I’m giving the closing keynote at the Digital Insight customer conference in Orlando today, staying at the continentally-misnamed Royal Pacific Hotel — there’s no ocean nearby, and if there were, it wouldn’t be the Pacific. I got in late last night and I leave this afternoon, so I don’t have a lot of (= any) time to see the sights, but this morning I made the mistake of taking a 6 a.m. walk along the river. Or is it a river simulacrum? It was a mistake only because I find the artificiality of the environment so disquieting. The grass has been engineered to be as close as organisms get to Astroturf. The shrubbery is placed at measured intervals. The dirt’s nudity has been clothed in wood chips. The river probably has a drain plug somewhere. It’s all too planned and perfectly executed. As an indoor Jew with no sense of nature, I found it disturbing that even I was disturbed.

But now I’m safely back within the overtly controlled bosom of the hotel cum themepark, mopping the dew from brow, and discovering that the dew has been lightly scented with lemon essence and Sucra™.

Categories: Uncategorized dw