Not the Spacey movie, but improvisational theatre. Back in Auckland, New Zealand, I used to frequent a comedy improv thing called “Scared Scriptless”, and before that a more structured team-oriented one called “Theatresports”. Rather like “Whose Line Is It Anyway” if you’re familiar with that show.

We saw a review of “The Usual Suspects” in the local paper, noted the time and venue – 8pm, Nov 16 – and decided to give this a try. The Community College of Southern Nevada sounded like a place we needed to check out for interesting events and activities anyway.

The show was very much like Scared Scriptless – a small, amateurish college theater, minimal-to-non-existent scenery, just three actors and an audience willing to suggest themes and one-liners. It was very enjoyable. They have another show coming up on Dec 7, and we’re wondering whether to take James and Sue when they visit (from UK on their way back to NZ) in a couple of week’s time. In fact, I’m fairly sure it was James who first introduced me to Theatresports.

This month was not so good for the cats. Kami stayed in one place long enough for me to observe a parasitical worm in her eye, which forced us to locate a decent vet. As it turned out, the one we see from the freeway as we drive South down 95 is called Creature Comforts, and it is very pleasent.

We took them both in to get their shots up to date and synchronised, and after we’d held Kami down and observed the vet remove the worm with a pair of tweezers, she went out the back to the microscope and looked it up in her parasitology textbook to find out what it was. It seems that it was a worm that lives in horses; she supposed that a fly had acted as an intermediary. Yick.

After a brief checkup, Karma was found to have an infected tooth. He has had one fang on the point of falling out for a number of years, but apparently rather than drop out naturally it had decided to stick around and fight it out. We hadn’t noticed Karms being uncomfortable, but this must have been giving him some pain for some time, and it was best to have it surgically removed. The following day we took him in, left him with the vet and when we picked him up that afternoon he was groggy, drooling, and had a bald patch on his forearm where the IV had gone in.

Update: About a week later, Karma is relatively complacent about taking his twice-daily pill of antibiotics, and seems to be improving in his appetites for food.

Reading the local paper can pay off in unexpected ways. One week this little article popped up in the “Living” section: “Geological Site sheds light on Las Vegas Valley’s Past”.

It turns out that there is something in geological circles known as the Great Unconformity. I’ll let hydrogeologist Nick Saines (http://members.aol.com/saines1/Unconf.html) describe it: “The Great Unconformity is the contact between the Precambrian and the Cambrian – a gap of 1.2 billion years – one fourth of the age of the Earth. It is not just the time missing that makes the Great Unconformity great; after all, Precambrian granite overlain by Recent alluvium or dune sand has a greater time gap. No, the Great Unconformity, as named by one of my heroes – Major John Wesley Powell – in 1869, is the contact between the Primeval World (when life was mostly single-celled creatures), and the world in which the continents and the life upon them really began to evolve.”

Pretty cool stuff. It turns out, this unique geological feature can be seen in only a few places. One of them is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Another is 100 yards off Lake Mead Boulevard.

It seems that the mountains at one side of the Las Vegas Valley were created through an interesting process that results in the exposure of this very early portion of strata.

After reading this article, I suggested to Lisa that we drive out there and take a look at it. It’s not every day you get to put your finger on the Great Unconformity.

So we did, and afterwards we walked to the top of the hill and got a good view of the Las Vegas Valley.

With the downturn in the tourist business here in Las Vegas, since September 11, many local shows have been running special “two-fer” prices for local residents during October. One of these was the Blue Man Group show at the Luxor. What you do is show your Nevada driving license as proof of residency, and you can get two tickets for the price of one. Normally the big casino shows are out of our casual price range, but the two-fer offer for the Blue Man Group was too good to pass up.

We managed to get lucky and get tickets for Wednesday, the same day as an invitation to lunch in Town from the Harvard Club of Nevada. Lunch with the Harvard Club is not the sort of thing that would normally appear in our appointment reminder book, but as parents of a Harvard student, the opportunity to meet similar people and possibly “network” with them seemed like an opportunity to be taken advantage of.

So we took Wednesday afternoon off from work, changed into slacks instead of our usual jeans, and spent the rest of the day in the city.

The lunch was business-like but not very formal, and we did meet some interesting people and also agreed to act as official HC representatives for a 2 hour shift at the local upcoming college fair.

After lunch we parked the car in the Luxor parking lot, and picked up our tickets for the Blue Man Group show, then decided to spend the rest of the afternoon walking up and down the ‘Strip. The objective: To have coffee and a croussant at a cafe in the “Paris” Casino.

The casinos on the Strip are further apart than they look.  Also, the Sun was hotter than we expected. So consequently, by the time we reached Paris we were really looking forward to that coffee.

Strangely, this was harder to find than we expected, but after some browsing in the faux la rue de cafe, we settled on ice-coffee and a crepe.

We wandered back to the Luxor via the Aladdin, which I think recently went bankrupt. It’s still open, but for how much longer? we wondered.

Blue Man Group

I saw my first Blue Man Group show in Boston a number of years ago. I still remember it vividly, and if anything it made me more keen to see the Vegas show.

If you’ve seen a Blue Man Group show, then you know what a challenge it is to describe one. If you haven’t, then to describe it in too much detail might take the edge off the child-like delight you experience when encountering the Blue Men for the first time. Perhaps the best thing to do is to suggest checking out http://www.blueman.com/feature/liveatluxor.shtml. 

