Language barrier

This is on a construction site near my office:



So, do you have to demonstrate that you can sign in complete sentences? Or will a simple "How are you" suffice?

Walk on by

The young man seemed close to frantic as he hurried across Las Vegas Boulevard downtown, one block north of Fremont Street, his arms held open in a pleading gesture.

"Please, gentlemen!" he cried. "You've got to help me!"

There was something about him that made me disinclined to acquiesce to his request. He was a little too wide-eyed and slack-jawed to be functioning normally, so I walked past him, only to be stuck at the corner waiting for a "walk" sign.

"Don't hide," I heard him say behind me. "You don't need to hide." I'm not sure if he was talking to me or the other guy at the corner, but we weren't hiding. He could've been talking to himself. Then he asked for help again: "A cell phone! I need the police!"

Maybe he's got a real problem, I thought as I crossed the street. But look! His problem's solved. There were two police cruisers waiting at the light, and as I walked north the police drove south, right toward the man in need.

He did not, however, flag them down. Ha! Big surprise there, I thought.

But then I thought about another troubled man I met briefly about three years ago. He, too, was very worried about something, and even went so far as to place an ad in the local paper asking for help identifying the people he said were spying on him from his backyard. He asked me if I'd seen them too; when I (politely, I hope) said no, he dismissed me as part of the conspiracy. I found him amusing.

And I remember this, too: Finishing up work at a farm in Oregon, and a woman was there loading food for a nonprofit she was heavily involved in. She wanted some assistance, so she said, "Hey, are you into helping the homeless?" And I said, "Not really." It was the honest answer, though it elicited a chill of disapproval from her. Which, in retrospect, I find amusing.

So maybe I am part of the conspiracy. Do I want the homeless to get help? Sure. Am I going to contribute? Probably not. Will I stop and render aid when confronted with this situation again, which in downtown Las Vegas will surely happen? No.

Does that bother me?

Not really.

Senseless in another city

I was leaving the men's room at gate C2 in the D/FW airport. Another guy was walking in — and singing.

"Don't," he sang. "Don't you want me ..."

Kudos for directness, dude, but you should stick with tapping your feet and assuming a wide stance.

We love the rain in Las Vegas ....

..... no matter what it does to the pool.

Salute

I was just another schlub crossing the street, as far as I knew. But for some reason the passenger in the truck at the stoplight noticed me.

He stuck his arm out the window and was yelling something I couldn't hear. Whatever. I kept walking; he's calling out to someone else. No. There's no one else walking here. So ... what?

So he's waving? No, not waving ... he's, um, got his arm straight out. And he's saying something, I just can't quite hear what it is. But why me? I don't know this guy.

At this point I should probably mention that this gentleman is African-American.

So, as I reached the other side of the street, and as the truck drove off with a green light, I figured it out. His arm was straight out. He was yelling, mockingly, "White power! White power!"

That's a new one.

Okay, so, sure, I'm a white guy with a shaved head who, at that particular moment in time, was wearing a brown shirt.

But does that make me a neo-Nazi?

Help! Someone! Anyone!

I've been profiled!

Rack 'em

What do you see when you look at this rack?

Did you say "a pressing First Amendment issue"?

No? C'mon — wasn't that the first thought that came to mind?

Yeah, me neither.

But that's the attitude of the ACLU types now that Clark County (most of The Strip is in Clark County, not Las Vegas proper) has quadrupled the fee for news racks in the "resort corridor," to $100 from $25. There are about 2,700 of these things — who knew? — but I'm not sure if all of those are on The Strip.

The ones that are on The Strip are almost exclusively ads for escorts and strippers. (Ahem: "This is not an offer of prostitution. Any money exchanged is for time and companionship only" blah blah etc.)

There is a civil liberties point, though, in that it looks like Clark County is targeting these naughty advertisements by making distribution prohibitively expensive. That's what the law school types call a "content-based restriction," which is a big First Amendment no-no.

Ah, schizophrenic Vegas. We play up Sin City and the "what happens here, stays here" line, then get all in a tizzy when someone actually tries to lead a tourist to temptation. Or when our mayor says brothels should open downtown. Or when a strip club tries to get downtown redevelopment money. Amazingly, we were a little late to the lingerie-and-coffee business — no protests yet, as far as I know.

Anyway, Clark County has gotten itself dinged before on free speech issues. An effort to ban people from handing out escort fliers failed — sadly, I think, because those hawkers are annoying. And now I'm guessing we'll get another court fight over the right to distribute poorly produced smut.

God Bless America!

(Related stories here and here.)

Blind spot

People in Vegas don't watch where they're going. And it's contagious.

I've seen it in the casinos, the stores, the sidewalks, the roads — people moving one direction and looking somewhere else. I'm starting to do it, too. I catch myself cutting people off as I walk down the street or through the grocery store; twice now I've almost run red lights, straight into left-turn traffic, while my attention was elsewhere. One of those times I stopped with two-thirds of my car in the intersection, the contents of my back seat dumped on the floor. I can't even remember the last time I was close to running a red light.

True, all metro areas have their distractions, but this is something more. I think this particular aversion to watching where you're going is an essential part of Vegas — in fact, it's one of the cornerstones of what I'm calling the Vegas-American Dream.

Vegas is a sustained boomtown. Sustaining the boom requires a certain willful blindness about basic realities. Locals ignore that we're living in a desert, and visitors ignore the odds against them striking it rich on their vacation.

Boom.

Consider this: The theory goes that every hotel room requires 5 to 7 people to service that room — be it construction to build the room, hotel staff, casino dealers, and the doctors, lawyers, grocers, video store clerks, etc. to serve the servicers. And despite the real estate downturn, new construction continues. Three developments on the Strip alone will add about 11,000 new hotel rooms in the next couple of years, and there's also the Union Park plan for downtown, a host of high-rise condo projects, and plans for a new casino-hotel anchoring a subdivision out by Kyle Canyon.

This at a time when the water in Lake Mead, our main water source, has dropped so low that one of the pumping stations isn't expected to be underwater much longer.

But this makes sense when you're in the grips of the Vegas-American Dream. No matter what the odds, you can't win if you don't play, so throw your chips on the table!

Reminds me of our invasion of Iraq. (The dream is contagious.)