I have, somehow, spent the past two three-day weekends in Las Vegas; the first time for a friend’s wedding, the second time for a work celebration.

This is too much time in Las Vegas.

Still, some highlights from the Vegas roads less traveled:

I saw the Beatles-themed Cirque de Soleil show, LOVE, which was (unsurprisingly) excellent. I went through a Beatles phase in about 2004 where I listened to their music exclusively for about six weeks. Beatles songs, at this point, are like Homer or the Bible – it doesn’t matter if you like them, they’re part of our shared Western cultural heritage. Fortunately, I like them.

A lot of my interest in LOVE was to see Apple’s first step into this brave new multimedia future – they went back to the original vaults to remaster and remix the tracks for the show. The result was great, and bodes well for September 9th’s Beatles relaunch – The Beatles: Rock Band, of course, but also the recently announced full catalog remaster. The remaster comes with a long-overdue global reset to the UK album system, which suggests The Beatles trust is finally dropping American Baby Boomers as their primary audience. It’s 2009 – we’ve all already met the Beatles.

I enjoyed the 16-course tasting menu at Joel Robuchon (full menu behind the link). I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what to say about the three-and-a-half hour meal – I even took some notes, afterward – but in the end I can only say it was the best meal – with the best service – that I have ever had or ever will have. I will, however, mention that the meal was not only full of amazing tastes, but featured a much wider range of temperatures and textures than I normally expect – and that the uni was the freshest I’ve ever had, including 7:30 A.M., Tsukiji fish market. If you have any questions about specific dishes, please ask in the comments.

I discovered a rare books store in the Palazzo that was like Needful Things for book lovers – everything was a first edition in excellent condition; most of it was also inscribed. They had a copy of The Waste Land from 1922, of Huckleberry Finn, of Blake’s Poems, of Ulysses (both first pressing and special Book Club edition with illustrations by Matisse). On the nerdier front, they had Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, The Martian Chronicles. Verne and Wells, of course. They had a 1909 Japanese translation of the Book of Mormon, which uses crazy archaic kanji and was surreal to flip through – like a Japanese book that slid over from a sideways universe.

The problem, of course, is the price. The cheapest book I found was $985 for a signed copy of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Most were $4000 plus, with the real eye-openers north of $20,000. Still, if you have an hour or so to kill some Vegas afternoon, there are many worse (and costlier) ways to do it than browsing rare books.

The final adventure I took was about a mile east of the strip, to the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum. If you like pinball or classic games at all, you must visit this place! 150 pinball machines in excellent condition, and all of them playable. Machines are $0.25 for classic electrostatics, $0.50 for “classic” pinball, and $0.75 for modern pinball machines. All machines are set to max balls per credit (either 3 or 5 ). Many have a small notecard with information about the machine’s rarity, release dates, and historical significance. There’s something cool about learning a machine was the first to introduce skill shots on ball release or the end-of-ball score bonus. I also greatly enjoyed the late 60’s electrostatics, most of which had an art-deco or pop art theme, c.f. “Op-Pop-Pop”:

At the other end of the historical spectrum are two unreleased prototypes from the 1990s, when the industry was floundering and companies were trying to “save” pinball. Pinball Circus is an impossibly complex “vertical” pinball game, with five stacked playfields, seven flippers, and an unbelievable amount of moving objects. It’s like a pinball machine and Rube Goldberg device in one. There’s also Pinball 2000, which “holographically” reflects a graphical display onto the end of the pinball playfield, resulting in a crazy hybrid of pinball and video pinball.

In addition to modern machines (there’s a new Batman machine released post-Dark Knight, and an Indiana Jones machine covering all four movies) and old favorites (Twilight Zone! Addams Family! Indiana Jones 1993!), I got to play some older machines I’d never heard of before. The most impressive of these was probably Gottlieb’s Haunted House, a 1982 machine featuring eight flippers – four on the main playfield, two on the elevated “upstairs” playfield, and two on the recessed crypt playfield – an upside-down playfield beneath the main playfield. That sound you hear is you freaking out SO HARD right now.

Anyway, yeah, Vegas.