Upstairs, though, is where you find the industry’s personal side: the porn stars and their agents, directors, and many, many producers. Putting aside the clothes people are wearing, the videos that are being shown, and the fondling that often takes the place of handshaking, the atmosphere is pretty businesslike. But woe unto you if you should be caught upstairs when the fans are let in.
The fans—they look like the crowd at a Star Wars convention after it’s done time at a state institution. These are round and unshaven men, pierced and badly tattooed, many of them tumescent, all of them with cell phone cameras held high pressing against you, a scum-dappled tide lapping toward the performers. Like salmon who will never successfully spawn, they are single-minded and devoted in their quest, taking no notice of anyone trying to press through the crowd without touching them. Instead they bear you backward, grunting slightly. Up close you note their oily skin and an odor that suggests Axe has introduced its own line of nacho-flavored body spray.
When they reach the front of the scrum, they’ll play it cool and casually tell the star how much they love her earlier work and that she showed great range in, say, the gang-bang scene in Ass Trespassers IV. She’ll stand there in hot pants, with electrical tape over her nipples, smile a little distantly, and say, “Why, thank you.”
Then each and every one of them will rest his head on her chest and smile as he takes a picture of himself, happy at last.
Interestingly, the massive Consumer Electronics Show and the porn show hit Vegas at the same time. The reason is that the porn show used to be part of CES (I’m not kidding). After all, the porn industry tends to be keenly interested in consumer electronics. Also, many CES attendees are keenly interested in porn.
BRENDAN BUHLER is a writer and staff reporter at the Las Vegas Sun.
Chapter 85
The World Bog Snorkelling Championships
Don’t be scared if you see a snorkel tube rising from the murky depths of a bog while taking an otherwise relaxing walk in the Welsh countryside. You’ve likely stumbled upon a training session for the annual World Bog Snorkelling Championship, held each year in a specially designed course on a farm on the outskirts of Llanwrtyd Wells in Wales.
The site of the competition is quite scenic—it’s even been designated as an area of “Special Scientific Interest” due to the rare and protected animals and plants that live nearby. But there is nothing pretty about the snorkeling competition. Originally started by the tourist board, it takes place in two sixty-yard trenches dug out of the peat bog. Protected animals and plants share space with hundreds of participants and spectators who gather on the banks to watch contestants race through the murky water, clad in everything from normal swimwear to wet suits to the occasional inflatable sumo wrestling costume.
As befits such a serious competition, there are, of course, strict rules: competitors are only allowed to compete in one of the two bog trenches, bog assignments are not transferable, and according to official guidelines, “No recognized swimming stroke may be used and lifting the head is allowed purely for orientation purposes.”
If all that still leaves you wanting more, you’re in luck: there’s also a bog snorkeling triathlon.
Fotograferen.net/Wikipedia Commons
Chapter 86
Your College Campus Four Months After You Graduate
Don’t be that guy.
Chapter 87
A North Korean Gulag
The word “gulag” originally was an acronym for a Soviet bureaucratic institution called the Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei—the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps. Like any Soviet bureaucratic institution, these original gulags were not fun places to visit—and while the word’s definition has since expanded to include any forced labor camp, it still indicates a place that you don’t want to experience firsthand.
North Korea provides some particularly good examples. Humanitarian groups condemn its “reeducation” camps for starving, torturing, and abusing prisoners, some of whom are there for crimes as small as listening to foreign radio shows. According to the Wall Street Journal, prisoners sometimes serve their entire sentences in the clothes they were wearing when they were seized—one woman had to bind her feet in rags after being arrested in high heels.
It’s hard to imagine, but North Korea’s kwan li so penal camps are reputably even worse than its labor camps. Kwan li so camps are home to North Korea’s political prisoners, and are thought to hold somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 people, some of whose so-called political offenses are as trivial as sitting on a newspaper containing a photograph of Kim Jong Il. Even worse, North Korea doles out punishments collectively, meaning that if one person in your family does something wrong, up to three generations of your entire extended family can be punished. The Hermit Kingdom is no doubt a fascinating place to see, but if you visit, make sure to play by its rules.
Chapter 88
Disaster City
Strolling through Disaster City on an otherwise pleasant Saturday, you’re likely to be accosted by a bloody, screaming woman begging you to save her children from a collapsed strip mall or come across a pair of mangled feet sticking out from a pile of timber.
Don’t worry—no one’s actually been hurt. Disaster City is a fifty-two-acre urban search-and-rescue training ground at Texas A&M. Want to practice responding to an earthquake? Worried about a terrorist attack? Need practice searching for victims in an eleven-thousand-square-foot pile of concrete rubble? It’s all here. A one-stop shop for simulated disaster, it comes complete with collapsed homes, a passenger train derailment, and a government complex inspired by the Oklahoma City bombing and built to replicate what might happen if a large explosion destroyed a three-story office building and parking garage.
