How America Masturbates

Spilled seed: hundreds of millions of sperm & no egg McMuffin

About.Com Sexuality
Sexuality Blog
By Cory Silverberg, Sexuality Guide

How America Masturbates
Thursday October 7, 2010

This is the second in a series of blog posts about specific data coming from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB). If you want to start at the beginning, start here.

Forgive the hyperbolic headline. It's not true, of course, that the data from the NSSHB, or from any other quantitative survey for that matter, can tell us much about precisely how Americans masturbate. Online surveys, statistical software, and the soft focus of a nationally representative sample all obscure the gentle (or rough) touch of a back of a hand, the swirling of finger tip or elbow in just the right spot, the heat we make between ourselves and our own bodies. How America masturbates will probably remain a mystery, and our sex lives may be better for it. But how often and with whom we masturbate are questions that researchers did ask, and when 5,865 people ages 14 to 94 responded, it's worth a look.

How Much, How Often?

The responses affirmed the idea that among the big ticket sexual activities (they only asked about masturbation, oral sex, vaginal, and anal intercourse -- I know, it's not fair, but no one surveys people about hugging, kissing, or earlobe roughhousing) masturbation is tops.

Overall 60% of adolescents (ages 14-17) and 82% of adults (ages 18-70+)say they have masturbated at some point in their lives, with more men reporting masturbating than women across all age groups.

Solo masturbation (both in the past month and past year) was more commonly reported than most partnered sexual behaviors for people 14 through 24 years and 50 years and older.

Participants were whether they masturbated, and if so, how often they did using several time frames (past month, past year, more than a year). In terms of frequency:

30% of women and 21% of men masturbated a few times a year or monthly
17% of women and 23% of men masturbated a few times a month or weekly
5% of women and 17% of men masturbated 2-3 times per week
2% of women and 11% of men masturbated more than 4 times a week

Masturbation Across the Lifespan

When responses are broken down by age the image of the constantly masturbating adolescent or teenager doesn't appear. Instead, people age 25-29 were the ones most likely to report masturbating in the past month (60%). 34% of 14-15 year-olds reported masturbating in the past month and 42% of 16-17 year-olds said they had masturbated at least once in the past month.

Who Masturbates Most?

Well it's not a contest. But 61% of women and 77% of men ages 25-29 reported masturbating in the past three months, which was the highest percentage across age groups (participants 70+ were least likely to report masturbating in the past three months, 16% of women and 35% of men).

Are You Lonesome Tonight: Do Single People Masturbate More?
Overall, participants who were single did not masturbate more than those in relationships. Among women it was those who were single and dating that overall were more likely to have masturbated in the past three months. Among men it was divided between those single and dating and those who were in a relationship but not living together.

Masturbating Together

Interestingly, the same age group of women who report masturbating alone the most, those 25-29, were the ones who reported partnered masturbation the most (35%). For men the group with the highest percentage reporting partner masturbation was those ages 30-39, 32% of whom reported engaging in partnered masturbation in the past three months.

As the authors note in the paper looking at the details of sexual encounters (they call them "sexual events") the results are likely influenced by them not being specific about what "partnered masturbation" includes or doesn't include. Other surveys have specified using fingers and hands to stimulate specific parts of the body (e.g. clitoris, penis, anus). Still, this survey lays interesting groundwork for future research on the details of what we do when we do this thing we call sex.

Personal comment: I love to masturbate! Especially when I feel like being alone. I’ll get my dive gear, slip into the pit, tether with ankle leashes at about 30 feet and get myself off with a Penetrator plug with a G-spot vibi ball in the tip; then have a short nap while I enjoy the afterglow. It’s awesome listening to the gas hiss through my DV as I inhale and the roar of the bubbles as I exhale and they rush toward the surface. When the vibi tips me over the edge, I love the feel of my vaginal muscles spasming, clenching around the shaft of my plug as I orgasm! As you can see from the statistics in the article above masturbation is a very normal part of human sexuality and is performed millions of times a week in the U.S. I feel sorry for those few people who feel masturbation is a sin and deny themselves the pleasures of masturbating. I wonder how they handle “nocturnal emissions”, wet dreams. Is having a wet dream a sin?

Pointe shoe quiz October 11, 2010

Who is the maker & what is the style & outer covering of these shoes?

