Viva Las Vegas!

US 605 slowed and began to descend. The vivid blue Lake Mead was interrupted only be a tiny speck of concrete, otherwise known as the Hoover Dam. The Airbus 319 banked sharply and my stomach dropped quicker than the aluminium tube I was strapped into. Seemingly endless rocky desert gave way to industrial units, houses and sports fields as we continued our final approach. The undercarriage screeched on the hot tarmac as we touched down. We’d just arrived at McCarran International Airport, gateway to Sin City... I mean Las Vegas, Nevada.

This neon, glass and concrete oasis sits in the middle of the Mojave Desert. And it gets hot, very hot. The thermometer regularly flirted with 110oF (43oC) during our stay, but the lack of humidity made the climate surprisingly bearable. The wife and I were slumming it at the Bellagio Hotel of Ocean’s Eleven fame. After turning on the charm with the check-in assistant we were upgraded to a junior suite on the 23rd floor. This made for a very agreeable stay indeed.

Gambling is synonymous with Las Vegas like Romeo is with Juliet, North Korea is with nuclear weapons and Bert is with Ernie. Gambling is in your face and it’s everywhere. When architects design Las Vegas resorts, they don’t start with the entrance or lobby, they plonk the massive casino down on their plans and fit everything else in around it. Consequently, you can’t get anywhere in these places without having to walk past roulette tables, poker rooms and row upon row of slot machines.

Over 35 million people visit Las Vegas every year and 86% of these tourists will gamble. The average person will spend 3.6 hours per day at the tables and will gamble $700 during their stay.

With so many people throwing around so much money, Las Vegas is a town where dreams do occasionally come true. Take Linda Thomas, whose husband’s business had just failed. As she dropped a quarter into a slot machine she wondered whether those four rotating symbols ever lined up for anyone. After violently spinning away, those four symbols did line up, and lights started flashing and alarm bells started ringing. But there was no torrent of quarters spilling out of the machine. Instead the casino manager approached and calmly told Linda that she had just won $1.8 million. But this win seems like chicken feed compared to the $40 million won by a 25 year old at Excalibur Hotel on 21 March 2003.

But gambling isn’t the only pastime in Las Vegas as there’s a plethora of shows to cater for every taste.

The wife and I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere at Treasure Island. It was a feast for the eyes of very fit men and women doing the seemingly impossible as they propelled their bodies through the air and posed in gravity-defying positions. We also managed to get some cheap tickets to see Lance Burton at Monte Carlo. Whilst not as spectacular as David Copperfield’s show at MGM Grand, this was good old fashioned magic at its best - a treat for all the family. And the scantily clad dancers were an especial treat for the dads in the audience.

You can gamble and you can see shows. And the third part of the Las Vegas trinity is food. You can eat until your heart’s content or your stomach bursts, whichever happens first.

There’s a restaurant to suit every palate and every budget. You can fine dine in the 1,000 ft high revolving restaurant at the top of Stratosphere, or you can gorge on the ‘all you can eat’ buffets at any number of casino resorts.

The gourmet buffet at Bellagio is extremely popular. The wife and I queued for nearly an hour to get in, whilst high rollers using their complimentary passes strutted past as they skipped the line. For $30 a head, you can feast on Alaskan crab legs, ribeye steak and much, much more. There is food as far as the eye can see and I know now where the phrase ‘your eyes are bigger than your belly’ originated. The food was good and plentiful - too good and too plentiful.

After a week of indulging in the grievous assault on the senses that is Las Vegas, it was sadly time to leave. This was our third time in this crazy town, and something tells me there’ll be a fourth, and possibly a fifth, at some point in the future.

I'm back...

After a sabbatical of idleness I'm back, and looking forward to posting more notes on life and stuff in the very near future.

Thanks for visiting my blog.

Floating houses

"After you land and collect your bags, grab a taxi over to the float plane terminal and I'll be there to meet you." Such was my first introduction to Canada – the epitome of the Yorkie bar culture.

As an add-on to our 2006 summer vacation through parts of western USA, my wife and I spent a week in the Vancouver area. We had friends there who offered to put us up for a few days and, a day before our arrival, I called Chip from San Francisco to arrange our pick-up.

