Dave’s Midlife Blog

I have been on the sidelines of quite a number of handgun deaths in my life. Thank God, I haven’t really been in the crossfire, nor has any member of my family. But gun violence has come close enough to me to be very unsettling.

In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, Thomas Weser, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun.

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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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I had the pleasure this evening of “interviewing” the two leading lights of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Austin Tichenor and Reed Martin.

I put “interviewing” in quotation marks because we really just shot the breeze for awhile. Neither they nor I really had any particular question points or theme in mind.

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While Red Rock Canyon is a marvelous example of how the Southwest changed over millenia, the Hoover Dam is a Wonder of the World that was built in less than five years.

The dam is on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. (We like to tell our friends that we walked to Arizona–across the dam.) It created Lake Mead, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, and it provides irrigation water and electric power to a good portion of the southwestern United States.

The dam is reached by one road and one road only: U.S. Highway 93, which runs through Boulder City, Nevada to the river.

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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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I’m typing this in the waiting area of gate D-10 in McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. I wanted to blog our whole trip this week, but the WiFi in the Hyatt Grand Vacation Club on the Las Vegas Strip is so weak and worthless that I could not even upload my pictures.

I have just accomplished more in 10 minutes of frantic blogging in the airport than I could in a whole week of trying to use the frustratingly slow and bandwidth-limited hotel WiFi.

Thanks, McCarran Airport!

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 »