1. By Royal Hopper

    

   It was a surprisingly boring week in the city of sin.

    Disco Returns
   This week the city was filled with Karate Kids, photographers and assorted party goers.
   Las Vegas casinos record an incident where a woman fell down dancing and hurt herself. I guess the Cha Cha can be really hazardous after your fifth half priced cocktail.
   One local casino decided to replace its normal array of top forty hits aimed at younger customers with a continuous supply of 70s soul, disco, and pop tunes.
   “Can you say  Bee Gees, bell bottoms and mood rings? …I knew that you could….”
   As one who remembers those bell bottom blues hits from his teen years, and the disputes they caused between dance fans and the local rockers and cowboys, I was taken aback to see many of the establishments younger patrons wiggling and jiggling in sympathetic rhythm with the 30 + -year-old melodies.   (They were dancing a little as they waited for friends to catch up with them on the way to the coffee shop)

2. 

          __________________________________________________

• A sign knocked down by a driver who apparently cant
• read lays on the ground in the back of A Las Vegas casino
1.  _______________________________________________________________________________
2.  Dude Dances
   One guy appeared to have studied all his parents dance moves and consumed several shots as he showed his moves to a group of passersby and players at a nearby gaming table.
   Trust me dude Stayin’ Alive stuff wasn’t that cool a song when I first heard or rather saw John Travolta dancing to it on the
3. silver screen in 1976 and that shaggy Earth, Wind and Fire perm your buddy sports looked just as silly on you today as it did on me in 1978 and that
4.  
5.  
6. when some people actually thought leisure suits, disco lights and polyester prints were cool. (think about it)

    

   Dancing Queen
   One guy was seen practically skipping across the casino keeping time with the 70s soul sounds with a babe on his arm that was clearly out of his league. While not quite in the trophy wife category she was very cute and this guy was clearly fighting above his not insignificant weight class.
   He was short flat faced homely Tabby with a strutting sultry lady jaguar on his arm.
   As that ultimate in white bread disco cool from Sweden, the all female vocal group ABBA filled the place with their most white bread of white bread hits “Dancing Queen” he strutted across the casino and you could almost hear him thinking …I’m an ugly dude and my woman is gorgeous. I’m homely and my girl is better looking than yours na na nanana ..” How exactly do you poke a hole in a guy who is playing that far out of his league and knows it and the woman appears cool with it.
   “I’m ugly and I got a good looking woman na na na na na….”na na na na hey hey good bye ….” 

   Signs
   That day on the commute home I saw people carrying protest signs waving them at drivers on the way home. I think they were protesting cuts in the local education budget I’m not sure and neither was anyone else. Once again that wonderful apathy of the City of Sin comes into play….
   “Oh look a protest sign………are those designer jeans,,,,,???

   Sliding the big one  
   Being that this was such a slow week in the City of Sin I decided to retell the story of lets call him ……Frank…(and for the record I am deliberately distorting his name and leaving his description vague)
   Frank was an older openly gay man who worked at a local casino in the 90s which is fine but Frank had this catch phrase he used to use when security guards who worked there came to pick up the gaming chips from the chip bank he managed and take them to the tables. 
   “Slide me the big one my boy…” he would say causing many guards and fellow cashiers to blanch a little and a few to quip back.
   Now in those days I was much less worldly than I am today, and being only a few years out of the military and southeast Texas and all that West Coast style tolerance I now embrace had not been tested in real life.
   When I first came to Vegas walking around the city or working here was a little like watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show in Gucci and Armani and other assorted costumes enacted in public over and over and over again.
   However when a downcast Frank was forced to stop using his catch phrase it was not me who ratted on him to human resources nor any of the other mildly macho security guards I worked with at this casino.
   We never did find out for sure who ratted on Frank or at least I didn’t but word and rumor was that it was a gay woman who worked there who ratted on Frank and forced him to stop using that catch phrase, rumor has it they felt it was stereotypical and improper or something uptight.
   What the hell?  Poor Frank was just trying to make a joke and he got his catch phrase taken away from him.

   Judge ???
   As for me I don’t judge. I don’t judge not because of any pretentious moral superiority I long ago gave up such illusions. I refuse to judge because of the most selfish of middle class bourgeois reasons
   It takes more energy to worry about such things than I have to offer these days and accomplishes nothing that helps anybody least of all me and mine. Much like the City of Sin itself  for the most part as long as you don’t harm me or mine or pee on something I walk on I just don’t care how weird you are.
   Whatever gets you through the day is fine by me, whether it inappropriate catch phrases, silly costumes or drunken dancing and shout outs.
   I’m going to write about it to be sure but afterwards assuming you don’t try to mug me or call me Frank I’ll still shake your hand wave at you as I make my way to my pick up truck to go home to the City of Sin Suburbs.

