Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

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Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times …

Ah, me. Here I live and work in the world’s biggest and glitziest adult playground, and somebody has gone and turned off the water, lights, and heat.

Well, not literally.

Still, much jazz and razzamatazz has left this jumpin’ joint in the Mojave Desert since the economic angst shut down Las Vegas’s mad, mad, mad building boom. I am not speaking of any of my old joints shutting down, mind you.

Only a couple of years ago the Strip used to be a high-wire act in “construction plaid.” What do I mean by “plaid,” besides that dead men do not wear it?

Picture this. For months the usual burning blue Vegas sky framed tall, thin, vertical condo towers—“every room with a view”—rising thanks to the high, wide, and horizontal lines of construction cranes.

They are both still there, mind you. Just dormant, sort of like me taking an ultralong Sunday nap.

This halted construction “plaid” has ruined the town’s once-so-dramatic helicopter-sweep vista, if you ask me. CSI: Las Vegas shows use old stock film when the scripts call for an aerial pan up Las Vegas Boulevard, aka the famous Strip. And the last venerable hotels that would be imploding to make way for the latest multibillion-dollar construction project are still standing proud and being marketed as bargains now that “exclusive” and “expensive” are looking mighty “expendable” in a lot of folks’ budgets.

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