Wrapped up like a douche you know the roamer in the night …
Anyway, it’s that time of year again. The time of year when the earth is lined up with the sun perfectly to turn the Mandalay Bay into a supernova for about 4 minutes every morning.
I don’t know if they planed this or what, but for about a week out of the year, the reflection will concentrate on the middle column and form some kind of “super beam”.
People on the east side near The Strip actually keep their blinds closed during this week to prevent the flash-blindness that this event triggers.
Photos don’t it justice. You have to be here at just the right time in just the right spot, and you will see this unnatural cone shaped beam suddenly envelop the area, and then go away as quickly as it arrived.
I couldn’t even take the picture facing the Mandalay. I had to us the LCD screen tilted backward while looking in the opposite direction.
My guess is that they can also not land planes on the 19’s during this, because you literally cannot face southeast for a couple of minutes each morning. Due to the magnification and convergence, this thing is like 5 times as bright as staring into the sun directly.
It’s our version of a yearly eclipse or meteor shower.
I’m surprised some cult hasn’t started making a yearly pilgrimage to this thing, or some conspiracy theories have not sprung up around it.
Someone really needs to start a theory. It will increase tourism.
I would like to be the first to proffer that the Mandalay Bay was designed by engineers at Area 51 to guide distant spacecrafts to their assigned parking spaces 100 miles to the north.
The Nevada Gaming Commission has announced a “one year trial” in which they will get rid of the cellphone ban in sportsbooks. At the end of the year, they will evaluate the effect, and decide whether or not to make it permanent.
I can’t imagine that they won’t make it permanent. With the proliferation of bluetooth and text messaging, anyone running numbers has known how to get around the silly ban for the last five years.
The only people security harrasses anymore are Joe and Jane tourist who are trying to coordinate a trip to see Blue Man Group while standing in line to place a wager on their Alma Mater.
This is a good first step toward removing impracticality and ambiguity from the casinos.
I have had some emails over the months, and I am just starting to get some comments in the forums along the same lines.
Basically, some people are kind of tired of seeing The Strip and Downtown.
They want me to show them “the rest of Vegas”.
The problem is, there just isn’t that much here.
I have photos of Red Rock Canyon, and I have some Hoover Dam shots somewhere … but once you get three miles from Las Vegas Boulevard, it’s one gated community, strip mall, and apartment complex after another. Most of them are behind walls. There’s no “here” here.
I’ll go to Boulder Highway and get some video soon, but it’s Boulder Station, Sam’s Town, and a few other joints separated by … nothing.
I lived on the West Side for over a year and moved down here near The Strip because there was absolutely nothing over there. I go back from time to time, and there is still nothing there.
Perhaps “nothing” is the incorrect term. “Nothing of interest” would be a more appropriate term. At least nothing of interest to me.
There are homes, grocery stores, and 7-11’s … but every other town has those things.
We have slot machines in our grocery stores, and some people hit large jackpots on them, but externally the stores look no different than the stores in LA.
Our people are the most awful people on earth, but you can’t really show that with photos. The absolute worst people in town start websites, so I present my evidence there.
Once you get off of The Strip, this place looks like Bakersfield or Albuquerque. You will encounter some things of interest, like Red Rock Casino or that god forsaken “District” thing, but for the most part, it is indistinguishable from the San Fernando Valley.
The Vegas suburbs was my least favorite place to have ever lived. Words cannot describe how depressing and awful the suburbs are. I felt my IQ dropping by the day, and frankly I don’t have any points to spare. It was like waking death. One day I looked out the back window of my gated-community home. I saw my .08 acre backyard, saw my neighbor’s toilet through their opened bathroom window, and realized that I had died. Except that I was inexplicably still breathing. To describe it as depressing would be an understatement.
I moved there because I had never really given the burbs a shot, and I got a large house (6 bedrooms, three car garage blah blah blah), but it was the most miserable 19 months of my life. We would drive to The Strip or some other property every day just to get out of there. It took very little time to realize that the suburbs were unsuitable for human existence. Say what you want about the degenerate gambling addicts and crack whores that I am surrounded by now, but I have never met a more boring or more dull-witted group of people than I encountered while living in the outskirts.
It reminded me of that “Stepford Wives” movie.
Everyone was the same. They looked the same, talked the same, and bought the same shit (mostly SUV’s). There was a huge HOA rulebook to enforce same-ness, and they dispatched some bored blue haired bitch on a weekly basis to make sure that nobody tried to exert any individuality.
It probably comes as no surprise that I was fined all the time. I kept getting a notice that I owed money for an “unapproved object” in my front yard. The problem was, there was nothing in my front yard. I asked what the object was, and they refused to tell me, and that I just had to pay a fine. I took a picture of the front yard, mailed it to the HOA attorney and told them to point out the object, sue me, or cease the bullshit.
I was later informed that most people pay to “go along to get along”, and it was just an expected cost that people factored in to their yearly expenses.
The only way I was going to pay them was if they sucked my dick, so none of us got what we wanted. I was a “trouble maker” for having the audacity not to succumb to extortion.
I’ll take whores and bums over that shit any day. From my brief experience, suburbanites are shells of humans. The people are zombies. That’s the only term I can think of to accurately describe them. The living dead.
To this day, I don’t understand why they needed all of those SUV’s. The streets were paved.
So, if I don’t take frequent trips to the Vegas suburbs, now you know why.
Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Judge for yourself.
