Living Las Vegas

At Home in the City of Lights

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Top Vegas Hotels: Bellagio, Luxor, Rio

Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier, by Megan Edwards

1-2 Day Trips from LV

Standing on the Corner, Watching All the ‘Bots Go By

For the third time in four years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a robot race and invited the public to come and watch the spectacle. This time, the event was billed as the “Urban Challenge,” because, unlike the first two events, which were held in the howling desert, this contest required the ‘bots to navigate city streets and interact with traffic. They even had to share the road with each other, something the organizers claimed had never happened on earth before…

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Escape to Tuacahn

It’s easy, when you live in Las Vegas, to fall into the mindset that you don’t have to go anywhere else for entertainment. Sooner or later, every show in the world will come to you. I mean, Spamalot and The Producers will be here next year, and Avenue Q has already come and gone. Phantom looks like it’s here to stay, along with more Cirque du Soleil shows than any one city rightly deserves. And I haven’t even mentioned all the singers, dancers, comedians, actors and musicians…

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Mt. Charleston Getaway

It must be all the neon that makes people who don’t live in Las Vegas think that the city lies on a vast and arid plain. Driving into town on Interstate 15, the bright lights seem to render the mountains surrounding Las Vegas invisible. When you tell your average Los Angeleno that you can go skiing 45 minutes from Fremont Street, they think you’ve got to be talking about a Disneyland mountain and Styrofoam snow. But as any local knows, they’re delightfully wrong…

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The Bots Came Back: DARPA Grand Challenge 2005

Whenever I go out into the desert to look around, I always run across one of three basic humanoid groups: geeks, grunts, or gearheads. The geeks are there because scientists are often banished to the howling desiccated wilds to carry out their explosive or radioactive experiments or to simulate life on other planets. The grunts are there because large arid expanses are perfect places for soldiers to drop bombs, play war games, and even fight real wars. And gearheads have been fans of dry lake beds ever since cars were invented because they are free of radar guns and traffic lights.

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Shakespeare in Cedar City

“City of Entertainment.” That’s what the big sign on the MGM Grand says, and as more big-name shows head to Las Vegas, the more the nickname is justfied. Avenue Q is about to open at the Wynn resort, and — joy of Monty Python joys — Spamalot is coming there next year, too! It’s enough to make me burst into a rousing chorus of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

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