   Such is life in the City of Sin.

   Til Next Week

   Take Care

    

By Royal Hopper

The Gun Show

This week the City of Sin was again invaded by people with guns, strange dudes who talk to themselves and have strange taste in clothes. 

No Nevada hasn’t been invaded by Belgium although I have it on good authority this actually happened, Gun shows, that most American of pass times, comes to the city of sin this week.
( No this is not sarcasm I am from Texas and do own a couple of guns myself but admit it where else except maybe dangerous or exotic places like Afghanistan or Detroit would you find such an open display of fire power)

This particular show had nothing on display Rambo would have known. This time the cowboys were here to buy pricy antique wild wild west tools of destruction that Jesse James and his ilk would have know well, including an eight guage shotgun and a Bowie knofe the size of my arm.

Two of the cowboys that invaded the City of Sin this week pose for fans at the Antique Gun show

Humans is the craziest People

One of the gun show patrons was particularly revealing  ..
He sported a gray and white mullet, a goatee, a Harley Davidson racing jacket and had an I miss the 80s air about him. I’m not talking a casual, I was tripping on acid  and listening my Billy Ray Cyrus albums, excuse me album, when I got this hair cut.
No, this was a redneck version of Ziggy Stardust in his prime. 

 Imagine if Wille Nelson and David Bowie somehow got together and had a child artificially grew it to 15-years-of age time traveled back to  1980s to raise it.
I can hear Diamond Dogs, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, and Achie Breakie Heart, remixed into some kind of bizarre insane 80s dance tune playing in the nursery.

Willie Billy Ziggy Jr. and his friends spent all week looking at and purchasing antique firearms and hauling them to their nearby parking garages. There hadn’t been so many firearms in Vegas since the age of Bugsy Segal and Tony the Ant or so many good tempered outlaws since the days of the Dalton gang. 
Another individual was seen walking through a casino having a conversation with himself and giving small items like designer soap to people rather than asking them for money.

Another individual stood in the lobby dressed in his pajamas with a pink top and blue bottoms with white polka dots that were cut off at the knees. He was wearing slippers and smoking a cigarette as he asked patrons for money quoting Shakespeare and Broadway show tunes as he was led out of the hotel by security guards.
“Charles Manson is angry,” the pink clad man said also mentioning Joan Crawford and several other unidentifiable Broadway denizens.

Another look at couples

This week I also decided to revisit the subject of couples.
As I have said before the way couples behave when they are together in the City of Sin is very different from how they act as individuals even they aren’t partying, drinking or gambling.
Once again I saw the role reversal couple walking side by side obviously lost. The woman ( this was an older couple by the way) was far more dangerous looking and refused to ask directions or stop to get her bearings and both seemed fine with it.
There was what I called the Smallville (notice the difference in spelling to avoid using copy written material) couple. They both looked lost and overwhelmed by the Vegas ambience and still to proud to ask directions.

“You ask them…no you ask them…” 

Then there was the truly odd couple where both were energetic and aggressive,  walking around pulling each other in different directions like wild horses or hyper 2-year-olds on a play date.

One couple I saw was particularly interesting. It was mixed race couple The man was Asian and was dressed like he had just stepped off a Tokyo commuter train and a girl next door, angry looking Caucasian woman dressed in all American blue jeans and a T-shirt with some obnoxious celebrity on the front.
The lady was going off like a car alarm in heavily accented English and the man was looking at her with a puzzled exasperated expression for several seconds before he sighed and stated in a perfect mid western English.
“I cant understand you…” adding as he stalked away “Freakin Foreigners” ……..

such is life in the city of Sin

Til Next Week

 Take Care

by Royal M. Hopper III AKA Royale

Its amazing just how full city streets can become when the hotels that inhabit it are full sex toys, porn stars, and 7000 kinds of electronic gadgets of every shape, size and kind.

The kind of dogs people remind me of
To keep myself busy when Im working by classifying convention goers by what kind of dog they remind me of.
Two days after the Porn convention left town people were still walking up to hotel employees and asking where Adult Con is. There are generally four kinds of Porn Show patrons who represent three kids of human/canine hybrids.
One I call the woohoo crowd. Essentially drunk and stupid pretty types with vacuous eyes and a lost happy look who pump their fists and high five each other on the way to the convention center like horny Cocker Spaniels loud but harmless and as I said before kind of stupid.
There is always one drunken Cocker Spaniel shouting “Vegas Baby” like its something no other Cocker Spaniel has ever said before being kept on their feet by a long suffering friend or sibling.
The players or wannabe players. They stand out because the ten foot tall security guards hired to police the event stop them at the door. They are like giant Labrador retrievers quirky, hyper and kind of fun in a bizarre 70s B-movie kind of way being faced down by stolid panting overweight Pitt Bulls.
 Lastly there is the guys who even make seasoned Sin City Security guards a little nervous.
They giggle a little and squint at you like the light hurts their eyes when they ask directions to the Porn show like giant, stoned bisexual Chihuahuas.
They look at you like they might ask you for a date, not because they are gay but because the narcotics they used before coming to the casino are making it difficult for them to tell the difference and they haven slept for three days.

