Friday, April 18, 2025

Las Vegas getaway!

Update, Friday, 4/18/25: Dear Readers, my wife and I have arrived in Las Vegas. You can read the prologue to this adventure on Lasken's Log at https://laskenlog.blogspot.com/. For philosophical and technical reasons, I'm transferring updates on our trip here, to Harry the Human's realm.

At this moment I'm on my laptop on the 9th floor of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas; my wife's doing her online class across the room. I just got back from a long walk through the Luxor casino into the Mandalay Bay casino and retail area. I also wanted to walk outside for the cool desert evening, but this place is not designed for walking outside- which is a wasteland of construction and busy streets without sidewalks. I must say, though, that I adore the large copies of ancient Egyptian sculptures in the Luxor lobby. I find them captivating, though they lack the power to make me gamble. They did make me want to stay here, so that I could drive once around the entryway, flanked by imposing columns, the Sphinx, and a pyramidal hotel, before seeking the massive airport sized parking lot. What a sucker I am for falling for those faux antiquities. On the other hand, they offer good focal points, especially this Passover week, for meditation on God's immediate purpose in launching the 10 plagues against the Hebrews. Each of those attacks was designed to destroy a specific Egyptian god, from Horus to Ra. The best known plague, the killing of the firstborn, was intended to kill the pharaoh, considered a god. And yet here they are, the Egyptian gods, back again in Las Vegas!

Update, Saturday, 4/19/25, 8:00 AM: The casino/resorts of Las Vegas 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. The desert was not planned into our current trip, though. This is an exploration of the city. Today we see a show at the new Sphere. It is advertised as "immersive," as Red Rock would have been. I expect to enjoy the show, in spite of my whining about the desert.

As far as gambling, I have an impulse to play blackjack, even if only for the thrill of coming up against an insurmountable force, the dealer, and I have an idea about funds I might designate for this. I earned an extra $50 last week from the Los Angeles Unified School District and feel guilty about what I had to do to earn it. The district notified me that my certification would expire if I did not take an online course called "Challenging Whiteness." This course informed me that, although individual white people might be acceptable if they speak the party line, "whiteness," as a generic catch-all term, suggests, in some overriding sense, a morally deficient group. Racial pride is a plus, but a doctrine of racial moral superiority has been at the foundation of all racist and fascist ideology. This Woke party line, which has so far escaped Trump's raging eraser, is doing exactly nothing to help children in the district learn to read. In fact the opposite is happening, to all races of students. We now play recorded narrations of assigned books by sophisticated companies like Schoology so that students can sit in class and listen to books read to them instead of reading them. Under this model very few teachers require students to read on their own, and the results are plain to see: American young people's reading skills are plummeting. Our culture is perhaps moving away from expecting people to read, beyond simple sentences on websites and machines. Back to Vegas, my idea is to feed the ill-got 50 bucks to the implacable Egyptian gods of the blackjack dealer, in a penance of sorts for my compliance with the wasted money and efforts of our school district.

Update, Same day, 5:15 PM, The Sphere show, "Postcard from Earth" was a wonder, masterfully written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel. The "movie" is not projected onto the screen, but is projected by it, using over 200 million embedded pixels creating images that are deliniated in sharp new ways. An advanced acoustic system directs sounds to specific spots in space. The seats rumble when elephants walk by. The realism is shocking. The story, too, is compelling, basically a sci fi tale of how life arose on Earth, grew everywhere, then was dominated by humans, who wrecked the place, at the last moment sending people into space to faraway planets to start the whole thing over. The movie (if that's still the term) is well worth seeing. In the lobby, AI powered robots talk to the public, making up conversation including witticisms and philosophical insights. The staff is efficient and friendly, even lining up at the exit to smile and wave goodbye. This is the good face of AI, put together to sell us on it. It does look pretty cool, but you have to admit that no one anywhere is being asked to give an opinion on how we should conduct this revolution. It's just happening, whatever anyone thinks or doesn't think about it.

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