Welcome to snowy Las Vegas. Sorry to have been gone for a couple days from blogging; we were having computer and Web problems that I hope are now fixed. And while I write items to catch you up on the last few days in Vegas (a casino was sold; a magician's assistant was hurt on stage at the MGM; and a certain show, if you can Believe it, has begun massive discounting on the quiet, among other events), I thought I would first share a little with you about what happened when it snowed here.

Sadly, Buffet photographer Sarah Gerke is out of state for the holidays and was therefore not around to take the photo I wanted of the Luxor covered in snow (let's see Criss Angel try that trick!).

But because I grew up in the East and was educated mostly in the Midwest, what amazed me was how Las Vegas is truly a fake place when it comes to the outdoors. And for tourists, when it comes to that spot between the valet and the resort entrance that we call the outdoors, Vegas tries to keep you totally separated from the thing. How many windows do you see in a casino? Standing on the Strip on a clear night and looking up into the sky, good luck trying to spot a star among all the man-made lighting around you. The Strip lights blot out the heavens.

In short, in a lot of ways, Vegas has always been at war with nature. Without air conditioning, nothing like Vegas in its current form would exist. This town has brutal desert winds that tourists almost never feel on the Strip. Also, the construction and landscaping is remarkably fragile considering how harsh the climate can be. The very weekend I moved here (Fourth of July weekend in 1999), Vegas had enough rain that the media called the event "the 100-year storm." For this new Vegas resident, the rain came through the roof of my apartment and rained on my floor. When a repair crew arrived with the landlord, I was told that buildings simply weren't meant to handle that much rain at once. No buildings could, I was told. Incredulous, I asked him what happens when they build in Seattle. And then I got that Vegas shrug people give when caught in a transparent fib but simply don't care enough to tell another one. Auto mechanics do the shrug best here.

Anyway, so this was the first really sustained snow since I moved here, I was curious to see how the buildings would hold up. At least at my condominium complex, all went well. I live in Green Valley, which of course is not at all green by nature and I don't think is technically a valley. But there is man-made green. So, many of what we call trees are little sprouts with sticks holding them up and a timed sprinkler keeping the roots from drying out. But even the full-grown trees are feeble affairs not really meant to exist outdoors in a desert. And if you can imagine a hurricane hitting a desert, that is what it looked like here Thursday and this morning. The snow froze on the trees, and many of the trees simply collapsed, with their trunks splitting. One resident told me her entrance was blocked for a day by the many tree branches that had fallen in front of her door.

This should obviously be a wake-up call when considering replacing all these trees, as they clearly can not survive the swings in Nevada's climate, even with a stick to hold them up and a sprinkler to keep them growing. Snow and rain force Vegas to face nature: one of the many forms of reality, like the economy, this town would prefer to avoid and now must face.

Photo credit: Richard Abowitz