This past weekend was the middle weekend of April. That’s the time universities put on dog-and-pony shows for students who have been admitted, to help them make up their minds.

My daughter has been admitted to several universities, and she managed to narrow it down to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Virginia Tech. Somewhat at the last minute, she decided she needed to see both campuses to make her final decision.

So on Saturday she and my wife drove down to Blacksburg from our suburban DC home, about a four-hour trip. They stayed near Blacksburg and then spent Sunday in Tech’s pre-orientation sessions.

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Okay, strictly speaking what I’m about to share with you is not in Las Vegas, per se, but it is just outside of town and is generally considered a “must-see” destination for folks who can tear themselves away from the casinos.

Red Rock Canyon is just on the western edge of Las Vegas. It is reached by driving straight out Charleston Boulevard to the west, until there is no more Charleston Boulevard. As the road continues into the hills, one enters the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. Just a few minutes after the straight road began to curve, we realized that we were in real, live desert.

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Here are pictures of the rest of the “heritage” hotels we visited on our trip. I meant to blog these from the hotel, but of course, the hotel WiFi would not handle the pictures. Now, two days after arriving home, I’m putting them up.

We’ll continue our pilgrimage of endangered hotels by going down Las Vegas Boulevard South. The one hotel that seems in most imminent danger of implosion is the Saraha, on the north end of what’s considered the Strip.

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We resolved to see as many of the (apparently) doomed old casinos in Las Vegas as we can. Yesterday (Tuesday) we concentrated on the north- to mid-Strip area.

According to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch, re-development will probably doom most of these hotels at some point in the near future. I already mentioned the recent demise of the Stardust, whose rubble I can see directly from my hotel window while typing this.

Here is the defunct sign of the Stardust, still standing behind the barrier that separates the curious public from the continuing work of hauling away debris.

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My wife and I are spending my spring break week in Las Vegas, to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. This was her idea, really, but I’m glad she pushed it. I don’t know what every would have gotten me out here, and this is a place I should see. Since I’m a part-time pro magician, and since Vegas is the town where magicians come to “make it,” I should have had the Vegas experience long ago.

We’ve been overwhelmed in our first 18 hours here. Too much to see and experience. Read the rest of this entry »

In the spring of 2007, everybody in the USA seems to have a cell phone. (Mobile, handy, whatever you want to call it.) Here in the suburbs of DC, they are used ubiquitously, but not always benignly. Driving while phoning, for example, is nearly as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. The Virginia legislature just passed, and the governor just signed, a law prohibiting cell phone use by drivers under the age of 18.

Maybe I’m a prissy old man, but I am amazed every day at the huge number of rude and/or clueless people who use these things. Like Pavlov’s dog, these cell phone users drop everything when their phones ring. They interrupt whatever social interaction, task, or meeting they are involved in (or witnessing) to respond to the ring of the bell, in hopes of getting the telecommunications equivalent of a morsel to eat. Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Post reports that the “wintry mix” is paralyzing the DC area. Over at Wonkette, folks who grew up in snowier places than the U.S. southeast are harumphing and growling like 80-year-old curmudgeons that these wimps in Washington can’t deal with a little “frozen water.” Makes ‘em feel superior to the yokel natives, I guess.

Whatever. Washington, DC is not New York or New Hampshire, for God’s sake. I’ve made this argument for about 25 years. Why would a community that hardly ever gets any snow invest tons of money on snow removal preparations? The fact is, the side streets are still slippery and dangerous to drive on.

But the point of this post is to talk about the solitude I’m experiencing today. My wife is running a large week-long national meeting in DC, and is camped out in a hotel in town. My daughter has gone in to work with her for the day, since she’s not at school.

Therefore, I’m at home alone, still unshaven and unshowered at 12:30 PM, wasting hour after hour customizing a couple of blog sites and drinking coffee.

