Month: May 2011

Day Thirty Three: Mandarin Oriental (Comped)

8 am, London time and I’m sitting in the ‘bite.’ coffee shop in the arrivals hall of Heathrow airport, eating an egg and cress sandwich.

It’s a little more than 17 hours, including the New York layover, since I left Las Vegas. I’m tired, disorientated by the time change, and the portion sizes here are weird; like going back to your childhood classroom and finding all the chairs have shrunk.

My final few days on the Strip were a curious whirl of press — TV, radio, magazines, newspapers of various stripes — all of whom asked the same question in a different way: how has 33 days in Las Vegas changed my opinion of the city?

An amusing thought occurred to me as I stood outside Caesars Palace, talking to Fox5’s Elizabeth Watts: there’s probably no other city on earth in which a man wanting to stay an entire month would constitute headline news. But Vegas, of course, is unlike any city on earth: it’s a place where, so the popular narrative goes, out-of-towners like me fly in in our millions, drink our body-weight in alcohol, accidentally fuck a hooker and go home with enough “crazy” stories to get us through the rest of the year.…

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32 nights in 32 hotels; the finish line is so close I can almost bite it. Just one night still to go, at the Mandarin Oriental, and my month-and-a-bit in Las Vegas will be over.

Of course, technically speaking I’ve failed in my stated goal: to stay a single night in every hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. For reasons I’ve already written about — and talked about — at length, I skipped out of the Palazzo, replacing my night there with one at the M Resort. I mean, I could argue a technicality: the Venetian (where I did stay) and the Palazzo share a check in and booking process, and an entrance, so technically I could argue that they’re the same hotel. But I won’t. I don’t care. What I care about is that I made it through 33 nights, staying a single night at a different hotel. And I lived to tell the tale.

Not only that, but I’ve enjoyed every second of it. Even during my horrible check-in experience at the Riviera; even during the darkest, unfunniest moment of Criss Angel’s show; even during the resulting half-hour phone call from his show’s publicist during which she insisted I’d been grossly unfair to Angel — even during all of that, I haven’t once been bored.…

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Day Thirty One: Vdara ($109)

The last thing the world needs is another person writing about how terrible Criss Angel’s Believe show at the Luxor is. Instead, then, I’ve decided to do today’s diary entry as a video. In which I talk about how terrible Criss Angel’s Believe show at the Luxor is.

If you’re looking for a snappy rant, this isn’t for you. Instead it’s twelve and a half minutes of me venting my frustration at everything that’s wrong with bad Las Vegas magicians, and everything that’s right — by contrast — with Penn & Teller’s show at the Rio.

The too long, didn’t watch summary: Criss Angel’s show is a disgrace, his use of stooges is beneath contempt, I feel sorry for Cirque Du Soleil (who co-produced the show) like one feels sorry for the long-suffering wife of a complete dickhead — and you should see Penn & Teller instead.

Video below…

Untitled from Paul Carr on Vimeo.

Quick note: in the video I say I can’t believe that Angel’s show cost $100 million to put on. I checked. It did.

Day Twenty Seven: The M Resort (Comp)

If I were prone to Trumpian flights of conspiracy fantasy, my paranoia would have been off the charts on Thursday night. Not twelve hours after I quoted a representative of Culinary 226 describing Venetian boss Sheldon Adelson as “a horrible human being”, I checked in at Mr Adelson’s flagship hotel and — well — it seems revenge is a dish best served offline.

For a start, the Venetian screwed up my booking: I had planned to stay a single night each in the Venetian and the Palazzo; Thursday and Friday. In fact, when I arrived at 9 p.m. on Thursday I found I had actually been booked into both hotels on the same night. To make matters even worse the person at the front desk was unable to fix the error, leading to the irritating possibility that my credit card would be charged as a no-show for the second room. Cool!

By the time I gave up trying to remedy the booking snafu, it was already heading close to 10 p.m., and I had to be up at 4:30 a.m. the next day to be on television. That barely gave me time to bash out a couple of already overdue columns and grab a couple of hours sleep before my wake up call.…

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