My expectations of a vehicular transfer were grossly exceeded by the sight a gleaming blue and white Cessna A185F four-seater float plane. We shoved our cases in the back, I sat in the 'first officer's seat' and my wife sat amongst the luggage. The Cessna bobbed about as we accelerated down our aquatic runway and before long we were rising into the blue sky.

The urban sprawl of downtown Vancouver gave way to rugged mountains, small inlets and sprawling green forests as we flew north-west along the coast of British Columbia. The vast expanse of Vancouver Island chaperoned our left flank. We passed the occasional yacht and, on one occasion, a seal hitching a ride on a flotilla of logs being towed by a tug boat.

I sat there tense, hoping that the occasional bump would not bring us down into the very cold looking Strait of George below. And that our pilot wouldn't have a heart attack during the next hour or so.

We soon reached Powell River, a coastal city of 13,000, which just clears the northerly tip of Texada Island. We flew over Powell River paper mill, once the largest in the world, and then turned north-east towards Powell Lake.

Our first stop in Canada would be a floating cabin on Lake Powell. And our transfer would literally drop us at the front door.

Powell Lake, named after Israel Wood Powell (former Superintendant of Indian Affairs for BC), is some 25 miles long. Our house on a raft was moored some 8 miles from civilisation. Several floating homes dotted the shore of this lake and our nearest neighbour was on the opposite side. We were completely cut-off.

The powder blue cabin resembled more a mid-western barn than a residence. An arc of tethered logs, about 30 metres out, formed a breaker for when the lake began to swell (which it did like clockwork late afternoon.) The cabin was connected to the shore by two linked pontoons, about 15 metres in length. The temptation to explore the forested banks was tempered by my knowledge that bears inhabited these woods. My thoughts quickly turned to whether a grizzly could navigate the pontoons and pay us an unexpected visit.

Our electricity was provided by a diesel generator and our toilet was of the chemical variety, at home on any campsite. There was no mobile phone signal whatsoever. But don't get me wrong, this was far from slumming it. This cabin was home to a wood-burning stove, three-piece suite, two double bedrooms and a fully-equipped kitchen. It had everything you needed for a comfortable stay.

You could quickly forget you were floating on a lake in the middle of nowhere as your body subconsciously adjusts to the gentle bobbing. You only really noticed this sensation when you arrived back on terra firma. A period of stumbling about in a state not unlike drunkenness would follow, before your normal sense of balance returned.

It was only after we'd returned to dry land, after a few days of chilling out, reading and sunbathing, that my wife said, "What would have happened if one of us had fallen seriously ill and needed medical attention quickly?"

The thought hadn't struck me at all whilst we were – good question though!

60 Mile High Club

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. An indicator in the cockpit is telling us we have a hot undercarriage. We are going to lower the landing gear at cruising altitude to cool it down. You may hear a slight noise, but don't worry - this is normal operating procedure."

You would be forgiven for thinking this is a line from a disaster movie, delivered just before a packed airliner spirals earth-bound out of control. But this was real life. It occurred about twenty minutes into a Virgin Atlantic flight from JFK to London Heathrow whilst I was wedged into my economy seat.

The gentle hum of the A340's landing gear deploying was quickly replaced by the loudest "whooshing" noise of turbulent air I have ever heard. A tall ship in a wind tunnel wouldn't make as much noise as this. My mind raced away with me. Was the aircraft going to stall and nosedive? Would the hot undercarriage melt a key electrical wire and ignite a fuel tank? Or were the wheels going to drop off and ruin our landing?

In the end, it was all quite uneventful. The -55oC air temperature quickly did its job and cooled the hot wheels, and the landing gear folded back into the streamlined fuselage. The dull drone of the aircraft engines filled the cabin once more and we continued eastward across the great expanse of the Atlantic.

Flying and I have a love-hate relationship. I love aircraft. I love watching them as they gracefully cut through an azure blue sky or hover in suspended animation on final approach. I have a credit card which earns free flights to anywhere in my home town if I spend over £75,000 ($150,000).