The 2010-11 season ballets

Poster for the ballet Ondine by The Royal Ballet in 2000

Ballets for the 2010 – 11 season: I was asked how I chose dancers for my small company and how I pick dancers for roles so I’ll write briefly about the process as well as the ballets we will be dancing this season. Dancers join my troupe knowing that we provide erotic ballet using the classical idiom. We screen for willingness to push the creative envelope so we don’t have a problem with squeamishness about having sexual encounters in front of an audience. This is Vegas and the competition for job openings is intense. We have never had a problem finding dancers with marvelous bodies and exquisite technique and in the current recession competition for a single opening is enormous. We have great health care benefits – We have to with unprotected sexual activity on stage. We are all screened with a full STI panel every two weeks so we are sometimes referred to as the Vampire Ballet because of the frequency of blood being drawn.

Every dancer is responsible for her own birth control and there are very few jobs for pregnant ballerinas (we are all tested weekly for hCG) so the girls are very careful to use their birth control correctly. Though the Ballet Mistress has Plan B One-step available for the asking if a girl thinks she may have had a birth control failure. The only contraceptive device we insist a female dancer wear during some performances is a diaphragm which is used as a gas guard (during underwater sex) to prevent water and air bubbles being forced into her uterus by the hydraulics of her partner’s thrusts while underwater. We have submerged sex in our version of the ballet Undine, the story of a water sprite that falls in love with a human.

I rotate dancers in roles to give new ones a chance to shine and get different interpretations of the same role since some high-rollers come to the show every night during their stay. Looks and technique are important, but ultimately it’s a about onstage chemistry so if couples work well together I’ll go with casting them, especially opposites in a ballet like Miss Julie where the guy is a sadist and the woman a masochist so there is really rough sex with the audience splattered with body fluids. They love it!

The ballets for this season are:

Undine: The set for our version of the ballet is a tidal pool by the sea. We are fortunate that in the five venues we dance in the buildings were reinforced either to take the weight of filled swimming pools on the upper floors or because the building had been designed to add more floors so that allows us to have a glass walled water filled pool to perform in.

The story comes from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine, popular in the 19th C. It is the tale of a water-nymph who marries a mortal. Similar to other 19th century fairy tales, the plot is based on man (Palemon) encountering the supernatural (the water nymph Ondine), but the outcome is rather different than many of the 19th century classics: here, it is the man that dies, and the female character survives. Ondine makes her first appearance from a fountain, shivering in the cold air. She meets the hero, Palemon, and is astonished when she feels his heartbeat as she doesn't possess a heart. Palemon deserts Berta, whom he has been courting, and decides to marry Ondine. During a particularly strong storm while at sea, Ondine is lost overboard. Palemon survives the shipwreck created by the angry Ondines and believing Ondine is lost ends up marrying Berta. Ondine returns and is heartbroken when she discovers Palemon's unfaithfulness. When she kisses him he dies and she goes back to the sea losing all memory of him forever.

In our version we have revised Sir Frederick Ashton’s 1958 ballet Ondine which he choreographed for the Royal Ballet. We have kept the original novella name, Undine, and changed the ending. So that after discovering his unfaithfulness, in place of the fatal kiss Undine has sex with him and her desire for him is so great that she sucks the life out of him as he orgasms inside her. She swims off holding hands with another female water sprite having found another partner before her male lover’s body is cold. The dancer/divers breathe from inconspicuous air hoses descending from a surface supply unit. The female lead’s long hair is worn loose and she wears only a Reflexions latex diaphragm and weighted pool-pointes to keep her slightly negatively buoyant with her weighted feet on the bottom of the pool. The ending has been hugely popular with audiences, especially straight Dommes and butch lesbians because Undine is one of the few ballets where a woman survives and triumphs.

The Image used at the top of this entry is of a poster for a production of the ballet Ondine by The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, London in 2000. This poster features former Royal Ballet principal dancer Sarah Wildor, who danced the title role.

