5/6/2005
The following is a guest column by Brian G.
Summer in Las Vegas can be brutal — hard on your body, hard on your vehicle. And these days, having to drive all over the place to pick up bounce-back cash from casinos, it’s good to know how to avoid the worst of the heat. Here are my top-ten tips for keeping (relatively) cool June through September.
10) Leave early; come back late. Pretty obvious, but you can usually do one or the other. Keep in mind that summer days are usually at their hottest around 4 pm.
9) Drink lots of water! Purified is better than tap. Keep a big container of drinking water in your car for emergencies.
8) If you must exercise outside, do it early or late. Keep your hair cut shorter. Walk in the shade. Carry water with you. Use sunscreen. Wear sunglasses. Wear lightweight cotton light-colored clothing.
7) Properly maintain your vehicle. Make sure the battery, cooling system, and a/c are in good shape, you have your oil, oil filter, and air filter changed regularly, and your tires are in good shape and properly inflated. Have your belts and hoses checked or replaced before the summer heat begins. Having your car break down when it’s 110 out is no fun! Keep a can of flat fixer in your trunk, maybe a roll of duct tape, too!
6) Always keep your cell phone with you for emergencies. Make sure its battery is charged! Subscribe to some sort of 24-hour roadside service, and have its number programmed into your cell phone.
5) If the cooling system in your car is in good shape, and if your a/c starts blowing warm air when you are stopped in traffic, slipping it into neutral and raising the engine speed a bit will turn the compressor faster and cool down the air blowing into your car. Do not do this if your temperature gauge is close to “”hot,”” or if it heads that way rapidly when you raise the engine revs! Make sure your a/c is set on “”re-circulate.””
4) Park in the shade, or in a covered parking lot or garage! Getting into a 160-degree car is a terrible thing to have to do! Not only is it extremely uncomfortable, but your a/c will take forever to cool the car down. Better to park in the shade and have to walk a bit than to park in the sun right by the door. You will cool down quickly once you get indoors; your poor car is stuck outside.
3) If you must park your car in the sun, use sunshades, reflectors, or anything that blocks out the sun from shining onto the interior of the car. At the very least, put a white towel or cloth over your steering wheel and shifter knob so you don’t burn your hands on them!
2) If you must park in the sun on a regular basis, when you buy a new car (or get the one you have repainted) get a light color with a light interior. Everything else being equal, the interior of a white car can stay as much as 20 degrees cooler than that of a black car. Also, a dull finish absorbs more heat than a shiny finish, so keep your car clean and waxed.
1) Use good judgment. Walking a couple of miles might be easy for you in November; in July it could kill you. Always keep in mind the dangers of really hot days.
5/13/2005
This just in from a Rio insider: “Yes, we know paying only even money on blackjacks in our bikini-dealer pit is a terrible deal for the customer. We decided to try it as an experiment, and if there were many complaints or business dropped off, we were planning to quickly put it back up to 6/5. But business is still booming at even money – so why change?” Hey, what if everyone in casinos all over the world would stop playing 6/5 for just one week?
From an Internet bulletin board, discussing the super new-member slot club promotion the Westin Casuarina Casino ran awhile back, giving $600 in free play for a buy-in of $300: “Some pros recruited players from a pool hall to go in and sign up. The pros took the bonus and gave the players beer and cigarette money. Another player went in with what looked liked a 35-year family reunion. They had enough relatives to play ‘Family Feud.’ Hey, where was Richard Dawson?” Some people with “insider friends” were throwing around huge figures (like a half-million, several million) for the loss sustained by the casino during this two-day disaster for them.
My sister was in town at the time I heard about this promotion and I figured we’d take her there to join up. But I, of all people who know better, procrastinated and she got shut out. I need to re-read my own books!
Headline: “IGT launches 1-cent Megabucks.” I don’t get it – the max bet to get the top jackpot of this “penny” progressive, beginning at $10 million, is 300 pennies. The original Megabucks is a dollar machine with a max bet needed of $3. DUH!!! Do they think we’re too dumb to figure out that 300 pennies is $3? And speaking of dumb and dumber, my friend Deke Castleman, senior editor of Huntington Press who checked out the new machines, says, “”The max bet’s the same as regular Megabucks, but there’s a million ways to play short coin.””
Brad always did believe that casinos pumped something –- maybe more oxygen? — into the air in casinos that kept customers playing longer. I was dubious. But recently I read about a company that since 1991 has been installing environmental-aroma systems in the air-conditioning ductwork of casinos, more than 30 of them in Las Vegas and Reno. They call their fragrance blends Aromatic Symphonies –- kind of like the Bellagio Fountains without the water.
And now here are a couple of stories of which I’d like to know the rest.
I just read one of the strangest gambling items I have ever heard tell of, in Casino Player: “In Weston, West Virginia, population 4,300, Mayor Jon Tucci wants to convert a former insane asylum into a $300 million hotel-casino.” I’m still deciding whether to laugh or ponder deeply about whether this just might be appropriate!
And from Fantini’s Gaming Morning Report: “Vandals glued shut the doors to 25 betting shops in Australia prior to the running of the Melbourne Cup, the nation’s biggest horse race, Reuters reported. They used quick-drying glue. Seems appropriate, given the proverbial fate of old horses.”
5/20/2005
Brad is always looking for subject material for me to use in this column, especially about “real life” in Las Vegas. But this time he outdid himself. Actually, he wasn’t looking for this particular story; rather, it came to him, abruptly, as he was cruising in the Frugal Silver Bullet down the same quiet neighborhood street he travels almost daily to the post office, just a few blocks from our condo. He was driving slowly, as he often sees police cars lurking about in this area on the lookout for speeders.