But I hate getting on aircraft. I tense up at the moment of strapping myself in. I relax a little once the seat belt light goes out. I tense up again during turbulence no more gusty than the average fart. I relax again once it stops. Then I tense up as the nose dips for the descent into our destination airport. If I were strapped up to an electrocardiogram, the line would resemble something from Disneyworld or Alton Towers.

It's nothing less than phenomenal how quickly the aviation industry has developed. Only fifty years after the Wright brothers' first struggled into the air in a rickety wood and canvas airframe, Britain was laying down plans to build a supersonic airliner. Concorde made its maiden flight on 2 March 1969 and whilst its commercial success is a matter of debate, no other supersonic airliner has come close to rivalling it, even 40 years on.

And the innovation continues. In the last few days, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has unveiled an aircraft that will launch two crew and six passengers on a sub-orbital flight into space. This aircraft will propel its occupants to a height of 60 miles (100km) above the earth's surface at a speed of 2,500 mph. The first flight is expected in around 18 months time and a seat is yours for a cool £100,000 ($200,000). More than 250 people have already signed up. How long before the '60 Mile High Club' has its inaugural members?

Aviation is seriously big business. It has been estimated that global aviation is a $880 billion industry, accounting for 10% of global GDP and employing some 14 million people. In July 2008, Etihad (the Abu-Dhabi based airline) bought £21.5 billion ($43 billion) worth of new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus in one go, eclipsing the previous largest aircraft order in the world. In the UK alone, passenger numbers are expected to grow from 200 million a year now to 500 million a year by 2030.

But this growth will not be without its costs. Friends of the Earth estimate that this expansion will see a doubling of carbon emissions. They claim that aviation is already the fastest growing source of carbon emissions. More flights means more noise pollution for those living around airports and under flight paths. And a desire for bigger and more numerous airports could lead to a loss of wildlife habitats and green field landscapes. I must admit that my love of air travel (whilst I'm on terra firms at least) and its environmental impact is something I struggle to reconcile.

Whilst it's impossible for those of us addicted to air travel to wean ourselves off it completely, my hope is that a bunch of very clever tree-hugging geniuses will discover the key to making flying and the environment better buddies.

Sale of the century

I read with some interest the other day about one of the largest land deals in history.

By a treaty dated 30 April 1803, the United States agreed to buy the Louisiana Territory (modern day Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma) from the French Republic. Thomas Jefferson led the negotiations with France and altogether agreed to buy some 2,144,000 sq km (828,000 sq mi) of real estate. With one sweep of a pen, Jefferson doubled the size of the United States.

Why did this transaction capture my imagination so much? Well, there was a lot of land involved. And this was an important, historic step in the development of the United States as a country. But that wasn't it. What really captured my imagination was the price Jefferson agreed to pay to France - $15 million (60 million francs) - roughly 3 cents per acre.

Yes - 3 cents per acre!

There are few things in life more satisfying than bagging a bargain. I have spent hours using comparison websites to track down the cheapest widgets – and then looking for discount codes to save even more. 3 or 4 hours online to save £20 on a hotel booking is not uncommon. At those rates I'm working at below minimum wage, but it's immensely gratifying nonetheless.

The Louisiana Purchase (as Jefferson's real estate shopping spree later became known) got my mind racing about some of the other greatest bargains in history. And there have been some absolute gems:

In October 1987, stock markets crashed across the world. A year later, legendary investor, Warren Buffett, started buying up a lot of Coca-Cola stock on the cheap and many of Wall Street's finest thought "he was downright crazy" to do so. Buffett eventually bought up 7% of the company. He would see his $1 billion investment grow into a $10 billion stake generating more than a quarter-billion dollars a year in dividends. Buffett once said, "If you gave me $100 billion and said take away the soft drink leadership of Coca-Cola in the world, I’d give it back to you and say it can’t be done."

A lucky shopper bagged himself an extraordinary bargain whilst rummaging around a flea market in Philadelphia. He bought a ghastly painting by an unknown artist for $4 because he liked the picture frame. When he got the picture home and prised off the back so that he could discard the painting, he found that a piece of folded paper had been used as padding. Upon unfolding that loose page, he discovered an original printing of the Declaration of Independence. It was sold at auction in 1991 for $2.42 million.

