I didn't spend a lot of time reading a lot of fascinating Vegas stories this past week. There are a couple of things I have wanted to check out, but never got to them.
One thing that stood out was this article I stumbled upon via Yahoo. This article isn't really stunning, but it speaks to a common phenomena. People who work in fancy, expensive tourist destinations may have a hard time living where they work. Not exactly shocking, I know.
It's easy to work in the Beverly Hills service industry and commute to and from your job, although I have it on good authority it's not exactly cheap to live in Burbank.
If you live in Hawaii, however, it's not so easy to commute to work from a modest suburb, for obvious reasons. This article notes that folks, particularly descendants of Hawaiian natives who don't have extraordinary wealth, flee to the contiguous 48 for its more reasonable cost of living. And the most popular place they choose to congregate? Yep, Las Vegas.
There is a bit of irony in this phenomena. The wealthiest of tourists tend to flock to Las Vegas Strip properties. Yet the fancy houses and high-end real estate isn't found in the shadows of Caesars Palace.
From my experience, you can live in modest, and in some cases less than modest, housing a few blocks off the Vegas strip, as there's not a lot of high end real estate, other than maybe high-rise condos, to be found around the strip, not that I know of anyway.
My buddy lives in a nice apartment complex south of the Tropicana. He can walk to the south Strip casinos, or the Pinball Hall of Fame, without a lot of effort, if it's not 110F when he does it. Yeah, it takes more than five minutes, but it's quite walkable in the evening. I've been to his apartment, and took a picture of the strip from his apartment balcony. It's a quiet area, if you don't mind noise from the nearby airport. I didn't notice airport noise while inside his apartment one November evening. But I imagine he deals with it.
If I moved to Vegas, I'm not sure where I'd want to live, but you could do a lot worse than my buddy's apartment complex.
If I lived in Vegas, perhaps I'd live this close to the Luxor, and the abandoned Skyvue wheel poles, as seen on the left side of this photo.
Lots of good stuff out there this week in the world of Vegas reporting and conversation, and I found a few things that have stuck with me.
Let's start with the Jeff Does Vegas podcast interview with Chris Hansen.
Hansen is not quite on par with Tom Brokaw, but his name is well known. During his years at NBC, he was part of several undercover investigations dubbed "To Catch a Predator." If you don't know: Adults seeking minors for sexual liaisons are busted in undercover law enforcement stings, which are recorded for broadcast to the masses.
There are clips from these stings all over YouTube. It's crime porn, almost literally. It's hard not to watch, and at times it's amusing because both the perps and Chris Hansen say things that aren't one-liners, but are funny. If you've seen it, ever, you know what I mean.
The point of the investigation, however, is anything but funny. Hansen's career seems to have become dedicated to busting the predators. After NBC cashed in on the concept, both at the mothership and via its cable outlets, Hansen has carried on the crusade, churning out new content for either a cable channel, a streaming app or both. I'm not sure on that part. But he's out there, proving that as the platforms evolve, the predators are still looking for victims nearly two decades after the predator stings began. (Not a surprise.)
All that said, Hansen is cashing in on his work catching predators through a behind-the-scenes presentation. In Vegas.
It seems odd to me that a showroom that exists primarily for comedy and musical entertainment is going to host ticketed presentations about baiting and trapping online predators, but that's the opportunity South Point Casino is offering you next month. I won't explain how and why my favorite Vegas podcast would up interviewing Hansen, but the host will if you listen to this discussion of both Hansen's career and his encounters with online predators. Great discussion, Jeff.
As I have noted, I don't follow any Vegas YouTube channels closely. To my surprise, I was unfamiliar with Miles to Memories. YouTube recommended one of their recent videos, showcasing the sadness that is Primm, Nevada.
I've been to Primm. Once. Probably in 2018. On a weeknight in September, I believe. Not much was happening, as you would expect.
I get why Laughlin works. It's on the Arizona border and it's 100 miles closer to Arizona residents than Las Vegas. You want a night of casino action, or cocktails served with prune juice instead of orange juice: You go to Laughlin. It saves you at least three hours of travel time, valuable time if you're not making it a weekend getaway.
If you're coming from California, I can appreciate why Primm made sense for a weekend, at least back in its day. Between the three casinos and the outlet mall, it was a cheaper alternative to Vegas if your primary interest was casino action, and you didn't need all the eye candy a night in Vegas offers.
Whatever the reason, Primm made sense to a lot of folks in decades past. Now it's a sad relic full of testaments to the greatness that once was, and Miles to Memories does a great job of capturing a lot of that in a video that is well edited and narrated.
Too many "content creators" think they're doing great work by walking around a casino floor for minutes at a time, pointing out the obvious and chatting about some random memory. There's an audience for that, I guess, but I'm not that audience. Miles to Memories, at least for me, produces quality content that's rarely matched in the bowels of YouTube.
