Catherine Price (18 page)

BRENDAN BUHLER

Fan Hours at the Las Vegas Porn Convention

T
here are some twenty-two thousand conventions in Las Vegas every year. Some are wondrous, many are boring, and a select few are terrifying.

You wouldn’t, say, want to hang out with the guys from the military section of the surplus merchandise convention, as they tend to wear German helmets and play with stun guns. And very few people could be comfortable at the dentists’ convention, which amounts to a room that’s a couple hundred thousand square feet and filled with the maddened whine of drills, saturated by the smell of burning demonstration teeth, and sprinkled with giant screens showing gum tissue being abraded by lasers and pressurized water, melting like Nazis in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

But none of those compares to fan hours at the porn convention.

Technically, the
AVN
Adult Entertainment Expo is two shows. Downstairs, there’s the business-to-business convention where porn shop owners browse the latest outfits, clamps, whips, gels, and miscellaneous toys in hopes of finding something new for their spring displays. This is initially titillating, eventually boring, and frequently confusing—as in “Really? A giant vibrating pink cone is the future of sex?”

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.

D
on’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

D
on’t be that guy.

T
he word “gulag” originally was an acronym for a Soviet bureaucratic institution called the
G
lavnoe
u
pravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh
lag
erei—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.

S
trolling 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.

W
hile 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.

F
or 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.

T
hese 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.