Skip to main content

fun with iPhoto and the neon boneyard

Inspired by the fabulous Sarah Dodson, I decided to try my hand at processing some pictures. This last weekend Jack and I were in Las Vegas with his side for a family vacation.

I think the number of lights in Las Vegas rival the number of stars in the sky. That's probably an overestimate, but close. Many of the neon signs of yesteryear have been retired in favor of LEDs. And like Bing Crosby asked, "What do you do with a general, when he stops being a general?" in White Christmas, "what do you do with all those old neon signs?"

The answer in Las Vegas is the Neon Museum. It's a walk-through neon boneyard of the signs. We went during the day (it was the last day for a day tour since the summer weather started early). The day gives the luxury of seeing all the signs, but unfortunately they aren't lit up. I'd like to go back and see the rave that must be it at night. Below are some of the cool relics I photographed, jazzed up a bit in iPhoto.






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Syllabus for the Next 18 Months

I decided at some point in the last week that I wanted to make a checklist of 30 things to do before I turned 30. Creating a list of 30 things is harder than I imagined it would be. But, to quote Julie Andrews (which I suppose is actually quoting Rodgers & Hammerstein), "let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start." There's nothing magical about turning thirty. I imagine that on July 2, 2015, when I wake up, my eyes will still be blue, my fingers will still number ten, my instant desire will be to go back to sleep. That said, it is one of those watershed points in life. The idea of approaching thirty is both reassuring and daunting. At least I'm theoretically past the point of having a quarter-life crisis. What I want to do is be able to look back at my 20s and tell my future kids about all the adventures their parents had before they were thirty. Creating this list isn't going to create those adventures. We've already had s...

Work-Life Balance, the Protestant Work Ethic, and Cross-Cultural Expressions of Worth

The United States and the United Kingdom are not the same place. Over the past 19 months, the differences have become apparent in some hilarious ways. For example, football means something dramatically different in Aberdeen than in Houston (and I use dramatically because both sports incite equal amounts of drama). I am fortunate in that I share a graduate student office with non-Americans. My department is overwhelmingly American and at times it can feel as though we aren't living in a foreign country, and to a larger extent a foreign culture. The realization of how vast these differences are appeared in an unusual manner this afternoon- the rights of postgraduate students to take personal time, or annual leave as its known here. The discussion emerged in response to a lovely blog by a postgraduate student elsewhere in the United Kingdom. At her university, the school requires their students to take annual leave, up to six weeks a year in that case. It seems that she isn'...

the socially-acceptable salad

I didn't realize this when I was younger. I blame my friends from high school and college for not being people that perpetuated the social custom of women eating salads in public. We gorged on pizza or mexican food or some other delicious but less than healthy foods. It was glorious.  It was also terrible. It set me up to not fully exist in a society that expects (not an outright expectation, more like a clique that defines social norms) where I'm the odd duck out if I don't order a salad. I noticed this tonight at a board meeting at a restaurant. All of the women in attendance ordered salad. Would something have spontaneously erupted had someone ordered a sandwich instead? Doubt it, but by the third or fourth person had sat down with a salad a pattern had been established. Now I legitimately wanted a salad- I think. What I really wanted pizza or a hamburger. But I was coming from the gym and I felt like I would be doing a disservice to my aching bones and digestive sys...