From: Harv@cup.portal.com (Harv R Laser)
Newsgroups: rec.gambling
Subject: Humor about a Vegas trip
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 21:59:12 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)

I've had this text on a disk for about 3 years. I don't have any
notion why it was posted on rec.arts.tv, nor do I know who "eli"
the author is/was.  But I thought readers of this group would enjoy
reading it. Typos belong to the original poster. 
Harv
-----
Subject: Travelogue
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Organization: Pandora's Box

(Thought you might like this...)

Random Notes from Cocktail Napkins and Menus

This past week I spent two days and nights in Las Vegas... or actually,
I spent the two days in a drunken stupor in Las Vegas casinos.  The most
lasting observation is that having read Hunter Thompson's "Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas" was akin to reading an excellent travel guide.
Each revolution of the revolving Merry-Go-Round bar at Circus Circus
brought another page from the book to life.

For anyone who's never been to Vega$, my recommendation is GO.  We flew
down Tuesday midday, and arrived at the LV airport around 1:30 in the
afternoon.  From the minute you step into the terminal you step into a
New World.  McKerran Field (or whatever it's called) is a multi-trillion
dollar development project bent on disorienting visitors as quickly as
possible.  Lots of chrome, neon and moving water.  Well, it doesn't *look*
like moving water, since the marble it's flowing over is so perfectly
smooth... but if you drop gum wrappers or coins you can make ripples.
As expected there's slot machines in your face (and the ever accompanying
human change makers) as soon as you exit the ramp from the plane.

The airport is a couple of miles south of the strip, and transportation
to Your Hotel is cheap ($2.75/person for a real limo).  We were staying
at the Circus Cirus... mostly because it was the cheapest rooms we could
find, clocking in at $18/room.  We decided to book individual rooms at
that price.  Check in is smooth, except that to get to your room in the
Skytower you either have to walk through the entire casino, which is about
3 miles, or take the tram, on which your luggage is unwelcome.  Hey, but
NO PROBLEM.  The bellhop will take care of it for you.  Once you get used
to spending money, or more accurately, giving money to the casino at the
tables, tipping becomes second nature.  IT'S ONLY A BUCK.

Circus Circus IS a circus in every aspect.  The carpet is a garish vomit
of reds and oranges with laughing clowns squirting you with a plastic
flower.  The casino is filled with eye-level flashing, blinking and
winking lights.  Every path through the casino involves walking through
row after row of slot machines.  Each one whrring and clicking and ringing
and buzzing and dumping coins with a constant clack-clack-clack.  The
slots are a lot like the lottery, in the way that they advertise themselves.
Someone within ear and eye shot is always winning a jackpot.  You never
stand in one place long enough to see someone else dumping $100 into a
machine with little or no payoff.  Another aspect of the slots is the shear
number.  Thousands and thousands.  You can just about always find a row
of machines all to yourself... with that one machine, just two from the end
that probably hasn't been bled to death... it's just WAITING to pay off.
And when it does, you get to scoop all the coins (nickels, quarters, dollars,
whatever you play) into little plastic buckets, and start dropping them
back into the machine.  You can usually go 5 or 6 rounds before you drop
$5.  And when you're all done, the change stations usually have little
moist towelettes to mop up with.

The walk through the casino is long.  You have to go by the poker tables,
through slots, past the gaming tables, past more slots, underneath the
Big Top, past more slots, past the shops, over the skyramp, down the
escalator, past more slots, past more gaming tables, past more slots,
and finally into the elevator.  If you're staying at the Sky Tower (or
worse yet, at the bungalow-like Circus Manor out back), take the tram.
Cough up the buck for a porter.

The rooms themselves aren't the Ritz, but adequate for $18/night.  We
each had two queen size beds, a color TV, a partial view North up the
Strip, and a shower with a seat (you can see the ghost of many visitors
being sobered up with a cold shower).  The TV gets about 4 channels, but
luckily one of them was a 24-hour loop of gambling instructions... made
in the early-to-mid 70's, so the hosts were... well.  I pretty much left
that channel on any time I was in the room.  The decor is Circusy, with
balloons painted on the wall.  The fluorescent lights in the bathroom can
be fixed by taking a couple of the table lamps from the room and plugging
them into the electric shaver socket.

