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Did you love playing in sandboxes when you were a kid? It was fun to move dirt around with little toy bulldozers and dump trucks. Now there’s a company in Las Vegas that will let you do it for real. Dig This in Las Vegas invites ordinary, untrained people to move dirt under the supervision of skilled heavy equipment operators.
Link -via The Presurfer
A
lot of people go to Vegas for bachelor parties, but death party? Now that's
unusual:
A British marine killed in Afghanistan left an unusual bequest in his will: money for his friends to go to Las Vegas for a party. [...]
Like many soldiers assigned to a war zone, Hart had taken out a life insurance policy.
After his death, his family found Hart had designated 50,000 British pounds for a charity that helps wounded service personnel -- and 100,000 pounds (about $163,000) for his military and civilian buddies and their girlfriends to go to Las Vegas.
File this one under "oops." A new stamp intended to commemorate the Statue of Liberty actually featured the Las Vegas replica instead:
You might think that the post office would have just gone with the original, the one off the tip of Lower Manhattan that for 125 years has welcomed millions of New York’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Instead, they accidentally used the 14-year-old statue that presides over thousands of weary gamblers a week.
The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty “forever” stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists.
But the post office is going with it.
“We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” said Roy Betts, a spokesman. Mr. Betts did say, however, that the post office regrets the error and is “re-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future.”
Note: The red dots shows homes currently in foreclosure.
Gus Lubin of Business Insider’s Money Game takes us on an unusual tour of sort: using Google Maps, he has created the Satellite Tour of America’s Foreclosure Wasteland. I was surprised to learn that 1 out of every 9 homes in Las Vegas are in foreclosure!
Link – Thanks Adam!
The slogan is “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but since Neatorama sponsored my trip to the BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2010, I had to report my experiences to Alex -and I might as well share some of them with you. It was my first excursion to any kind of trade convention, and my first trip to Las Vegas.
(Image credit: Flickr user Justin Bugsy Sailor)
1. Bring more money.
Las Vegas, or at least the big resort casinos, are designed to extract as much money as possible from every visitor and then send them home. Rooms are relatively inexpensive compared to other cities, despite the fact that my room rate went up between the time I made reservations and the time I checked in. I skipped the $10 sandwiches in the airports and later regretted it, because the cheapest hamburger at the hotel was $15. Try the all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s only $42. However, once you leave the hotel, you can find normally-priced food -IF you can figure out how to get there! I played the slots just enough to say I’d gambled in Las Vegas, but not enough to rate the free drink treatment. If there is one tip for a Las Vegas trip, it’s bring more money.
2. Distance is an illusion in Las Vegas.
(Image credit: Flickr user Bill Rice)
Friday night I wandered down the strip and checked out the other casinos. Distance is deceiving in Vegas. The hotel and casino buildings are massive compared to buildings in other cities. You look out the window and tell yourself, “The Luxor is just next door -and Excalibur is the next building. No problem to walk!” But each resort covers many acres and “two buildings down” can easily be a half-mile walk. I walked as far as the Bellagio and probably put five miles on my feet. I was rewarded with a fairly nice video of the Bellagio Fountains (nice except when that woman stuck her camera in front of mine) and blisters on my feet. My legs were sore for a week afterward. That didn’t stop me from doing the same walk in the sunlight on Saturday! When planning the particulars of your trip to Vegas, take your age and physical condition into consideration.
3. Las Vegas is built for tourists.
The strip has lots of wonderful street performers: costumed characters posing for pictures, musicians and magicians, a woman with a snake, and one fellow who invited me to his Facebook page. It was like Times Square, except in New York there are some locals in the crowd. Here, you can tell the residents because they are working.
4. Jet lag is a killer.
more …
Can you imagine losing $1 million to the casinos? No? How about $127 million? In one year. That’s how much Terrance Watanabe lost, making it one of the biggest – if not the biggest – losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history.
The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history. It devoured much of Mr. Watanabe’s personal fortune, he says, which he built up over more than two decades running his family’s party-favor import business in Omaha, Neb. It also benefitted the two casinos’ parent company, Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., which derived about 5.6% of its Las Vegas gambling revenue from Mr. Watanabe that year.
Today, Mr. Watanabe and Harrah’s are fighting over another issue: whether the casino company bears some of the responsibility for his losses.
In a civil suit filed in Clark County District Court last month, Mr. Watanabe, 52 years old, says casino staff routinely plied him with liquor and pain medication as part of a systematic plan to keep him gambling.
Like the motto says, apparently your cash really does stay in Vegas. Alexandra Berzon from The Wall Street Journal reports: Link
(Photo: Peter McCollough for the Wall Streer Journal)
Hundreds of couples are living underneath the US gambling mecca Las Vegas and living off the scraps left behind by its patrons. It’s claimed that up to 700 people call the network of tunnels beneath the casinos home.
They make their living by scavenging, and working their way down the strip of casinos. Steven moved into the tunnels two years ago after he lost his hotel front-desk job due to a heroin problem he claims he kicked in January. “The most I’ve ever found is 997 dollars on one machine. I’ve found about $500 a few times. But normally $20 or so is enough to call it a night.
“We buy food and supplies like shampoo and soap. Last night I went and watched the new Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds up at the Palms Hotel.”
Pete Sampson wrote the article for The Sun: Link (Photo: Austin Hargrave)
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by MJ.
Photo: Roadsidepictures [Flickr]
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s no denying that neon signs have become a big part of the urban landscape. Take, for instance, the iconic Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign above was designed by Betty Willis for the Young Electric Sign Company in 1959. She never copyrighted it, because she considered it a gift to the city – as a result, the image became synonymous with Las Vegas.
Oobject has an interesting list of The 10 Most Important Examples of Neon Signage for your enjoyment (don’t miss the Vegas neon boneyard!):
The most impressive neon districts in the world include Tokyo’s Ginza and Shibuya, Osaka’s Dotonburi which was the inspiration for Blade Runner, the worlds largest shopping street, Nanjing Road in Shanghai and, of course, Vegas and Times Square. Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy district (named after an American who opened one of the first go go bars in the 70s) deserves inclusion on account of its unpleasant strangeness, with live elephants paraded up and down the pink neon streets.
