[2Tone]

I started Friday with Tylenol and Starbucks, after which I was set for another day of conferences. In between, I made it to the Sony Booth, where they were showing off some amazing stuff, including an OLED TV that was literally only 8 mm (the equivalent of three credit cards) thick. It is a literal flat screen. Meanwhile, their 3D technology is insane. It still requires glasses, but the images are perfect. They were using it to show off their Blu-Ray discs, so you could tell what you were seeing wasn’t real, because you know Shia LaBeuf isn’t standing there in front of you. But if it had just been images of a ball being thrown at you, it would be impossible not to reach up and try and catch it.

I know some of you guys are into guitars – Gibson had a tent full of Les Pauls, acoustics, and more.

Plenty of environmentally friendly gear on display as well, including a foldable bike with no chain (a thin piece of rubber instead) and hydrogen fuel cells that can power a household appliance for a few hours – that technology is still more of a novelty, but it was interesting to check out.

All right – on the porn. The Adult Video News has its annual awards show and fan expo in Vegas the same weekend as CES. Back in November I was checking out the web site for the fan expo. Tickets were $60. I might have been OK with that, as I understand sleazy smut peddlers need to make a buck. But the payment process had all of these required fields along the lines of “How much porn do you buy a month” along with demanding my home phone number. Uh, I don’t know about that. So I entered a bunch of random characters and an invalid test credit card number and hit submit to see which fields were actually required. To my surprise, the next screen was a bar-coded ticket, made out in the name Xlksfrw Snene. From there, it was a minor task to do a screen grab and change the name to mine before printing it out. Two months later, the woman at the booth scanned it and checked my ID. The name on the ticket and ID matched, so I was good to go.

Inside was a very weird scene. Thousands of guys snapping pictures of each other groping porn stars next to giant pictures of these same women taking it from behind. The “superstars” of the industry – Hustler and Vivid girls – had elevated booths, good hair and makeup, and security. But the stars of Cum In My Whole or whatever were walking down the aisle lined with booths peddling blow-up dolls and sex toys. They’d hike up their skirts and bend over for the camera phones. Not to mention the obese chicks, foot fetish models, and dude dressed up like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction. As previous trip reports can attest, I am nothing if not a dirty old man, but the whole thing was a little over the top skeezy, even for me.

Friday night I played in the Ceasars $130 tournament, with a $50 bounty for each player you knock out. 3000 starting chips, blinds start at 25/50 and double every 30 minutes, nineteen players, top three cash. 45 minutes into the tourney, I have about T$2750. Player in front of me raises the $100 blind to $750. I flat call with AceKing off – is this donktastic? To my surprise, the player immediately next to me shoves for just about what I have. Original raiser tanks for a minute, then folds. I figure with the bounty factor and dead money, I have to call. He has Kings, no Ace comes, and I’m out. Misplayed?

Saturday was my last day at the conference. In sessions most of day, I still found time to visit the NBC/Universal booth, which had a table-top PC, on which you could drag and drop/start and stop/shrink and expand video clips with your fingertips. Panasonic showed off an incredibly useful underwater Internet browser. Web surfing indeed.

Saturday night I hit Poetry, the hip-hop club in the Forum Shops. I definitely was out of element – the clientele was at least 90% black, and the very few other white guys there wereneither old nor bald like I am. None the less, plenty of the women were amused, and happy to dance with the out-of-place old white guy. I’m in line at the bar, when two of the largest men I have ever seen start moving everyone out of the way. In between them was auto-tune hit-maker T-Pain, draped out in chains.

I’m loving the hip-hop music and having fun, when all of a sudden the jam-packed dance floor empties in a crush of people. Behind them are two groups of guys throwing punches at each other, with security no where to be found. I’m not far from the stairs, and start heading down them, with a large crowd coming down fast behind me. I make it out just fine, but it was not the way I wanted to end the evening.

So I end up making $100 bucks at a loose 3/6 game back at Bally’s on my way back to my hotel. I still finished down for the trip, but it helped.

Back home Sunday a.m.

Vegas notes: City Center is unbelievably huge – 76 acres. It’s the largest construction project I’ve ever seen aside from ground zero of the WTC. And, if things don’t turn around, it might end up taking down the whole MGM/Mirage corporation.

I didn’t make it to Encore (no poker room), but heard a lot of people raving about it.

I didn’t play at the electronic tables at the Excalibur this time around, but they seemed to have a decent number of players.