Despite the air quality and the fires (which are fortunately mostly under control now), I am pleased to be back in the City of the Angels. I spent the last couple days in Las Vegas for a real estate conference, and as always, I am a bit amazed by that city.

At the conference, the highlight was a speech by Queen Noor. She's very intelligent and passionate about her issues, and was at her best in a less-formal Q&A at the end of her speech. The text of her speech was outstanding, but I was little surprised by her mediocre delivery. She read most of the speech word for word (from paper, not from a teleprompter) and many times, seemed to be a bit like a high school kid practicing eye contact in a speech class. Contrast this to Colin Powell, who spoke at the last fall conference of this real estate group--Powell seems almost like he was born to speak publicly, and does it completely without notes or text. Donna Shalala also spoke at the same conference as Powell, and she too seemed extremely comfortable and natural speaking to a large audience. But despite all of her years in the public eye, Her Majesty actually looked like she had stage fright several times during her speech. On the other hand, Queen Noor is 56 and looks like she is all of "early 40's."

But my intention was to write about Las Vegas. Here are a few thoughts:

--I stayed the The Hotel, which did not live up to its ostentatious name. Tired soft goods and an end-of strip location in a tired building overwhelmed the classy and well-done aspects, like the well-appointed bathroom. Note to self: Self, next time you stay at a decent hotel, remember the drapes might be electronic. Good grief, I spent 10 minutes trying to pull the drapes together and finally gave up. The next day, I noticed the switches on the wall that open and close them.

--At 6:30 am yesterday morning, I dragged myself out of bed to go running. I got on the elevator and was immediately assaulted by techno-beat music. 10 seconds later, the elevator stopped and on hopped a bouncy, happy young prostitute, fully made up and wearing clothes that said, "I may be a hooker, but I have at least a modicum of class." She was wearing jeans tighter than the skin on a grape and a bright red frilly top (but not overly revealing) and bright red glossy lipstick and a bright red glossy little purse and--here's a shocker--bright red boots. She gave me a megawatt smile and wished me a "happy day" and a good workout. No, I don't have courtroom evidence about what she does for a living. But I would give 100-to-1 odds that she was a practitioner of the world's oldest profession.

--If this real estate thing doesn't work out...in the cab line at the Venetian yesterday, I noticed that the guys opening the cab doors were getting cash handed to them constantly by people like me. I have noticed this in Vegas before, but yesterday I really paid attention to it. I saw one cab-door-opener guy get about 20 dollars in ten minutes, and that's if all the bills handed to him were ones only. If you just won $1000 or more in the casino, handing $5 or $10 to the guy who opens the cab door for you doesn't seem outrageous. Since Vegas alternates between insanely busy and merely breakneck busy, I can reasonably assume that the guys opening cab doors are making between $1,500 and $2,500 per week in cash. Assuming they work 50 weeks in a year, that's between $75K and $125K annually in *cash.* If they really got $20 every ten minutes like I saw, that's $960 per day, (assuming 8 working hours) or $4,800 per week, or $240K per year. But I assumed a third to a half of that, just to be conservative. And btw, that's just tips, it doesn't count the minimum wage they are probably being paid. Anecdotally, I have heard many, many stories of waiters, dealers, cab-door openers, and bellhops in Vegas making between $100K and $200K, with some of the best dealers working the whale tables making triple the high end of that. And I bet almost none of these folks report much more than $40K or $50K on their taxes.

--Our conference was at the Venetian, and I hung out for a bit with some Italian real estate executives who were in the US looking for investors. One of the guys had just built the Four Seasons in the heart of Florence (slated to open in February 2008). It was interesting to get their take on the canals, facades, and frescos at the Venetian...generally, they were flattered by the imitation and amazed by the "sky" in "St. Mark's Square" but thought the whole thing was just another exercise in American "over-the-top-ism" and, btw, far too clean and pigeon-free to be anything like the real Venice.

--My cab driver on the way to the airport was Ethiopian. I recalled that 20 years ago, when I was in high school, I had an Ethiopian friend and teammate on the track and cross-country teams, named Brian Tezfaghi. The cab driver said he knew the Tezfaghi's, but it's probably like Smith or Jones. I then recalled the only Ethiopian words I knew--spelled phonetically here: "Gu-yay" for fast and "Kess" for slow. My cab driver laughed out loud as I said "Gu-yay!"

And now, back to work. Have a happy day!