Las Vegas meta-luck
(Disclosure: I am just not a Las Vegas sort of person.)
I’m at a resort at Las Vegas Lake for the day to give a talk at a company’s annual user meeting. LV Lake, about half an hour from LV, is a built around a long, skinny lake. The place seems to be patterned on Florence, complete with a Ponte Vecchio spanning the lake. Nothing that 400 years and a Renaissance wouldn’t make interesting.
At every intersection in the “village” there are small water fountains, about half the size of a kid’s wading pool, with little spritzes of water shooting up from them. At least they architects didn’t go into full Trevi Emulation Mode when designing them. The amazing thing to me is that into every one of these pools visitors have thrown some coins. So, we can now add to the table of equivalences: Gambling in a Las Vegas casino = Walking through a Las Vegas casino with a hole in your pocket = Leaving a tip for a mobster = Losing your wallet = Throwing money into a Las Vegas fountain.
Actually, I’m assuming the coins in these fountains came from tourists. Maybe they’re seed coins placed there by the casinos. But if they’re real, they’re a form of meta-gambling: Toss money into the water so that hyou’ll have better luck tossing money into slot machines. In fact, as the world turns more meta, here’s a meta-gambling ploy I’m surprised the casinos haven’t hit on yet:
The only place I could get breakfast agt 6am this morning was in a casino. On the way out, I tried to find a slot machine into which I could put a quarter, because the reptilian portion of my brain responded to the twinkling lights. But the machines only take bills or vouchers. And since they pay out only in a voucher you redeem for money — bring back the analog cash! — they let you bet uneven increments. Anyway, let’s say you buy a $100 voucher. Why not have some slot machines next to the cashier that don’t pay out in money but instead increase your odds at the other machines? Meta-gambling!
(Someone please inform Captain Copyright and his good friend Reichsmarschall Patent that I own this idea. Thank you.)
