A lot has happened since my last post, but none of it had anything to do with Sweden. Last week, I put on my Popular Science hat and traveled to Vegas to cover the Consumer Electronics Show as an on-air "tech expert" for CNN (I'm still the editor of PopSci.com, don'tcha know— at least on paper). I've done this for the past few years, and it's exhausting, but pretty fun. This time around, I shot 11 segments (you can see some of them here, if you're interested), but burned the candle at both ends slightly less than usual, resisting the urge to get drunk and dance all night at Pure or Tao and then get back to the broadcast booth for a 7 am East Coast hit. That is, except for the last night of the show, when I had a great time cutting loose on the dance floor at Studio 54 with the CNN crew. The only thing I had to do the next day was fly to Orlando, give a presentation to Bonnier's U.S. CEO and then hop on another plane for a 20-hour flight to Stockholm. No big deal (aaarrrgggghhh).One weird thing about CES—and there are many—is that it always happens concurrently with the Adult Industry Expo, resulting in a culture clash of balding computer nerds and silicone-enhanced porn stars. This is especially true at the Sands resort, where the bottom floor of the convention center hosts the toys, robotics and lesser-known inventors from CES, and the top floor hosts booths for porn production companies and innovations like a floor-to-ceiling lucite pole that retracts into the ceiling "when the kids come home." The CNN producer I was working with on the last day of the show thought it would be funny to shoot our outro inside the Adult Expo, and I agreed, since I'd never been there and was sort of curious. As I expected, it was a total freak show, but not in the glitzy way I'd hoped. Most of the porn stars (both male and female) were worn and sad looking, the hall itself was badly lit with unflattering fluorescents, the booths were sort of bare and poorly constructed... it could have been a vacuum-cleaner convention but for the occasional giant plasma screen showing explicit video footage and the bizarre number of booth babes wearing nothing but body paint. While we were in there, we also shot a quick interview for a CNN show called "News of the Absurd" with the reigning it-girl of porn, Stoya. She was the exception to the worn-out rule, with porcelain white skin, almost no makeup and a slender, unenhanced figure. But there was something unsettling about her, too. We wanted to interview her because we'd read that she was really bright and unusually well-read and we thought it would be fun to get her take on some current events, like Obama's inauguration and the Gaza conflict. Well, Stoya was articulate and polite, but she definitely hadn't been watching the news lately, so our segment didn't work out as neatly as planned. At the last minute, the producer decided he'd like to do the talking while I held the videocam, but he was sort of stumped as to what to ask her when it appeared she didn't know anything about what was happening in the world. "I guess you read my bio," Stoya said. "You know, I didn't write it. Our PR people may have picked out some elements of my personality and exaggerated them a little." Hmmm, in the adult industry? Really?! I guess that also means the Hustler Honey was never a park ranger. Oh well. I'll leave you with these two images of me cheesing it up with the porn stars. I might have been a little afraid of Stoya...
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