In our fractured age, do children still discover pleasure in chasing elusive fireflies and capturing them for display in jars? Continue reading Sirius Hours
Category Archives: Observed
Speed Kills … As It Should
In July, barreled down into Northwestern Arizona from Las Vegas. Dropped some coin in barren White Hills playing lottery that’ll help fund the Grand Canyon State’s educational system. Such donations would’ve been better spent here in Nevada. But thanks to the Nevada gaming industry’s dumb insistence lotto dollars will deduct from the Silver State’s games of chance and sports books, Nevadans do not benefit from such participations. Continue reading Speed Kills … As It Should
Reemergence Maybe
Perhaps this last weekend of May 2022 is the one that finally returns the visiting hordes who once flooded Las Vegas. After all, Memorial Day, or as it should’ve remained, Decoration Day, is seen as the unofficial start of summer.
According to hopeful leisure industry analysts, Americans are busting with all sorts of pent-up desire to getaway. Two years of Covid conditions have made us stir crazy. Where better to let everything hang out and fly the freakiest freak flags than Las Vegas? A city where even if strangers knew your name, they’d be too involved in their own personal deviances to notice others.
Anyone working directly in the hospitality industry or its adjuncts is counting on such participants who contribute to Las Vegas’ “What happens here, stays here” tall tales.
No matter what sort of happy faces the tourist bureau sketches, the numbers just haven’t been there. It’s fine that conventions and spectacles have returned to the city, yet post-Covid attendance has been generally woeful. Continue reading Reemergence Maybe
Theirs Ain’t No Mudd Club
The normalization of bad behavior is costing us all. Continue reading Theirs Ain’t No Mudd Club
No Rainbow. No Pot of Gold.
California is not sending it best people across the Mojave Desert into Nevada. Not visitors, necessarily, but those hopefuls intending to relocate.
For the most part, Californians flocking from the Golden State to settle in the Mojave aren’t the most sterling. Once here a sad portion of them tarnish the Silver State. Continue reading No Rainbow. No Pot of Gold.
On Our Side of the Line
Perception must depend on location and familiarity as well as with who surrounds oneself. This realization has become even more pronounced since moving cross-country.
Before coming to Nevada, I’d already accumulated years in the Southwest. Though after whatever needed conducting here was finished, I scrammed back to New York. Now as a Silver State resident, the region’s peculiarities are more present and therefore more insistent.
Especially among non-landed citizens. It’s as if they’re intentionally indifferent towards recognizing individuals, preferring indistinction and keeping certain groups amorphous. Continue reading On Our Side of the Line
Commemorations
What holidays haven’t Americans hollowed out?
This year plenty of major merchandisers started displaying their Yuletide offerings and running Christmas ads so early these infringed on Halloween. And didn’t the whole month of November seem a ceaseless promotion for Black Friday? Continue reading Commemorations
Social Surveillance
The management company operating the co-op complex where I reside installed surveillance cameras inside what had been the residents’ private purviews. The courtyards. There, we have access to pools and barbecues.
While this address has always had cameras eyeballing our parking lot, whatever occurred on the patios remained unseen. Unseen, yes, though not unremarked upon. Continue reading Social Surveillance
Dispensable
“Graveyards are full of indispensable men.” ~ Charles de Gaulle
The above is attributed to the renowned French president but he may’ve cribbed it from a predecessor, George Clemenceau. In any case, as recent sporting developments from Las Vegas have shown, de Gaulle remains correct. Continue reading Dispensable
A Grim Silly Season
Looks like the 2021 Silly Season will be vicious. Usually, these months don’t leave much behind in the way of planet-realigning events. Uh, other than the outbreak of the Great War and Martin Luther King’s appearance at the Lincoln Memorial.
Safe to assume this August will deposit avoidable death on us as it further scars American society. Continue reading A Grim Silly Season