A+E

A+E All the ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT You Can Eat!

Where
An is the number of alcohol units consumed,
L is the luminance of the "person of interest," as the Brit researchers so delicately put it,
Vo is the Snellen visual acuity, or how bad your eyesight is when you haven't been hammering them back, and
d is your distance from the "person of interest." But you already knew all that, didn't you?

The really interesting factor in the equation, though, is
S. That's the smokiness of the room, going from
0 for clear and presumably breathable air to
10 for extremely smoky—think gas attacks during World War I trench warfare. In other words, if it's not just you that's fuzzed out, but the entire room, you've got a better chance of getting lucky.

Which explains why people are actually upset about Nevada's recently enacted smoking bans, and why so many establishments would rather give up the grill in the back of the house rather than the ashtrays on the bar. If the voters had known that the Indoor Clean Air Act would interfere with people hooking up, it probably wouldn't have passed. Talk about the law of unintended consequences.

So what's the answer? Obvious—fog machines. Everybody loves 'em; they've been a staple of cheesy stage shows since forever. The first meat-market bars that can advertise guaranteed visual impairment, even before you start drinking, will make a fortune.

Geez, $120 million so far for 300? Those who may enjoy a more old-fashioned Hollywood take on Hellenic history could do worse than renting The 300 Spartans. It was made in 1961, when special visual effects were reserved for cheeseball sci-fi and horror flicks. The combat scenes will seem almost laughably primitive to anyone born after Star Wars. But 300 someday will feel old-fashioned to viewers accustomed to 3-D spears being hurled into the audience. Here, the gallant King Leonidas of Sparta is played by the popular leading man Richard Egan. It is his duty to lead 300 "free" Spartan soldiers, and 700 Greek volunteers, against the vast horde of slave-warriors led by Persia's King Xerxes. (As it was made at the height of the Cold War, any comparisons between the Persians and the Red Army were encouraged.) The battlefield action is quite good, however. Fans of 300 who still haven't gotten their fill of Spartan lore will also enjoy such PBS documentaries as Empires: The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization and The Spartans.

The Long Road Home, by Martha Raddatz (Putnam, $24.95). This nervy, brilliantly reported book tells the human stories that ricocheted out from one long, brutal firefight in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, which is generally considered the starting point of the Iraq insurgency. Eight Americans were killed and 70 wounded.

Raddatz re-creates that day minute by minute as it goes from bad to worse. Troops from the First Cavalry Division went to Sadr City on what they thought was a peace-keeping mission in what they thought was one of the safest parts of Baghdad. None of the by-the-book procedures prepared them for the ambush lying in wait. "The sheer number of people—hundreds of them—firing at the platoon was astonishing," writes Raddatz.

What follows reads like an urban-warfare nightmare, with bullets flying, heaps of trash set on fire to confuse the soldiers, the residents of the slum well-prepared to take advantage of tanks' limited mobility in tight quarters. Meanwhile, soldiers separated from one another await rescue as the ranks of the insurgents multiply by the hour.

Raddatz makes clear that the job U.S. soldiers are being asked to do is an impossible one. No matter how much Kevlar they bring into battle, every day is potentially the last on the long road home.

There's never a dull moment for fans of alternative cinema in Vegas. The closing of the Tropicana, at the behest of the new owners of the shopping complex where it resides, means that its planned repertory series will also never come to fruition, although owner Rod Fox told the Review-Journal that he is "actively seeking" a new location for the theater.