Real Conversation ??
Question: So do you polish your balls????
Answer: “We polish our balls ever day ….
Where did this conversation take place??? A Las Vegas Bingo Hall…..”
Apparently professional Bingo halls do polish the plastic balls they use to generate random numbers to avoid having them get stuck in the Bingo ball machine  and to increase the randomness of the numbers the balls generate.

So do you polish your balls????

Children learn what they see and hear not what you teach them

file photo of a Vegas “newstand” advertising private dancers_ Photo by Royal

Sin City shows it respect or lack of it for signs of any kind – Photo by Royal

The reason children should not come to Las Vegas casinos is not as obvious as you may think. It’s not about dangerous men named after body parts. Like Jimmy the Nose or Freddy the Elbow or slouching weirdos looking for the right moment.

Casinos are full of security guards and employees who have children, and except for the occasional tragedy like the one that occurred in another casino town a few years ago, their physical safety is not in question and it is against the law to allow them to gamble or even hang out where people gamble.

 However, boys as they say will boys and girls will be girls and especially if their mother isn’t watching. Perhaps that’s why three young boys seen hanging put in front of one casino spent half an hour raiding the “Las Vegas news stand,” where the papers advertising all the private dancers ??? are stored.

Now the papers are free and the stands are never locked so they weren’t actually stealing anything. The stealth and careful planning that went into purloining the naked lady ads was pointless in fact because the few people who noticed these young boys sneaking back and forth to the news stand didn’t really care. ( Thats wonderful Sin City Apathy again)   

 I can’t imagine these boys mother would be to happy with the gold mine of dirty pictures they stuffed in their T-shirts and heaven forbid one of them figures out how to call one of the women in the ads for a round of private dancing and raided Moms purse for credit cards to make it happen but that is not the real danger either.

As it happens the next morning stacks of private dancer cards were found in the bathroom of that particular property and a small stack of magazines advertising their services was found in the arcade on that property just feet from where a white haired video game fan pumped quarters into a video game about giant man eating caterpillars and the spaceships that hunt them which brings me to my point. (yes there is one)

You might remember a man named Pavlov and his dog. Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to drool whenever a bell rang and perhaps one day years from now conditioned by the sights and sounds of the world these young men will be the ones who wake up after a long night of imagined lust and a glass of fizzy grape juice spiked with knockout drops sans wallet, pride and memory a flier advertising D-Cup private dancer Bambi Jones laying on the nightstand.  “Just go to sleep for a few minutes,” Bambi might say.

 After all,  children learn what they see and hear not what you teach them. Perhaps these young men  will be luckier and even if conditioned by years of video and advertising that this is what real women look like will take private dancer Bambi home with them to meet their mother who will suddenly remember the time her little angels stole her credit cards to bring private dancer Bambi to their hidden fortress of solitude located in the families rented condo.  To further illustrate this point consider this comparison of two places….Cosco and a random dark and smokey casino. Not so different as you think. Consider this.    

 Which what is which ???

Lets engage in a little game where we describe two places and see if you can guess which place it is a Sin City casino or a Cosco food court.

First there is place A

 In one corner of place A you see a person, an older male person a father or uncle or family friend, devouring a piece of pizza like a giant starving chipmunk just awakened from his long winter’s nap gnawing on the first acorn he has eaten in months. Then look across the table from him and see a young man of about three years doing exactly the same thing. In another corner you see an older woman telling her problems to a younger relative occasionally stopping overcome by emotion and drowning her emotions in a giant sized two for one drink while the other pretends to listen all the while obsessing over the attractive member of the opposite sex and steals bites of the older woman’s dinner as she vents.

People of all shapes sizes and colors, weird clothes, crowded into a large building crowded with electronic entertainment devices, and exotic wares of all kinds someplace you have to show an ID (that’s ID not Id) to get into to. There people who constantly play with the electronic entertainment devices despite having no money to spend on them and who sometimes get so involved in the games they forget where they are.                 

 One place has no clocks and a legion of employees willing to please for good tip and a and bases its profits on conspicuous consumption of the modern citizen. Which place is which. I can’t tell can you.

