Still, if it is no Vegas – for a start it is roughly 1,400 years older – it is not without its fascination.
The American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry (a writer who is admirably immune to eco-romanticism) once remarked that without a "fascination" for the natural world, "the energy needed for its preservation will never be developed".
The people there act like "serious" adults without the endless fascination of what really keeps people young.
Some might damn them for doing so, but the Internet wouldn't be quite the same without our unhealthy fascination with them.
Some years ago, I succumbed to what Perkins called, not without irony, the "terrible fascination" of Death Valley.
When she stoically resumed filming her new show, Bindi the Jungle Girl, with Humphrey the bison but without her father, popular fascination turned to concern.
He had perhaps reckoned without the enduring popular fascination with the figure of Hitler, who dominates the history sections of bookshops and is covered in so many documentaries on the History Channel that it is sometimes referred to as the "Hitler channel".
The movie has the Romantics' fascination with death without their spiritual eloquence, which turns morbidity into art.
To musicians with or without the cosmic baggage, the fascination lies in the intricately layered pulse and shimmer of the gamelan, the indigenous form of orchestral ensemble, dominated by percussion and associated for centuries with Balinese ritual and devotion.
"Great Expectations" has long been a core text for Irving's fascination for children without parents, usually fathers — but the model for "In One Person" is really Shakespeare's "Tempest".
