Here are a few pictures from the cross-country trip Lee and I made from Boston to Las Vegas. The top left picture is from the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas; the top right picture is from about 10,000 ft. at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado (Lee is standing on the large boulder); and the bottom picture is from Dead Horse State Park in Utah (you might recognize the river bend canyon (or a similar one) from Koyaanisqatsi). I’ll likely put up larger versions of all of our pictures within a week two, so keep an eye out.

So what’s going on with Suicide Girls? For the uninitiated, Suicide Girls is an online soft porn site (i.e., no penetration) that specializes in girls with tatoos, piercings, bondages – the sort of thing the hipster/punk/goth crowd would be into. Its figurehead is a woman named Missy and the models come off as freethinking and independent on their onsite journals, so the site has garnered a reputation for being the kind of porn site even a radical feminist could love (although I’m sure a radical feminist would prefer the appellation to be something like Suicide People Referred To Diminuitively).

I finally saw this Park Chan-wook film several days ago, after anxiously awaiting it all summer. It was released in South Korea in 2003 and the US this past Spring, but I missed it in theaters. The DVD came out domestically in August, so I rented it as soon as I settled into Vegas. Why the anxiety? Chan-wook and the film itself have been hyped endlessly by such outfits as Ain’t It Cool News and by Quentin Tarantino as the next generation of cool cinema, so of course I had to check out the buzz.

Harry Reid, my new senior Senator, has become the first congressional leader with a blog: giveemhellharry.com. The first few posts indicate that he won’t so much be giving them hell as much as giving them the usual detail- and reason-free partisan complaints. C’mon, Harry, check out some good political blogs and give ‘em real hell.

I plan to write a bit here and there about my experiences in this strange city of Las Vegas, just as a warning. We’ve already encountered a “professional” poker player at a dinner party who claimed that Bush is a reptilian changeling after spouting Illuminati conspiracies; seen slot machines at our neighborhood gas station, grocery stores, etc.; and visited a furniture store the size of a warehouse run by a Tommy Chong lookalike and staffed by >15 Mexican (likely) illegals overseen by two roving guys on Segways. More to come.

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Danc at Lost Garden has a long post about Nintendo’s development cycle, and why it differs so greatly from Sony and Microsoft’s approach. Short version: Microsoft and to a lesser degree Sony release games aimed at the hardcore gamer demographic (e.g., first-person shooters) whereas Nintendo profits by innovating and then banking on creating the classic game based on that innovation. Then, when the competition jumps on the bandwagon and starts creating games for the hardcore player, Nintendo innovates again. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it leads to really fun games that even a casual gamer can enjoy.