spring flowers, march '09 edition

The Bellagio Fountain

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A few strictly tourist-grade photos of the amazing fountain in front of the Bellagio. I hope I don't have to explain that this is in Las Vegas and not Portland, right? I don't know where we'd put something like this. It's big and loud and splashy and gaudy and shameless, which is to say it just wouldn't fly in Portland. Which is a damn shame. And if by some weird accident we ended up with a Bellagio-style fountain here, they'd only run it in the summer months, and it'd be broken most of the time it was supposed to be running. And we'd be constantly wringing our hands about how to make it more sustainable. Sheesh. Sustainable, sushmainable.



These are actually all the photos I took of the fountain, despite standing there watching it for quite a while. At some point I went, oh, wait, I should take a few photos for the Gentle Reader(s) back home (or wherever it is you people are located). And here they are. As I said, they're strictly tourist-grade, at best. It probably didn't help matters that I was about halfway through a large Eiffel tower full of strawberry daiquiri. Which I was holding as I walked down the street, perfectly legally. Very civilized place, that Las Vegas.

Luxor, Night & Day

komodo, las vegas

It may seem weird that my first batch of Vegas photos are of the Komodo dragon at the Mandalay Bay's Shark Reef Aquarium. The main reason for this is that I only had these three photos of the beastie, so this was an easy little post to put together. It was, er, a bite-sized chunk.

And with that, I've used up my lame joke allotment for today. So there'll be no lame and unoriginal wisecracks here about meeting Mr. Komodo up close when you're caught counting cards at blackjack or whatever. Besides, everybody knows they use the piranha tank for that. (Yes, they do have a piranha tank too. And sharks, obviously.)

vegasbaby

Did I mention something the other day about walking down the street at 3am with a plastic football full of beer? As it turns out, walking down the street with a clear plastic Eiffel Tower full of strawberry daiquiri is even better. But don't tell the OLCC I said so. They routinely waterboard people for much smaller offenses.

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moblog du jour

So I've been way too busy to post for a while now. I've even been way too busy for any photo-expeditions. Two more days, though, and it's time for vacation, assuming I make it that long. My waking hours are basically a maze of twisty little Java classes, all with names nearly alike. And then there's some JSP stuff to worry about too. Have I mentioned I'm not the world's biggest UI guru? Well, I'm not. And don't get me started on all the other distractions going on around the office.

So anyway, about that vacation, this time we're headed to Vegas. Seriously, we are. We aren't really into the gambling thing, and we hadn't given the idea much thought until a month or so ago. It was cold and dark and the city was getting us down, and I saw this article in the normally-useless Oregonian travel section about what a deal Las Vegas is right now, with the economy and all that. A light went on. Not so much for the deals (although I'm willing to accept good deals if they're available), but because Las Vegas seems like it might be the anti-Portland. Ok, there probably are several anti-Portlands actually, but Vegas is the only one that sounds like any fun. A Dionysus to our Apollo, basically.

I've been there once before, briefly, back around 1993. I was on a bus trip with mostly European backpacker types doing the youth hostel thing. We stopped briefly on the way to (or maybe from) Red Rocks, with a stop at Hoover Dam in there somewhere too. The Europeans were both fascinated and horrified, and I went to great pains to point out that I wasn't the sort of American who has anything to do with the place. There was much sneering. Although secretly I had a nickel in my pocket and planned to spend it if I found a nickel slot and nobody was looking. The opportunity never presented itself, though, and that was that.

I've since figured out that life is a lot more fun if you don't go around sneering and criticizing everything all the time. and when you do, it helps if you've actually tried it before you start ranting, so you maybe have a clue about what you're talking about.

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Feh. Hit "send" when I meant to hit "save". Damn you, Chernobyl Stout!

Anyway, the plan is to go and give it a chance and see if we like it. And yes, I do intend to feed a one-armed bandit just a little. No sense in going to Vegas, and then coming back all smug about all the stuff you didn't do while you were there. If smugness is what you're after, why bother leaving Portland? We're like the world capital of smug right here. And irony, we've got that too, the sort of irony where you're only allowed to like things in the "so bad it's good" sense. Which is just the hipster cousin of sneering, really, where you take a simple, elemental thing -- say, walking down the street at 3am with a clear plastic football full of cheap beer -- and play like the experience is all complicated and multilayered, which it probably isn't.

Oh, and the plan is also to come back with a lot of photos. I've almost forgotten what it's like to take photos where you don't have to crank up the color saturation to make them interesting.

Until then, though, it's back to the Java mines for yours truly.

mt. hood from mt. tabor

a gravel barge in the fog