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.

Monday they had moved up Interstate 81 to JMU, but my daughter had pretty much decided that Tech was the place she wanted to attend. Standing on the campus Sunday, looking around, she began to see herself as a student there.

As I was walking back from the cafeteria in my high school on Monday, one of the Spanish teachers had his classroom TV on. There was a map of Virginia with the town of Blacksburg highlighted. I saw a graphic indicating “21 dead, 21 injured.” It didn’t take long for the news of the massacre to filter through, as well as the instruction from our administration that we were to keep TV sets off and not talk about the news in class.

Many students from our area attend Virginia Tech. It is one of the more competitive universities in the Virginia system. Hokie loyalty is more intense than that of alumni of other places. Hokie pain is now intense. To see Virginia Tech on the front page of all the world’s newspapers because of a rampage that wiped out 33 young lives is deeply disturbing.

My daughter will probably still attend Tech next year. She realizes that Tech is the place she saw on Sunday, not the crazy-man-land it became on Monday. But it will always be unsettling to walk the campus where the worst shooting massacre in American history took place.

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.

The first thing we saw on the 13-mile loop road was the Calico Hills trail. The reason for the name is obvious: the contrast between red and beige rock. This is really a canyon. It was hard to believe how small people looked from above when they walked down the canyon trail. This picture shows only the top portion of the trail, but it really went quite deep into the rocks.

These boulders are formed from ancient sand dunes. The lighter-colored layers show where water leached out all the color (copper?) from the rocks. The effect is very striking, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We are fans of the sci-fi spoof movie Galaxy Quest. At one point on the road, we became convinced that the makers of that movie must have gotten the idea for their rock-monster from these boulders at Red Rock Canyon.

It was a bit hard for us to wrap our minds around the untouched beauty of this desert in such close proximity to the city of Las Vegas. Then we looked at a map and realized it is 17 miles away from town. Here are some of the mountains that rim the Las Vegas valley. (Incidentally, the name of the town means “the meadows,” and refers to the verdant valley early travelers found on their way to the Pacific.)

After having visited the canyon on our second day in town, we became much more aware of the sunset over the western hills each afternoon. This was our first view of that sun settling behind the hills, from close up.

These ancient sand dunes, these calico boulders, were our introduction to the overwhelming force of nature in the desert southwest. Later in the week we would see how humans in the 20th century absolutely conquered a portion of the natural landscape.

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.

This hotel is a weird combination of themes. Obviously, the basic concept is a faux-Egyptian motif. But inside, the area off the main casino floor is devoted to a NASCAR theme, with real racing stock cars on the floor and a kiddie-midway of racecar simulations. The Amazing Jonathan performs there, as do a couple of musical acts.

The loop in the picture is the final flip of the roller coaster that begins inside the hotel. On the Thursday of our trip, this coaster got stuck right after coming out of the loop. This snafu made the local TV news, as well as some national TV coverage.

Another old standby on the north Strip is the Riviera. This is located between the construction site for a fabulous new hotel-resort and a rather low-end shopping strip. We found the casino somewhat average and unimpressive, but the Riviera remains a major feature of the north Strip, directly across from Circus Circus.

In mid-strip, next to Harrah’s, is the Imperial Palace. This hotel has a faux-Chinese theme, and looks a bit like a Chinese restaurant, at least at its main entrance.

This hotel is rather hard to get into, at least from the Strip. It has a monorail stop in back, but on the Las Vegas Boulevard side the entrance is nearly invisible. The most distinctive feature we noticed–which may or may not be an actual part of the hotel–is the disco-bar in front that advertises itself as the place where it is easiest to get laid in Vegas. So I guess you would say it’s a pickup bar.

On the south end of the Strip is the 50-year-old Tropicana. It has the longest-running production show in Vegas, the Folies Bergere. We saw the show and were unimpressed with the performances, although the technical spectacle was quite imposing, and the featured comedy juggler, Michael Holly, was fantastic.

One other south Strip hotel of note, whose demise is actually immediately visible, is the Aladdin. While it has not been demolished, it really is no longer the Aladdin, since it is undergoing a transition to a Planet Hollywood. When we were there, the signage on the front of the hotel actually made the whimsical-feature section of the local TV news. For a couple of days, this hotel was known as the “Planet Ho.”

We also delved into the downtown Las Vegas area of Fremont Street known as Glitter Gulch. Before there was a Strip, there were hotel-casinos downtown. According to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch site, a couple of these hotels are in danger of being sold and then possibly “converted” or destroyed.

Possibly the most familiar of these would be Binion’s, whose official name is “Binion’s Gambling Hall & Hotel.” Before it was sold to MTR Gaming in 2004, it was known as Binion’s Horseshoe. Binion’s is a casino for serious gamblers. Its poker room is most directly accessible through a rear door, open to the public but hidden from the pedestrian walkway on Glitter Gulch. You might know the name Binion’s because the World Series of Poker, seen on TV, used to be staged there.

