Good, Better, Best

So, yesterday I was totally That Married Guy. You know, the one who walks around in a cable-knit sweater, with a cup of tea in one hand and slippers on his feet (with socks)? Yeah, that one.

On the Vegas front, here are Kirsten's and my casino reviews, in no particular order:
1) Riviera: Crappy, slightly sleazy. However, the outside looks better in the day than at night, which defeats the purpose of all the neon lights that used to be in working order on the front. The mirrored effect is a nice touch. Surprise upside: Very few smokers in there, and they had a decent Chinese restaurant.

2) Treaure Island: Kirsten called it "classy," before seeing this motorcycle. Yes, that's right - the motorcycle has breasts. The pirate ship display was closed for the season while we were around, but it still looked pretty neat. Surprise upside: Tangerine, the wait-in-line-to-pay-a-cover club in Treasure Island, will have Kevin Federline as the New Year's Eve host.

3) Caesar's Palace: Apparently, this is the place for hookers to hang out. It's one of the original giant casino/hotels in the city, along with the Riviera and Circus Circus. It is built into the Forum Shops, one of the largest malls in Las Vegas, though, which is a bonus. Surprise upside: This is the place for hookers to hang out.

4) O'Shea's: this casino doesn't have a hotel, so it's totally dedicated to the sin that made Sin City Sin City. Plus, they have a strip poker room, which is great if the poker players look good. Surprise upside: Apparently, the Irish invented Baccarat. Not true.

5) The Wynn: Very nice, and they're adding on a second identical building called "Encore at The Wynn." They have their own golf course on site, which is very neat and, I'm sure, quite wasteful. However, in the interest of environmentalism (and cash savings), the entire grass front of the Casino isn't actually grass - it's close-cropped astroturf. When you're just walking past, you hardly notice. And it doesn't take an ounce of water, except to hose off the vomit. The interior has very tasteful marble - judicious enough to be understated, but obvious enough to be classy. Surprise upside: The Ferarri/Maserati dealership built into the casino.

6) The Bellagio: We didn't see much, although we went to Almond, the free club. "Free" is a very loose term, since both of us shelled out 15 bucks for our martinis, and the dancing was terrible. By "terrible," I mean "done by white guys." On the outside, though, it has that great water display every half hour. Surprise upside: It's really about the last casino you can see with any clarity from the Stratosphere observation deck, because of all of the other hotels in the way.

7) New York New York: We didn't even go into this one, but it has a great exterior - the hotel building is a streetscape of NYC. The exterior also has a half-size mockup of the Statue of Liberty, and it's got an ESPN zone. Stuart Scott could live there and never notice that people stopped paying attention to him in 2002. Surprise upside: Even in the pouring rain at midnight, it looks awesome, especially with the roller coaster.

8) Slots of Fun: A big box full of slot machines. Imagine a Target (or perhaps more appropriately, a K-Mart) with all that clothing and food crap ripped out and replaced with 1-dollar blackjack and 2-dollar poker tables. They're sketchy and shady-looking, and they know it. Add in the 50-cent hot dogs, and you can't go wrong. Surprise upside: there's no doors on the front, so you always know what the weather is, especially if you're at the front tables.

9) Paris: Very simple, with an exterior consisting of Paris's Union Station combined, for some reason, with the Eiffel Tower (perhaps because people recognize the one and not the other). The floor of the casino is interrupted at several points by the Eiffel Tower's support structure, which is pretty cool, I think. Surprise upside: The exterior sign is a mockup of the Montgolfier Balloon, the next-to-last true high point in France's history.

10) Circus Circus: It looks so ugly and faded, day or night, that we didn't even go in. Surprise upside: I don't know if it smelled bad or not.

11) The Stratosphere: Well, it's got a 1000-foot observation deck, so that has to count for something. Plus the buffet is good enough that we ate there twice without complaint, and it's got a decent if slightly dated mall. The biggest complaint I had is that the entrance to the tower is about half a mile (no joke) from the ticket booth for the tower. Also, the hours to the tower deck aren't posted anywhere. It's like they want to force everyone to go in the middle of the day, when tourists are sure they'll be open. Stupid. Surprise upside: They have a leather and bondage shop in the mall. God bless Las Vegas.

And, in more important news, we ordered a replacement screen for Kirsten's camera.