Yesterday, for a change of pace, I hit the Golden Nugget. I rode the bus downtown, swam through the stream of the Fremont Street crowd and chaos, but when I got to the poker room I didn't feel like sitting down at the table.
I had one of those fights with myself where I walked back and forth, towards and away from the room, making three or four narrow oblong 30 yard circuits, and probably looking a little crazy if anyone was watching me. Finally I talked myself into sitting down, and I played an okay albeit short session.
Afterwards, I walked through the crowded and overstimulating Fremont Street Experience and noted some of the changes from when I used to work my advantage slot machine downtown "fun runs" there nearly 20 years ago.
Compared to the Strip a lot of the FSE hasn't changed much in two decades. Back then they committed to a look and a style that couldn't be subsequently modified without some new strikingly original and bold vision, and a lot of money, and the tacit cooperation of the dozen or so entities involved in the FSE. So, to use a turn-of-the-century phrase, it is what it is.
Back around the year 2000 the FSE was fighting in the courts for the right to have their security guards harass the homeless people and street performers who flocked to the open air corridor. Today, it's obvious that the FSE lost that battle.
As a seeming compromise, They have drawn 40 or so circles on the concrete pavement below the dome inside which street vendors and performers can do their thing and ask for money. The result is an aggressively unattractive cacophony of blaring music, bad costumes, plastic bucket drummers, at least a half dozen corn husk flower weavers, buff shirtless men in army and cowboy outfits, women dressed as nuns or sexy cops, or wearing only g-strings and tape on their nipples, and all manner of wheelchair folks holding signs.
The area of the FSE under the dome is an open public forum, and I support everyone's First Amendment right to be out there asking for money--I don't see begging as being philosophically different from conventional advertising--but it's not a good look, though I don't have any solutions in mind that wouldn't trample on the rights of a whole class of people.
I decided to take a walk down to the El Cortez, for nostalgia's sake, and to see if their old decent and cheap coffee shop still existed. It doesn't. In its place is a pizza joint, along with a franchise cafe that was going to put me on a 20 minute waiting list when they clearly showed half of their seats empty. I chose not to reward poor (or skimpy) staff scheduling management and declined.
After stepping out of the El C, what to my wondering eyes did appear but the lit up signs from my old barrio card counting casino; and here I'd thought that the place had been closed for years.
I walked the few more blocks towards it, down into the barrio, down to the end of the line, only to find that the Western was indeed closed. If I were a mugger, that would certainly be my spot every night; perfect for picking off clueless tourists following their phone cameras too many blocks down to their doom.
Speaking of phone cameras, here's an 18 foot (5.5m) tall praying mantis that shoots fire out of its antennae to the baseline of various club songs.
The container park holding the mantis went up where there used to be only a fenced in gravel lot with human feces in it, so definitely an improvement.
Golden Nugget: 3 hours:
+$64
Last edited by suitedjustice; 10-24-2019 at 09:33 PM.