Sidewalk meetings
Also one of the features of the City of Sin are sidewalk meetings you see across the breadth of the city mostly, but not entirely,  in the less than spiffy parts of town. Sometimes the meeting are sitting sometimes standing but they are everywhere you look.

Downtown it might feature a motley group of domestically challenged nomads clad in dirty charity hand me downs munching on donated leftovers and day old Twinkies from who knows wher , a day laborer and two of his buddies eating their convenience store breakfasts and some one I named Freaky Fred who even scares the bikers who stop by the street corner to roust this sidewalk breakfast meeting club that is cramping their meth dealing style and are spooked away by Freaky Fred or his smell and the conversation he was having with his Twinkie h e held in his hand. This was a sitting meeting.
The laborer who I’m guessing had seen much worse in old Mexico continued munching on his ageless yellow wrapped breakfast thingie or it could have simply been a hotdog I couldn‘t tell.
However I firmly believe that after the apocalypse in the last convenience

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

An unknown entrepreneur peddles maps and directions and assorted good will on the

Vegas strip last week during the beginning of the Sin City Convention Season

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

store open for business there will be a handful of cockroaches, a Twinkie and  one of those hotdogs still slowly turning on the roaster and an unnamed breakfast sandwich sitting neatly wrapped in insanely generic yellow paper wait.

The City of Sin Missing

Lastly I cant tell how many people who go missing are last seen here in the Vegas Valley area. For some reason people come here to gamble, drink, do other things and to disappear. If you want to be swallowed up by the urban landscape and your smart enough to not run naked through a casino or rob a drug dealer on your way to get gas all people will see of you after you bolt is grainy security footage video and a poster on someone’s wall near a stack of posters of other people who are being looked for.

Sometimes they get found but not usually

Such is Life in the City of Sin

Til Next week

Take Care

This as the City of Sin week the city recovers slowly from the ravages of the the end of Year festivities laughingly called New Year’s Eve. Hotel guest spent  days stumbling sleepily and hung over to security podiums all over the city to search for ID, jewelry and underwear lost in the New Years debauchery.

One fellow who shall remain nameless
Apparently this man brought another man to his room to participate in some NewYear’s Eve debauchery ( I don’t know what kind and in Sin City it is sometimes better not to ask) Anyway he woke up three days later battered and bloodied claiming not to know what happened and phoning in a suspected robbery to hotel security in a trashed room spattered with blood.
All righty then.

______________________________________________________________________________________

This type of sign is often seen in older casinos because apparently in the old days people were surprised when they encountered casinos in Las Vegas …Photo R.M. Hopper

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Putting on clothes is hard work
Another man deciding that putting on full set of clothes after two days of excess was an excessive amount of work strolled through a casino dressed in a large pair of boxer shorts and a white T-shirt like a 300 pound zombie with bad breath and hangover pills falling from his stumbling fingers as he tried to openly pursue a young woman who even smoking a cigarette and checking out football scores on the Sports Book television as she walked was to quick for him to catch much less ….well catch…if you get my drift.

Coming attractions
Guess what’s coming to the City of Sin in the near future. What is the one convention where tattooed working girls, robe wearing soccer moms and Punker green haired grandmas, and desperate horny New Jersey housewives might hang out together here in Sin City.
Wait for it…wait for it….I’ll give you a hint….bzzzzzzzzz…….okay another pass the batteries….That’s right boys and more importantly girls. The Sex Toy convention is coming to town again as the weather warms and the convention season prepares to go into full swing. OMG…WTF…..ROFL…..Imagine an entire spacious Vegas convention center ballroom full of buzzing and squeaking marital aids.
I’m told there is a convention of porn stars also headed this way in the near future. Did I mention the Consumer electronics show is also due to stop here. So that means the city will be full of salesman and computer geeks near the same time these more adult conventions are in town.

To Good to be True
Warning…Las Vegas PD reports that a particularly desperate individual is going around town talking up lonely and possibly drunken women and convincing them to trade $100 bills for $1,000 in Dunes chips.

The chips are souvenir chips and incidentally the Dunes was imploded 15 or so years ago. I know because I saw the comedian Gallagher there the year before it was imploded and worked at the Bellagio, the hotel that replaced it after it was imploded.   can you say  “I like totally don’t eat meat because I’m like veterinarian,” (Just in the interest of not committing  plagiarism  that phrase is from a commercial made long ago and is a copyrighted T-Shirt slogan. I knew that you could.

