly-written blogs out there. They're either too geeky (speak English! Not HTML!), self-indulgent with no redeeming qualities whatever, or just plain stupid. Happily, there are also some (but far fewer) thoughtful and provocative web logs. I've included a handful on the left.
I finished reading 24/7: Living it Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas today. Very entertaining and well-written, for the most part. It's about how one former Wall Street Journal reporter takes $50,000 and gambles for one month straight in Vegas in the late 1990's, when Sin City was in the midst of a new building surge (Bellagio, Venetian, Paris casinos). Then again, when is this city not simultaneously tearing down and reinventing itself?
The book really gives you a feel for the city beyond its ersatz glitz, providing snapshots of several Vegas gamblers, comparing how his erratic poker, craps, baccarat, and blackjack play fares to that in Dostoevky's The Gambler, and speaking on how corporate, for better and worse, Vegas has become.
I did a Nexis search on the author, Andres Martinez, and it seems he's now on the editorial board of the New York Times. He's also a finalist for a Loeb Award for commentary. The Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism are the Oscars of business reporting. The 2004 winners will be announced on June 28. Go Andres!
That sounds like an interesting book. I'll have to look for it next time I go to Waldenbooks or Border's. There's a book called "Las Vegas: Then and Now" and it shows old pictures of Vegas and what is there now in the present day. It's fascinating to see how much the city has changed.
ReplyDeleteI was in the EDR (Employee Dining Room) last night eating dinner when the "Las Vegas" show came on. I didn't watch all of it. I like the intro to the show, with Elvis's "A Little Less Conversation" while they show images of the Strip, though, which is about all I know about that show, to be honest - LOL! Like I said, the real thing is way cooler. :-)
So it is ironic that a few months ago I had no idea I would be working at a casino on the Strip and watching the "Las Vegas" show in the EDR. Funny how life works sometimes!