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.

Link

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.”

Link

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!

(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.

It took 12-13 hours to travel each way, but the three hour time difference meant I was ready for bed by 9PM and up 3AM. That’s not a problem if you’re there to gamble -the casinos are busy 24/7. I saved several dollars on a cup of coffee by trekking 15 minutes across the street to the fast food outlets, along with the other east coasters who couldn’t sleep until sunrise. The Europeans were already out jogging by then. Jet lag also meant I was dead tired when the other BlogWorld attendees were partying the night away. If you have a chance to visit Las Vegas, do it while you’re young enough to handle staying up late.

5. Bloggers never stop blogging.

BlogWorld is what happens when you put four thousand internet geeks in one hotel. Sure, they look like they’re not paying attention, but what they are doing is blogging -in real time- as the speeches and seminars are going on. Many were sending messages to each other and to their readers via Twitter. Apparently most of the attendees have day jobs, because I seemed to be the only person there with neither a laptop nor a smart phone. In one seminar, the only way you could ask a question was by Twitter! Not that I had any burning questions, but they gave away some nice prizes to those who submitted.

6. World records can be broken anywhere.

My room did NOT come with a coffeemaker, so I spent a lot of time in search of an affordable cup. Gourmet Gift Baskets had a very large cup in the exhibition hall. It held 2010 gallons of coffee, which broke the world record for the largest cup of coffee ever! A representative from Guinness was there to certify the record on video. They also gave away coffee, so you can bet I got my share.

If the coffee runs out, Scotch will do nicely. Macallan Scotch was one of the sponsors of BlogWorld. Their booth was very popular. Because they gave us free samples of 12-year-old single-malt Scotch.

7. Drawing on cars is fun!

Both Kodak and Ford were event sponsors. Ford had the 2012 Focus on display, but Kodak had a Focus they invited attendees to scribble on! I, of course, had to do some advertising.

8. Free stuff isn’t free if you have to pay luggage charges.

I picked up a lot of swag -five t-shirts and a bunch of toys and stuff, and I won a drawing for a Yahoo stylebook. I carried two big tote bags (also giveaways) back to the room and wondered how I’d ever get that stuff home without buying a suitcase and paying for checked luggage. UPS was there to save the day, with an offer to ship swag home free! They gave out 100 luggage boxes. I filled the box with convention giveaways and souvenirs as well, 20 pounds total, and shipped it back. My souvenirs got home a week later than I did, but the price was right.

9. The internet is much bigger than you think.

(Image by Flickr user Yann Ropars)

BlogWorld gave me a taste of how vast the blogosphere is. There were people from all corners of the internet- cupcake bloggers, diabetes bloggers, railroad travel bloggers, corporate bloggers with big followings, and tons of tech bloggers, many of whom had never even heard of Neatorama. I felt like a fish jumping out of the small pond into the big ocean. And once I left the Expo and wandered into the casino, I chatted with people who were wondering where all those geeks at the convention center came from. Some said they don’t understand the internet at all. Of course, that’s not so different from my hometown, where only a small percentage of the people I know use the internet at all -and that’s mostly Facebook. Even if you surf for a living, there’s a vast universe waiting to be explored.

10. It’s good to be home.

I appreciate the opportunity to travel and attend BlogWorld, and especially the opportunity to meet Neatorama’s social networking expert and BitLit curator David Israel. Still, no matter how much fun you have on a trip, there is relief is getting back to your family, your own bed, and your regular schedule (not to mention your personal coffeemaker). My daughters made cupcakes and decorated them with sprinkles that spelled out WELCOME HOME.

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.

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.

Link