As the largest and most comprehensive facility of its kind in the world, Disaster City is an invaluable training ground for rescue workers. Teams travel from around the globe to get a chance to practice here. But if you end up strolling through the city on a simulation weekend, watch out. That’s when the victims arrive—a never-ending stream of volunteers whose definition of weekend fun involves having makeup artists burn their arms, cut their faces, give them compound fractures, or impale them with rebar. Once wounded, the volunteers are sent out into the field to scream in pain and beg for help, thus adding the critical element of reality that makes Disaster City one of the world’s best places to train—and one of the most unpleasant places to come across unawares.
Chapter 89
The Inside of a Spotted Hyena’s Birth Canal
While most mammals maintain separate orifices for urination and giving birth, the spotted hyena makes no such accommodation. One of the most dominant predators on the African savanna, it does both through something called a pseudo-penis, a seven-inch fleshy protrusion that also happens to be its clitoris.
Wikipedia Commons
Considering that females also have fake scrotums and pseudo-testes, early researchers can be forgiven for being repeatedly confused when their “male” hyenas gave birth. But the title of this entry refers to what the inside of a hyena’s birth canal would be like from the perspective of a cub. Imagine, if you will, trying to give birth to a two-pound hyena through your penis. Now imagine that you are the baby trying to get out.
Chapter 90
Gropers’ Night on the Tokyo Subway
For a nonconfrontational person, I have some pretty aggressive daydreams. An example: when I’m standing on a crowded bus or subway, I like to imagine what I would do if a man tried to grab my butt. In my fantasy, I take hold of his hand and pull it into the air. “Whose hand is this?” I’d shout. “Was it yours? Because it was just on my ass.” The offender would slink away in shame as my fellow passengers commended me for my wit and courage.
Suffice it to say, that has never happened.
But my chances might improve if I were to ride a crowded late-night train in Tokyo during bˉ onenkai season. Bˉ onenkai means “forget
the year party” and is a December tradition similar to American office holiday parties: a professionally condoned excuse to get roaringly drunk. Unfortunately for female commuters, it also results in crowds of boozy men riding late-night commuter trains. Inhibitions unleashed, many of these gentlemen decide that there is no better way to ring in the new year than to grab a fellow commuter’s bottom.
It’s not just around the holidays, though. A survey conducted by the Tokyo metropolitan government and the country’s largest railway operator found that 64 percent of women in their twenties and thirties reported being groped on public transportation. This became so much of a problem that in 2000, Tokyo’s Keio Electric Railway Co. introduced female-only train cars.
Ladies-only cars make it easier to avoid having a stranger touch your boob, but they occasionally lead to a different problem: the assumption that any woman not traveling in the female carriage wants to be touched. Some critics say that instead of sequestering women, there should instead be groper cars, where like-minded men can congregate.
This would never really happen—what’s the point of a groper commuting, after all, if he can’t cop a feel? But perhaps some of them could be shunted off to an imekura, a brothel with rooms decorated to simulate public places. There are locker rooms filled with horny co-eds, doctors’ offices staffed by naughty nurses, and classrooms full of skanky schoolgirls. And, now, subway cars—conveniently stocked with sexy commuters just waiting to be fondled.
Chapter 91
The Yucatán Peninsula When a Giant Asteroid Hit the Earth
These days, Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula is a popular vacation destination better known for Cancun than it is for cataclysmic events. But if you happened to be hanging out on the beach near the town of Chicxulub sixty-five million years ago, the atmosphere wouldn’t have been quite as relaxing.
That’s when the Yucatán Peninsula got smacked by a giant asteroid; an asteroid so big, with such far-reaching consequences, that it may well have been what killed off the dinosaurs. Estimated to have been more than six miles in diameter, it slammed into earth at a speed of nearly twenty miles per second and left behind a crater about 110 miles across.
Scientists estimate that the force of the impact was some two million times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. It sent megatsunamis crashing through the oceans, triggered earthquakes and volcanoes, and blasted up a storm of debris that became so hot when it reentered the atmosphere that it ignited wildfires around the world. Some scientists believe that the impact would have destroyed so many carbonate rocks—thus releasing a sudden giant spurt of carbon dioxide—that it would have caused an instant greenhouse effect. But even Al Gore would have had to ignore this prehistoric global warming to deal with a more pressing issue: researchers think the asteroid would have sent up a cloud of superheated ash dust so large that it could have covered the entire surface of the earth for up to a decade, blocking the sun, killing off many of the earth’s species, and suggesting that sixty-five million years ago, you might have wanted to avoid visiting the earth at all.
Chapter 92
Monday Morning at the DMV
It’s never fun to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the government bureaucracy better known as the tenth circle of hell or, and I really did hear this once, Satan’s asshole.
That might be a little harsh. But regardless of which of Satan’s orifices you decide to compare it to, there’s no denying that much like the Dementors in Harry Potter, the DMV has a singular ability to suck people’s will to live. And everything’s worse on Monday, from the lines and crowds to the moods of the people who work there.
