Luxor Revisted

The Luxor, written about here before, I believe in February, and it's swift decline in quality being reported on, is still on the downswing. We stayed there the four days before Jesusmas because the bargain rate was in progress. However the bargain rate, it turns out, has a lot of hidden costs. One of them is the "resort fee." Which is political mud-talk for "room rate." So the room rate was whatever it was plus the additional room rate which was another handful of money. Plus some tax. Nevada must make billions in taxes every year but doesn't do anything with it. Except for Las Vegas and Reno - built by the Mob - Nevada is all desert. So I guess it just goes into the elected officials' pockets. Not a bad deal. I think the only thing the State of Nevada operates is a jail system. Apparently a lot of people go there because Las Vegas itself has only well-behaved people in it. I guess all the rest are in a Nevada jail. To return to the Luxor, the "bargain" rates only apply to the pyramidal building. Not to the two more-conventional straight up and down additions built later. We were on the 25th floor. Up that high in a hollow pyramid the perimeter of the floor is a lot shorter than if you are on the 3rd floor. You are up in the "nose" or the top of the "cone." You cannot see the casino floor from up there because the casino has a floor built over it at about the level of "story 3" that covers all of the casino and houses a really brutally ordinary food court with about 5 varieties of low-grade fast food and some stores selling Luxor shit that are never open, and the "theaters" which house Carrot Top, the ugliest and freakiest and most unhumorous comedian on earth, a topless show that is, well, a topless show, and Chris Angel, a magician who never wears a shirt and pretends to be a rock guitar player by wearing the uniform of a Motley Crue or Poison band member, two groups that suck and that nobody remembers. This level also has a carnival booth that sells videos of tourists pretending to be on a flying carpet that is then computer-installed into a
previously-produced amalgam of scenes from the strip filmed from ground level and from helicopter level. The tourists are placed on a slightly rotating piece of wood or something covered in green and in a green environment the size of a kitchen and a man yells at them with a microphone and tells them what to do on the carpet so that when them and the previously-filmed backrounds are put together it looks like they are interacting with the town. It's wild. It's zany. It's goofy, happy fun. So these pathetic Persians, fat Mexicans, and nerdy zany Hindus, they have to fall, and lean, and bounce around, all the while the man with the mike is yelling at them to "fall down!" and then he screams "whoaaaaaaaaa!" real loud to kind of get an energy level going. I don't know if it works with the Mexicans but at 11 oclock at night it gets the energy levels of the people on the 25th floor going pretty good. The sound from the bottom of the Luxor Pyramid bounces around in the upper cone of the building really really effectively! There is also a 24 hour loop of elevator music that plays along a roofless corridor that leads to the Mandalay Bay walkway that can be heard a lot clearer at 4 AM than it can be heard at 3 in the afternoon. All the tobacco smoke from the past 20 years of the Luxor's existence is still floating around in the upper cone of the building. Not that I care myself, but it ain't what I would call
a luxury smell in an allegedly upscale hotel. The Luxor staff of dilapidated "guards" who are all dressed in baggy black uniforms and look sloppier than dirt-poor, white-wrinkle-shirted, gold-braided, epaulet-festooned Scientologists, go apefire with anger if they see you taking pictures in the huge sign-in lobby. No picture-taking anywhere in the Luxor my friend. I don't care if you traveled here from the Andromeda Galaxy to see the place and spend your fortune at the slot machines, no photos. This is the Luxor, my naive friend, the pesthole of the Strip, and we do NOT want anyone to see what it looks like before paying. And even then you can't take pictures. The only ones who obey the guards are the ones being actually humiliated by them. Meanwhile all around the shocked areas of guest-humiliation ten million other people are all taking pictures. But one of THEM will be next to come under attack. Meanwhile all the others will continue taking pictures. None of the restaurants are open at the Luxor. There are bright signs everywhere telling you to eat here or there but when you go here or there the places are empty and there are no signs telling you why or for how long. I assume they are empty because Luxor staff is lazy and that they will remain closed for eternity or until the lazy Luxor staff rouses itself to action. The Tacos&Tequilas was closed, Company was closed, The Cat House was closed, Fusia was closed, LAX was closed, but the buffet was full. Good luck getting to eat there, though: they had a "bargain" rate for the buffet: all three meals for one low price of 29.99. So if you already paid, you pretty much better eat there, right? Well, I hope you brought some food in your pants, my frin, because the line for the buffet at mealtime was longer than the hidden-fees list on the hotel receipt. And you can't go somewhere else, pal, you already paid to eat on the other side of the line that you are now standing stock-still in. Tough it out, dude. Like with everything else at the Luxor. Tough it out. It builds character. You want that, don't you? Character? Whatever that is? Well, good. Cause you're gonna get a cloaca full of it at the Luxor. I was walking around outside the Luxor at a place where there were no people, and a gate-bar crashed down onto my head and then went immediately back up again. There were no moving cars in the vicinity. I was the only thing moving. And after the bar hit my head even I stopped moving for a while. For some reason I did not lose my temper. It was like it was being held in check by supernatural means. Very often when I make violent and surprise contact with an inanimate object I destroy the inanimate object. It usually happens before I can even stop to wonder if I should or should not destroy the thing. For some reason I didn't go through this process. I just shook it off and wandered on, wondering why it had happened at all and spent a lot of time conjecturing if demons were pursuing me. Or angry dead human spirits. But i eventually decided that that was a pretty complex and very involved explanation for an event that was probably more likely caused by me tripping an electronic relay, since it was an area for cars and not pedestrians. Still, it would not have happened at the Wynn or the Bellagio or even Circus Circus. However it would and did happen at the Luxor.