Like the channels I do follow on YouTube, I won't watch every video, but I will be sampling more Miles to Memories content in the weeks to come. They have another recent video from Primm that I have yet to watch, so I'll start with that. Based upon what I've seen in my introduction to their videos, I'll be checking out their content with some frequency.
The following story was not the most amazing thing I have ever read, but it was an entertaining little story from something called Robb Report. I am not familiar with it, but a wealthy Canadian podcaster certainly is, so I'll assume if he is reading Robb Report, it's a credible source.
The host of the Jeff Does Vegas podcast recommends a lot of great articles I'd never find since I don't scour the internet for Vegas news on a regular basis. This nugget he unearthed is the story about an airplane that Elvis Presley purchased late in his life. (It couldn't have been his first, could it?) So what happened to it after his death? Here's the answer:
And finally, I'll note two stories from the Vital Vegas blog that were memorable for one reason or another.
I'm probably not the only person who finds the saga of the long-delayed Fontainebleau casino/resort to be entertaining. I was certain the structure would be torn down rather than completed. Yet here we are, promised the latter.
A blog post this past week shared photos of construction progress toward completing the tower more than 15 years after it began. The photos do not come from Vital Vegas author Scott Roeben, but they were shared with him for use in his blog, and it was mildly interesting to see what's happening right now.
And finally, in-depth coverage of a "food hall," as the marketers like to say, isn't fascinating, but an overview of the new fast food dining options downtown at the Fremont casino pointed out something that greatly surprised me.
I can't name every restaurant in every downtown casino, but I have a pretty good idea of what's available, for the most part. With the opening of a food hall at the Fremont, it's Second Street Grill appears to have closed permanently. This grill was essentially the 24-hour cafe of the casino, as best I can tell. I had no clue it existed. I was slightly stunned to learn it was a thing.
I don't read any news source exhaustively, and I don't have time to listen to every episode of every podcast. Neither do you.
I'm not a news aggregator, nor will I be, but I thought it might be worth sharing things I have consumed, and enjoyed, on an occasional basis.
The Jeff Does Vegas podcast shared this article in late November, and it provided a great inside look at the world of organized busking. (I like to call those folks tipsters. Take your pick.)
I have long wondered why folks who invest in a decent costume, as well as those who don't try very hard, act as if they're owed an exorbitant fee for posing for pictures. They can't set a fee, of course, but there are enough stories about how awful they get when you try to play dumb, or pass off a couple of bucks as a tip. If I knew they'd be happy with $5 for a picture, wouldn't I be inclined to get more pictures with these tipsters during my Vegas trips? Absolutely. But they realize that plenty of people are easily manipulated into paying far more than $5 for a photo, and this story really drives the point home.
The article provides a great look at other facets of the business, as well.
I have enjoyed Sam Novak's writing and photos for years. He is currently the deputy editor of Vegas 411, a website with stories and information that is generally of interest to tourists, and a lot of information you won't find elsewhere. He wrote a two-part story in November about a rather odd celebrity named Joe Chavira. It's a very bizarre story about a guy who nobody knows by name, yet was set to be honored in December. Admittedly, it wasn't a significant honor, but nonetheless it's a crazy story about a guy you've never heard of, and a guy I'm not sure has ever actually entertained anyone. (Word is that he was quietly honored in December, in a manor to avoid a lot of public attention. I can't speak to that with any authority.)
If nothing else, check out 90 seconds of this video for the song "Tantalize" and you'll be as skeptical as I am that this guy has ever entertained anyone.
Finally, I don't watch many Vegas YouTube vlogs, because I find them to be too long and relatively uninteresting most of the time, at least for me. There's an audience for watching people dump $100 into a slot machine, but I'm not that audience.
There are a few folks I will sample the work of occasionally, because they will churn out something worthwhile and interesting. There are a few channels I'll never feature content from, most likely. And they don't need me. They're doing way too well without me. That YouTube money flows like oil from a Texas well, it seems.
I haven't been a regular viewer of Bobby G’s Gambling Times and Adventures, but I saw one of his recent tweets noting, not to my surprise, that a video referencing legal prostitution has performed very well on his YouTube channel.
So I checked it out, not because I was hoping to see nearly naked women in the window of a brothel. I'm sure I'm far from the only person who is mildly fascinated to see what life is like in areas of Nevada not associated with Las Vegas.
I've traveled outside Vegas occasionally, but I haven't driven around the state. In the video below, Bobby G goes to Elko, a modest town that has casinos, and prostitution. It's far from the trappings of Reno. It's not exactly Searchlight, it has 20,000 people or more, so it's not a small, desolate town in the middle of nowhere. And Bobby G's video isn't anything extraordinary, but I found it to be an interesting, simple and entertaining look at a city that has to be a regional epicenter for a lot of old, small towns an hour or more in every direction. It's nearly 300 miles from Elko to Reno, but only 230 miles to Salt Lake City, Utah!
