Freakish

The last few days there have been strange formations in the sky. Fluffy, amorphous, ranging in color from bright white to dark gray. They block out the sun. And sometimes, when they're covering the sky, water falls out of thin air!

Yes, it's been that long since it rained.

So why aren't we all blind by now?

I was at the Fremont Street Experience with an out-of-town friend a little while ago, and she was highly amused at one of the light shows — the one with the bikini girls dressed as firefighters who are tugging on a fire hose, making it longer and longer. I just shrugged, but it made me think about how much of this stuff you're bombarded with living here — and it's not just the free porn all over the streets.

Take the "adult" pools at the various casino resorts, with their "European" or "Brazilian" (at the Rio) experiences. Translated, that means "bare titties." The pools are heavily, and sexily, advertised everywhere, and raise barely an eyebrow. The Pond at Green Valley Ranch has the best ad I've seen:


No, I haven't been, and I probably won't until I have washboard abs — which is to say, like, never. (And if it's skinny dipping, why does she have clothes on? Not that I mind the heels.)

Green Valley Ranch is actually out in the suburbs, so I'm a little surprised they've got the naughty pool. I'd just assumed those were reserved for the raunchier Strip-area properties. Sadly, the truth about these places looks a little bit more like what's delicately called a "sausage festival," at least according to this photo in a recent Las Vegas Weekly:


Not quite what I had in mind.

Thing is, this stuff is everywhere. Like, at the shuttered-for-now Lady Luck casino, there's this sign:



See? They'll be back soon. Which of course calls for a picture of a naked lady's back. Makes perfect sense.

But my favorite out-of-place, wacky, sex sells example is off the beaten path a little — it's in the industrial part of Main Street, a bit south of all the downtown lights:


Look, if I ever do need bail, it's going to be BECAUSE of a girl dressed as a slutty cop. Who's wearing heels.

Numerology

"Excuse me," the woman said, motioning me to stop. "Can you help me with something?"

Since I'd already slowed down and made eye contact, I figured I didn't have much of a choice. Besides, she looked like a tourist — purple flowery shirt, makeup spread with a frosting knife — and I figured she just wanted directions.

She did. Sort of.

"If I wanted to tell what bit me, a mouse or a rat, when I was sleeping, how would I do that?" she said. "Would I get a tetanus shot?"

You see, I'm not a doctor, but I look like one to strangers when I'm walking down the street.

"I have no idea," I said, grinning in spite of all my efforts not to. Then I strolled off.

"It cost me $600 at the hospital to ...." — do something. She was calling after me, but I was out of earshot quickly.

But ... wait a minute. $600? That's weird.

That's the amount this woman ranted about the other day as she complained about a jaywalking ticket. Then I get Random Mouse Lady, and of course in the next 10 days I'm expecting $600 from the federal government as President George "Winkerbean" Bush makes good on his second attempt to bribe people into believing the economy's okay.

Is it a warning? Beware of jaywalking, hospitals and mice? (And/or rats?) Is Bush going to jaywalk and end up in the hospital?

Is Cheney going to shoot someone in the face again, necessitating a tetanus shot?

Maybe it's just that I was raised on devil rock and any grouping of 666 gets my attention. But I'm a little confused on the math.

Do I use 600/600/600, which would be the power of the devil multiplied by 100? (Scary!)

Or do I use 1,800, which would be the power of the devil times 2.7? (Not so scary.)

Somehow, the decimal point makes Ol' Scratch less intimidating. HA!


OVERHEARD ON THE STREETS OF VEGAS: "I figured if I was down here, I'd remember where I was. I remember that beer."

Worth 10,000 words

I love this picture:


It's from this story in the R-J last week about a bunch of college kids from Lynchburg, Va., who are on a nationwide field trip for the American Culture Program at Randolph College.

They're at the Chicken Ranch, a brothel in Pahrump.

I'm guessing you can tell which one's the working girl and which one's the college student who doesn't what the hell to make of it all.

Now, if Lynchburg, Va., sounds familiar, that's because it's home to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. And the news coverage of the semester-long course (they do a lot more than visit brothels) apparently generated some heat for Randolph College, which issued this release and referred to news coverage as "news" coverage.

Yeah, blame the messenger. Most news stories did, in fact, put the trip in context and show that students were probing a sensitive issue. But since some blowhards got mad about it, then it's obviously the media's fault. Weak.

A blog at the Daily Herald in Everett, Wash., had a nice take on it, though, under the headline "Brothel gives college class a group rate":

American Culture students at the tiny liberal arts school attended seminars given by prostitutes. Topics included "Preventing Politicians From Leaving Paper Trails."

The class was actually very practical. Students got to see firsthand what kind of careers are available right now to American Culture majors at tiny liberal arts schools.

Neighborhood amenities

A friend mused the other night that I have a radically different view of Las Vegas than many people who live here simply because I live downtown. The area's changing, but it's still fair to look at much of it as a dump. Though not where I live, of course.

