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Baking in the Las Vegas Sun

While we suffer through an unusual fall heat wave here in the Bay Area, I was sent this toasty story from Las Vegas. It seems yet another glass tower is turning people on the ground into sizzling strips of human bacon. This is not the first time this has happened in Vegas, they are known for buildings that double as solar reflectors. Today it is the brand new City Center on the Strip, more specifically the Vdara towers. Perhaps appropriately the focus of the heat wave hits the pool at Vdara, meaning the people are already bare and basted.

The curvature of the South Tower is the problem. It forms a really nice parabola that focuses the sun's rays into about a 10'x15' patch of sizzle that moves with the rotation of the earth. Pool goers have reported melted drink cups, scorched hair and many medium rare humans. You see these people are already laying out by a pool in the 100+ degree Las Vegas sun. Estimates are that the death ray reaches temperatures about 20 degrees higher than the surrounding safe zones, so we are looking at 130 even 140 degrees at times. By the way, management prefers "hot spot" or "solar convergence" to the more off-putting "Vdara death ray."

What is more interesting is that such solar problems were anticipated and a special film was placed on the glass surfaces of the Vdara towers which disperses 70% of the reflected energy. One has to wonder why the entire City Center isn't tapping this solar power to run the place instead of dispersing it below fatal levels. This is not the first time hotels towers have created hot spots, the golden towers of Mandalay Bay still do create a moveable baking spot, which pool staff note is often sought out by bathers in the early spring and late fall cooler days. In the summer apparently they simply avoid the spot, apparently there is a better early warning system at the Mandalay Bay pool.
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artwork: Las Vegas Review Journal
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The Fabric of Friendship

I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.
-Gilda Radner


Like Gilda I make my sartorial selections based solely on comfort. I once wrote that "96.4% of my clothes are cotton" but I really don't think I own that many shoes anymore. I remember as if it was yesterday the first dress slacks my mother bought me, they were gray and felt like fiberglass on my legs. I just don't get scratchy garments, perhaps there is a wide variation in tactile sensitivity or it may be that I am simply too sensitive for this harsh world. But this is not a post about clothing but rather one about comfort. I stumbled upon the Gilda Radner quote and it reminded me of one of my absolute favorite lines -

I like my friends as I like my sofa that they may easily be reclined upon.

Unfortunately I am reminded of this by an olde friend who is ever so slowly slipping away. Not from life mind you but from our friendship. I had not been able to figure out exactly why this was happening until recently when I was with him and a small gathering of his friends. The conversation was sarcastic, critical of everyone identified as "they" and just plain unhappy. I don't know what happened to my friend but he now runs with the truly disenchanted and morose.

I enjoy the company of bright, talented, interesting and interested friends and those who seek comfort in our friendship. Opinions can held and defended without vitriol, disagreements tend to be of degree not of core beliefs. Laughter is genuine, conversation is expansive and care is inclusive that they may be easily reclined upon.

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Peripheral Epiphany

I got a call last night from the east coast, which made it a very late call for him. He was on his way home from the emergency room, she would stay the night for observation. During the call I switched off the reading lamp to accentuate the audio, after he hung up I sat in the gloom and wondered. The diagnosis was not life-threatening, there had been a couple of options in that ominous category but they had been ruled out. Probably just an added pill taken twice a day forever. Those were facts or at least medical opinions, not what I was pondering alone in the dark. Once again dis-ease, a lack of ease, eventually I drifted off.

This morning on my walk there was an accident. There was a car, there was a bike, it was an unfair fight. I was less than a block away and drew the bicyclist as my charge, a nearby neighbor got the hysterical driver, 911 had been dialed. He was fairly cool, the collision was mostly his fault, we agreed on the diagnosis - broken fibula, maybe the tibia too but the fibula for sure. His only real concern was not having to deal with the overly distraught driver, another neighbor ran interference for us and kept the victims separated. I asked about calling someone and then he got a overly defensive and much too nervous, I cut that off at the lymbic system by offering to make the call for him. "After the (now arriving) paramedics tell us which hospital and play it down, he can be a real drama queen." In twenty minutes the whole scene was over, only the police lingered with the driver but my supporting role had ended. 

