Wichita, Kansas

Wichita, Kansas, is as nice a town as any to take a train ride through, I can tell you from first-hand experience. But, there's not much more to it than that, I'm afraid. after departing the downtown station, the buildings quickly decline in stature until you are rolling--at an odd angle to the cross-streets--through a residential district populated by one- and two-story houses and schools. And it's not long before you leave even this behind, venturing out into the open country side. The one remarkable aspect of the trip happens, anti-climatically, right at the outset. Warren Buffet's newly built headquarters (did you know that he relocated from Omaha?), situated adjacent to the downtown train station, is a must see. It is a formidable and stylish red-brick box of a building which includes a sort of swinging mechanical arm that streaches out over the train tracks. This au courant flourish offsets nicely the traditional formality of the brick facade, creating an architectural effect that is hard to pigeon-hole--or to miss! So, next time you find yourself in Wichita on a business trip or because of some kind of airline scheduling disaster, be sure to check out Buffet's building. But I wouldn't be in a rush to plan your honeymoon here.

GTA4

GTA4 was, in a word, a disappointment. It is not really a video game for the XBox and Playstation platforms, like its predecessors. Instead, it is a sort of board game that comes as a large rolled-up map that you place on your bed. You do not control an avatar, going wherever you please through a graphic-rich, 3-D environment designed to look and feel (and smell) like New York City, laying waste to cars, pedestrians and moral taboos at will. Instead, you move a sort of mini skateboard around the map, and, if you leave the skateboard in one place for long enough, a hologram image of an urban street scape will load in that area. While the hologram images are cool, they take altogether too much time to load, making the gameplay feel stilted and rather slow. In short, I got bored after about five minutes. There didn't even seem to be a point to it or a storyline to follow. Don't bother with this game, I say. Everything good you've heard about it is just hype.