I had to go to a strip mall yesterday, and I recorded some of the trip in all of its spine-tingling detail. This wasn’t even the outer suburbs. This was the interesting part of the suburbs only a couple of miles west of The Strip.
I was at a buddy’s condo this afternoon, and we were hanging out on the balcony because the weather was kind of mild.
Some old guy passed us limping down the sidewalk. He was obviously talking to himself and had a mental illness, but (in all seriousness) that is not uncommon in this town. It’s not uncommon in any urban area.
All of a sudden a cop car stopped next to the guy, and two cops got out. I had no idea anything unusual was going to go down, so I didn’t get the action on camera. I was just sitting there talking not really thinking anything of it.
The next thing I knew, the cops face-planted the old man off of the sidewalk and into the street in front of the cruiser.
I didn’t see any scuffle or altercation beforehand, I just saw the two cops grab the guy and take him down.
To their credit (and it’s a shame we have to give credit for such things), they didn’t Rodney King the guy when they got him on the ground. They handcuffed him and then helped him up.
Obviously the guy was saying things to them during the incident, and maybe shouting at them, but that’s what mentally ill people do.
Curiously, an ambulance showed up literally within seconds of this happening. Either they were just passing by and saw what happened, or their response time is getting really, really good.
The cops put him on the gurney and un-handcuffed him (ergo, the did not really think he was all that dangerous) … and they put him into the ambulance.
Then they hung out behind the ambulance for about 5 minutes chatting and laughing with the ambulance crew. They were certainly in no hurry to get the old man anywhere.
Call me a liberal pussy if you wish, but I just didn’t dig watching the old guy being thrown face-first off of the sidewalk and onto the asphalt.
Severe mental illnesses are an organic illness like cancer or diabetes.
If given this choice:
Do you want to be mentally ill?
1) Yes
2) No
I’m sure that absolutely everyone would pick option #2.
I seriously doubt that someone wants a biochemical disease of the brain. It would be like asking someone if they wanted AIDS.
However, more often than not, mentally ill people are treated as if they woke up one morning and said “You know what, I think I’m going to go insane!”
That’s typically not how it goes down at all. They have no more control over it than a woman who develops breast cancer.
The man walked very slowly with a pronounced limp, and he sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere. I grant you that it would have taken more time and patience to cuff him in a more gentle manner (and they had plenty of time to chat afterward), but I would personally have taken the extra 15 minutes to find a way to get him into custody. Like I said, he certainly wasn’t going anywhere and he didn’t seem to present much of a physical threat. I guess that’s why I would make a shitty cop.
I don’t consider two armed guys taking down an unarmed old guy “heroic”, and I never will. I realize that after 9/11, cops are supposed to be heroes every time they pass gas, but I did not drink that particular flavor of kool-aid yet.
Despite all of this, I am not going to do the cop-bashing “excessive force” thing. It was certainly excessive to the point that it definitely wasn’t 100% necessary, but they did let up after they had him on the ground. I assure you that I have seen much, much worse.
These cops didn’t appear to be “bad”, “out of control”, on a “power trip” or any of the sensational claims that are sometimes made. Unfortunately, that’s simply how they are taught to take everyone down. I don’t agree with it, but nobody cares what I think.
They seemed to get no joy out of hurting the guy, that’s just how the book says to deal with people who don’t immediately comply with a demand. I’m sure being a cop and having to deal with annoying people all day is a pain in the ass. It’s probably very similar to being a cocktail waitress … with a gun.
Since I doubt the guy had health insurance, and since this is America, the greatest country in the world (conclusively proven by Michael Phelp’s fast swimming) … my suspicion is that you will be eating this man at the Imperial Palace buffet in the near future.
We need people who can’t pay out of our health care system, and Strip buffets need inexpensive mystery meat.
I just downloaded the remaining photos from my camera, flipped through them, and stopped and stared at this one for awhile.
Dining EXPERIENCE?
Really?
I must have missed the thrill ride or IMAX movie because all I did was sit and eat.
Don’t get me wrong, the Sahara Buffet is a great value for seven bucks. Some people spend $7 at Burger King. The barbecue pork chops and prime rib were worth more than 7 bones in and of themselves.
The “experience”, however, involves walking to a food bar, placing food on your plate with some kind of tong apparatus, and returning to your seat to ingest whatever edible compound you procured. Rinse and repeat.
The buffet is fine, but I think they may be getting ahead of themselves a bit with the grandiose “experience” declaration.
Also, I cannot help but wonder what happens after two hours?
Do they put the clock on you when you sit down, and when your time is up, are you dragged kicking and screaming from the dining area? Do they break your fingers in the back room and tell you “We better never see your face in this casino again or we’ll bury you in an unmarked grave in the desert”?
All those stories about people being buried in the sand north of Vegas … I wonder how many of them are Sahara 2 1/2 hour buffet diners?
“Please take a clean plate” … what am I, five years old?
Is a new sign at the printer right now having “don’t speak with your mouth full” added to the list of rules?
How would you manage to take “food to go”? Dump the mashed potatoes into a purse and run off?
I mean … what the bloody hell?
It’s a mid-quality buffet.
I never thought I would see the day when they would get all uppity at the Sahara Buffet Experience.
When it went from a standard buffet to an “experience”, I imagine they had little choice but to keep a tight leash on the riff-raff.
Remember, if you eat at the Sahara, do not, I repeat DO NOT wipe your ass with your plate and put food on it.
