Here's a great irony. Las Vegas, the city best known for being fake, is surrounded by some of the best natural scenery in the Western Hemisphere. Oh, I know you've been told Sin City is an unnatural blight in the middle of the most unattractive and inhospitable landscape to be found on the planet, but trust me, you've been misinformed. Continue reading »

Hoover Dam will be seventy years old next year. This means that if it were on the Strip, it would have been blown down at least a decade ago. But if age isn't beauty on Las Vegas Boulevard, it is in the Black Canyon of the Colorado. Hoover Dam may not be the newest, biggest, or most expensive of its kind, but a million visitors a year don't seem to care if it doesn't merit any of those superlatives. Continue reading »

Two words have been reverberating in the back of my head all summer. "Road trip" began as a whisper sometime back in May, and it grew steadily more insistent until it was a bellow I could no longer ignore. Summer is made for road trips, and summer is almost gone... Continue reading »

If it gets too hot in the city, head for the waterfront, right? Yeah! Because it's even hotter! That's what I found out when I headed out to "the river" last weekend. I motored down to Laughlin, to be precise... Continue reading »

Since the DARPA Grand Challenge was first billed as a race "from Los Angeles to Las Vegas," I'm considering it a local event. This is very generous on my part, seeing as how... Continue reading »

Las Vegas Superbowl parties andadvertising: The NFL just says no. Howard Dean’s gotta be happy about Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.” “I Have a Scream” has fallen off the charts while every twelve-year-old in America scours the Web for images that will prove once and for all she wasn’t wearing a pasty. So here’s the irony [...] Continue reading »