Of course there is a difference people actually need food and electronics and the conveniences of modern life and they don’t need free whiskey sours and easy odds on single deck black jack but the mentality is the same.

See hear it smell and associated with fun and well being even if common sense tells you otherwise. Who knows what the British soldiers who ventured out of their hotel rooms complete naked and commandeered several motorized wheel chairs and raced them down the hallway in the wee hours of the morning were thinking?

Who knows what the person  who ran over the no parking sign at one local casinos loading docks several times was thinking or the bridge teams who flocked to Vegas to scarf overpriced hotdogs and participate in scotch tasting suppers. ( I don’t know)Who knows but in the end I’d be willing to bet it was based on what someone heard and saw repeatedly as a child sometime back in the day.

By Royal Hopper

What do you say when you are sitting 100 feet from the front doors of a prominent Las Vegas casino and someone walks up to you and asks in all seriousness…Do you have front doors ??????
“Yes,” I said pointing toward the fifteen or so shiny glass and brass doors 200 feet across about fifty or so feet away from where I was sitting.
 

Working on some night moves early morning in the City of Sin
This week I will talk about the usual stuff, drunkenness and the like, but I would also like to talk about a quiet kind of weirdness not often associated with the City of Sin, the kind of weirdness people in the normal world might relate more to, the kind found not in a smoky casino full of gamblers, dancing daisies and women of the evening, but the kind that comes from spending a half hour in a Las Vegas area DMV.
I don’t mean Dogs and Men love Vines or Deadly Mechanical Vehicles or Demented Mercurial Violators I mean a half an hour in that infamous pit of weirdness that is a Las Vegas area Department of Motor Vehicles.
Lets start with the man with the pink turban, probably a Sikh gentleman renewing his drivers license who sat quietly and unmolested in the vicinity of a androgynous gentleman /lady””” with a receding hairline and braids trailing down her/his back. ( I don’t judge but I do write about it).
There was a young woman I will call LA chic after her LA style duds rocked a subdued version of the celebrate the 80s giant Anime doll look that seems so popular these days.
There was the rough looking young( well she was younger than me anyway) woman who sneered at me for holding my wife’s hand. (It was the day before her birthday and I was making brownie points sue me) and then French Kissed her neighbor, who similarly was a she.

Now there is nothing wrong with two women kissing in fact in was kind of hot (I’m a guy sue me) but if you are going to French kiss your neighbor don’t’ sneer at me for a little g-rated hand holding.
In fifteen minute wait to renew the tags on my ancient GMC truck I saw just as much weirdness in the local DMV as I saw all week on the infamous strip. It was like being at the UN on a Saturday when everybody had nothing to do but sit and wait.
 
Now back to Las Vegas Boulevard

The debris from Electric Daisy Carnival literally piled up in the casino lost and found offices. As the daisies left town they left behind their hats, medicines of all kinds, purses, wallets full of multiple IDs some of them real, feathers, bags of abandoned snacks, tassels, brownies and cookies that smelled of oregano and stuffed animals of all kinds and the occasional pair of neon underwear.  
The day after the Daisies left and the casino was nearly empty I spied a man marching across the casino floor holding what looked like a small toilet with a clever saying on the side. He was marching and singing a drunken casino marching song while he cradled his plastic toilet full of cheap liquor like a soldier holding his rifle in a parade.
Just across the casino his equally inebriated friend made time with both of the women they had been hanging out with while he drew sidelong glances from the few lonely souls and older married couples popping dollar bills in a Las Vegas slot machine at 6 a.m. on a Thursday.
It’s all about priorities I guess. Sometimes marching a straight line with your plastic toilet just takes priority over keeping your friend from hitting on your woman.
Some Sin City tourists seek to escape attention like the man who fainted and threw up in the middle of his marital vows at his wedding in a local casino. The man who was 50-years-of -age was standing at the alter when the moment got the better of him and he decided worshiping Earl and passing out was more important that getting married. An ambulance had to be called for the man who had incidentally spent all night the previous night drinking.   One can only imagine what the prospective bride thought about all this and what she said to him once he regained consciousness.  

   I don’t get it who comes to Vegas to play Bingo

Vegas is where you go to indulge the ID.

