A Day in the Life of Chaos

"Same Dice!"  Is the call that goes up when a craps table is hot.  It is a yell of hope, a cry of superstition.  It happens when a shooter is hot and no one dares break the rhythm. Every one standing around the table becomes nervous and each maintains a stare out of the corner of their eye.  They are fixated on the chips they have laid out on various bets and hoping that nothing has been jinxed, that the rolling will continue. My most recent Las Vegas Excursion led me on a craps-a-palooza.   It is an eternal quest to find the cheapest craps tables in town.  Cheap craps means a low minimum bet and for my good buddy Dave and me, it can be extrapolated into the following:  Low risk and hours of dice rolling accompanied by free booze.  It also means some of the best player odds in Las Vegas when you do one simple thing; make the same boring bet with odds over and over again. The house edge for a simple pass line bet is 1.41%. Compare this to say Keno where the house edge is

Las Vegas is forever evolving.  I imagine the place as a kind of organism that is alive and constantly metastasizing into different forms.   It is not just metastasizing it is in a constant state of metamorphosis.  I almost think a new word should be invented to describe the condition, perhaps "metastasorphosis."   It is precisely this change that intrigues me so much.  I have often said that if I could change my way in life I would have been an urban planner.  There is something about the re-invention of design and function that fascinates me.  Very few urban planners begin with a blank slate, a canvas with which to completely adorn with their own image of perfection.  While this might seem idyllic, in truth I think it is a recipe for disaster.  Cities created with such an open canvas tend to be Stalinistic monolithic nightmares or organized chaos.  Brasilia was carved out of the jungle as a model capital and is instead an urban horror of concrete steel and glass that is

Today I received a sad piece of news.  No, no one is sick and no one has died.  The news was simply that a certain place has now been officially filed away as a memory because it will soon no longer exist.   Photo by Steve Marcus In a previous blog sometime back I recalled this place in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Las Vegas is an ever changing monster.  Little is ever permanent yet what vanishes often leaves nostalgia in its wake.  The city is like the shifting sands of the desert that surrounds it and if they don't figure out a way to get more water there the whole damn thing might disappear.   Las Vegas is fascinating on so many levels but one of the things I find the most interesting is the fusion of local degeneracy and poverty with visitors from around the world and at times opulent wealth.  Both coexist almost as if battle lines have been drawn around the city separating one from the other.  There is a kind of invisible Berlin Wall.  The old core of the city on Fremont stree