Las Vegas Picture Postcard One
Greetings from Las Vegas, land of sunny weather and loose slots! I’m here on business, and so today was spent setting up the booth for the trade show. Due to clean living, we wrapped up our booth setup at around 6pm today, so Chap and I hit the town to find dinner.
I took a stroll around the Flamingo, checking out the penguins and, er, flamingos around the pool area beneath my window, as well as the casino. I paused by a craps table and watched for a few minutes. Perplexed, I walked on, stopping at another, which really didn’t clear things up either.
Chap and I met up a bit later to go get dinner, and after an hour of walking (it turns out Caesar’s Palace doesn’t have but one or two cheap restaurants), we found ourselves in a familiar restaurant in the Venetian, an arty mexican place called Canonita (reasonable prices, but food that looks and tastes unreasonably good) that overlooks the canals. A nice way to cap off a day of sitting in an un-air-conditioned convention hall and an hour of walking and searching for food. Refreshments were also served.
We then decided that, having walked through Treasure Island (above is Tangerine, an outdoor thumping club that overlooks the Treasure Island bay) searching for food, we should return for the 11:30 showing of what used to be a pretty entertaining show and what is now called Sirens or something similarly alluring. As I write this I’m struck by the duality of the name. In the “performance” pirates are lured and then attacked by sirens. The pirates fight by means of gunpowder - great stuff - while the sirens fight with…. music? And yet it is the audience that are left sprawled across the rocks.
Above are two such sirens. Note their alluring poses and leathery getups. This is the extent of their draw. Here’s the set-up: a lone pirate is lured to the sirens and captured, shirtless. The sirens haunt a boat and wear glittery outfits. They also sing and dance. Think Jem. The pirates then bring their ship around to rescue their boy from certain sin (Monty Python, anyone?). Still more dance routines and terrible rock-operatics ensue.
The pirates fire their cannons, yielding some pleasing pyro, but instead of retaliating like a reasonable person would, the sirens instead wield their torturous songs, laced with the weakest double entendrés you ever had to endure (it’s impossible to leave; hundreds of other tourists are similarly trapped).
These songs oddly cause the pirates’ ship to sprout fireworks and sink. (That’s the pirate captain, going down with his ship.) I’m not spoiling much when I reveal that the pirates all end up on deck with the sirens in a final rousing dance routine.
I miss the old show. What corporate shuffle took place that yielded this mess? Yes, we all know sirens like to dance, but somehow when I heard, “They’ve changed the pirates to girls,” I envisioned a sexier, less ridiculous production. Yeah, they still blow the warehouse doors open (left), but it’s as if they changed their demographic from “quite nearly everybody who finds swashbuckling and explosions enjoyable” (a significant portion of the tourist population) to… I don’t know. Who actually likes this stuff?! When they invited applause at the end (verbally), a woman near me was the first to clap. She was particularly impressed by one fellow taking a 30 foot dive into the lagoon. (Ooooh.)
Okay. Enough busting on the Treasure Island show. Thanks to Chap for letting me borrow his 100-300mm zoom lens, which brought you the above images.
Above is the monorail, a pretty nice way to get around town without getting yourself killed (riding in a taxi or pedestrian crossing roads taxis drive on) or in a traffic jam (taxi). This image reminds me that tomorrow’s a new day. After all we’re planning to visit Hoover Dam late tomorrow, the biggest photo-op of the trip — literally. And there are no dancing sirens at Hoover Dam.