I was not a block further on my walk when some semblance of clarity descended, I had been resisting mortality as the easy answer to what has been vexing me, then I began to assemble this list - in reverse order:

-the car/bike accident;
-late night phone call from the emergency room;
-she loses her job, they move-in together it's the "right thing to do";
-drowning death of a 4 yr. old. - three degrees of separation;
-second parent slides slowly into dementia;
-benefit for a lung transplant;
-another retirement date set;

And that's the list from just the last seven days. I kept on rolling back in time with illness, aches, pains, many more retirements, several additional job losses. I resisted once again the easy answer - just time and mortality.

The reason some events are labeled cliches is because we all recognize them as basic, common human experience. It is indeed normal, but we do so resist being normal. Part of me wants to come away from this with a simple and truthful acknowledgment that I am indeed a very fortunate fellow. Another part of me doesn't.
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$150 Million Dollar Governor

California politics are always interesting. They do things bigger, better, dumb and dumber out here on the edge. Right now for instance the former governor ('75-'83) and frequent presidential candidate ('76, '80, '92) Jerry Brown is running for one of his old jobs again. Jerry wants to be the Once and Future Governor. He is currently the Attorney General of California and has been the Mayor of Oakland, the chairman of the California Democratic Party and a candidate for U.S. Senate. He is remembered fondly and otherwise as "Governor Moonbeam", which had something to do with proposing a state owned communications satellite and dating Linda Ronstadt. 

So you might say this election is Moonbeam vs. Moneybags. You see Brown's opponent is former CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman. Last week Ms. Whitman became the highest personally financed candidate in U.S. history. She has now officially spent $119 million dollars on her own campaign. Extrapolated through the November election, she will easily top $150,000,000 in out-of-pocket expenses in her attempt to become the governor of California.

Now I acknowledge that all politicians have fairly hefty egos. The psychological factors behind running for public office would make Sigmund spin in his coffin, but what on earth would make someone want to be the head of a bankrupt state with a shrinking population, failing schools.... well you know the laundry list. On top of that, not only is Meg Whitman running to head up this disaster, she is spending one hundred and fifty million dollars of her own money to get the job.

Yes there is another argument to be made about internet multi-millionaires. Did eBay actually need to give her hundreds of millions of dollars for merely staying out of the way of that internet juggernaut, they did - well actually as CEO, she did. Now she wants to spend part of that cyber-wealth to be governor, I mean make a list of all the things you would or could do with a couple of hundred million dollars, where does politician fall in your rankings? Doesn't wanting to buy this office make you supremely unqualified to manage the California State budget?

Ah well, it is nice being back in California. You just have to be really quick with the mute button or you might actually have to listen to these egomaniacal millionaires tell you that they really care. Well that really isn't fair because her ads are not about her accomplishments or her proposed programs, nope -- the Meg Whitman ads are all attacks on Jerry Brown, including one where she uses a '92 Bill Clinton clip from a presidential debate with Brown. Such dirty politics in California may be the single largest drain on the State's water supply because every time they run an ad, we all want to take a shower. My solution - bring back the 'None of the Above' voting option.

By the way the the book cover up top is a parody, she really did co-author a book called: The Power of Money with the subtitle: Values for Success in Business and in Life. Values something else Meg Whitman and I do not share, that and a hundred and fifty million dollars worth of hot, dirty air.


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Kliban

Bernard "Hap" Kliban (1935-1990) is best known for his cat cartoons. But many of my generation first encountered him in Playboy in the early 70s, which was about the time most of us stopped reading Playboy, except for the interviews of course. In fact, it was a Playboy editor who spotted some of Kliban's cat cartoons and set him on his infamous feline career. Personally I knew he was "the other" cartoonist at Playboy because Shel Silverstein and Gahan Wilson were the more famous architects of illustration for Hefner.

I still remember being introduced to Kliban's work in 1978 when I was handed Tiny Footprints, Whack Your Porcupine, and Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head. Those to me remain the quintessential Kliban.
I thought we might reminisce with some of his drawings and commentary on life as we don't know it.


