CONVENTION CRASHING: POOL & SPA AND BACKYARD LIVING EXPOS

Saturday, Dec. 2, 2006 | 7:05 a.m.

Way in the back of the combined Pool & Spa Expo and Backyard Living Expo, past the drooling-tongued tiki head bar stools, past the robotic pool vacuums with names like "The Jet" and past the hot tubs with built-in televisions, there was a pool cover.

A nice, sturdy pool cover, a green trampoline that attaches to bolts around the pool and is guaranteed safe if elephants mate on it. That kind of thing. Our photographer pointed it out.

"You know what we did instead of that?" he said. "Taught our kids to swim. Works pretty good, too."

How strange and out of place his kids would feel if anyone let them into a modern back yard, one not based on the cruel swim-or-die logic of a Canon-wielding madman, but on the principle that the outdoors is the new indoors.

For instance, take the home entertainment center, take it and drag it out of its living-room prison and put it in the back yard. Enough with roses and shrubs. Those piffling plants are nothing compared to a 65-inch pop-up, weatherproof LCD high-definition television. Do plants have a DVD player? An iPod dock? A place to plug in your PlayStation? Do plants, to be blunt, have surround sound?

They do not. Plants are notoriously retrograde about home entertainment, especially during the winter, unlike what Cal Spas is calling its "ultimate outdoor theater." Besides the audio-visual goodies, the faux stone-surfaced system also includes: a five-burner convection grill, twin side burners, two fire pits, a wet bar, an ice machine, a kegerator and weatherproof recliners. With cup holders.

Yours for $60,000. (Actually, though, the whole thing is modular, so if you want to treat your children with photographerlike cruelty, you don't buy a fire pit or a wet bar or whatever.)

But how smart is it to put thousands of dollars of home entertainment technology out in the yard?

"Don't worry about it," spokeswoman Nicole Lasorda says. "Chances are if you can afford to have this in your back yard you live somewhere where you don't have to worry about someone sneaking in and stealing it. Or you have some really good security."

The $100 Breaststroke

When surfaced for a breather, we asked the guy in the stationary-swimming pool how long he'd been in the water.

"Like, swimming?" he said.

Yeah.

"About 12 years."

Um, in this water?

"Oh. Since 11," he said. "Sorry, I've got water in my ear."

Mike Merrill, an 18-year-old redshirt freshman on the UNLV swim team, spent three days, between the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., swimming against the current in H2X Swim Spa (slogan: "Water to the Extreme"). The current, the video kiosk near Merrill announced, was gently driven by propellers and "helps you escape the fire-house-in-a-prison-riot current of other swim spas." To be spared that feeling while bobbing about in his swim trunks, Merrill was paid $100 a day.

Originally, the company had wanted a woman, Merrill's friend, to do the swim and glisten, but she had to undergo back surgery. She recommended Merrill for the job.

"It's a pretty good gig," Merrill said. "You work out and then you go sit in the spa part and relax."

Product No. 1: So That's Where Green Valley's Statuary Comes From

Lifelike bronze statue of young girl with pigtails vaulting over the shoulders of equally bronze boy. Clothing colored to suggest actual fabric. $2,995, wholesale.

Product No. 2: Timeless Elegance, Glowing Fronds

Plastic palm trees with LED lights embedded in the fronds. Lights can be made to blink, pulse or just stay on. $1,200 to $2,000, retail.

Overheard

"We're going to show the people of Las Vegas something they've never seen. They see steel all the time on their slot machines, but never in their pools."

- Salesman for stainless steel pools