Swan Lake: We have a very popular ending to a shortened version of Swan Lake where Odette (the white swan) gives herself to Prince Siegfried who penetrates her from the rear while she is en pointe. The male dancer uses Cialis as a performance enhancer and she wears a thong bottom tutu and crotchless tights. The high-roller clubs all have intimate venues so the audience gets to watch up close and personal as the Prince shoot his wad inside her. There is an onstage costume change for Odette as his making love to her turns her back into an almost nude (she is still wearing pointe shoes) beautiful princess. Is it real? Yeah, it is, this is Vegas. The female usually doesn’t have time to orgasm, unless she has been masturbating backstage, but the male does and as he pulls out there are usually still strands of semen dripping from his fading erection as the couple takes their bows. It’s all great fun and the guys who lose heavily at the tables have their minds diverted for a while.

Miss Julie: A ballet in one act with choreography and libretto by Birgit Cullberg. Based on Johan August Strindberg’s famous stage play (first produced in 1889) about sex and class, the ballet tells the story of the aristocratic Miss Julie who seduces the family butler and has to pay for her indiscretion with her life. The main characters:

Miss Julie: Twenty-five-year old daughter of a count. She hates men, thanks to her mother’s influence on her, and believes her high social station makes her superior to her servants. Nevertheless, her instinctual female sexual urges drive her into the arms of a valet, Jean, who is all that she despises–a man and a lowly menial.

Jean: Thirty-year-old valet of the count. Though of the servant class, he is articulate and even can pepper his speech with French phrases he learned while working as a wine steward in Switzerland. He seems to represent the lower classes of the late 19th Century in a world that was casting off class distinctions and allowing the lowly to become equals of the high and the mighty. When Miss Julie entices him with her charms, he invites her to his room—and the boundaries separating social classes, and Miss Julie’s clothes, droop to the floor.

The servants talk about the incident that caused Miss Julie’s fiancé to breakup with her. Miss Julie was “training” her fiancé as a master would train his dog, forced him to jump over her horsewhip. Twice he did it and twice the whip cut him. When he was supposed to jump again, he took the whip from her, broke it into pieces, and walked off.

Miss Julie, on the rebound, seduces Jean and after they have been sexually intimate he tells her that the other servants know about their affair and they need to get away. Their plans fall through when Jean finds that she can’t finance their escape. They argue and Jean gets the better of her. Miss Julie becomes despondent and kills herself with the razor that Jean just finished shaving with.

We have revised the story line to include Miss Julie being brutally taken and having her cervix repeatedly rammed while she screams and squirms as the couple enjoys rough sex. There are also several wonderful S&M scenes with Miss Julie whipping Jean with her riding crop and them both enjoying it before he inseminates her on stage. Then after he refuses for a second time to go away with her she beats him with her riding crop again and then slits her wrists. The long sleeved riding habit she is wearing hides the bladders of fake blood that pour onto the stage as she runs the razor over her sleeves. S & M fetishists as well as misogynists love our version of Miss Julie for the beatings and the heroine’s suicide at the end.

Pointe shoe quiz October 8, 2010

What maker’s shoes is the dancer in pink wearing?

And, what are your reasons for choosing that maker?

Barrier training and identity theft

All-Flex diaphragm compressed for insertion

The All-Flex as a training barrier: The 12-14 y/os at St Lucy’s in our Feminine Hygiene class are fitted with an All-Flex as their first training barrier because it is the easiest style to insert correctly. Every girl is fitted regardless of any other method of contraception she is using. For anyone reading this who says that 12 y/os are too young to be using birth control, I say, “Get Real!” It’s true that the age of consent in Nevada is 16, but we teach the use of a diaphragm as a method of flow control during a woman’s period. It just so happens that it can also be used as a contraceptive device and for URTP (upper reproductive tract protection) when she is old enough to have dive-sex. Most of the girls past menarche are on some form of hormonal or IUD method of birth control anyway because their parents have approved it. The usual reason given is ‘to regulate their cycles’ even when everyone is aware the teens are using it for protection while actively participating in horizontal sports.

Elke and Flibanserin – an update: Boehringer Drops Female Desire Drug. Germany's Boehringer Ingelheim said today (10-08-2010) it will discontinue development of its investigational compound Flibanserin for the treatment of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder because of FDA requests for further support the efficacy and safety profile of the drug. “The decision was not made lightly, considering the advanced stage of development,” said a Boehringer executive. “We remain convinced of the positive benefit-risk ratio of Flibanserin for women suffering with HSDD”. Returning readers will remember that in my entries for June 17 and July 8, 2010 I wrote about Elke, Adolph’s pool assistant and German arm-candy, being on Flibanserin. Perhaps it had some placebo effect for a while but she is off it now as the improvement she seemed to have disappeared.