I'll bet most Green Valley residents aren't accosted by Ozzy Osbourne's twin sister (complete with round granny sunglasses) outside the video store and asked for either $5 or 50 cents. (Like Ozzy, she was mostly incoherent, so I'm not sure what the denomination was.)

Aliante dwellers aren't treated to rants like this one on their way to work:

"I've lived in Nevada for 42 years and I've never had that explained to me until that cop did it. They don't do it that way in Reno, in Sparks, in Pahrump, in Ely ... all I did was step one foot in the street when the light started flashing, and now I have a $600 ticket ... I'm a nice person, and this upset me! Six hundred dollars! I wasn't even crossing the street, I was just thinking about it ... I'm a good person. I am."

(I sincerely doubt the fine for jaywalking is $600, but just the same I'm going to be more careful. Thanks, ranting lady!)

And the folks out by Red Rocks Casino aren't greeted by this scene when they're walking down the street: A weathered woman with teased blonde hair, wearing tight clothing over the kind of painfully skinny body made possible only by years of drug use and malnutrition, standing next to a beefy black guy while yelling at a woman across the street.

"That's my DADDY on the phone!" she screeched. "That's my DADDY on the phone!" (The black guy was using a cell phone. Or maybe Daddy was on the other end of the call?)

At the time I thought she was happy about something, but looking back, I'm pretty sure she was trying to trash talk the other woman. And this wasn't some dark side street. This was Fremont Avenue, just outside the El Cortez and a block from the tourists at the Fremont Street Experience.

Nope, none of this out in new suburbanland.

Poor bastards.

UPDATED: Okay, maybe it's not very nice of me to use these tales a fodder for entertainment, so allow me to kind of make up for it. This discussion points to Nevada's acute shortage of treatment options for the mentally ill, and I think my musings above are directly related. In most parts of the city you don't see the impact that untreated mental illness has on people. Therefore, there's not much of a constituency to make noise about it.

Cruising the Strip

Woman: "It's just ... I can't compete with that."
Man: "Look, it's not like I'm saying, 'I looked at that, and I think it's better.'"
Woman: "But, just that you would look at her ass, and like it —"

Poor dude. She wouldn't let up. This conversation had been going on for a while when they got within earshot of me near Harrah's, and it kept going for as long as we were walking near each other. He'd noticed a girl with a nice ass and now he was paying for it. She wouldn't even allow him to claim it was an involuntary glance.

And I thought, "You know, if you can't stand your man lookin' at a nice butt every now and then, you'd better not come with him to Vegas. Or the beach. Or, um, the mall. In fact, you should probably just be single."

They were heading south at the time toward Flamingo, and we all know what billboard's at that intersection:




Here's hoping our beleaguered friend didn't look up.

I wanted to take someone to task myself that evening:

GUY: (singing) "Jeremiah was a bullfrog!"
GIRL: "Is that, like, a song?"

Seriously?

Pretty and not-so-pretty pictures

This is the view from the roof of my new apartment building — the north end of The Strip, in all its glory. Those construction cranes on the left side are for Phase 2 at the Wynn (modestly dubbed "Encore" by ever-understated owner Steve Wynn), and at the very edge on the right side you can see the new Trump tower, a condo and hotel project. New stuff going up all the time on Las Vegas Boulevard South — which makes a couple of news stories troubling.

This story reports on a study estimating that Lake Mead, our primary water source, has a 50 percent chance of running dry by 2021. (Remember when 2020, or 2010, seemed like sooooo far away? 2021 is 13 years from now. Yikes.) As the reporter notes, that 50 percent chance is "better than your odds of winning at any casino."

Not everyone agrees with this, of course, and they make the point that Lake Mead won't be allowed to run dry because it's too important. There's a complicated series of water agreements requiring other Colorado River users to take less water as the lake level drops.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman touched off a little bit of a firestorm by talking about that aspect of the story, singling out California farms: "The Imperial Valley farmers will have their fields go fallow before our spigots run dry." The response from California people was along the lines of, "Oh yeah? Try it, tough guy." (See here and here.)

Like Mark Twain said, in the West, whiskey's for drinkin' and water's for fightin'.

There probably will be less of it to fight over, though. This National Geographic story cites studies showing that future flows in the Colorado River will drop to levels well below what's taken out now for the 30 million or so people who depend on that water. This goes well beyond Vegas — lump us with Denver, Phoenix, and pretty much all of Southern California.

What's most interesting to me is the fact that, according to the researchers in that story, Vegas and SoCal developed during exceptionally wet years for the Colorado River. All of our data and agreements about the river are based on a time period that, historically, was a freak anomaly.

This is potentially dire news that portends an ugly dismantling of major population and economic centers. But I also think it's funny. It's not as though our country has been especially responsible in the West, either to the environment or to the native people. Even though I benefit from all that irresponsibility today, I can still have fun thinking that our Manifest Destiny is, ultimately, to have the rug yanked out from under us.