The hotel whose demolition would be most disquieting is the Golden Gate. This is located at the corner of Fremont and Main Streets, and is the oldest hotel in Vegas. It was established in 1906.

When we walked into its casino we got an immediate feeling of being in the old West. The ceiling is low, with ceiling fans; there are no frills; there is a lot of dark wood. On the wall of the casino is a replica of the first telephone in Las Vegas, whose number was 1. It was the telephone of the Golden Gate Hotel.

I apologize for the lousy photograph. All the pictures of the downtown hotels were taken with my cell phone’s camera. I stupidly left my Canon PowerShot in the hotel room when we went downtown.

We were glad to have seen all these “heritage” hotels. I think the demise of the downtown hotels would be the most distressing, since they carry so much of the history of Las Vegas.

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.

The pile of debris from the demolition was the thing most visible from the window of our hotel room. Here it is looking through the fence, just past the sign depicted above.

As we walked down the Strip toward the defunct Stardust, we passed a very impressive sign. This is the sign from the old Westward Ho–which apparently was not all that impressive a hotel. The sign sure is cool, though.

Down the Strip from these two ruins is the Frontier (currently called the New Frontier). This has, as you can tell, a Western theme. Gilley’s nightclub offers mud wrestling every evening. It looked somewhat cheesy and sleazy from the outside, but inside it was rather charming. (Barbara was not waiting for the mud wrestling, but rather for me to snap the picture and move on up the Strip.)

We experienced our first Las Vegas buffet here, a breakfast buffet. As we were standing in line for the buffet, I noticed this interesting sign, which tells you a lot about the Las Vegas economy. They use U.S. money, but they also seem to have their own.

There are more “heritage” hotels to be reported on, but I’ll do that when I get home. This is being typed and posted in McCarran Airport, which has better WiFi than the hotel did.

We’ve been overwhelmed in our first 18 hours here. Too much to see and experience. We are staying in a Hilton Grand Vacation resort hotel on the Strip, which is really a resort hotel and not a casino place. There’s a lovely pool with a bar downstairs, similar to the place we stayed in Aruba 10 years ago, but there’s no restaurant nor casino.

We have tickets for three shows (Mac King, Lance Burton, and Crazy Horse Paris), but otherwise no specific plans. We reached a point of Strip-fatigue, and our trip had no focus until this morning. Curious about that ugly pile of rubble three lots over from our hotel, we did some investigating and discovered that it is the ruin of the legendary Stardust hotel and casino, one of the first hotels on the Strip.

The Stardust was demolished on March 13 to make way for something called the Echelon. (Thanks to The Strip Podcast for this, plus fantastic video of the demolition.) I am very sorry to have missed seeing that place. It closed last year and is now gone forever.

Further googling and digging led to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch page, which has a list of hotels in Vegas that are in danger of being converted to huge non-kitschy modern highrises. Now our trip has a focus.

We just agreed that we should be looking at as many of these classic hotels as we can, both on the Strip and downtown. After we see Mac King’s show today, we will take a closer look at Harrah’s, as well as the Riviera and the Sahara.

Pictures will follow. The hotel’s WiFi connection is not fast, but it does seem to work just fine.

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.

Yet there are people who, like me, tend to find a quiet, removed corner to conduct their communications. There are people, like the general contractor who met with us this morning to discuss a remodeling job, who apologize when the phone goes off, and who ignore calls that don’t matter. Thank you all for showing some basic level of good manners.

For the rest of you clueless louts, here is my own little list of cell phone rudenesses. Please be aware that to some people, you come across as a jerk when you violate these little social taboos.

1. If you cannot take a call, don’t answer the phone. If you are in the middle of sawing wood for your new garage, or re-wiring your house for the Internet, or changing your baby’s diaper, DO NOT ANSWER THE PHONE if I call you. To answer the phone and then tell me that you cannot talk because your are sawing/re-wiring/changing the diaper is just rude. Let the voicemail do its thing and then call me back. I am happy to leave a message. Voicemail technology is the great social lubricant of the 21st century. Use it.
2. If you are standing in line to purchase something, that thing standing at the cash register is a HUMAN BEING. Do not carry on a conversation with somebody else on your cell phone while the grocery cashier is trying to ask you whether you want paper or plastic, whether you want your change in fives or twenties, whether you would like to get a less leaky gallon of milk. Your ongoing phone conversation is a signal to the cashier that he/she does not count in your world of humanity. Give your cell phone a rest. In the meantime, practice saying this phrase, over and over, until you are comfortable with it: “I have to go, I’ll call you back later.”
3. If your call is a fight or a breakup with a significant other, or any other emotionally-laden discourse, do it in private. You do not have sex, or even foreplay, in the middle of a crowded mall. Don’t do your breakups there either. I just don’t want to see or hear every ugly aspect of your personal life. Go out into the parking lot, sit in your car with the windows rolled up, and let ‘er rip. But don’t share it with me.
4. You do not have to shout to be heard by your interlocutor. I often witness perfectly quiet cell phone conversations on the Washington Metro, in which the Metro rider is speaking to the person on the other end in a quiet voice, and I can’t hear a word. Thank you, quiet cell-phone talkers. On the other hand, some people seem to think that the cell phone is designed just to give the voice a little boost between here and home, 10 miles away. These people shout so they can be heard. Don’t. The microphone on a cell phone works wonders. It converts your voice into a digital signal that is miraculously amplified so it can be heard on the other end.
5. If you are driving a car on the same streets or in the same parking lots as I, hang up your phone and drive. At least get a real hands-free kit. Put the phone down and put both hands on the wheel. Turn your head around and look for my car coming up the street. Tell your conversational partner that you have to pay attention for a second and then come back to the conversation. Don’t kill me, or destroy my car, because you’re talking to your cousin about last night’s American Idol. Hang up and drive.

