I took this picture yesterday, while standing on Hoover dam. The dam itself isn't very interesting and, in reality, looks smaller in person than it does in pictures. There are lots of fancy towers with lots of wires , but that's really dullsville too.

But there's these two big statues in this sort of hokey exhibit with a recorded talk about the sun and the planets and how when the aliens from space show up 5000 years from now how they'll decode this arrangement of astronomical symbols set into the ground around the statues and figure the exact day in 1935 that the dam was dedicated. If that doesn't impress those aliens, nothing will.

In addition, you can rub the toes of the statues for good luck. I did, as did the Hobbitt, and as a result we had an uneventful trip back from Las Vegas to our home in Virginia. (If you don't count the white-knuckle moments when we got lost on our way to return the rental car on the way to the airport.)

So here's the face of one of the statues, who's been around even longer than I have. It's the same sort of epic statuary that decorated the World's Fair in 1939.

I did do one adventurous thing. After getting permission from one of the guards, I walked until I was over the dam and threw a quarter over the side and watched it go down until it seemed to vanish about halfway. The guard said no one does that, so maybe I've started something new.

I guess you can say it's for someone who doesn't give a dam about where their money goes. and it was a lot more interesting than putting a quarter into one of the machines in the casino back in Las Vegas where we were staying.