I find that I’m tyrannized by my solitude. My school district has already cancelled school for tomorrow (the only responsible thing they could do, Wonkette, if there’s ice and snow on the roads the school buses travel). Therefore, I have nothing pressing me to come alive, really. My neighbors are already busy shoveling their sidewalks while I’m blogging and taking photos. Guess I’d better go out and be responsible now.

I believe that by the end of this two-day forced vacation from teaching I will have had enough of snow days. Let’s get back to our regularly scheduled life now.

My 17-year-old daughter, who is herself a Beatles fan, gave me the new CD/DVD set Love, the mashup of Beatles music produced by Giles and George Martin for Cirque du Soleil, as a Christmas gift.

I am the original Beatlemaniac, yet for some reason the CD sat on my desk for three or four weeks before I imported it into iTunes. (Maybe it’s a sign of the times that I had to wait until I had a few minutes to import it to my iPod before I got around to listening. Does this serve the Beatles right for waiting so long to join the digital music revolution?)

The album is fantastic. Beatles purists (mostly on discussion forums) who complain that it’s “messing around” with the originals must not remember what the Beatles did during their recording careers. They messed around all the time. John Lennon was one of the earliest proponents of reverse-tracking and using found sound.

On the other hand, many people criticized the CD for not being bold enough. And many reviewers seem to share my fascination with the combination of brilliant re-mastering and wild creativity from an authoritative source, the Martins. (Mercifully, the producers did not try to include any of “Revolution #9″ on this soundtrack. Wild creativity does have its limits.)

As a Baby Boomer, I will probably always have the feeling that the Beatles are somehow “cutting edge.” However, listening to and looking at the interviews with surviving Beatles and spouses reminds me that their music is now the music of really rather old people. Classic it may be, but cutting edge it’s not anymore.

But it is great music. I will go to my grave (hopefully several decades from now) maintaining that modern rock-and-roll owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the Fab Four and George Martin, for essentially inventing such things as massive multitracking and stadium rock shows. And the music remains fresh and strong. Why else would kids born in the 1990s be so into it?

I was sitting in the senior awards assembly at Stone Bridge High School this morning, and I got to thinking about people from my past, people who were good friends or mentors or teachers, with whom I’ve lost contact.

I realized that I will be one of those people for some of these kids. For some reason, I began to feel rather guilty at the bad job I’ve done keeping in touch over the years.

I especially remember my boss from the early 1980s, the Dean of Residential and Judicial Affairs at Vanderbilt University, K.C. Potter. He was a great dean and mentor who taught me a lot about teaching and guiding adolescents–several years before I even thought about becoming a teacher.

K.C. was the spirit of Vanderbilt while I was there. He actually lived on campus. He wore bowties in black and gold (Vanderbilt’s colors) and was at every event. He had a law degree from Vanderbilt Law School.

As I was stewing in my guilt today, I realized that I didn’t expect any of those kids at Stone Bridge necessarily to “stay in touch.” I won’t be at all hurt if they don’t. I’ll consider it a great treat in my life if I hear from one of them in five years. Right now I expect them to move on and get started in life.

When I had finished my Ph.D. in German from Vanderbilt and was applying for assistant professor jobs in 1992, I asked Dean Potter to write me a letter of recommendation. It contained one of the most keenly sharpened turns of phrase I have ever encountered:

David Shepherd knows how to pierce a bureaucratic veil and arrive at the desired result.

Even my dissertation advisor, who really wanted me to get letters from respected academics rather than university administrators, was impressed with that sentence.

I have been blogging or messing around with this blog (mostly the latter, actually) in just about every free moment this week.

WordPress is very cool software, and I’m starting to feel that I’m getting some control over it, but how many rotating header images do I really need? It took pretty much all of two days to master what I needed to do with the photos in PhotoShop, and now there they are.

Of course, the more I do this the fewer posts I actually put up here. Yikes.

Okay, this is it.

Incidentally, the rotating header photos are from my own little mid-life. Most from home, some from schools where I teach. I may stick others in as the spirit moves me.

Particularly since I spent two days learning how to make the headers.