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The MGM Grand Hotel has a lion habitat: a zoo enclosure with glass walls facing the casino floor. After all, Leo the Lion has been MGM’s mascot since the early years of the last century, so the MGM Grand is all about the lions.*

We paused there as we passed through last Thursday afternoon, and overheard an announcement that they would be introducing a pair of lion cubs to the habitat the following morning. So Friday morning, after checking out of the hotel, we drove over to the MGM Grand to take a look at the lions again.

Sitting lion.
Lion chewing a rawhide toy.
Two Lions.
Lion Cub being fed.

*Well, it used to be split between lions and The Wizard of Oz. It’s green because it was basically the Emerald City. Sometime between 1998 and 2005 they seem to have ripped out all the Oz stuff. Katie pointed out that they really missed their chance. If they’d kept the theme, Wickedmania would have brought them an entirely new class of Oz-seeking clientele.

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Katie and I seem to do vacations in pairs. We’ll go somewhere on a trip, then a year or two later come back and do all of the things we discovered but couldn’t find time for the first time around. Last April we went to Las Vegas for an extended weekend, did some sightseeing, saw some shows. This year we came back mainly for the shows, and did the trip during the last week of March, driving out on Monday and returning Friday evening.

Standard Rio RoomWe stayed at the Rio, which has very nice, huge rooms—even if we didn’t spend much time there. The casino floor is also surprisingly easy to navigate, unlike some of the mazes on the Strip. We’re probably the only people to stay there four nights and not to see the “Show in the Sky” (some vaguely Mardi Gras-ish production they do with floats that run on tracks in the ceiling).

Of course, it is a bit off the Strip:

View of the Strip from our hotel room

But at least it wasn’t as far off as the last hotel we stayed at.

We managed to catch Spamalot (which replaced Avenue Q at the Wynn), Cirque du Soleil’s O (the one with the water), Penn & Teller’s magic show, and Jubilee! (a traditional-style Vegas extravaganza, and yes, the exclamation point is part of the title). Continue reading →

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With any luck I’ll finally post about last week’s trip to Las Vegas soon, but meanwhile, here’s something interesting that we spotted a couple of times on the drive back: The shadow of a contrail against the sky.

Here’s what it looked like, as the camera saw it. Actually, it was much more visible at the start. It faded considerably in the time it took to get the camera out and snap the photo.

Contrail and shadow, unprocessed

And here it is with the contrast enhanced. You can see a dark line extending across the sky from the end of the trail down to the lower left. The sun was at the upper right, almost but not quite in line with the trail at that point.

Contrail and shadow, with contrast enhanced

Atmospheric Optics has a huge collection of cloud shadows, rays, rainbows, ice halos, and more, including a diagram of how contrail shadows work.

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I haven’t seen 300 yet. But not because I’m not interested in the story.

I hadn’t heard of the Battle of Thermopylae until a few years ago, when I picked up a book called Atlantis Gate, by Greg Donegan. It was a sci-fi/fantasy thriller involving a war across time for the fate of the world. One front was ancient Greece, with one side aligning with the Spartans, and the other with the Persians. IIRC, the Spartans had to protect a gate in the pass until either someone could get a message through, or someone could close it. I actually found that the most interesting part of the book. The rest felt too much like it wanted to be an action movie. (About 2/3 of the way through I discovered it was actually the final book in a series of four. It didn’t grab me enough to pick up the earlier ones.)

Not long afterward, I started reading Harry Turtledove’s Videssos Cycle, in which a Roman legion gets transplanted to a sword-and-sorcery world. Among their number is a Greek doctor, who remarks at one point about the very same battle. At this point I realized that Donegan wasn’t making everything up, and started reading up on the actual battle.

So when I heard about the Frank Miller/Lynne Varley graphic novel, I put it on my wish list. Eventually I picked it up, read it, and enjoyed it. Then I heard they were making a movie, which sounded really promising.

Then the first previews aired, and it looked… well… overblown and hammy. Even the good reviews make it sound like two hours of hack-n-slash.

I think I’ll wait for the DVD.

(Sort of vaguely a response to Warren Ellis’ recent remarks on “Bad Signal” that he hasn’t seen 300 because he read the book—and didn’t like it.)

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Alternative Browser Alliance - New LogoI’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it’s time to refocus the Alternative Browser Alliance. Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler has referred to Firefox and Internet Explorer as the “mainstream browsers” for more than a year now, and it looks like that’s become true.

The web is no longer an IE monopoly. It’s become an IE/Firefox oligopoly. Firefox is no longer an alternative web browser. It’s sold out, its ads are everywhere, and it even allows people to build Firefox-only code.

So, starting today (April 1, 2007), the Alternative Browser Alliance will no longer promote Firefox.

So what will replace it? I thought about Opera, but most of its install base is on cell phones and PDAs, and we all know the mobile web browser is dead, right? Safari? Well, it turns out that WebKit is shutting down.

So the site will be putting its weight behind iCab. It’s as alternative as they come, and it’s guaranteed to remain that way (since it won’t run on Vista).

Update: Yes, it’s an April Fools joke.

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On Sunday, March 11, a brush fire struck in the Anaheim Hills area. It was controlled relatively quickly, and by the next morning, the smoke had settled into a blanket of haze over Orange County.

Layer of haze in front of hills

For contrast, here’s a shot from a few weeks earlier (February 23), when it was unusually clear. This was taken from a park in the Quail Hill area of Irvine, looking across the Saddleback Valley from the south toward the same range of hills seen on the left of the picture above.

Quail Hill View

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Overly-cute fox with puppy-dog eyes, captioned: Please don’t hurt the web. Use open standardsThe Mozilla Developer Center has just posted some desktop wallpaper promoting open standards, (and the MDC itself) with the theme, “Please don’t hurt the web. Use open standards.”

Apparently the design was a big hit as a poster at SXSW.

For those who haven’t seen it, the MDC is a great developer resource for web developers, describing lots of standards along with Mozilla-specific information.

(via Rhian @ SFX, who notes that the image is available for use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. These wallpapers are also covered by the Mozilla Trademark Policy.)