I am a Southern Nevada native, born and raised in Las Vegas. Another way to say that is I was born and raised within a hundred miles of where most nuclear weapons tests were performed in the continental United States.
Growing up, I had a hard time coming to terms with growing up in a town associated with gambling, hangovers, and everything flashy and tacky.
The New York Times in 1975, described its tackiness as being on “a whole new level,” in 1979. Woah, ma’am. Ma’am. So, you’re telling me that Las Vegas—the home of 99¢ shrimp cocktail served in fake Swarovski crystal champagne flutes by women covered scantily in feather-based clothing—that place, is…tacky? Really? You have no idea lady.
You don’t know tacky until you’re an eight-year-old about to see a movie in the late nineties in Vegas. Picture it. You’re going to the grocery store, but right at the entrance is a mini casino, only ten-fifteen slots in size, but every one of them has a retiree stationed for battle. Bill Clinton’s ironic fiscal conservatism fueled by Regan-era voodoo economics birthed an army of octogenarians with too much cash and too many extra years with nothing to do but day drink, chain smoke, and play penny slots.
The smell of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume, Parliament cigarettes, and ointments is viscous, as if it were a thick soup. It feels comforting, while unsettling at the same time.
It smells like you’re about to get a big hug when staying home from school, and you hear a song on the radio your grandma, a song which seems to say: but it’s a dry heat…Barbara—stop complaining! What? You miss the cold back in Jersey? I sure as hell don’t. Now, who do I have to bribe to get a drink around here.
Nope. That’s Barbara (you can call her Babs) in her sequin-adorned, intricate-pattern garb from J.C. Penny’s in 1984. If you’re Bab’s grandkid reading this, why don’t you visit more often, huh?
Babs is our tacky Vegas grandma. She’s not going to leave any money for the grandkids when she passes, but she will leave a lot of players cards. In lieu of flowers, send a nice dry vermouth. Mourn not, little ones, for she had fun.
That’s not tacky. That’s just fun! We love Babs. We love having fun! (I don’t, but I have it on good authority that some people do.) The real tacky is not the mere having of the sequins or false nails, hair, lip fillers, architecture, impersonators, and the whatnot. What’s tacky is the contrast.
The contrast between the sundry falsities that are endemic to an artificial tourist trap the size of Rhode Island in the middle of the desert which hosts a vibrant community of churches, schools, and other industry surrounding the inner core of debauchery.
It’s the PTA president who wears 4″ heels, wears too-low-cut blouses, always has designer handbags but happens to have a masters in business administration and drives her kids around in a minivan. It’s the banality of every day life worn just like Babs wears her sequin sweater drinking gin at 10am on a Saturday.
Tacky is what jealous people say when they see a city filled with good people living in a way that feels right to them, and only them. That’s far more real than anything not considered tacky by everyone else.
So yes, we’re tacky. But, as far as I’m concerened, I’d rather take tacky over superficial, boring, and pedantic conformity anyday.
I wouldn’t have it any other way, frankly. The Times would do well to correct the record, thank you.
When in Rome, Put It All On Black
My mother, a bartender turned teacher, would drag me to trainings and staff development days growing up. She read so much that our bookshelves were insufficient to hold her ever-problematic penchant for the likes of Steven King and Joan Didion.
My father, a Pitt business school dropout turned bartender, read the entirety of the Las Vegas Review-Journal every day to me until I could talk. I never got to ask him why, but, science would say that a large part of my reading and writing capacity was built from that experience, even though I mostly just chewed on the newsprint.
In high school, I was a nerd and did yearbook, was the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, did speech and debate, and anything else that could give me somewhat of a social life, but also an excuse to be introverted if I wanted. Oh, and a perpetual excuse to not be in the class I was supposed to.
To my senior-year math teacher who signed my yearbook “It was nice having you in class, when you actually showed up. Good luck,” I see your point. I probably should have gone to class more often or I wouldn’t have struggled so much when I got into AI later.
—Amelia Hollis
At the time, there was a slight stigma about Nevada higher education, which looking back, I feel was wholly undeserved. Upon the advice of one of the most influential people in my life, my late AP government teacher, I decided to go out of state for college.
She was born and raised in Oklahoma, whose politics none of us could even hazard a guess, she described the apparently massive benefits of a change in perspective when she went to Texas for college, even though it’s just one state away.
Having spent my senior year as an intern at the Review-Journal, I was excited to attend the the famous University of Missouri School of Journalism.
After I wrote a similarly aggressive piece about the quagmire that was the construction surrounding the VA hospital, which was jamming up the roadways around the university teaching hospital, and only level one trauma center in central Missouri, all while leaving shamefully leaving American veterans without or delayed the care they deserved. I figured that the person in charge of the construction had a Marie Antoinette kind of attitude, which he did. And, you could hear it in his quotes, and I couldn’t have liked it more.
