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I have now been to Las Vegas four times in my life, twice in the last six months. This is, in my view, a sufficient amount of direct experience to conclude with confidence that I don't get it. The phrase "_____ is why people hate America!" is overused, but it is tempting to say that Las Vegas is in fact why people hate America. Tempting, but wrong. At least based on the vast quantity of Japanese, European, and Middle Eastern tourists blowing obscene amounts of money there on any given evening.

That Vegas is garish and overdone requires no discussion. For many people this appears to be part of its charm. It creates for its visitors a unique experience. Bear in mind, however, that getting kicked in the nuts is also a unique experience. My primary issue, however, is not that the Strip is an incredible sensory overload, nor that everything that passes for entertainment – gambling, strip clubs, celebrity chef restaurants – is staggeringly expensive and leaves one with the feeling of being on a steam locomotive, shoveling piles of money into the roaring fire of the boiler.

Not pictured: taste, restraint, dignity

No, my problem is that I developed my mental image of Vegas as a kid from things like James Bond or old Rat Pack movies. And when you visit for the first time, it hits you: no one is wearing a tuxedo or playing high-stakes baccarat. It's a bunch of slobs walking around in flip-flops, their rolls of fat and Tweety Bird tattoos protruding from clothes that might have fit 5 years ago, stumbling up and down the strip with giant novelty frozen drinks in a container shaped like the Eiffel Tower. It's every jackwagon you see riding the average city bus, except they're piss drunk at 2 PM and they won't get out of your way.

The casinos, despite the amount of time people seem to devote to discussing their relative merits, are substantively identical once inside. And the patrons are almost universally depressing – old people, some attached to wheelchairs or oxygen tanks, listlessly pressing a button on a slot machine for hours and hours until the Social Security check is gone. The younger people are a mix of fratboy types and the kind of crowd one would meet at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the bad part of a rural Midwestern city. You see people who look like the only time they leave casinos is to tend to their meth labs or sell whatever they can burglarize from the seedy apartment blocks set just off the strip. You see a lot of old cocktail waitresses who look like they've lived indescribably rough lives, the kind that makes you look 60 when you're 42. You see pawn shops with lines of people out the door (and around the building) displaying baby strollers in the front window. There's nothing even fake-classy about the city. It's just sad. Apparently I'm more disturbed than most Americans by throngs of sex workers who look beaten up and strung out.

I enjoyed myself because I was with my friends and that's where they wanted to go. I will go again if it gives me the opportunity to be near people I like. But I do not get it. I do not understand the appeal, other than that many people enjoy an adult version of a low-rent Spring Break – say, whatever destination is two or three steps down from South Padre in terms of cost, class, and vomit coverage. Lots of people see Vegas as paradise, but all I see is one of the ugliest things in America built in the midst of one of the most beautiful. For the thousands upon thousands of dollars people spend there – throwing money away in casinos, paying for bottle service in tacky clubs with $30 drinks, seeing overpriced shows, shopping in "luxury" mall stores, or jamming $100 bills into the thong of some runaway from Beloit, WI – it blows my mind that none of the city's visitors could come up with a better destination on which to spend all that money.

I was half-tempted to skip NPF and eulogize Andrew Breitbart, but instead let's do A Little Politics Friday: here's a link to Andrew Breitbart's FJMing from 2008. That was back when he was merely dumb. It took him a few years to work up to being a malignant tumor on our public discourse.

And I'm sorry to be hitting you with all of these random links on Fridays, but HOLY BALLS THE BULGARIANS BUILT A GODDAMN JAMES BOND VILLAIN LAIR ON TOP OF A MOUNTAIN back during the Cold War.

Check out this site for a photo tour of the property. Usually I find blogs full of "Hey look, an abandoned building!" pictures somewhat trite, but this is no ordinary abandoned building and the photographer relays some interesting history behind it too. It's like a flying saucer / monument and it's covered with Communist-era frescoes. Someone graffiti-ed the entrance with the phrase (in English, curiously) "Forget Your Past." Not a chance, buddy. This is the kind of thing that needs to be remembered.

Oh, and incidentally, do any other fans of modern architecture note more than a passing resemblance to Oscar Niemayer's Congresso Nacional building in Brasilia?

Maybe "resemblance" is the wrong term, but there is clearly some shared stylistic DNA there.