Fall pregnancies: Last week at the clinic we began to see the usual crop of Fall pregnancies. There was only one St Lucy’s girl. The other seven came from UNLV (3), local public high schools (3) and the last one a new showgirl at a rival casino who came from a casino in Atlantic City. This phenomenon occurs each Fall as young women switch from their Summer vacation or intern jobs to Fall back-to-school routines. All were within the 8 week maximum for taking Mifeprex but five of the six (the seventh miscarried) had menstrual extractions. The sixth, the showgirl, took Mifeprex.

Boned at the Barre: The St Lucy’s girl is a transfer student from Los Angeles who is taking ballet and was using Lybrel the estrogen/progestin pill (90 mcg levonorgestrel and 20 mcg of ethinyl estradiol) that is taken every day for 365 days. That dosing regimen is supposed to stop your periods, but break-through bleeding is common for 30% of users for up to 6 months while user’s bodies get used to the hormone levels. In June of this year the maker, Wyeth/Pfizer, repackaged Lybrel in a new blister package and the St Lucy’s girl had a hard time remembering to take her pill from a blister pack rather than the old ClickCase. She liked the ClickCase and thinks the blister pack is common. The psychology of that probably led to her not taking her pills correctly and eventually her pregnancy. Counting back it appears she had been inseminated when she arrived on campus. She tested negative for hCG during her mandatory pelvic exam the day she arrived and hadn’t had sexual contact with a partner for the next six weeks which means she conceived a day or two after she arrived.

Since she never had a period she didn’t have any warning that she was preggers until her breasts began to swell and the milk glands surrounding her nipples became prominent as they increased in size. Three weeks later during one of her first times being penetrated from the rear while en pointe, in the usual Boned-at-the-Barre position - feet a la seconde penetrated from the rear while bent over holding on to the barre - she had her cervix rammed several times by her partner and began to hemorrhage. She fainted and miscarried right in the studio bleeding all over a new pair of Gaynors she had just bought to have sex with her fave ballet teacher. She was rushed to the clinic and had a menstrual extraction to make sure that all the fetal tissue and placenta were expelled. She was put on a ten day regimen of antibiotics and told not to have any sexual activity that would cause her uterus to cramp for the next week while her endometrium was replaced.

Identity theft: I’ve mentioned in earlier entries that my women escort candidates and St Lucy’s students who are fitted for gas guards have RFID chips put in them so we can tell who is absent from class and ensure that they are wearing their gas guards before they enter the water for dive-sex labs where partners will finish inside each student during her dive. The RFID chips also help identify women when they are wearing DiveRubber or encasement suits where faces and identifying body markings (tats, scars, blemishes, etc) are hidden so from a distance it is almost impossible to know who is wearing the rubber suit. We have had instances where someone tried to have another woman take an exam dressed in the absent students DiveRubber or fetish gear. We are seeing gym-bag, dance-bag and reg-bag thefts in women’s locker rooms apparently to get their gas guards with RFID chips in them so they can pretend to be the student/dancer when dressed in fetishwear or dive gear. Wearing another woman’s diaphragm with her RFID chip it makes it much easier to get into some of the women’s secure areas at St Lucy’s and in the escort training areas at the casino. To combat that we have gone to biometric scanning of thumbprints as a cross-check to get into women’s secure areas.

Sin-city recession economics

76 acre City Center original rendering

The Harmon tower (lower right) is only about half the height originally proposed. Faulty engineering made it unable to support original height. The Vdara Hotel (with the Death Ray problem) is the wide tall curved structure at the rear.

The New York Times
October 2, 2010
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

Las Vegas Faces Its Deepest Slide Since the 1940s

LAS VEGAS — There are many cities across the country that are beginning to see the first glimpses of the end of the recession. Internet gambling,

This is not one of them.

The nation’s gambling capital is staggering under a confluence of economic forces that has sent Las Vegas into what officials describe as its deepest economic rut since casinos first began rising in the desert here in the 1940s.

