Las Vegas will note its centennial by entering a float in the January 1 Tournament of Roses Parade. Look for such Vegas icons as Sassy Sally and Vegas Vic, plus a big champagne bottle and birthday cake. All to celebrate a big land auction!
As float No. 42, it will enter the parade at approximately 9:30 a.m., so you can take a quick peek and get back to your regularly scheduled hangover.
Arsenic and Apple Pie toy company has released the soon-to-be classic doll Trash Talkin' Turleen, an 11-inch cigarette-sporting pregnant woman with rollers in her hair. Push her belly button and and belches, laughs, and says, "If the trailer's a rockin', don't come a knockin'," or, "Pour me a double, I'm drinkin' for two." We're awaiting a Vegas doll. What? This is the Vegas doll?! Pour us a double, we're drinking for 1.5 million!
Tireless. Dedicated. Really, really, fascinatingly fascinated with tedium. Secretary of State Dean Heller and his tribe of voter registrars finally wrapped up the election last week. Turns out, Bush won! Eh, they were just auditing—doublechecking those provisional votes, coming up with a reason for Heller to proclaim just shy of December, "The voters of Nevada can be confident that their fvotes were recorded, and recorded accurately." Whew.
In a story on the city's 100th birthday for Budget Traveler, profilic local freelancer Steve Friess does his usual bang-up job of penning our idiosyncracies without throwing them in our faces.
The Friess-er writes: "If ever a city had a peculiar relationship with its past, it's Las Vegas. In the last 15 years alone, almost five centuries' worth of buildings—and it-could-only-happen-here history—have been bulldozed or imploded (in several cases, on national TV). As a result, Vegas can't celebrate its centennial the way most cities would—that is, by reliving historical moments at the carefully curated scenes of their occurrence. The Desert Inn suite where the reclusive Howard Hughes lived for years? Gone. The wedding chapel at the original Aladdin where Elvis Presley married Priscilla? Gone. Even the Moulin Rouge, the city's first interracial casino resort—it was on the National Register of Historic Places—is gone, having succumbed to arson in 2003."
Keep reading, it gets better.
..."Not every old building has been blown up. The El Cortez casino (a block east of the Fremont Street casino cluster) still has the same low-rise brown-brick gambling hall and neon lights from when it opened in 1941, albeit with a newer, high-rise tower. This is a no-frills Vegas of viscous air, dingy carpeting, and low minimum bets (25¢ roulette tables—after a $5 buy-in—and $1 craps). A few blocks west is the city's oldest hotel, the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino. Built in 1906 ... it was advertised as the definition of turn-of-the-20th-century luxury: electric lighting, "large" rooms of 100 square feet, and the city's first telephone. The facade has changed over the years, but many of the wood fixtures date back to the beginning. And it still sells the 99¢ shrimp cocktail."
..."Even parts of the Strip have survived. At the foot of the Strip is the Little Church of the West, a quaint, 62-year-old miniature of an Old West mining-town chapel built of cedar that was moved from its original site, outside of what's now the Frontier Hotel."
Yes, the Fever finally broke. The Sahara hotel has dumped its version of the stage play Saturday Night Fever, deciding that in the end, it was just a steaming lump of Manero. But that leaves disco—in the form of Mandalay Bay's Mamma Mia—at only one end of the Strip. So we propose that out of Tony's white-suited ashes, a polyester replacement can arise. How about a show about the death of a show? You wouldn't even need to change that famed musical score—just tweak the lyrics and titles a bit.
Consider insta-hits like ... "Slayed It Alive, Slayed It Alive," cheerily warbled by critics. For backers of the show, there's "How Deep Is Your Financial Loss" and "Investment Inferno." Imagine K.C. and the Sunshine Band rockin' out to "I wanna put on, my-my-my-my-my-bankrupt show." The surviving Bee Gees could assemble in the studio to rerecord "You Should Be Cloooo-sing, yeaaaaaah!"