Las Vegas

eBU is in Las Vegas for the first time. Previous years it has been held in Orlando, Florida, in Disney World; and also in a European city, Berlin one year and Barcelona the next. The move to Vegas has allowed IBM to consolidate and have everyone from around the world attend one huge show.

To be specific, there are 17,000 IBM people in Las Vegas at the moment. That’s enough to fill the conference facilities of the MGM, Mirage and Venetian, with a few hundred excess people at the Paris and a couple of other hotels. Walk the streets and you’ll see IBMers everywhere.

And no, this is not the IBM of the 1950s, 60s, or even 70s. There are no suits and ties. The Brazilians are in party mood: they smashed their sales targets, so they’ve all been wearing bright yellow IBM T-shirts with the Brazilian flag on the front, sitting together in blocks, and starting Mexican (Brazilian?) waves. They look like the Brazilian football supporters who flood the streets of Somerville whenever Brazil wins a game.

There were other people in Las Vegas on Sunday, though. It was also the last day of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, America’s top porn tradeshow. As I found my way back to my room, I saw a woman with melons the size of… well, melons. And I’m talking watermelons, not cantaloupes. She was wearing a black leather outfit that had presumably been reinforced with kevlar to take the strain, and the rest of her body was somewhere between trailer park and heroin chic. I’ve no idea if she’s famous, and if there are naked pictures of her on the Internet I don’t really care to know where.