As I have said before Vegas is dedicated to the Monsters of the ID like in the old B-Movie of B-Movies Forbidden Planet. In this B-Movie of B-movies the crew of a spaceship steps onto the surface of an alien planet spouting 50s jargon, smoking Pall Malls and sporting well oiled hair only to find themselves attacked by monsters created from their own subconscious by powerful alien machines that destroyed their alien creators in an orgy of psychically created monsters from the minds of the crew. Las Vegas is a place that caters to the monsters of the Id (that’s Id as in Freud) where have I heard that before.
If you believe Freud monsters from that part of the human brain want and never wonder why or how much or when…it just knows hunger and seeks to feed that hunger anyway it can.
Those that hunger for attention wear strange clothes or very little, dress like cartoon characters posing for rent money or dress like Elvis because its Tuesday and its what Elvis would do on Tuesday or the Miley Cyrus look alike I saw stumbling into the elevator of a local hotel toward the end of the Electric Daisy Carnival. That was a look alike right Miley ???? I mean she looked like you and that neon bikini showed off far more of her skin than I could ever could have seen on an episode of Hannah Montana

(okay I have a 16-year old daughter so I have seen a few episodes. Thankfully she, my daughter I mean, is now really into old metal and actually asks me questions I know the answer too..) Ooooohhh I feel like a celebrity gossip columnist somebody get me a poison pen.
Who knows what Id monsters the woman running down Las Vegas Boulevard in a black bikini this week was thinking or it could be she was running from the group of motorized scooters that were barreling down the street nearby.

In other places even youth gets tired of partying and indulging the Id  but here not so much. The  pleasure center of the brain never thinks or decides or wonders or considers consequence it just wants and it wants right away and that is what this city thrives on.

Such is Life in the City of Sin
Til next week
Take care

Joggers report: This week there was little in the way of notable jogging activity. Except for the man with hair down to his waist and a three Musketeers goatee. No pretense here he was jogging down the street in a red concert T-shirt and a pair of long bouncy red hair metal jogging pants???? Perhaps he was a member of a Hair Metal band getting in shape for the big reunion tour or someone who saw a picture of Dad’s glory days from the 1986 Hair Metal Festival or perhaps he is just a color blind fitness nut from Germany who never quite got the message that Hair Metal faded from glory sometime around 1991.  Also more and more people who should never be naked are being seen running down the boulevard barely clad …Iggghh my eyes my eyes ….ahhhhh

By Royal Hopper

How did it ever come to pass that walking down Las Vegas boulevard in oversized knee length plaid underclothing is a cool thing. The whole week I saw grown men and women  well I didn’t actually look at the men,  wearing what my generation called underwear and the way they were strutting they thought they looked good.
“Look at me I’m such a stud I can wear geeky looking neon underwear and I look good…” really seriously.

I can win. I know it…Photo by Royal

The Electric Daisy come to town and bad hairdos
Well some of the women did actually look kind of good.
As the Electric Daisy Crowd stumbled and raved their way into town shedding glitter and brain cells as the walked down the boulevard, sporting neon frog backpack, bus passes and fairy outfits. For those who don’t the Electric Daisy is basically a huge rave where the participants where neon underwear and glitter and dance til they drop and imbib all kinds of chemicals.

Many of the girls and some of the boys wore what looked like neon underwear in broad daylight as they strode down the street and many just stopped where they were and decided to be unconscious, brightly colored and unconscious.
Perhaps seeking to put forward a regular guy alternative to the Electric Daisy in the week leading up to the EDC many wore plaid neon boxer like shorts whiel power walking down the street.
Now I don’t feel so bad about my generations flirtation with leisure suits, bell bottoms, yellow jogging suits and feathered hairdos for men. ( Sue me it was the 70s)
Its not surprising as it might sound to see silly people convinced into thinking they look cool in the same fairy princess outfit’s my 16-year-old refused to wear for Halloween when she 10. (she opted for the white ninja instead.)
 It’s something that the ten beautiful women sited wearing fuzzy pink leggings should have been told before they stepped out on the street looking like the kindergarten version of Pretty Woman.

