from www.news.cnet.com – If you’re attending this year’s CES, you will, perhaps, experience withdrawal symptoms.

For, as I peruse the landscape for next week’s porn fest of gadgetry, I notice that there will be something missing: the porn fest.

It has seemed like an immovable tradition that CES occurs at the very same time as the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo.

Indeed, the porn exhibition was, one suspects, the primary destination for many of the attendees. They were like gentlemen of old who hid their Playboys inside their copies of The New York Times.

Now, however, the flesh show will occur the week of January 18, long after even the most hungover CES attendees will have returned to the ones they say they love.

What could possibly be the reason for such an incomprehensible decision?

Might it be that the porn stars were fed up of being harassed by nerds whose experience of girls was akin to their experience of the love poetry of Pablo Neruda? Might it be that the porn stars were, in fact, so obsessed with electronic items that they were being distracted from their carnal exhibition?

The reason I was given by an AVN spokesman was interesting.

“Because CES was not over a weekend this year, this would have changed the date pattern of AVN and the AVN Awards (must be over a weekend, with Saturday night being held for the AVN Awards). This caused everything on AVN’s part to be moved to later in the month. With the new show format, The Hard Rock Hotel was a perfect fit for AVN,” is what I was told.

Naturally, I was skeptical. After all, the porn show actually emerged from the bosom of CES. The gadget show once had an adult video section. One day, those sectioners thought they’d organize their own shindig.

Some estimates suggest that 40 percent of the AVN attendees also attended CES.

It so happens that I know a few people in the nation’s capital of sin. (This ought to surprise no one.) I hear that, perhaps, one contributory factor to the rescheduling of the AVN Expo might have been certain difficulties with the Venetian, whose Sands Expo Center has been the venue for the show.

Those of a positive nature will suggest that the change will make it cheaper for those who wish to exclusively visit AVN. During CES, things can get a little more expensive.

Those of a more realistic nature will suggest that Las Vegas ought to have an additional police presence at CES. Frustration can affect some of the male attendees in particular. Especially those from the U.K. and those from the advertising world who are visiting for the first time.

I have personally been told by some die-hard CES attendees that they have reached the point where they are consulting their psychologists in order to find ways to deal with this difficult scenario. It’s not even as if the Alien Cathouse, the sci-fi themed brothel just north of Vegas, will be open in time.

I fear trouble. I fear that the finest Vegas restaurants, such as Jose Andres’ sublime Jaleo and China Poblano, might suffer the ululations of discombobulated men.

I fear that the men who slap their little fleshpottery flyers against their knuckles 12 hours a day on the streets of Vegas will not be able to cope with the number of customers ripping the flyers from their hands and calling the numbers printed on them.

I can only offer this one small hope: the two shows may rekindle their fire at some future date. For the AVN spokesman told me: “AVN would love to coincide with CES in the future.”

In the meantime, nerds will have to rely on the excitements provided by ultrabooks and ultra-thin TVs. I have a feeling it may not be enough.