For those not near a web browser, I will merely say that the three blue men (always there are three, with 6 accompanying fluorescent musicians) are child-like aliens who never speak but observe and reveal the fascinating world we live in through rhythm and optical illusions. My kind of brain food.

The show did not disappoint.

The kids have left, the house has been quiet for a week. Stan and Jeanne suggested we drive North up ’95 for 15 minutes and have breakfast at the lodge at Mt Charleston. This seemed like a good idea, so we agreed.

Apparently in Winter you can ski on real snow on Mt Charleston. At this time of year, however, the sun is hot, the breakfasts are good, and you can’t see the Vegas Valley unless you climb to the top. Which we didn’t do, but now we know where to go, we might do it some other time.

You have probably all read enough about the events of September 11, and therefore I don’t need to describe them here. Check the web. Look hard enough and you’ll find images and eyewitness accounts that they don’t play on television. This Century’s Hindenburg. Argh.

The first we heard about it was when Anna rang at around 7:30am to say not to worry, Josh was ok. Of course we had no clue what she was talking about. “Go turn on the TV to CNN,” she replied. We did, and we basically stayed glued to the set for the next few hours. Certainly nobody at work expected anything productive to get done that day.

Two days later as I write this and the sliding scale of relative misery has been altered for the foreseeable future. If I try to write about pleasant things I feel guilty, and if I write about unpleasant things I feel like I’m complaining about relative insignificance. Therefore, better not write about anything.

On a brighter note, as I write this I am sitting in the lounge listening to the new Yes album, _Magnification_, for the first time. There’s something about listening to music the first time – you can only do it once, for a start.

Yesterday evening I saw my first Black Widow spider.  Erk. She had decided to make her web in the left rear wheel hollow of our car, in the garage. After admiring her fine black body and red hour glass marking, I confess I persuaded her not to nest in the car by swotting her dead.

Now I’m a little more cautious venturing into the garage with bare feet.

Our house, as designed, has two central heating/airconditioning zones. One is supposed to be the living area, and the other the bedrooms. We threw a spanner in that design by insisting on using two bedrooms as daytime offices, but we could deal with that, providing the zones worked independently as advertised.

Unfortunately, the thermostat for the bedroom zone is located in the same room as the living area one – the living room. I kid you not. Apparently the builders don’t see a problem with this. In practice of course, the two zones are not independent, because the the bedroom thermostat thinks the temperature is whatever the living room thermostat is specifying. We can be sweltering in our offices while it’s cool in the living room, and freezing while the living room gets hot. The latter is more likely, because if we’re not in the living room during the day, we don’t want to waste energy cooling it down. So the bedroom thermostat works hard to cool off, and because it is not any near a bedroom vent, thinks it never succeeds.

For a while we put up with this while trying to convince the builder that it was a fault, or broke the building code, or something. Then we’d talk to the air-conditioning people, and they’d say “Hmm. This can’t be right. Let us talk to the builders about it, they should pay to have it moved.”

Of course, the only effect this had was to delay the whole process. The builder gets away with doing it because apparently the thermostat *is* within 10 feet of the bedroom zone intake vent (albeit through a door and round a corner!)

I will cut a long story short and say that this month, finally, the air-conditioning people came out and moved it for us, into the bedroom hallway. Now it is where it should be: directly under an intake vent for the zone it controls.

Of course, the seasons are changing and with them the range of temperatures our rooms experience, but we can already tell it has made a huge difference to our ability to control the temperature of the rooms. We like to set the max temperature pretty high (80) In order to maintain manageable electric bills and reduce the duty cycle of the air-conditioners. When they fire up it’s like a jet engine. And we have enough of those flying overhead as it is.

For the later half of August we had Derek staying with us, prior to his moving to Boston to start the academic year at Harvard. For a week or so we also had Josh and Anna with us. It was great to spend time with them, and meet Anna’s parents Judy and Marshall, and generally enjoy having our house full of people.

We had been keeping our pool table a secret from them so that it would be a pleasant surprise for them – and it was! In fact, I think we played pool so much that I don’t think we’ve felt like playing pool since they were here.

As a special treat, one evening we all went out to see the Cirque Du Soleil show “O” at the Belagio Hotel on the Strip. “O” has the gimmick of a moving stage that is sometimes completely under water (think “water” in French) which is spectacular. It was pretty cool show, but for those of you who might be tossing up whether to see “O” or the other Cirque du Soleil show “Mystere”, I think that I would recommend Mystere over O. It’s hard to say exactly why – there’s no doubt they are both fantastic shows in the C du S tradition – but maybe it is because Mystere is the first of their shows I ever saw. Maybe it is just a more perfect show.

Around midnight to 2:00 am was supposedly the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. When I stepped outside at 11:40 pm I saw one in the first 30 seconds – bright and with a long tail, it streaked overhead as clear as anything. Cool, I thought, tracing it’s trajectory back and observed that it intersected a point in the sky mid-way between the constellations of Perseus and Cassiopeia, indicating that yes, this was most probably a piece of the tail of the Swift-Tuttle comet – which is what the Perseid meteor shower actually is, as the Earth passes through the debris field left by the comet.

Unfortunately, that was the only meteor I saw that evening.