The epiphany

 This paradigm was also the cause of a personal epiphany for me this week when I sited a young man wearing almost exactly the same hairdo I sported for a few brief months back in 1978 or so. I’m told fashions come back every 15 to 20 years and seeing this young person with that same cool hairdo made me realize just how silly I looked in the Led Zepplin decade all those many years ago.

Think about it. The very name of this city is a contradiction.
The way I understand it Las Vegas means The Meadows. A city located in the middle of the worlds largest sandbox and surrounded by miles and miles and miles of sand, rock and cactus is called The Meadows.  Imagine the first time Bugsy Segal stood in the sand near whatever gas station occupied the city’s four or five street corners shooing the coyotes away from his Cadillac and saw fat guys named Murray handing him their life savings.
  This is Vegas. It is built to convince people they are gorgeous, lucky, stylish and invincible when even they know they are not.
“You’re a stud handsome,” said the leather mini skirt clad woman to the man drooling at her heels with a slot ticket in one hand and a handful of tourist maps in the other.
“I am?” asked the man, “I mean I am…”
Kind of like the lady in the red white and blue plaid shirt who strutted back and forth in front of confused group of Asian tourists. Now Daisy May as I’m going to call her was probably a hot number in Topeka back in the day;  the hit of Elvis Jam 82 as it were; but this week all she did was confuse the group of mullet wearing Asian tourists. ( I’m talking full on Billy Ray Cyrus, Ziggy Stardust _  Do you Know the Mullet Man, the Mullet Man the Mullet Man glory) which just goes to show Billy Ray does have a future playing two shows a night at the Hong Kong Hilton.
“Don’t give up Billy Ray,” the Achie Breakie mullet still lives in parts of the world.

The very name of the city is built to spin.
There are dollar signs everywhere you turn. the sound, smell and taste of money life sized cartoon characters and monolithic modern art projects disguised as hotels pleases and assaults your senses at the same time.

Everything is built to convince people who should know better they are invincible and that everything they see is built for them, the world is for their taking.

Something else I saw
Like the person who watches while a young girl struggle to pull the family Pit Bull away from his eight pound cat and makes no effort to help the young lady by pulling his future Pit Ball lunch side item away from the dog who wants to eat it??
What do you call the cat ???
I just call the man an ahole with delusions of grandeur. I call the cat a tourist. Yes there are cats tough enough to take on a full grown dog, my sister had one when we were young, but 99 percent of the time the cat is tackled by a Pit Bull the cat is going to be Pit Bull lunch and you know it and the poor teenager holding the dog is going to be traumatized. 
Tramatized kind of like the family who was almost run over by the convoy of motorized wheel chairs speeding down the sidewalk weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic trying not to spill the drinks some of them were holding or the drunken Indian????who tottered through the casino looking for lost keys and making eyes at the men he was passing by.

Such is Life in the City of Sin
Til Next Week
Take Care

Look at me I’m pretty

By Royal Hopper

Picture your in Las Vegas. Nevada that is_ Sin City _ the town without a conscious. It’s noon and hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk (in the shade no less) and your dressed completely in black. You stop to take photos your tight black pants hugging your flouncing hips, Chantilly Lace wrappings trailing from your puffy sleeves as you once again traipse down the main byway of the City of Sin accompanied by a enchanting Gothic beauty in a black sun dress.

Chances are the effort you are putting forth to appear you wish to be left alone is complete BS. You want to be noticed and you are in fact in the right city. This city is so weird it takes a lot to get noticed here. People assume you one of the attraction or one of the drunks when you are different. However even if being noticed takes effort here we are geared to give people what they want. We find a way sometimes even if like the man in black lace you roll your eyes at the people