I’m not saying don’t talk on the cell phone. I couldn’t live without my cell phone. I’m saying please, please try to recall that other people share the space in which you walk and talk. Don’t pretend your cell phone comes equipped with an isolation capsule. Be aware that whenever I see you violating any of these taboos, I assume that you are a rude jerk–even if you aren’t really.

End of curmudgeonly rant.

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.

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 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.

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.

This got me to thinking about my own secrets. No, I don’t think I’m going to reveal them here. The blogosphere is too public. There are (or could be) people reading this with whom I’m just unwilling to do that kind of sharing.

But there are facts in my personal history that, for some reason or other, I haven’t necessarily chosen to reveal even to the people closest to me. Nothing dramatic. I wasn’t imprisoned for dealing drugs at an early age. I’m not secretly gay or bi-sexual. I don’t have information the CIA would like me to hold onto. Just little things. Things that might embarrass me if I recalled them.

Okay, here’s one. It’s the only one I’m letting go today, and you all get to read it: I was about seven or eight when I was in the third grade, since I was born in October and skipped the first grade. One day in third grade I wet my pants in class, just�sitting right there in my seat in school. My teacher was a mean old witch. She had made it�clear to all of us kids that we would not be allowed out to the restroom, and I really had to go, and finally I just couldn’t hold it any more. It was one of the worst moments I can remember from my childhood. I had failed utterly to control my body.

It’s the only time this has ever happened to me, but it remains, 45 years later, one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.

We all have them, these nagging little secrets. There are a lot of reasons we don’t want to give them up. They might be simply embarrassing, or take us back to a moment of embarrassment from long ago. They might cause us to be perceived as something other than the way the people closest to us see us.

Or there might actually be professional consequences. When Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA agent by Dick Cheney or Scooter Libby or whomever, with the knowledge of Karl Rove or George Bush or whomever, it ended her career.

In today’s Washington Post there’s a story about the Rev. James Moran, a priest who was sexually abused as a young man. When he tried to talk about this openly during Holy Week, when he tried to share this secret and thereby share his humanity, the Catholic Church first reprimanded him, then removed him from his position as a hospital chaplain.

That’s a real loving church, eh? That’s a great way to show Christ’s love for the shunned. Push one of your own onto the street for even remembering and talking about what happened. Keep the secret, above all else.

These kids are restless, excited, eager for the day to be over. They’re having trouble concentrating on their work, and they’re counting the minutes until the end of the day.

I have to admit, I feel the same way.

This evening I’ll be going to the first Washington Nationals baseball game in the city in 2006. The Battle of the Beltway will kick off with an exhibition game between the Washington Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles. I have a great seat behind home plate for this game; and two days ago I received my season tickets,a 20-game mini-plan, which are also great seats behind home.

This particular game has really captured Washington’s imagination. For 34 years, the nearest baseball team was the Baltimore Orioles, 45 minutes up the road from Washington. Tom Boswell in today’s Washington Post argues that this rivalry is likely to be a friendly one, because both Orioles and Nats fans have a common enemy, the Orioles’ owner, Peter Angelos. Washington Nationals fans have a beef with Angelos because he kept baseball out of the city for so long; the Orioles’ fans have an axe to grind with him because he has mismanaged their team for so long.

Since my “plan partner” (the guy with whom I’m sharing the 20 games) only wanted two of our three seats, I will have a single seat for all 20 games of the plan. I’ll be watching a lot of baseball this summer.

It’s hard for me to explain my youthful giddiness about having season tickets to the Nats. I feel like a “real” baseball fan for the first time in the last 25 years. Last summer, the Nats were a novelty, and my family and I rediscovered the joys of baseball. This summer we have a lot of games entered on our calendars already. We’ve scheduled some aspects of our lives around baseball games.

My wife and I have two season tickets in Washington, DC: to the Nationals and to the Shakespeare Theatre. Shakespeare and baseball. Two pastimes whose appeal is subtle and rather esoteric.

There are now 100 minutes until the last bell of the day. See? I am literally counting the minutes until I can go to the ballpark.

Categories: baseball, washington-dc, midlife