Around Town this week

It’s hopefully starting to warm up here. We had a nice few weeks in February, but usually a cold spell comes back in March. Well, yesterday when I got up for work it was 28f, so it looks like the cold came. But it was mostly sunny and when I got home in the afternoon the temperature there was 67f, almost a forty degree swing, that’s pretty wide for us. We do normally have a thirty degree difference between nighttime lows and daytime highs; that is what living in the desert brings us, along with the lack of water of course. It looks like we’ll have a slow warm up, and be in the mid 80’s by Tuesday with lows in the mid 50’s. Fine with me, but I would rather have it up around 100 myself.

When I arrived home yesterday afternoon I found this happening:


B out front painting the new overhead. I finally found somebody at work that knows how to weld, and he came by last weekend and permanently attached the crosspieces together. I used screws on corner angles to get things put up, but something stronger was needed before the full top decking could be put on. We tried a few different things, and B likes the wooden 2x6 boards standing on edge. We just have to figure out how far apart to put them, then I can calculate how many dozen to get, then its paint and a lot of drilling and screwing. Hmm, that last part sounds kind of Vegas like.

A few months ago the Folies Bergere announced that they were closing, after a 49 year run.


A local news article talked about the closing. We saw the show a long time ago, probably fifteen years or so when we came to visit and stayed at the Tropicana. After reading the article about the closing I wanted to go see it again, just to catch a glimpse of the last few feathers still in Vegas. It is a feathers and topless show, but if you want to emphasis the topless there are several dozen places in town where you can get a much closer view, in your lap and face if you want it that close, but this is more of the old fashioned spectacular kind of stuff. The closing leaves the show at Bally’s as the last big old fashioned spectacular show in town (also topless with feathers); it seems the Cirque shows have taken over. I was writing a comment to Kevin and realized that time was almost up, the last show is March 28, so yesterday I logged on to the Trop web site and purchased two tickets for next weekend. Reviews say that the show is showing it’s age, it hasn’t been updated for quite a while, perhaps rather than invest in it management would rather just lease out the space and hope someone else will put on something that will draw people in.

Talking about drawing people in; a new casino hotel opened last weekend, the M Resort had a grand opening. Supposedly it cost over a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) to build but has only 390 rooms. We haven’t been yet, usually the crowds for the first month are just a little too much for me to handle, but there is a video story from our local paper that makes it look nice. It is located on Las Vegas Boulevard, but on the far south end about ten miles from the main Strip area. This is too far away to attract tourists, so it is expected to be mostly a ‘locals’ hangout. This is the first hotel in a long time where the owners control everything inside, all the restaurants and bars are run by the hotel itself. For all the other casinos and hotels the food and bar spaces are usually just leased out, with the hotel just collecting rent and having no control over anything else. The builders of M want to control everything, it’s the same guys that built the Rio, and that seems to have done quite well, even though they found out they were not good at running a hotel and had to sell out. At least the profits moved them on to this one. We’ll see, I will probably wait a month or so before going down there, it is quite a ways away from my house and I will most likely not visit it very often.

In another semi related story about the Las Vegas Top Offenders, it seems our police department is cracking down on the top 50 most prolific prostitutes in town. I do not fully understand this as prostitution is legal in all of Nevada except for Clark County where Las Vegas is and Washoe County where Reno is, the two biggest cities in the state. It is not an industry that I partake of, but it does seem strange to me that in a city basically built on sin one remaining part of that is illegal. You can get a lap dance from a woman wearing only a g string, you can have a naked woman on stage just a few feet away, there are naked men in several shows and over three hundred pages in our yellow pages phone directory with escort services listed (the only bigger group of listings are lawyers, which somehow fits), trucks with big signs ‘naked women direct to your hotel room’ drive the strip and people hand out little picture business cards of women that will come to you (for ‘entertainment purposes only’), but that last few inches is prohibited. I understand that the religious groups have some control, but if it is something that people do all the time, and like marijuana seems to consume a fortune to semi control and extracts a huge toll on people and it still happens, come on, make it legal and forget about it. Start collecting sales and use tax on something else.

I always heard that the street prostitutes are not very attractive. I do wonder how some of the ones pictured get customers, but some of them seem like sweet young things. This one somehow looks a lot like the winner of the New Zealand Barbie contest pictured in my last post, this one probably wears dresses of the same length as Barbie. Note: this is not an advertisement or an endorsement for this person, she is shown here for entertainment purposes only.