Hey look at me I’m pretty

Peacocks and the people who ignore them
One of the great needs of people who visit this city is to be seen. I’ve called them Peacocks in this blog but whatever you call the drama queens of the world they all eventually find their way to this city to be seen.
I’ve seen just about every mode of dress that can be worn by human beings in this City of Sin but even a jaded old cynic like me was taken aback by the all black costumes of the two characters I saw strutting down the Strip this week. They put a great effort into pretending they didn’t’ want anyone noticing them as they pretended to be on some kind of black Preppie Goth photo shoot.
“Don’t’ look at me I’m working. No really look at me I’m stunning, don’t look at me. Do you think I look manly in black lace,” their body language seemed to say as they walked past one casino casting disdainful looks at passersby and the occasional security guard who was staring at them all the while glancing over a shoulder to make sure someone was watching them.
The woman wore a simple enough Gothic black Sun Dress. It was cut in all the right places kind of like a stripper who lost her costume on the way to work and had to make use of the black table cloth in her dressing room or an extra at a Rob Zombie concert.
The dude in this photo shoot,  and I say that without any degree of certainty,  wore a black knee length pant like ensemble…… and fashion cut shirt with black lace wrap arounds trailing in the wind as he waved his fancy camera which was not fancy incidentally pretending to be unconcerned at the people staring at him.

When is weird to weird

I’m an easy going guy but I tell you I felt an overwhelming urge to mug this couple and steal their clothes and their wallets and their cheap camera. Which didn’t look any fancier than the old D-100 I used at the Orange Leader so many years ago. (Well it was more like seven years ago) but she was working it like a stripper on a dance pole surrounded by drunk and amorous billionaire.

“Don’t notice me …okay look at me…I’m pretty and cool…I wear lots of black …notice me…”
This paradigm continued throughout the week with a repeat of a common Sin City Theme that occurs when a homely dude somehow manages to hook up with a hot chick, an occurrence I have spoke of before. Today I spotted a guy who was 5 foot 3 inches tops walking with a drop dead, knockout bathing beauty babe who wasn’t much shorter than me (I’m a shade under 6 foot 2 inches ) and man she was haawwwwwwtttt. He pretended to not notice people watching them as they crossed the street but every guy who saw this occur knows what was going through his mind.
“Hah ha I’m holding hands with a haaaawwwttt babe and your not…see me…see me..I’m short and homely and dress badly and my girlfriend is freakin hot …….People want what they want and this guy wanted to be seen with his hot girlfriend even if he had to duck his head to keep from bumping her generous breasts with his forehead as he walked.
As a follow up I’m guessing the chick who was seen jogging down the strip with in a black tights with ruffles hanging down from the legs wasn’t trying to blend in.

I need a drink and a cigarette
Lastly and more obviously people come to the city of Sin to gamble, drink and smoke. One gentleman who may have been homeless or just had low standards was seen walking from trash can to trash can picking the oversized themed plastic drink containers from the full cans and pour the remains of those fruity themed drinks in his personal container until he got enough to guzzle and then went on to his next round of cans. People want what they want and want it when they want it and this dude wanted a drink.

On the way to work one morning this week I spied a man sitting on the ground in front of a convenience store behind a sign advertising the store to all who cared or could still read at 5 a.m. in the City of Sin.

He was to well dressed to be homeless or appeared to be so and he wasn’t attempting to panhandle from the two or three people on that particular street at and didn’t look like he cared if anyone noticed him as he sat on the ground and occasionally rolled over to lay down. In fact the only thing he appeared to be interested in was the cigarette he was smoking. It was for the time being the center of his universe. It was what he wanted so he just stopped where he was sat down somewhere he could escape from the wind and smoked.
People want what they want and want it when they want it.
In closing I would like to bring up an old story. In my first week at the Mirage in 1989 there was a gentleman who was sure he could win at gambling if he just kept playing. He gambled away his life’s savings around $20,000, cashed in his first class ticket (which you could do at the time apparently) gambled that away and wired a friend for bus fare and was going to gamble that when we walked him out the door, perhaps for his own good perhaps to avoid doing it later when he was truly devoid of funds.
People want what they want and want it when they want it.

People who come to Las Vegas strictly to have fun generally do. Those who come seeking to conquer the world or the city generally don’t.

People do win;  sometimes millions;  I’ve seen it. However the odds always favor the house and even the pros who know what they are doing know when it is time to walk away with a story to tell their family and a plane ticket to get them there.

Such is life in the City of Sin

Until Next Week

Take Care

Jogger report: uuuughh Lots of fat guys with no shirts on aaaahhhhhhhh