Friday, 4/18/25
Friday, April 18, 2025
Las Vegas getaway!
My wife and I are in Las Vegas after a four hour drive from L.A. through the Mojave desert. Before we checked in at the Luxor hotel, we watched a show at the new Sphere (see below). Afterwards, while my wife conducted an online course in the room, I strolled through the Mandalay Bay casino and retail areas, with some transcendent moments when I stepped outside.
I wanted to keep walking away from the hotel into the cool desert evening, but this place is not designed for walking outside, which is a wasteland of construction and busy streets without sidewalks. So I hung out at the front of the hotel, inspecting the many big plaster recreations of ancient Egypt that bedeck it. This includes a grand, snow-white pyramid which had a strange effect on me, like the flickering neon dragons that once enticed me into "amusement" parks. This new pyramid has only 4.06 percent the mass of the original, is 104 feet shorter, and was built with little effort, supported inside by steel scaffolding enclosing empty space, though its outside shines with a fiberglass finish. The ancient pyramid, by contrast, was built by stacking stone blocks, weighing up to 2.5 tons, on top of each other, the blocks slowly diminishing in size to end up 451 feet high, with a marble finish, as a pyramid. It took 30 years to build. You have to respect the dedication of the ancient builders, though they obviously didn't have a labor union. It must be admitted, too, that the new pyramid has much better maintenance.
It was hard to resist that old amusement park feeling, and I let the illusion draw me in. Soon I was standing near the left paw of the massive Sphinx, an intermediate god who works for the top god, the Pharaoh. I felt the Sphynx's merciless gaze upon me, then walked blindly into the casino, where I realized what had happened. Hell is so unpopular you have to be tricked into going there. I saw the damned, an endless sea of them, condemned to pull a stick up and down for eternity, in the vain hope that there will be a "pay-off." The casino is overseen, appropriately, by Anubis, god of the underworld (a man with a jackal’s head). Anubis looked upon the damned below and thought, "It is good."
All seriousness aside, though the repurposed gods lack the power to override my aversion to gambling, they are able to make me want to stay here. What a sucker I am to fall for this commercialized extinct religion! On the other hand, the figures offer good meditative focal points this Passover weekend, where one might ponder God's immediate purpose for sending the 10 plagues described in the book of Exodus. Each plague was designed to destroy a specific Egyptian god. The best known plague, the killing of the firstborn, was intended ultimately to kill Ra (who, like the Sphynx, personified the pharaoh), and yet here they are, the Egyptian gods, back again in Vegas!
Saturday, 4/19/25, 8:00 AM: The casinos are hermetically sealed from the surrounding desert to maximize gambling revenue, and I long to escape to Red Rock Canyon, 15 miles west, where the Southern Paiute and many earlier native American tribes hunted and sat around fires over the last 10,000 years. What would be their reaction if they suddenly had a vision of modern Las Vegas? Certainly shock and incomprehension, the same reaction we would have if we viewed our culture a hundred years from now. But the desert was not planned into our current trip.
As mentioned, earlier in the day we watched a show at the new Sphere, a giant ball whose outside is supported by steel scaffolding which, like the new pyramid, encloses mostly empty space. On one side inside the ball are steep rows of seats; the other side is covered by a gigantic screen. It might not be accurate to describe what we saw as a movie, because the images were not projected onto the screen, but by it. The sharpness and depth of those images were striking. You have to be careful, though, when you exit your aisle, especially if it's a bottom aisle that's high up, in which case all that keeps you from falling 40 feet below onto someone's head is a barrier that comes up only to your knees.
To recap: Las Vegas is worth visiting once in a while, if only because it's in the middle of a beautiful desert and very strange.
D.L.
[Check out my blog exploring AI technology, "Conversations with AI," and my latest post about teaching humor to an AI, at https://smartypantsgemini.blogspot.com/].
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