I'm posting this this from Vegas, where I've spent four days locked in a hotel room at the Fiesta, battling a deadline. I'm winning, but not without a lot of bloodshed.
The Fiesta is a "locals'" place with a big casino and a small hotel — 200 rooms, which is the minimum a casino-hotel can have and fulfill certain rules 'n' regs of operation. In other words, they have the hotel only so they can have the casino. Their website may or may not still promise that all rooms have "internet access, email access, dataports," as it did when I booked my room. Turned out, they have none of those. They've been planning to install something of the sort but at the moment, it means each room has a phone…and in order to log in for my e-mail, I had to crawl under the bed and unplug the wall jack. They may change the site since I called the (ahem) discrepancy to their attention but a desk clerk told me that info's been up for months and I'm the first to mention it.
There are a lot of these "locals'" establishments, most of them far from the Strip and most offer great gaming rules and great food. The buffet at the Fiesta is terrific, the one across the street at Texas Station is even better…and my buddies Steve Gerber and Steff Osborne took me to the one at the Suncoast, which is outstanding. Many of these places for some reason have western themes and most have either a bowling alley or a movie theater, though they rarely have showrooms. And the thing they really lack is a line of taxis out front since, as I said, they're mainly for Vegas residents and such folks have their own vehicles. But as a place to just "get away," spots like the Fiesta are perfect. Unless you have your heart set on the promised "internet access."
Sunday night, I was in the casino at the Plaza downtown when a fire alarm went off. I've always heard that in Vegas, when an alarm goes off, not one person even considers budging from the crap table or slot machine. It turns out this rumor is true.
Lastly, after the first four weeks of XFL Football scored overnight ratings of — in this order — 10.3, 5.1, 3.8 and 2.9, a friend at NBC e-mailed me that they'd touched bottom, couldn't go any lower and would now rebound. Week #5 then got a 2.7. Before I leave Vegas, I'm going to visit a Sportsbook and see if they're accepting bets on the XFL…not on which teams will win but if the ratings will get even worse.