Build Date: Tue Jan 21 12:20:21 2025 UTC
It is to sigh.
-- P a u l
El Destino vs. Comdex
2000-11-15 02:24:57
One of our star reporters was sent to Comdex by his employer. El Destino reports live from the biggest, geekiest trade show in the world.
Dateline: Excalibur Hotel, Room 14501, Las Vegas, NV
"Comdex wants you to know about prostate cancer... For every completed session evaluation returned, a donation will be made to CaPCure by Key3Media."
Yes, I'm at Comdex -- that Dante-esque sworl of geeks and marketing exhibits at edge-of-the-earth Las Vegas. It's a town so crazy, there's a billboard for vasectomy reversals. My room is at the Excalibur, past the Jester's Cafe and Sir Gallahad's Steakhouse, where Queen Guinevere and Merlin appear in a non-stop infomercial on channel 17 reminding hotel visitors of such handy features as the hotel's "gaming instructors," available 24 hours a day.
AdultExpo is next-door at the Tropicana -- but most of the other Vegas entertainment is eerily unappetizing. There's countless billboards advertising "The Rat Pack is Back" dinner show, even though it's on hiatus until next week -- but unfortunately, Siegfried and Roy are still in town. David Cassidy is at the Copa, and soon, Dokken will be appearing. It's all a little surreal. I don't understand why, but for some reason in the lobby of the Excalibur, they play adult favorites from the 70s and 80s. Tonight, it was Styx.
Savor the thrill of colliding cultures. Every cab driver spouts resentful diatribes during the entire ride. ("You FUCKING COMDEX people. I HATE COMDEX! They make us work FIVE DAYS A WEEK driving you geeks to COMDEX. I HATE COMDEX.") And most of the exhibits are about things I don't care about, while most of the people speaking in the educational sessions are saying things everybody already knew. The only real benefit is the increased job satisfaction you get from knowing your employer shelled out big bucks to fly you to a hotel next to AdultExpo.com. Sure, Palm loaned us all Palm IIIs to play with, but even then, I was disappointed by Vindigo's "sleazy" entry for Nightlife. "Larry's Villa?" Crap, there were people on the streets passing out coupons for sleazier joints than that.
The most educational thing I did today was go on the Star Trek ride at the Hilton. At first it seemed a little odd that they wouldn't let you use your cellphones on "Star Trek: The Experience," but I guess they're worried it would spoil the illusion. ("Larry? No, I can't talk now. Klingons are attacking. I'll call you later.") At the end of the ride, you're disgorged into the Star Trek gift shop, where a giant placard advises you to "Apply for the Star Trek MasterCard today."
Live long and prosper, O geeky merchants.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Skunk School -- Learn Why Not To Keep Skunks As Pets
There is an alarming trend in pet purchasing habits this fall. People inspired by the WWII film, "Life is Beautiful" -- the one with that annoying Italian guy -- are buying descented skunks by the millions. (More...)
Naked Australian Redhead -- Missing!
She posed naked on the web, fought for pornography online, and even kept an online "Diary of a Virtual Girlfriend." But after earning a place in internet history, Bernadette Taylor vanished without a trace. (More...)
Yet another delicious SPOCKTAIL from the SMRL Beverage Science Labs! Check under the cap for your chance to win thousands of fabulous prizes! (More...)
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
We here in SMRL's Beverage Research Lab realize that there is more to life than just drinking spocktails. It's important to have other activities. One such activity that we wholeheartedly support is dancing six or more hours to Trance music. So we have designed a drink to accommodate this. (More...)
Spock Went, Spock Wrote, Spock Kicked Ass
Every Labor Day weekend a large portion of the PDJ staff joins 30,000 other freaks at one of the biggest and strangest art festivals in the world - Burning Man - somewhere on the edge of the Black Rock Desert. Our base of operations is always the ultra swank Spock Mountain Research Labs - the World Leaders in Beverage Science and Leisure Technology. This year, we hauled up our computers, printers and a massive digital duplicator, determined to become Black Rock City's third daily newspaper. Even Spock was surprised by our success - news will never be viewed the same on the playa. Read all seven issues of the 2002 Spock Science Monitor for yourself and see why. (More...)