As far as a "home casino" goes, Circus Circus is a bit too much.  Too many
families, too much light, too much noise.  I think you'd be better off
staying at a slightly more expensive hotel and visiting Circus Circus in
limited doses.  We actually ended up doing much of our gambling at the
Flamingo-Hilton.  It's very distracting to play blackjack at Circus
Circus... the dealers have a knack for feeding you cards just as the
poodle show cranks up with some jerk hitting rim shots for a dog jumping
through a flaming hoop.  You keep looking up to see the trained monkeys
flying across the trapeze, and all you get is a mirrored shot of yourself
slumping on a stool.

Circus Circus has a circus big top in the middle.  On the mainfloor it's
a casino.  Suspended right above the slots is a circus net, and above
that a trapeze and highwire.  There you are, plugging quarters into a
machine, when the bell rings, coins dump out, you look up to Thank God
and WHAM! a woman is flying straight at your head.  Then, bang! she
hits the net and flys away.  You get to scooping the coins out of the
tray, and a few hours later try to remember what you just saw.

Around the rim of the big top, on the level above the casino is the
Midway.  Junior gambling.  Get 'em warmed up.  Trad. dart and milk bottle
games for ugly stuffed animals.  We wasted many dollars trying to win a
Snuggles Bear... which we planned to decapitate and hang in our room...
The midway floor is host to the famed merry-go-round bar.  It's really
not all that exciting (it moves about a centemeter an hour) until you
watch people who've been sitting in the center portion (that doesn't
revolve) get off their bar-stools and find out that the floor behind them
is Moving.  A guaranteed laugh.

Much of the fun of LV is to observe how well synchronized everything is.
You *never* have to wait for a cab.  You hardly every have to stand in
line.  Valuable time that could be spent in the casino is never wasted.
When you're giving blood at the tables (especially the poker tables),
the cocktail waitresses time themselves so they never interrupt your
hands.  It would be criminal to have you fold just to deal with ordering
a drink... or worse yet, to skip a round of drinks just so you can
figure out what to bet.  While you're sitting at the tables all of your
drinks are completely free.  The best rule is to always answer "Yes" to
any question resembling "Would you like something to drink?"  Even if you're
not playing, drinks are usually only $1 or $1.50.

Another good example of the synchronization is Keno.  We mostly played Keno
while eating breakfast.  You pick a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper, and
a Keno Runner (*always* a woman in her early 20's in a very short dress) picks
up your ticket and money and comes back in a few minutes with a validated
receipt.  You then stare through your bloodshot eyes as the numbers pop up.
Our runners always managed to come back to our table with 3 or 4 numbers yet
to be called.  She'd then stand and "play" with us... hoping that we'd Win
Big.  She was our Pal.  And then, as soon as the last number was up and we'd
only matched 2, she'd ask if we wanted to play again.  So sympathetic.

The first night we were there we went to the Maxim Hotel to see "Playboy's
Girls of Rock 'n' Roll."  Next to "Natalie Needs a Nightie", this seemed like
the show with the most potential.  We realized, of course, that the show would
have *nothing* to do with Rock 'n' Roll.  Instead, it dealt mostly with
anorexia and large breasts.  A stock Vegas band played loud arrangements of
top-40 hits, while three different Playboy-like women came out one at a time
to sing and dance.  Well, one could sing and dance... the other two... uh...
behind these three Stars there were three other topless dancers.  The three
sets were separated by two Vegas lounge comedians... who were actually fairly
funny.  Good Elvis jokes ("Excuse me ma'am, you know where a ghost might get
a cheeseburger?").

The second night we went to see a Big Las Vegas Review called "Lido de Paris"
at the Stardust.  The Playboy show was in a rather small room with tables,
while the Stardust show was a full blown Vegas showroom with terraced boothes
and such.  We slipped the maitre'd a five and sat at eye-to-breast level in
front of one of the ramps emanating from the central stage.  While the Playboy
show was fairly easy to grasp, the review was a completely twisted world of
immense over-stimulation.  For 90 minutes you are confronted with topless
showgirls, half-naked male dancers, ice skaters, orangatans, a huge waterfall,
African voodoo masks (complete with a Vegas rendition of Olatunji's "Jingo"),
and on and on.  At any moment you might start to get bored the show elevates
to a competely new level of absurdity.  It really can't be described.  It's a
complete sensory blowout.  The oddest moment came after the show, when we
were walking out of the showroom into the casino, slightly ajar in the mind,
and my friend said "Finally, back to reality"... just as we made the
transition back into the whrr-whrr-cling-clang-clunk-clunk soundtrack of
the casino.  We both stopped and broke out laughing uncontrollably.  (BTW,
no one ever gives you a second glance for just about any kind of behavior.
Standing in the middle of the casino ripped out of your skull, staring,
laughing and pointing is Perfectly Acceptable).

