Events in Las Vegas
Pinball Wizards
I stopped by the Pinball Hall of Fame this evening. Okay, come on! Tell me you aren’t envious that I live in a city that has a freakin’ PINBALL HALL OF FAME! Unless you live here, too, I’m willing to bet you can’t just casually drop into an ordinary-looking strip mall and find 200 pinball machines from every decade since their invention, all in working order and waiting for you to drop in a quarter (well, sometimes a couple more) and start the ball bouncing…
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Out With the Old, In With the New
I still can’t claim I’m a Vegas native, but early Tuesday morning, I took one small step closer to feeling like one. I headed to the Strip to watch the New Frontier come tumbling down. It was my third implosion since I began living in Las Vegas, and the second one I’ve attended this year…
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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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Ten Years Behind L.A.
Ten years behind L.A. I’ve heard it said about Las Vegas, but I’ve never been quite sure what it meant beyond the usual putdowns: “unsophisticated,” “uncultured,” and “well, you know, retarded.” It’s difficult to be magnanimous in the shadow of such descriptions, but it’s possible that those suave Angelenos have a point dangling below their up-tilted nostrils. California passed a “no smoking in bars” law over a decade ago. At the time, such a restrictive rule seemed unimaginable in Las Vegas, but now, Nevada voters have passed their own anti-smoking law by a surprisingly large margin…
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Hail, Elvis and Joe!
You might think that everyone in Vegas is out doing something Elvis-related today, the 30th anniversary of the King’s death. Around 75 Vegans, however, were out celebrating something much more mundane. I was one of the small throng present at the 9:00 a.m. opening of a new Trader Joe’s supermarket on the south side of town…
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