Even as city leaders remain hopeful that gambling revenues will rebound with the nation’s economy, experts project that it will not be enough to make up for an even deeper realignment that has taken place in the course of this recession: the collapse of the construction industry, which was the other economic pillar of the city and the state.

Unemployment in Nevada is now 14.4 percent, the highest in the nation and a stark contrast to the 3.8 percent unemployment rate here just 10 years ago; in Las Vegas, it is 14.7 percent.

August was the 44th consecutive month in which Nevada led the nation in housing foreclosures.

The Plaza Hotel and Casino, which is downtown, recently announced that it was laying off 400 workers and closing its hotel and parts of its casino for eventual renovation, the latest high-profile hit to a city that has seen a steady parade of them.

“It’s been in bad shape before, but not this bad,” said David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “If you look at the gaming revenues, they have declined and continue to decline over the past three years. “

“Sept. 11 set off a two-year slowdown,” Mr. Schwartz said. “But nothing of this magnitude.”

Mayor Oscar B. Goodman said in a recent interview that he was “very bullish on our future,” offering as evidence the packed airplanes he encountered both ways on a recent trip east to appear on “The Colbert Report.”

But, he added: “Our daily room rate average is not what it was. Our hotel room rates are bargains now. People aren’t spending on gambling as they have in the past. Ordinarily Las Vegas was the last to go into a recession and the first to come out. This one is different. As soon as they feel secure in their financial position, then Las Vegas will come back stronger than ever.”

The drop in the city’s gambling revenues, at first glance, tracks historical trends: Americans cut back on recreational travel and gambling during a recession. There are some signs that gambling revenues, which are down to 2004 levels, have at least stabilized. After months of precipitous decline, revenues increased 3 percent in the first quarter of 2010, but then dropped 5 percent in the second quarter, according to the Center for Gaming Research.

“I think we are bumping along the bottom,” said Stephen P. A. Brown, the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which has been tracking the downturn. “Expectations are that once the U.S. economy turns around, the gaming industry will begin to improve.”

What is worrisome now is the nature of this economic downturn, when many people saw the value of their retirement funds or homes collapse. Economists say people are less likely to gamble as freely as they have in the past, particularly baby boomers, who may now be rattled about their retirement years. In one sign of this, while there were more people coming to Las Vegas in recent months, gambling receipts have remained stagnant.

“The big players, the ones who gamble the big money, I’m not sure they have it anymore,” Mr. Goodman said.

Gambling by Nevadans — itself a steady and critical stream of revenue — has also fallen off as a result of high unemployment, and analysts see no obvious way to turn that around anytime soon.

“Although gaming dropped with this economy, don’t automatically assume that when the economy comes back people will start gaming at the same level,” said Keith Foley, a senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Service who tracks the industry. “We put this in the grand scheme of things. This is a highly discretionary form of spending. People lost their savings.”

And in the midst of all of this, standing as a prime symbol of Las Vegas’s taste for extravagant risk — or perhaps of a fateful misreading of a changing landscape — is a huge new “urban community” called CityCenter, which opened next to the Bellagio on the Strip.

Built by MGM Resorts and the government of Dubai, CityCenter is the largest privately financed construction project in United States history. It is an $8.5 billion labyrinth of hotels, casinos, retail malls, meeting rooms, auditoriums and spas spread across 76 acres with 16 million square feet of floor space. Steel and glass, a crush of buildings often rising at discordant angles, it is an arresting display of a new style of architecture and urban planning that has not been seen in Las Vegas before.

CityCenter was conceived before the economic downturn and did not open until last December, an unfortunate turn of timing that dropped 5,000 new hotel rooms into the city when some of the older properties had been struggling to bring people in. Another 2,500 rooms are due to be added when another new hotel and casino on the Strip, the Cosmopolitan, opens in mid-December. (A recent check online found rooms being offered for as little as $38 a night at the Sahara Hotel and Casino.)

At the same time, officials here are watching another potentially disruptive storm on the horizon: legislation in Congress that would legalize Internet gambling. Mr. Brown said he was hopeful that online gambling would not draw people away from Las Vegas because “Internet gambling appeals more to addicted gamblers than people who are seeking a casino experience.”

But Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader who is in the middle of a bruising re-election fight, said he would oppose such a move because it would hurt the state’s tourism industry and cost jobs.