Generally I'm not the paranoid type, and I wouldn't say I devote much mental energy to the topic of "online privacy." I take it as given that every search engine, social networking site, and free email service is collecting staggering amounts of data about me and my online habits. I also accept the fact that every email I've ever sent is probably stored in some gargantuan NSA database, every text message I've ever sent can be subpoenaed from my service provider, and any cell phone call I make is potentially being monitored. None of that is paranoia – it's just reality. These new ways in which we communicate offer very little privacy. Read up on ECHELON, 641A, Titan, the Interception Modernization Program, and all the other very real ways in which whatever expectations of privacy you might have are being compromised.

One thing we can stop, at least to some extent, is having information about our online habits packaged, sold, and put to various commercial uses. To that end Google, the 900-pound gorilla of online information harvesting, is altering its privacy policies on March 1. You can limit the amount of information you surrender and the extent to which it is used for commercial purposes by opting out. Quoth the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

To opt out, follow these simple instructions: sign in, go to google.com/history, and choose "Remove All Web History". This also revokes your consent to have your search history recorded going forward.

Let's not kid ourselves, we'll probably learn a few years from now that they're recording all of our search habits anyway (Shocking scandal! Online giant becomes Big Brother and sells out users!) but I don't see any reason to give them the satisfaction of consenting to it.

Everyone loves getting blown on a Friday. Mind-blown, that is. So without further ado, here's a bunch of stuff for your "I could work, but why?" period this afternoon.

1. The proper plural for "octopus" is "octopodes", and Britney Spears is a perfect anagram for "Presbyterians."

2. In this staggeringly interesting Fresh Air interview, voice actor Billy West (Futurama, etc.) describes how his research and preparation for voicing Popeye required mastering the art of Tuvan throat-singing. Apparently original voice actor Jack Mercer had unwittingly employed it to create the classic Popeye voice in the 1940s. Listen to this interview. It's fantastic.

3. Chinese officials were forced to shut down a supercomputer this week because it was learning. What was it learning, you ask? To give vaguely sexual answers to queries from users. Apparently when supercomputers finally become sentient they will be like 15 year old boys.

4. I'm probably late to the party on this one but apparently iPhones aren't just tracking you everywhere you go – that data is being sold to, well, anyone who pays Apple for it. Sounds cool! I don't see what could go wrong.

5. File under Pitches Lobbed Directly in Ed's Wheelhouse: someone has scanned and shared a collection of brilliant propaganda posters from the Soviet space program, 1958-1963. Holy balls.

6. Dueling is legal in Paraguay. I'm getting in on the ground floor of a new industry I call Grudge Tourism.

7. Had we known this in our trivia tournament a few weeks ago we might be $1000 richer: the only film to win the Oscar for Best Picture without its director also being nominated for Best Director is Driving Miss Daisy (1989). If you ever win money for knowing that, I want a cut.

Enjoy.

I had been looking forward for quite some time to two comedy experiences from the past week – seeing Mike Birbiglia live and seeing John Mulaney's new album/TV special. Birbiglia has the combination of a dry delivery, traditional joke structures, and the tendency to get weird that I really like. Mulaney's first album, the "criminally overlooked" The Top Part, is hands-down the best comedy album of the Obama years. His measured delivery and tenor voice on that disc helped make him one of the more unique and recognizable new comics in recent years. On the basis of that album I was beginning to wonder if John Mulaney might be the funniest man alive at the moment.

So I saw Birbiglia's live show and listened to Mulaney's new one (New In Town). I laughed at both. A few times I even laughed hard. But I can't hide my disappointment.

Unbeknownst to me, Birbiglia has been appearing on NPR quite a bit lately, which guaranteed that the audience in the large venue in which I saw him was predominantly old white people with a smattering of young hipster types. Accordingly, his 75 minute set was more of the one man show variety than a true stand-up act. He delivered the kind of material (dating is hard, being a kid was hard, etc etc) that might appeal to the widest possible audience. He definitely was funny, but he pushed the boundaries of…nothing, really. It's not even a clean-vs-dirty thing; there was profanity, a few sex jokes, and so on. In terms of the ground he covered, though, it was all very safe. Standard comedy tropes.

Mulaney's new special has him using an entirely new delivery – why he went from the slowest build-ups this side of Stephen Wright to this rapid fire approach is not clear – and a similar reliance on less creative subject matters. He's a bad driver. He has a girlfriend (and hilarity ensues). Wacky stuff happens when you live in New York City. And he actually closes with an 8 minute ass/poop joke. There are laughs to be had, but nothing at all to make the listener say "Wow, this guy is something special."

