Switching from politics and what a wonderful little town Springdale is for a moment …

I’m in Las Vegas for a convention for a few days. In my other life, I work with computer software. Microsoft is launching their latest and greatest development environment, called Visual Studio 2010. They rented the Bellagio Hotel convention center for the launch event. Microsoft has plenty of money.

Have I mentioned that I dislike Las Vegas? Everything here is measured in money but nothing has any actual value. Except Visual Studio 2010 while the launch is going on. Visual Studio 2010 has real value. I can scarcely believe that we have gone from bytes punched into paper cards to this in my lifetime. It boggles the mind. Boggle, boggle, boggle.

But if I didn’t have to come here for this event, I probably wouldn’t. Someone did a survey recently and discovered that 24 percent of the people who live here want to leave. I can understand that.

Like a good host, Microsoft threw a party tonight. They rented out a nightclub (called “The Jet”) for everyone at the convention. I decided to go. I was pretty sure there would be food and I’m just cheap enough to eat free if that’s an option.

It was bizarre.

There wasn’t quite enough room in even this fairly large nightclub for the people registered for the convention. Things got pretty packed. But I was right about the food. I arrived at just the right time and was close to the front of the line to get in when they opened the doors and uncorked the nerd torrent. So I did get enough cheap pizza and finger food to stave off starvation for another day. And I got more than enough free beer to drink. But I made it back to my own hotel without incident so I’m doing OK.

It was a real nightclub. I was impressed by the substantial force of hard-eyed men in black suits the place employed. I haven’t actually been in many nightclubs and I think most of the other nerds hadn’t either. As the nerd torrent flowed into in the main room, I noticed that there were about thirty or forty really attractive young women already there. My first thought was, “How did they get in early?” Then I figured it out.

To begin with, it looked a lot like a junior high school dance. All the nerds lined up on the sides of the room and the young women sat in the middle waiting. As the nerds became lubricated with free drinks, there was more mixing, but there were still fairly large knots of young women sitting together with nobody around them for as long as I was there.

The noise was absolutely deafening. Literally. It was the kind of sound system that you could feel a lot better than you could hear. The sound man for the band was just a few feet away from where I was. I noticed that he wore industrial grade ear plugs.

A lady my age … that is, older than rocks … sat down near where I was and during the occasional pauses in the noise from the band, I decided to find out if she knew any more than I did about the place.

“What are all the girls for?” I yelled at the top of my voice so she could barely hear me. “Eye candy for all the men!” she yelled back. That they were! But it seems to me that is all that they were. You couldn’t talk and there was no dancing. There really was no room.

The lady confided to me at the top of her lungs that she knew that’s what they were there for because “they asked my daughter to be a Bud Light Girl at football games and they were just there for the men to look at. But I told her I didn’t want her doing that.” A few minutes later, she showed me pictures of her daughter on her cell phone. I would have accepted a Bud Light from her any day and I don’t even like light beer.

Then the lady said that her own husband died a few years ago and she thought it wasn’t right for people to be alone. I agreed. And then I decided that I really ought to be getting back to my own hotel. After all, I needed to get this written.