It looks like I'm not alone in my quest for a bargain. The ongoing 'credit crunch' has put a squeeze on the finances of many, and an unexpected side effect has been a growth in the popularity of car boot sales. While the idea of wading through a muddy field examining junk arranged in the back of an old banger is some people's idea of hell, others can't get enough of it. When you see some of the bargains to be had, a pretty strong case for donning your wellington boots and getting out there can be made:

• An 18th-century painting of cats by the artist Henrietta Ronner-Knip cost £0.50 and was sold at auction for £22,000
• An autographed Rolling Stones album bought for £2.00 made £4,000
• A certificate awarded to an officer who rescued Titanic survivors in 1912 was bought for £10 and is worth £3,000
• A Fabergé vodka cup bought for £0.20 sold at auction for £2,000
• A letter from Abraham Lincoln bought for £1 is estimated to be worth £500,000

I'm off to start swotting up on the Antiques Almanac. Happy bargain hunting!

Lost and not found

I lost my credit card the other day, for the umpteenth time. I went to pay for some all-in-one dishwasher, denture cleaning and coffee sweetening tablets (or something like that) and discovered my flexible friend was missing.

I knew this was nothing more sinister that old fashioned absentmindedness. I hit the now familiar speed dial on my phone and was connected to my credit card company twenty-five minutes later. "Good morning sir", answered the condescending female voice, "Misplaced your card again, have you?" The conversation may have started a little differently from this, but after a few moments I was grateful my card had been cancelled and a new one was on its way.

I lose stuff all the time – keys, socks, files on my computer. And I nearly lost a dog once too. Not some farty little Chihuahua, but a fully grown Alsatian. It was my first day of house-sitting for friends and I really didn't want to make the call to say I'd lost their beloved dog not two hours after they'd left on vacation. Thankfully, the obtuse canine turned up in its own time and acted as if nothing had ever happened.

When I lose things, it tends to cause me inconvenience, sometimes mild irritation (or terrible fright in the case of the missing dog). But when governments lose stuff down the back of the political sofa, it has the potential to cause hysteria and seismic bowel movements.

Stuff is always falling out of the pocket of the UK government.

In November 2007, HM Revenue & Customs lost two CDs containing the names, addresses, dates of birth, bank account details and National Insurance numbers (similar to Social Security numbers) of 25 million people, over 40% of the UK's population. HMRC had unwittingly released 'The Dummies Guide to Identity Theft' to a would be fraudster.

And it doesn't stop there. Agencies which should know how to keep important assets safe (you know, information on national security and that sort of thing) lose a lot of stuff too. In 2000, an officer from the Security Service (MI5) had a laptop stolen from him on the London Underground. Two weeks later, a colleague from the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) mislaid a laptop containing classified information - after having a few drinks in a tapas bar. I don't recall 007 having lost anything after a visit to the local hostelry.

We should be grateful that the UK tends only to lose vital information. Other governments have tendencies to lose nuclear weapons.

Greenpeace estimates that since 1945, some 50 nuclear weapons have been lost - and remain - at sea. Perhaps Iran and Syria should stop building reactors and send more people on PADI courses. Another report indicated that Russia cannot account for around 100 'suitcase nukes'. Rumours that Samsonite is responsible cannot be confirmed at this time.

The US Department of Defense is so confident of losing nuclear bombs on a regular basis that in 1993 it published Directive 5230.16 - Nuclear Accident and Incident Public Affairs (PA) Guidance. The introduction to the Directive states that it is intended: "to prevent public alarm in the event of accidents or significant incidents involving nuclear weapons or nuclear components, radioactive material, nuclear weapon launch or transport vehicles (when a nuclear weapon is aboard), or nuclear reactors under DoD control." I feel better already.

I'm off to write a proposal paper on the establishment of a lost nuclear weapons hotline. When a government loses another nuke, it simply calls 1-800-NOT-AGAIN, presses 1 for a downed aircraft, 2 for a sunken submarine or 3 for any other misadventure. The nuke then gets cancelled and a new one gets sent out by DHL. Could come in useful, couldn't it?