Both of these guys are now far more popular than ever before. Birbiglia has a movie coming out and is selling out 1000-2000 seat venues with high ticket prices. Mulaney is a writer for SNL and is all over Comedy Central now. I doubt they are looking for any tips or have any reason to question the choices they've made recently. They've done what makes sense from a career perspective. If the choice is between doing dark, weird material and touring in a van 10 months per year or recording TV specials, getting high profile writing work, and making big money headlining, then the choice is pretty obvious. It saddens me, though. All of the weirdness, all of the edge, is gone. They feel flat compared to their earlier stuff.

Is that inevitable? I mean, is that what we have to do to become successful? I'm not talking strictly about comedy here – any creative pursuit (and a lot of non-creative ones) has the same dynamics. Is this simply part of a maturation process or is it selling out, consciously or otherwise? It feels counterproductive to push the envelope for years in order to get noticed and then immediately retreat to what I like to call Meet the Parents territory – that is, a product three generations can enjoy simultaneously without anyone getting bored or offended.

Hell, if you put me in that position I'd probably make the same choice to soften the material up a little and make it more accessible. A skeptic might say that the previous sentence is a fancy way of saying "dumb it down", though, and he or she would have a point. I wish there was some magical world in which John Mulaney could be richly rewarded for being John Mulaney rather than for taking a step, however small, toward being more like everyone else. I don't want to sound like the 15 year old who shit-talks bands who sign with record labels for "selling out, man." These guys need to eat and I have learned quite well the lesson that comedy does not pay well if at all on the lower rungs of the ladder. It simply depresses me that the market for real creativity is so small. I wish that people who write, paint, play music, act, talk, or whatever didn't have to work within such narrow confines in order to earn recognition and achieve success. Because being a starving artist is neat and all that, but so is being able to afford, you know, medical care and rent.

Two things I was fairly certain I would never do: say "You should all read this thing in Marie Claire!" and comment on the death of Don Cornelius. Having already done the former this week, let's go ahead and knock out the latter.

The famous Soul Train host died on Wednesday, leading to many topical Facebook posts and shared video clips. I remember the show well from childhood – it followed Saturday morning cartoons and was also popular on Sunday evenings – but it is hardly an integral part of my life or memories. It has been a good 25 years since I watched or thought about it. But this clip, of the much-loved "line dance" portion of the show, caught my eye:

A lot of things have changed in 30-plus years, obviously, but it is striking how much different these people look than the ones we see on TV today (or would see if Soul Train was still on the air). They look like real people. No fake hair, fake boobs, fake nails, fake collagen-pumped lips, fake eyelashes, or fake smiles. The women don't look like porn stars and the men don't look like steroid addled He-Men with abs like cheese graters and zeppelin arms. They're all dressed loudly but quite differently. And they look like they're having actual fun rather than wearing fake, practiced personalities for the camera.

Nothing's easier than idealizing the past – usually unjustifiably – so I'm trying to tread lightly here. It's just surprising to me in a way that has probably already occurred to older readers to see how the idealized image of cool people listening to cool music has become so overwhelmingly fake and detached from reality in a relatively short period of time. Would any of these women make it on an MTV-type program today without a boob job and/or lipo? Would any of those guys be trying to make it in Hollywood today without hitting the gym until they looked like UFC fighters? And we wonder why kids transition to adulthood with such horribly distorted self images these days. I'm sure the pressure to be thin and pretty has been around forever, but it would be nice if Hollywood suggested that you could look like an actual human being and still be cool.

I have no logical way to connect these things by way of an introduction, but this has been a banner week for discovering aesthetically pleasing things that you should waste your Friday afternoon perusing at work. Click any image to embiggen:

1. Graphic artist Mike Joyce has put together a gallery of dozens of old rock & punk show flyers re-done in the International Modernist style. It works eerily well for reasons I can't pinpoint.

As an added bonus, maybe some of you old bastards actually went to one of these shows.

2. For the comic book nerd dwelling deep inside of you (or perhaps right on the surface) here is Marko Manev's gallery of "minimalist designs" for superheroes.

Something tells me that if they actually existed and needed to advertise, this is how they'd do it.