After the show we wandered into the Sports Book at the Stardust.  A large
room at one end of the casino with 30 foot ceilings.  The center of the
room is filled with fixed seat-desks (like in a lecture hall).  All of
the seats face a wall that is covered ceiling to floor with enormous
electronic race sheets.  Each horses name can be easily read from 100 feet.
Between the display for each track are huge columns of large color televisions,
and in the center of the wall are a pair of enormous projection screens.
We sat and watched the Lakers and Sonics games (one on each screen).  We
left before the games were over, so I still don't know what they show
when there's no hot sports event available from the satellite.  I suspect
that, like ESPN, they run fishing shows and offer odds... "2-1 he catches
a fish over 12" in the next 10 minutes."  Hey--FISHING IS A SPORT.

LV is the ultimate 24-hour town.  The only things that close down are the
gift shops.  The bars, the tables, many of the restaurants, stay open all
the time.  You can drink, in the casinos or in the streets, anytime you
want (and Please Do).  We were sitting in some neo-50's diner restaurant
at the Stardust at about 2:30 in the morning watching some guy with his
toolbox fix the juke box.  Only later did we even realize how incredible
it is to see that sort of activity at such an insane hour.  There is no
night and day in LV.  Only awake and asleep.  Gambling and not gambling.

Food in LV is great.  You can eat huge amounts of bad food for virtually
no money in each hotel's buffet, or you can eat reasonable amounts of really
excellent food for medium prices at the better restaurants in and out of
the casinos.  We ate our first meal at the Circus Circus buffet, and found
that the combination of warmed over steam-table food and red-and-orange
barfing circus clown decor kept us from every coming back.  After that we
just stumbled into whatever reasonable looking restaurant was at hand at
hunger time.  Our eating schedule was completely disassociated from time.

An interesting aspect of the Strip is its sheer size.  Each of the bigger
casinos has a sign that's many hundreds of feet tall, with marquees blaring
who's Appearing in letters 15-20 feet high.  Everything is so big that
it looks like the next casino is just across the street... when in fact it's
1/2 mile to the next casino's parking lot, and another 1/4 mile from there
to the door.  In the daytime the Strip is NOTHING.  A bland stretch of wide
street, with lots of HUGE empty lots.  At night, however, the lights are
among the most amazing man-made things I've every seen.  Each casino has
a very distinctive look from the outside.  Inside they are much more similar,
differing only slightly in layout, ceiling height and lighting.  We found
the Flamingo-Hilton to be a pleasant place to give away our money.  Caesar's
was probably the most impressive from the outside, where everything is lit up
in a beautiful shade of turquoise.  The Sahara had the best lettering in
their logo, while the Stardust probably had the best single lighting display.

Besides the 3-4 miles of the Strip, there are a number of big casinos on
Main Street, downtown.  We looked around there one afternoon, but it was
fairly dead.  The advantage of the downtown casinos is that they run up
right next to each other.  I imagine that Main Street is the place to be
on a pleasantly warm Spring evening.  Lots of people wandering drunkenly
from one casino to the next.  Some of the older hotels, like the Mint and
the Nugget are downtown.

Things we missed:  The waterslide park across the street (and 3/4 miles
down) was closed until April.  Looked like big fun.  The Hilton hotel,
which is a bit off the strip, apparently has a huge statue of Elvis...
and since Friday was his birthday, there were probably a number of Elvis
impersonators in the lounges.  The "Fly-a-way" which is some sort of
skydiving/parachuting padded cage deal.  We figured that just taking off
in the airplane was enough to toss our lunches on, so...  We also missed
seeing off-the-strip Vegas.  Next time a rental car would be a good idea.
Parking is extremely plentiful.  "Park and Gamble Here."

... eli
-- 
Newsgroups: rec.gambling