Kamikaze gateaux

I walked into the kitchen and stooped down to carefully remove a sumptuous gateaux from the fridge. I could hear the background chatter of friends and relatives gathered to celebrate my birthday. I firmly took hold of the serving plate and began to gently withdraw it from the fridge, twisting and turning it to avoid other chilled foods. Unbeknown to me, the friction between the cake and serving plate eased just enough for gravity to take hold and set the dessert on a kamikaze course. In a blur of slow motion I witnessed the cake leave the safety of the plate, tumble through the air and land in a heaped splodge on the tiled floor. The dreaded mishap had reared its ugly head once again.

Mishaps form an integral part of my life. No matter how careful I am, they strike when I least suspect it. Debonair is what I aspire to. But accident prone is what I have become.

My own mishaps come in all shapes and sizes. Cake-bombing ranks at the more farcical end of things. At the more costly end of the spectrum, I once turned too sharply while reversing out of a parking space and wrapped the car's front wheel arch around the only darn tree on the entire street. I was driving my parents' car at the time.

The pinnacle of my career in calamity occurred during the early stages of dating my wife. My now father-in-law kindly lent his beloved car to his daughter to enable her to come down and visit me. With the very best of intentions, I suggested we refuel the car as a thank you. (Before you embarrass me by gushing about my generosity, I should point out that this was in the days of much lower oil prices.) I learned the hard way that diesel cars do not run very well on unleaded petrol. As you can imagine, this wasn't the best way for a would be suitor to impress his new girlfriend's father.

As a doofus, I relate to very well to mishaps of all kinds. It is probably for this reason that I take immense pleasure in observing the simple mishaps (as opposed to tragedies) of other people.

Mishaps are no respecter of age, status, nationality or celebrity. As we will see, old people, government agencies, business men and women and pioneering explorers have all been victims of the unwelcome blunder.

93 year old Welsh driver, Jack Higgs, did not have an accident in 76 years of motoring. But when he did experience his first accident, he did it in style. He caused £60,000 ($120,000) worth of damage to two Porsches sat outside a dealership. The former Pentecostal minister said, "I just don't know what happened except that I lost control as I was reversing and suddenly I had hit the cars… The next thing I knew I was hanging upside down in my car thanking my lucky stars I was still alive." Just how the pensioner managed to get his compact hatchback airborne and complete a 180 degree flip – in reverse gear - seems to defy the laws of physics. We can be thankful that Jack was completely fine and, more so, that he's now given up driving.

High-tech government agencies are not without their mishaps. And when they do experience mishaps, they tend to cost big bucks. I read that NASA lost a Mars Climate Orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English imperial units of measurement while NASA's team used the more conventional metric system. A report confirmed that the units mismatch prevented navigation information from transferring between the Orbiter spacecraft team in Denver, Colorado and the flight team in Pasadena, California. The Oribter burned up in the atmosphere of Mars - and a cool $125 million went up in smoke.

One of my favourite historical mishaps was by 16th century English explorer, Martin Frobisher. After exploring the Arctic region of Canada, Frobisher excitedly returned to England with his boat dangerously laden with 1,500 tons of gold. Close examination of Frobisher's bounty determined it was not gold, but worthless iron pyrite. Undeterred, our intrepid explorer set sail once again for Canada, found another 1,300 tons of gold and sailed home with his boat creaking at the seems. An exasperated Royal assayer confirmed that Frobisher had again returned with worthless iron ore. Not the sharpest tool in the box, you might agree. Needless to say, Frobisher very quickly dropped off history's radar.

More recently, a typing error by a broker at Japanese bank Mizuho Securities cost his company $225 million (27 billion yen). Instead of selling 1 share in J-Com for 610,000 yen (£2,893 / $5,065), he sold 610,000 shares for 1 yen each (0.47 pence / 0.8 cents) – a bargain in anyone's book. The order represented 41 times the outstanding number of J-Com's shares, but still went through the trading system. Mizuho had to buy back as much of the stock as it could and was left with a very large bill indeed.

Cock-up, blunder, fiasco, misfortune. Call it what you like, but the results are usually nothing less than spectacular. Mishaps are a bit like hiccups. Whilst we don't welcome them with open arms, life would be a bit dull without them.

Wish me luck. I'm off to help carry a large sheet of plate glass across a very busy road.