LAS VEGAS – No wonder Ocean’s Eleven, the remake of the Brat Pack classic with George Clooney and Brad Pitt was a Judi Online24jam smash hit: which red-blooded Americans in their right minds would not dream of breaking into the vault at three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously and leaving with the loot through the front door?
Vegas bills itself officially as “The City of Entertainment” – and unofficially as America’s most fabulous city. A carefully constructed public relations myth rules that while the rest of the United States is devoted to “family life and economic liberty”, Vegas concentrates on the “pursuit of happiness”. In Vegas, more than anywhere else in America, perception is indeed reality. But even if Vegas is the national capital of the Judi Online24jam pursuit of happiness, “a little less conversation”(Elvis) and some investigation reveals that some dudes are definitely getting happier than others.
Charge my life to my room
The whole Vegas strip can be experienced as an ultra-tacky competition over who rakes in more bucks in the sport of converting Europe (or “Yrup”, in mid-America speak) into a shopping mall.
The Paris-Las Vegas casino, with its fake Eiffel Judi Online24jam Tower and opera house, almost takes the cherry in the showgirl cake (“a taste of France without leaving the States”). The fake cobblestone street, Le Boulevard, “lined with store facades designed to resemble charming country-style cottages and houses”, would enrage many a Washington neo-con: the food is predictably lousy, but why aren’t there any “freedom fries” on sale?
In the average Vegas casino mogul’s Italian obsession stakes, the only one that delivers a decent “luxury experience” is the relatively discreet (for Vegas standards) Bellagio – the imitation of a deluxe belle epoque hotel on Lake Como in northern Italy. The Venetian, with its fake frescoes in the grand lobby and fake Vegas gondolas under a mini-replica of the Rialto bridge, is just plain tacky. More to the point would be to shopJudi Online24jam like a gladiator in the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace, which, in the imperial words of Wallace Barr, Caesar’s entertainment chief executive officer, “gives Las Vegas visitors even more reasons to make Rome their home”. For those on a Russell Crowe swords-and-sandals trip and a Bush family budget, it’s even possible to buy a “timeless Tuscan setting” in the desert: the Chateau Bella villa sells for a cool US$6 million.