3. Photographer and artist Lilly McElroy has a series entitled "I Throw Myself At Men" wherein she would find men through Craigslist, meet them in some public place, and proceed to literally throw herself at them (while what I assume is a colleague of hers took photos in mid-throw). The reactions of her unsuspecting (victims? dates?) are priceless.

4. You've probably seen this one already; NASA released a 21st Century version of its famous Apollo 17 "Blue Marble" photo courtesy the Suomi (Finland?) satellite. The original resolution (8000 x 8000!) makes it the most detailed picture of the entire planet ever taken. That's stretching the truth, though, since this is actually a composite image that, as is the case with so much photography of natural phenomena, is probably "enhanced" and Photoshopped in a dozen different ways. Still, this is pretty amazing. Zoom in on a few different spots to get the full effect. The amazing level of detail reminds me of my favorite Earth-from-above photo, of Sicily's Mt. Etna volcano erupting in 1999.

Kodak declared bankruptcy on Thursday, which is interesting to me inasmuch as I've spent the week sick, mostly at home, and obsessively looking through NASA's newly released, true color, hi-res scans of the photographs from the Gemini missions (pre-Apollo). Incredible is an understatement. I'm not a photographer and I don't know much about the technical aspects of it, but I do know that nothing coming out of a digital camera looks quite like Kodakchrome (which they stopped making in 2009, incidentally) and other kinds of film.

Yes, I understand why film has gone the way of the dodo. It makes perfect sense. From an aesthetic perspective, however, it's sad. There's something about the way things are captured on film that all the Photoshop filters in the world can't reproduce. Besides, in fifty years I doubt we'll get the same kick out of looking through a flash drive full of cellphone camera pics as we do from flipping through an old box of pictures.

Bonus: If space isn't interesting to you, take a look through one of my other favorites, the Prokudin-Gorsky color photographs taken in Russia between 1900 and 1910. Or learn more about the pioneer of color photography here. It's pretty difficult to convince your brain that this photo was taken in 1905, isn't it?

Popular music is one of the more common ways to depict generational divides for a good reason. Very little music is timeless; the vast majority has a shelf life of a few years at best and tends to be aimed at whoever happens to be in high school at any given point in time. So nothing is more familiar to the point of being cliched than the image of parents listening to their children's music with a sense of bewilderment about how one could listen to such crap. Indeed, being unable to understand or tolerate what The Kids are listening to these days is one of the first and most reliable indicators that you're getting old.

Currently an alarming number of the teens and tweens are listening to this type of thing:

OK.

I'm 33 years old. This music is not aimed at me or people in my demographic, so it goes without saying that I'm not going to like it. But Jesus Harold Christ the Third, this shit is just unlistenable. Does every generation of old people say that? Of course. Your parents told you that your (Elvis Presley / Chuck Berry / Beatles / Led Zeppelin / Sex Pistols / Devo / Black Flag / Public Enemy / Nirvana) was godawful racket, "just noise", and the definition of headache-inducing unlistenability. It would be ridiculous for people who are old now to say "Well our parents were wrong, but we're right: this crunk / autotune /screamo / electronic shit is not even music" without being both hypocritical and wrong.

Let's say it anyway. I think old people are finally right. Half of this stuff isn't even music. Now that making music no longer requires being able to play an instrument (ProTools), sing (AutoTune), or even how to program (hundreds of idiotproof software packages for churning out mediocre electronic music), it shouldn't surprise us that the resulting product isn't music. And having grown up on Disney Pop, The Kids These Days^tm think that music has always sort of sounded like a Mountain Dew commercial.

See? I'm old now. This both puzzles and horrifies me. Do young people actually pay to see this live? Are high school boys making mixes full of this cacophony for high school girls they have crushes on? What are kids singing along to in the car? What about this music is there to connect with listeners on an emotional or personal level? Is "Brokencyde" going to announce a reunion tour in 20 years to joyous applause? Is this going to be on "Oldies" playlists in 2030? Sure, musical fads never age well but there is at least SOME level on which people can still enjoy Disco today (i.e., dancing and enjoying kitsch).

This stuff is popular and, I'm sorry, that's terrifying. I don't mean to go all Andy Rooney or full-on Grandpa here, but these "artists" blow on a level that our parents never had to try to comprehend. Of course not everyone in the current target demographic likes it, but the fact that anyone does is just another reason that I'm terrified for the future.

Oh, and before you type out your scolding comment, listen to as much of this as you can:

Crunk indeed, folks. Crunk. Indeed.