My favorite part of my local branch is that you have to wait in line to get a ticket telling you which line to wait in. But that’s nothing compared to the experience of Laura Zhu, whose DMV disaster ended up on AOL Money:
Newlywed Laura Zhu tried to get a license with her maiden name as her second middle name. When she explained this to the DMV worker at a New York City office, Zhu says the woman yelled at her, “You have to hyphenate if you want two last names!” After speaking with a supervisor and finding out that it is indeed state policy to hyphenate, Zhu says she was sent back to the same window. That’s when things got ugly. “Little Miss Doesn’t-Want-to-Hyphenate wants a license now,” the clerk announced loudly, then proceeded to sing a little tune as she worked: “Anderson hyphen Zhu! Anderson hyphen Zhu!”
It’s enough to make you want to take the bus.
Chapter 93
Black Rock City
Black Rock City is the home of Burning Man, a giant art festival held each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. For devotees, Burning Man can be a life-changing experience, a chance to break free from societal norms and spend a week indulging in so-called “radical self-expression” in a giant, impromptu community. But if you don’t enjoy being surrounded by drugs and naked people coated in glitter, you probably should not attend.
For starters, the festival is huge. The first Burning Man, held in 1986 on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, drew twenty people. These days, it attracts around fifty thousand. To accommodate these revelers, every year Burning Man’s organizers construct a temporary civilization—Black Rock City—on the desert’s playa, an ancient lake bed. They set up a circular settlement centered around a giant anthropomorphic sculpture called “the Man” that is set on fire on the festival’s last night and gives Burning Man its name. At the end of the weeklong party, the entire city disappears.
Burning Man’s organizers provide emergency medical services and Port-O-Potties but that’s about it—visitors have to bring everything they need to survive in the desert for a week. This is known as “radical self-reliance.” To make things especially radical, no commerce is allowed in Black Rock City, and the only way to obtain things you don’t already have is through “gifting,” a Burning Man term for bartering with other partiers. This abhorrence of capitalism does not, however, apply to the entrance fee—tickets to Burning Man cost more than $350.
For most people, the best part of Burning Man is the art: burners, as attendees refer to themselves, sometimes spend the entire year building installations to bring to the festival, from refurbished steam locomotives and giant robots to full-size replicas of Victorian houses on wheels. But while it’s amazing to see, for example, a large-scale stroboscopic zoetrope sitting in the middle of the Nevada desert, the experience is a little less fun when you’re waiting in line for the communal toilet under the blistering midday sun.
That’s the other thing about Black Rock City: its weather. During the day, thermometers regularly reach one hundred degrees; dehydration and heat exhaustion are common problems. But when the sun sets, the temperature can plummet fifty degrees, and it’s not uncommon for predawn temperatures to approach freezing. Frequent wind storms send seventy-five-mile-per-hour gusts whipping across the desert, stirring up so much dust that festival organizers recommend packing masks and goggles to use during whiteouts. And then there’s the dust itself. Highly alkaline, it can give you what’s known as playa foot—a malady unique to the Black Rock Desert that is, in essence, a chemical burn.
Burning Man bills itself as being “radically inclusive,” meaning that anyone and everyone is encouraged to attend (it’s also “radically participatory,” which tends to lead to a lot of drug use). This worked well when the festival was small, but now that Black Rock City’s population is larger than most American towns, it’s begun to experience some of the same problems as a regular metropolitan area, like bike theft, litter, sexual harassment, and even arson—during a lunar eclipse in 2007, several people were nearly killed when someone set fire to the Man five days ahead of time. (The accused suspect was the same man who, several years earlier, admitted to outfitting the sculpture with a giant pair of balls.) The Web site suggests not accepting open drinks from people you don’t know, and warns that the area may be policed by undercover officers using night vision goggles to detect illegal drug trafficking, though t
he red eyes and vacant stares of many Burning Man participants suggest that this threat is not taken seriously.
There are also rules specific to Burning Man: “Do NOT burn other people’s property!” says one. “Do not bring large public swimming pools or public showers,” says another. And then there’s my favorite: “Defecation on the playa is in violation of the law”—a regulation, it’s worth noting, that wouldn’t exist without good cause.
The Man
Keith Pomakis/Wikipedia Commons
JENNIFER KAHN
Burning Man
The year I attended, there were a series of disasters, the most notable being when one of the Man’s giant, mechanically-controlled arms got stuck mid-rise during the finale, with the result that it shot fireworks into the crowd rather than into the sky. That was also the year that a woman, presumably high, fell out of and was then fatally run over by her own Art Car.
There were dramatic events, but really, even without the bleeding and the screaming, the place is awful: a parched desert squat with the population density of a refugee camp, but with more noise—the ceaseless battering of amplified techno music—and less hygiene. I mostly hid in the bookmobile, where, on one particularly hot afternoon, a naked man offered me a filthy banana pancake, macerated after being clutched in his bare sweaty hand. Having been in actual refugee camps, I will say that Burning Man made those look like Tanglewood.
JENNIFER KAHN is a contributing editor to Wired magazine and contributor to The Best American Science Writing 2009.
Chapter 94
The Bottom of a Pig Lagoon
Catherine Price Page 13