Suddenly, in a where-are-the-police-when-you-need-them second, he heard a loud boom and felt intense pressure against his chest. It took a few seconds for him to realize that his airbag had inflated and the van was sliding across the intersection. After the vehicle stopped moving, it took him a few more seconds to figure out what happened. His first major clue was the badly damaged car sitting some yards down the street from him. All he could think was: “Where did that car come from? I’d looked both ways before entering the intersection!”
Then it dawned on him: He’d entered the twilight zone inhabited by Vegas drivers who think stop signs and red lights are just suggestions. The other driver had barreled down the cross street so fast, not seeing (or ignoring) his stop sign, that he was never in sight when Brad, who had no stop sign, approached and started through the intersection.
Fortunately, Brad was broadsided on the passenger side rather than the driver side of the van, and he suffered no injuries, except some chest bruises where the airbag and seatbelt left their marks. The two people in the other vehicle were lucky. In spite of two big curved recesses in the shatterproof windshield where their heads had bumped (no seat belts on), they had relatively minor injuries, although they were taken to the hospital by ambulance. Neither vehicle came out so well, though. Both totaled.
We can now tell you about Vegas police reports (lengthy), Vegas towing companies (complex details), Vegas car-repair companies (highly complex details), and Vegas insurance adjusters, who aren’t simple to deal with either.
I was already drowning in the above paperwork when insult was added to injury a few days later. The rental car our insurance company had arranged for us was stolen right out of our parking slot in the condo parking area! More lengthy police reports and notary visits and the complexities of a second insurance claim in five days!
We finally went out and bought another vehicle after continuing our Vegas real-life research project at car dealers and the DMV, plodding through more official red tape to make our little plum-colored PT Cruiser street legal.
Now, after almost a month since the accident, we’re finally crawling out from under the stacks of documents the whole affair generated. We’re more knowledgeable about business in Las Vegas than we ever cared to be. But all’s well that ends well. We got to keep our FRUGAL license plate. And we drive the Frugal Plum with a fairly secure feeling — we’ve got extra turbo power to get out of the way of reckless drivers, plus side airbags. But we trust Vegas drivers even less than we ever did, which wasn’t much, and I notice Brad slows down a bit at every intersection.
We’re looking forward to a vacation away from Vegas traffic this weekend, when we will be in Canada, at Casino Windsor, where I’m speaking at seminars during a Gambler’s Jamboree. Hope to see some of you fellow frugal gamblers there!
5/27/2005
We’re home from the Gambler’s Jamboree at Casino Windsor, having flown free round-trip Vegas-Detroit on Northwest tickets bought with travel vouchers for $600 earned from a bump on a flight in January. Northwest is becoming a favorite airline of ours: We were bumped twice on this trip to Detroit, for a total of $1,200 in travel vouchers. We were offered a choice of vouchers or two sets of round-trip tickets to any U.S. city to which Northwest has service. We were advised by the agent not to take the free tickets because of many restrictions in their use. We’d already decided to take the vouchers anyway, since we can usually find a fare for less than $300 for a round-trip ticket to any city where we might want to fly, and we’d also earn frequent-flyer miles with the tickets bought with the vouchers. You don’t earn FF miles on free tickets.
We were bumped both times at the start of our trip in Vegas. The first time there were no seats on any flights the rest of the day, so we were able to go back to the condo and sleep in our own bed and return to the airport the next morning, scheduled on the same flight as the day before. Fortunately, we’d planned to arrive a day early for the Jamboree anyway, so we were able to adapt to this delay.
The second morning when we arrived for our rescheduled flight, we volunteered again when the gate agent called for volunteers. This time we could get out in the afternoon, although this meant a late arrival in Detroit and an even later arrival at Casino Windsor. I had to speak at a seminar the next morning at 10:30 a.m. But for $600 we figured we could catch some zzzz’s on the plane and take a nap in the afternoon the next day to catch up on our sleep.
We had about a five-hour wait until our afternoon flight. We thought about popping down to Ellis Island, which is not far from the airport. It was a 5x-points day and we can always get a comped meal there. In addition, we were planning to play there at least one Friday this month anyway to keep up our level of play to get our usual bounce-back checks. However, we would’ve had to get our car out of the garage, then come back to the airport early enough to go through security again, with the lines being extremely long that day. It was going to be a very busy and tiring proposition.
But to be totally honest with you, my dear readers, there was an even more important reason why we decided against this plan: We just didn’t have the stomach to risk losing what might be even much more than the $1,200 we’d just scored with Northwest. Now, you may think this was silly of us. If you know us at all, you might tell us that you know that we often lose much more than $1,200 many days that we play video poker. I know that –- and it’s quite possible that we’ll lose that much or more playing at Ellis Island this week. However, that won’t bother us. You say this doesn’t make sense.
Yes, we are skilled. Yes, we are experienced. Yes, we have an adequate bankroll to play at the levels we do. But we are only human –- and our feelings don’t always follow our logical minds!
So I asked the gate agent for a food comp, which he was glad to give us, and we had a nice leisurely meal in the airport. Then I got out my laptop and worked on my current writing project. Brad read the newspaper and some magazines and snoozed a bit. It was a relaxing afternoon. And when we finally got on a plane, we had a nice relaxing flight in first class, an extra perk from a grateful airline and one of our favorite comps!