My view of the world

A friend asked me to write a nostalgia piece about Las Vegas, the only constraints are that I try not to mention names of those who are still living and I can’t bad mouth the FBI or Metro, doesn’t leave much does it?

What I’ve found myself thinking about are the number of people I’ve known, and actually liked, who’ve died in recent years.
I just found out that Billy D. from Bangkok died in January, Billy was one of this world’s truely nice guys.
Another guy we both knew, Tony Poe (Poshepny), died in 2003. Tony was the guy they said Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, was based on, he denied it. He was one of the good guys, he fought for an idea, even when he thought the implimentation was broken.
I remember him insisting on being the loudest guy in the bar, but he never started shit and he always seemed to enjoy life.

Others are gone as well, the brothers I rode with are mostly dead or taking advantage of the time share opportunities offered by the local, state and federal authorities.
Mostly, the people I knew well and liked, were a few years older than I was, now, I’m the old dude in the crowd, and yes, I give the youngsters advice they don’t take and I find myself telling stories to an audience that has no idea what I’m talking about and could care less.

I’m feeling my mortality and I’m a little depressed, but I’ll get over it, I’ve just kinda run out of people I want to talk to.

The only question I have is, how the hell do I write a story about the more interesting people I’ve known here in Vegas, without mentioning what a bunch of assholes the Bureau has sent to our fair city?

This is a story I heard from a security guard at the Horseshoe, more than a few years back. It may be pure “urban legend”, but it was told as true, and it certainly reflects the general attitude here in Vegas, “back in the day”.
In fact it wasn’t that many years ago, when seeing a man wearing a gun on his hip while wandering downtown might have raised a few eyebrows, but it wasn’t all that uncommon.

Late one afternoon, a guy I remember seeing around town, walked into the Horseshoe wearing his usual single action revolver, tied down low, in one of those gunsmoke style fast draw rigs.
He wandered up to security and asked if Wyatt or Doc were around. The security guard didn’t even blink, he just looked the man in the eye and said they hadn’t been in, but that if the man wanted to wait he’d have to check his gun. The man started to get loud and said they’d have to take it from him, at this point the security guard looked at him and said, “look. if Wyatt and Doc have to check their guns, you’ll damned well check yours”. At this point the man appologized and checked his weapon.
This guy really existed, and I don’t recall ever seeing him without his gun, but, as I said the rest may well be the product of somebody’s overly active imagination, still, it does reflect the attitude of the times.

Things change, it wasn’t too many years back when I used to come in from target practice out in the desert, and rather than leave my guns in my old ragtop Jeep, I’d wander over to the casino security office, wherever I was having lunch, and check my weapons.
These days, I doubt there’s a joint left in town that wouldn’t have a cow if you did that, and you’d wind up talking to Metro.

The Las Vegas real estate market has gone completely insane, the price of land in the Las Vegas Valley has gone through the roof. A long skinny acre I sold six or seven years ago for $130k is now worth $300k, and because of the shape and location, it’s still a miserable piece of land to try and build on.
The house I live in was built in the early 60s, towards the tail end of a major Las Vegas real estate boom, because of the slowing Las Vegas real estate market, the builder did things like covering the roof on the side of the house facing the street with the wooden shakes that were considered upscale at the time, and doing the back side with the less expensive wooden shingles, I’ve since had to replace the roof with conventional fiberglass shingles.
After I replaced the roof, this house was worth about $100k, in the last 3 years, it has increased in value to the point that I’m now being offered $220k for the same house in pretty much the same condition.
The house next door needed a new roof when it sold a few months back,


they got $209k, and the realtor, who’s been in the Las Vegas real estate business for 20+ years, told me that the buyers didn’t care that it would cost them approximately $10k more to fix it. The couple that bought the house are from southern California and didn’t think the price was out of line, I guess, as long as the property in southern California is more expense than the property in Las Vegas, the people from there will keep moving this way and driving up the price of housing here.

I’ve lived in the Las Vegas Valley all my life and my house is going to be paid off in less than 2 years, at this point, I could care less what the Las Vegas real estate market does. The only thing I’m going to have to worry about are the new property taxes, at the rate the Las Vegas valley is growing, they’re going to have to raise property taxes for homeowners, throughout Clark County, in a big way.

Speaking of Las Vegas real estate. Does anyone know how much Walmart paid for the property directly across the Boulder Highway from Sam’s Town?
At one time there were plans to build a casino there, now they’re building a Walmart Super Store.

back up to a 4. …And there was much rejoicing.

I see Google is doing weird stuff again.
Today a friend called to tell me that my blog was a pr 4 and had been there for over 24hrs. With Google you need to give everything time to equalize across data centers. When I checked the page rank hadn’t moved, but this afternoon it showed a pr4, now it’s a pr 0.
I don’t worry about this site, since it’s just a place to talk to myself out loud, without having the people in the grocery store look at me funny, although I have been known to talk to myself there too.
The google bots report back to the ranking software, and through some sort of arcane alchemy the page rank is decided.
I would dearly love to know the secrets of page rank, but the algorithm changes continually and the Google page explaining page rank has nothing at all to do with the latest changes.
I guess we’ll have to get page rank the old fashioned way….now was that a black goat and a silver knife or….