As a journalist, it’s not my job to tell you how to think about someone or something. But, I’m not going to complain when the actions or words of a subject in an article make themselves look bad, leading to positive civic change. No, I was told that
I In my first semester, having previously been a minor hot-shot having written a small and retrospectively vague exposé on high school censorship in the Clark County School District .
Give AI a Joke, It Laughs for a Day. Teach It to Tell Jokes, Joke’s on you.
While in college, I started working for a company that was developing artificial intelligence before the advent of parallel processing aided by GPUs like they are today. Instead of large language models, the company’s AI was expert system-based, which I still believe will be the route to a genuine general artificial intelligence.
For all intents and purposes, I was working on what you can think of as ChatGPT’s great aunt. Much like a great aunt, complex expert systems require so much work to get going, but once you do, they work. Just like baking cookies with great aunt Josephine—not mine, yours—it takes her a minute to get out of the rocking chair. A long minute. There even might be a swear word seaid or two out of frustration. But, once she gets back inside she’s going to work you and everyone else into the ground baking cookies. You better be careful, okay? It’s a family recipe and every cookie needs to be the same size. Be efficient.
Wow, your great aunt Josephine sounds interesting. Well, that’s basically an expert system.
Initially, I worked on a project to improve sentiment analysis and continued working at the company and, after graduating college, became head of research, then managing director.
Limited by the technology at the time, a project I started and continued for around three years was to be an AI which combined best of both the LLM and expert system worlds. Although largely debunked and generally considered goofy, Sigmund Freud’s conception of id and ego.
The structure and order of an expert system (the ego), and the recursive, fuzzy modeling and learning by a large language model (the id), properly configured, would produce an AI should be able to teach itself while grounded within an order—not just an ontology, but an entire Weltanschauung we all impose on ourselves and each other. (I Kant believe it’s not a ding an sich!)
I suck at coding, though, which is always my limitation. I’ve thought about picking up the project again, and if you’re reading and are interested, feel free to contact me. I have no problem working with other people however, this is a little bit of an “out there” project so, fair warning. Maybe I’ll write a paper and submit it somewhere instead; who knows?
Eventually, we established a publishing division to produce textbooks to go along with our AI-powered essay-grading software. My background in publications and journalism was particularly helpful and a very fulfilling part of my career.
Teaching Into the Void: The Kids Are Not Alright
In the end, I left to pursue teaching due to corporate shenanigans and the kind of burnout that comes with working as many hours a day as one physically can. My mother being an educator had always left me with a desired to try so I gave it a shot.
Besides, with how deeply broken our education system is, I wanted to explore firsthand the reasons why. Although the below based on opinion and anecdotal evidence, you can make up your own mind if it resonates with you.
Students are passed to the next grade level with little review, thought, oversight, or consideration. In my current position, students read approximately five grade levels below their actual grade level. That makes them effectively illiterate, but I am not allowed to teach the basics of reading. Most school districts force teachers teach at grade level, no matter what, even if a student is several grade levels behind, and forbid secondary teachers from teaching phonics or other things that students literally do not know how to do.
Teachers leave schools constantly because of toxic work environments brought on by administration who themselves have toxic work environments because of top level leadership, looking for quick fixes and who care about appearance over substance.
The fact that the modern English teacher is no longer a teacher of logic, reason, and rhetoric means that there is no one teaching students these concepts, which are the fundamental building blocks of critical thinking. In days gone by, English teachers were responsible for teaching actual logic (syllogisms, contradictions, paradox, fallacies, etc. etc.) Not only is it that most teachers don’t teach any of that, they were often not taught logic themselves. No wonder the nation seems to be rationing critical thinking as if it were milk during the second World War.
Among the reasons the system has failed, is the fact that the Western literary canon shouldn’t have been thrown out. It should have been expanded. In the effort to be inclusive, many districts over-corrected to the point that at least two generations have completely lost their bearings. The Western canon isn’t just literature by “old dead white guys.” It’s math, science, music, and philosophy. It’s the very concept of democracy and liberty and due process. But, out of a well-meaning sense of something, they threw it out. Instead, they should have kept Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Hegel, Locke and added Toni Morrison, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglas, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, among others, to it.
The canon was never meant to an ivory tower that never changes. If one unthinkingly gets rid of the canon, one is also getting rid of the origins of the very ideas that are celebrated most by those same people. That includes ideas like democracy and freedom, the equality of mankind, religious plurality, agape (brotherly or neighborly love), discourse and conversation, and good-natured competition. Again, we wonder why the support for those was as if it were rationed. No wonder. Kids aren’t going to believe in those ideals that we clung to for so long if they’re never exposed to them in the first place.
I have much more work to do in thinking through these issues. Eventually, the blog will be where I go into more detail. For now, I’m going to enjoy this shrimp cocktail, which is definitely not radioactive.
Just kidding. I hate shrimp cocktail.