Another Day in Sin City
Look outside the doors of any casino and quite often you see what I saw one day this week. I saw a shapely working girl or stripper or maybe just someone who liked tiger skin dresses that showed off her assets. I saw Asian tourists taking cheesecake pictures of each other  ( I mean no offense but tourists take lots of pictures and some take pictures of everything). People in costumes, and carrying signs, a family with their kids in tow one of them dressed like a Jester and a bike rider stopping in his tracks and suddenly realizing he doesn’t look cool riding his bike down The Strip sidewalk and realizing even more accurately that know here cares. Cops were called for a man who threatened to kill himself, hotel guests discovered mysterious spots of blood in their rooms and a pair of working girls complained about getting kicked out of one place because…you guessed it …because they are prostitutes…

Such is life in the City of Sin

Til Next Week

Take Care

Happy New Year such as it is.

In the week leading up to New Years I saw a cornucopia of Las Vegas cliché’s. A few days ago I saw that utmost of Sin City clichés the Elvis imitator passing through my casino clad head to toe like the king of Rock N Roll.
I also spotted a strangely dressed person talking to themselves. Maybe it was their inner child speaking to them maybe an imaginary friend but they were talking up a storm and there was no cell phone I could see.
As I watched a married couple from somewhere in Europe argue intently in a foreign language I made what I consider an important discovery. The sound of someone nagging their significant other sounds the same in French as it does in English even if you don’t speak the language.  I watched a young woman nag her significant other in French scant feet away from where I sat. Even though I didn’t understamd a word pf what they said the look of guy to guy sympathy I gave him is a universal sign that flew across the language and culture barrier with the speed of light as did the annoyed look his wife gave us both.
This week their were annoying people; Idiots who tell the security guards they look like Barney Fife (well okay maybe we do a little) while they are sitting down to spend their rent money ..Okay I’ll see your operation and Ill raise you my son’s graduation  fund..etc etc …”

An unknown Elvis fan stops to pose for pictures on his way out of a Las Vegas casino a few days before New Year’s Eve…Photo R.M. Hopper

New years Eve in Las Vegas is the one day of the year all the people who visit the city and who seem normal,. get a chance to let go and be drunker, stupider version of the people they usually are. Numerous women who wear no underwear fall down laughing and numerous men who by that time are to drunk to really notice or remember fall down too.
 2011 ..a satirical year in review>>>

We had the pool playing drill team. By that I mean a large group of middle aged pool players marching in step with a bag of 40 ounce malt liquor cans in one hand and an open can in the other on the way to finish the summertime pool tourney at a local casino.
We had the Roller Girls, with multicolored hair and late night topless pool parties. We learned that drunk people have their own language called Drunkese and can often converse with each other in ways sober people cannot understand;  and we also learned casino guests often go to church after gambling their pocket money and usually abandon any hint of fashion sense when they come here.
Irish soccer fans made their annual pilgrimage to Sin City and retro hair styles made a brief painful come back in Las Vegas as I had to tell several young people that I had had a similar hairdo in 1977 about the time I got my fist pair of bell bottoms. And realized that outside of a few Italians, Straight White Men Can’t Dance.

As I said in a particular weekly blog, when even  the fat middle aged red neck can tell your outfit is a disaster maybe you should rethink it.
I have seen at various times a 6 foot 4 inch Snow White, four or five Elvi of widely differing sizes ages and disposition, a Captain jack Pirate, Bret Michaels ( for those of you who don’t know who that is search your rehab luggage for the old Poison flyers) Weasel , a Punk Rock Granny dressed head to toe in 1976 blue dyed Mohawk glory , Big Bird, numerous faux football players, a witch, a ninja, a living statue and so many Anime characters I actually felt out of place with my non dyed hair. For the record, as someone who once owned six or seven of them leisure suits and tie dye T-shirts are not back in fashion and Disco will never return

2011 ended with neither a whimper nor a bang but a loud obnoxious burp as thousands of revelers flocked to the city of Sin to get privately drunk and pass out in convenient places where they wouldn’t be in the way. One gentleman never made it to the front doors and was found passed out on the front steps of the hotel he was staying at.
In closing I would like to simply say Goodbye to 2011 from the City of Sin you were a weird miserable year and I’m glad your gone.

Til Next Week
From the City of Sin

Salut and Take Care

Favorite question of the week. May I ask where the restroom is?
Favorite answer. Yes you may…

Also a silly question: Can you tell me where the restroom is ???
Also an answer …Of course I can. I speak English”””sort of Im from Texas its not quite the same thing

T-shirts…spotted. All will suffer, I’m a Bastard, Sweetie and  Guns and Posses…