And Billy Vassiliadis, the chief executive of the advertising agency that represents the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said, “People are looking at mall visits and online shopping and saying, ‘Yeah, that could be a problem.’ ”

“Am I worried?” Mr. Vassiliadis continued. “Hey, listen, I wish we could go all the way back to before Atlantic City opened. By my nature, I like monopolies as long as they are my clients.”

The potential challenge from the Internet is a reminder of just how much the playing field has changed for Las Vegas over the past generation: with states sponsoring weekly lotteries and legalized gambling permitted in many cities and Indian reservations.

In what may be no better sign of this city’s concern, Mr. Vassiliadis said officials were thinking of tweaking its iconic advertising slogan “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” to better appeal to a country that may not be in a big-spending, “let’s party” state of mind.

The downturn in gambling is just one big part of the economic malaise. Nevada is paying a price for an exuberant and often speculative run of commercial and residential construction that has left the market glutted. As a result, the confidence that the return of tourists alone would spur the city to rebound automatically after this recession — the way it did after, say, the recessions of 1982 and 1992 — is absent.

“There was a time 25 years ago that if tourism rebounded, the state rebounded,” Mr. Vassiliadis said. “That isn’t the case anymore. The other side of the economy here is going to be harder. There needs to be some real, thoughtful, deliberate effort to rebuild an economy here. It isn’t going to happen by itself.”

Personal comment: City Center opening backed by foreign money wasn’t what we needed and Internet Gambling (if it occurs) won’t help either, but we are focusing on what sells and our casino profitability began to slowly increase in December of last year. Plus, as returning readers know we are updating our product lines to include new and very exciting services which have proven to be extremely popular with our target markets. We are providing a far better experience for our clients today – at a third less cost - than we did before the banking and real estate bubbles burst 2 ½ years ago.

A City Center hot spot

The Vdara hotel at City Center Las Vegas

THE UPSHOT
By Brett Michael Dykes
Wed Sep 29, 12:00 pm ET

Swanky new Vegas hotel’s ‘death ray’ proves inconvenient for some guests

Las Vegas: And here you thought bedbugs were the biggest source of anxiety for hotel guests.

Yes, guests at Vdara hotel in Las Vegas now have something else to worry about: being burned alive by the glare of the building's "death ray."

What the heck's a "death ray," you ask? Well, first off, it's not as deadly as it sounds, since no one has actually died from it -- at least not yet. But according to the U.K. Daily Mail, the powerful beams of Nevada sunlight reflecting off the glass hotel onto sections of the hotel's swimming pool area have burned some guests and have melted plastic bags.

The building's concave design creates a sort of magnifying-glass effect. The hotel's designers reportedly anticipated that ill-situated humans might experience some discomfort courtesy of the building's blinding glare, so they placed a film over the glass panes of its many windows. Obviously that didn't quite do the trick. So for now the hotel is placing larger umbrellas in the pool area while designers try to come up with another remedy.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the hotel's employees coined the term "death ray" to describe the intense reflection. Reports of the glare have also enhanced the hotel's public profile, though almost certainly not in the way its owners would like; Yahoo! searches for Vdara have spiked by nearly 19,000 percent in the past 24 hours.

It turns out that Vdara isn't the only building out there creating intense heat and glare for hapless passersby. Gordon Absher, a spokesman for MGM Resorts International, which owns Vdara, told the Review-Journal that in Las Vegas, the AdventureDome at Circus Circus and the Mandalay Bay produce "hot spots" that some guests have actually sought out, believing the spots will aid tanning regimens. In Los Angeles, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall produced such a harsh glare that it heated nearby homes, forcing residents to blast their air conditioners high above their customary capacities in order for the residents to keep cool.

Bill Pintas, a Chicago attorney, told the Daily Mail that he experienced the harsh glare of the death ray firsthand during a recent Vdara stay. Pintas reported that as he lounged out by the pool, his head suffered a sensation he likened to a "chemical burn." He added, "Within 30 seconds, the back of my legs were burning."

In another interview, Pintas said: "I was effectively being cooked." Thankfully, he returned home alive. Still, his skin was burned and his hair was singed -- disproving the old saying that whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Personal comment: The Vdara hotel is in the new 76 acre City Center that opened in December of 2009. There are always design problems to work out as any new project becomes operational.