Attentive readers may have noticed I have varied a bit from my every-other-day blog production. Today was simply a visual thing. I use my blog as my home page and quite frankly having that cobra head pop up all day yesterday got a bit distracting, so I moved up my ode to Kliban due to reptilian hebbie-jebbies.


Who hasn't felt the need for such relief, I find the political talking heads drive me quickly to the mint flavored floss. I prefer the the Glide polymer variety and I like the flat tape over the string version, it gets into all those folds and ruffles of the cortex.


He just gets it. Anyone care to take a shot at defining "it"?


Of course I can't end without another cat cartoon, here his nod to Botticelli's Primavera (Spring).

Methinks I shall need a 2011 Kliban Kalendar. Search Amazon.com for kliban
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In the News

I just don't understand why some things go viral on the net and others do not. Today two examples of stories I was sure would go as crazy as the MGM lion nibbling on its handler last week. 

First, I was on Facebook and noticed these items that were "Trending Now":
Jennifer Grey
Mortgage Rates
Gluten-Free Food
Candice Bergen
Emma Stone
Vanilla Ice
Seasonal Allergies
Liam Neeson
Escaped Cobras
Elizabeth Warren

Now I am guessing that very few of my readers are all that concerned about celebrity breakups, dieting tips or nasal irritation. But you just gotten wonder about snakes escaping, if only to ask escape from where - reptile rehab?

Well it seems a guy in southwest China was illegally breeding cobras when one hundred and sixty of them staged a break-out. This was in a small village and apparently the locals were a bit hissed off about this inconvenience. No one got bitten but there were several unfortunate encounters in bathrooms, apparently the cobras like cool, dark porcelain places. You may want to turn that light on before you take your seat. Handlers caught "all but four or five," which apparently is supposed to calm everyone.

Since this story did not go cyber-viral, here is my second choice for a huge internet story that also seems to have gained no traction whatsoever. Why I have no idea, like the cobras it struck a certain Freudian chord with me.

This story comes from an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which might explain the lack of wider coverage; it is a preview of the upcoming 2nd Global Symposium on Cosmetic Vaginal Surgery (September 23-25th in Las Vegas). The article is titled - Frankengina. Vaginal cosmetic surgery is "the fastest growing category of cosmetic procedures according to the statistics collected by the American Society for Plastic Surgeons." Apparently so much so that a 2nd Global Symposium is necessary.

I wish not to engage in any feminist rhetoric about the hows or whys of such procedures, nor do I intend to rally round the cosmetically enhanced vulva, which an astute reader pointed out is the correct description of the genitalia in question not vagina. I just want to know where is the internet coverage of this significant event? And will there be press coverage?

[Addendum: the accompanying photo was intended as a reference to the first story only; several readers suggested potential implications for the second item; I have, in turn, recommended a good therapist]
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Winter Window Weather

For those not familiar with San Francisco weather, I have been waiting for the fog since I moved in six months ago. While the imagery outside my windows remains spectacular, my very first night living with the view was in mid-March or right around the spring equinox. The sun was moving slowly north of the Golden Gate and the famous San Francisco fog was in its dry season. Now as another equinox approaches the fog is returning.

Last evening at sunset the silver bluffs had piled into the Bay like a thick blanket, the Marin headlands to the north had been overwhelmed, the waters of the bay were smothered in a twenty foot high layer with eruptions as high as 100 or more feet. A novice viewer would have supposed an island under those peaks but Alcatraz, Treassure and Angel were far off, these were just billows of happenstance. The City itself still stood out over the lower fog bank much like the picture above, but it floated alone in the gauzy mixture that I know is only a preview of many grey-white winter scenes to come. 

Today surprisingly broke in dull light but fog-less, the rain that was predicted to slide down from the north never arrived. It is as though a bubble has descended on the Bay and nowhere outside of this hazy scene exists, that somewhere just over the hills the world dissolves into a tommy-knocker nothingness. An interesting winter has been announced.
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