Diets suck!!!
Small quantities only work if you’re someplace where you have total control over when and what you eat. You also need a massive amount of willpower. Stuborness I have in abundance, but a willingness to deprive myself of what I want is lacking.
So far, I’ve left the apples I peeled and sliced, so I wouldn’t eat cupcakes, at home. I’ve had beer and camerones imperiales, at Las Islitas, I highly recommend them.
There were two birthdays in the last week and I’ve eaten enough birthday cake to gain a couple of pounds, one cake was Tres Leches with a carmel sauce between the layers and the other cake was a Tres Leches with guava between the layers.
I just finished KFC with mashed potatos, gravy and biscuits.
I’ve become very sedentary in my old age and therefore, I don’t burn the calories like I used to, so I guess I’ll start my diet next week. This attempt, requires only that I control my intake at home and that I add 10 minutes to the ski machine. I figure anything will help.

I was watching a cute little latina, that I know just well enough to talk to, walk by this morning. She is without a doubt one of the sexiest women I’ve seen, she’s also less than half my age.
This doesn’t keep a certain amount of flirting from going on, she doesn’t take me seriously and I don’t expect her to, but this got me to thinking.
In the culture I grew up with, a woman didn’t flirt much, unless she was at least, somewhat interested, in the man, but the latinas seem to insist on flirting, regardless of whether or not they have an interest in the man.
This is a good thing, providing the guy knows that it’s just harmless flirtation and not an invitation. It makes an old dude feel younger and it doesn’t cost anything.
The only bad thing is that you can find yourself spending way too much time talking to some sweet young thing , who thinks a bare midrif with her belly hanging over her belt buckle is sexy.
That’s another major cultural difference, in the traditional American Anglo culture, women tend not to wear clothes that show their stomachs unless said tummy is fairly firm, the latinas don’t seem to care. This doesn’t matter much to me, except that I refuse to go out with a woman that has more beer belly than I do.
Yes, I know I’m a chauvinest pig, I can’t help it if that’s the culture I was raised in.
Tastes vary, I happen to prefer a woman that’s fairly slender, without being too skinny, the operative word being “prefer”. I find that the girls do get prettier at closing time.
In the mean time, it’s fun to flirt, it keeps you young, just as long as nobody takes it too seriously and her husband doesn’t catch you.

Well the beginning of the end for personal freedom is upon us.
The latest:
A security company in Cincinatti, has started using RFID chips in some of it’s employees. These are to control access to a secure room, but RFID chips also allow anyone with access to the technology to tell when and where you entered a store, to tell what you purchased or looked at.
In other words, these devices don’t send out a signal like a beacon, but are activated by an electromagnetic field, just like a credit card, and once the infrastructure is in place, the datacenters like the credit card proccessing companies and the ubiquitous “government”, will have our every move on file.
Unlike current credit card technology these devices only have to be in the general vicinity of the reader.

The company that is developing the Veri-chip has stated that they are attempting to develop an implant that would contain a Global Positioning System, which would allow the implanted carrier to be pinpointed anywhere on the planet.

“Mexico is the first country to go public with its use of the microchip for law-enforcement purposes,” observes VeriChip’s president Keith Bolton. Russia, Switzerland, Venezuela and Colombia have also purchased an undisclosed quantity of chips. And Italy’s Ministry of Health announced last April that it would be putting the chips to use in hospitals as part of a six-month trial.

Makes the NSA look like a bunch of girl scouts doesn’t it?

I didn’t start this blog to be yet another doom sayer, but this whole bloody mess is getting out of hand.

My initial source for the above is, Stop the FTAA, which is affiliated with the John Birch Society, but I checked the data with Hacer and The Register and it is essentially correct.

This is a site I found by accident. Quote Garden.
They have quotes on almost any subject, but I found reading the section on freedom to be a bit disturbing in light of current events and our so called leaders actions.

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. ~Daniel Webster

Well I see the Google desktop is progressing as expected. In beta 3 they want you to put your data and you browser history on their servers so you can search your desktop from any computer, anywhere. Can you say Keyword search?
You might want to read the google watch blog .
Your surfing habits are worth their weight in anything, and the ability for the Government to check out your habits and your data…priceless.
Not to mention offering a target that hackers simply will not be able to resist.

Under their old privacy agreement,Google states that no data was ever sent to google .
Just a thought, but, Ya know, the machine I have the google desktop search on sure does generate a lot of traffic.
Does anybody besides me remember when M$ denied emphatically that it was collecting personal data back in the days of Win98, until that guy out of Spain showed the world the file where they were storing said data.

These guys are not there to make your life easier, they’re there to make themselves richer.
It’s all about selling, and the best way to know what you might buy is to see where you’ve been and what you keep on your machine. Besides, it keeps some bureaucrat over at the NSA from having to get a real job.

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” ~Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759