Month: June 2007

Gluttony On The (Assisted) March

Countdown to when someone coins the term “douchebuggies” for these slugs in T minus 5, 4, 3…

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AP) — There’s lazy, and then there’s Las Vegas lazy.

In increasing numbers, Las Vegas tourists exhausted by the four miles of gluttony laid out before them are getting around on electric “mobility scooters.”

Don’t think trendy Vespa motorbikes. Think updated wheelchair.

Forking over about $40 a day and their pride, perfectly healthy tourists are cruising around Las Vegas casinos in transportation intended for the infirm.

You don’t have to take a step. You don’t even have to put your drink down.

“It was all the walking,” 27-year-old Simon Lezama said on his red Merits Pioneer 3. Lezama, a trim and fit-looking restaurant manager from Odessa, Texas, rented it on Day 3 of his five-day vacation, “and now I can drink and drive, be responsible and save my feet.”

The Las Vegas Strip is long past its easily walkable days. Casinos alone are nearly the size of two football fields. That doesn’t count the hotel rooms, shopping malls, spas, convention centers, bars and restaurants.

And that’s just inside. For tourists who plan to stroll from one big casino to another, there are crowds, construction sites and long stretches of sun-baked sidewalks between.

A tourist could accidentally get some exercise.

“We’re seeing more and more young people just for the fact that the Strip has gotten so big, the hotels are so large,” said Marcel Maritz, owner of Active Mobility, a scooter rental company whose inventory also includes wheelchairs, crutches and walkers.

Most of those using the scooters are obese, elderly or disabled. But many are young and seemingly fit.

The number of able-bodied renters has grown in the past few years to represent as much as 5 percent of Maritz’s business, he said. The company, which contracts with some casinos, has a fleet of about 300 scooters.

“It makes it a lot easier for people to see everything,” he said.

At full throttle the scooters open up to about 5 mph, though crowded sidewalks allow little opportunity for such speeds. They can go anywhere wheelchairs can — elevators, bars, craps tables — but are banned from streets. They come with a quick operating lesson, an instruction booklet, a horn and a basket.

“At first, I figured it was for handicapped people, but then I saw everybody was getting them. I figured I might as well, too,” Lezama said.

Las Vegas has other transportation options, although each has its problems. The Strip is regularly clogged with cabs and drive-in tourists. A double-decker bus system, dubbed the Deuce, often gets stuck in the mess. A $650 million monorail with stops at eight casinos has been plagued by poor ridership, perhaps because it runs behind the resorts, well off the Strip and out of sight.

Police and casino workers often use bicycles.

Some think it’s unethical

Some find the notion of using a device intended for disabled people unethical.

“It’s the same principle as parking in a handicap spot,” Mike Petillo, 64, a disabled tax accountant who recently visited from New York City.

Several hotel bell desk workers — who handle most of the rental requests from tourists — said they try to discourage people who do not appear to need the scooters from renting. But refusing the self-indulgent is not really an option.

“You can’t really discriminate against anybody,” said Tom Flynn, owner of Universal Mobility. “We don’t require a prescription or an explanation of why they need it.”

Michelle Bailey, a slender, apparently healthy 22-year-old, used a scooter to get around a recent pool tournament at the Riviera hotel-casino. “Four-inch heels,” she explained with a laugh, pointing to her lipstick-red pumps.

But Troy Burgess, a 21-year-old optician visiting from Detroit, said he considers it “immoral” for an able-bodied person to rent wheels. And not only that, but “you probably wouldn’t pick up too many chicks on that scooter.”

Nice to see that jackass use “drink and drive” and “be responsible” in the same sentence. Is it wrong for me to wish that he gets pasted by The Deuce bus while crossing The Strip?

[via Five Hundy By Midnight]

He Is Very Heavily Armed And Legged

williamswatson_twoforprice.pngI’ve run across three different mentions of Johnny Watson in the past twenty-four hours and I need no further signals to fish out Larry Williams & Johnny Watson’s 1967 album Two For The Price Of One and that absurdly amazing album cover. “Mercy Mercy Mercy” is the one song that most people know (though it’s probably the Buckinghams’ later cover), but the winner is the titanic “Too Late” – two minutes twenty of warp speed LA soul that gave those Wigan kids a kick in the head.

Office Naps posts Williams & Watson’s “Nobody” – one of the early psychedelic soul experiment and/or exploitation tracks that followed in the wake of the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today.” Williams & Watson teamed up with none other than David Lindley and his fellow sitar and saz hippies in Kaleidoscope. I had no idea this record existed and my world is significantly better for it. Even odds says that Tarantino is going to mine this (or anything off of the Okeh label) for a future soundtrack. Hell, their story even sounds like a Tarantino movie. Copy/pasting from the Office Naps post:

Larry Williams’s career began in the early ‘50s as a session pianist at Cosimo Matassa’s New Orleans recording studios. He briefly joined Lloyd Price’s band, and thereafter earned a name for himself as an R&B shouter with late ‘50s hits like “Short Fat Fannie,” “Bony Moronie,” “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” on the great Specialty label. In the early ‘60s, Williams relocated to the West Coast, there working as a producer and A&R man for Okeh (Columbia Records’ R&B subsidiary) and a handful of other California labels. Never quite able to revive his early successes as a recording artist, Williams lived out the sort of disreputable life that you expect of the echt R&B musician, succumbing to a gunshot wound in 1980 that, depending on who you ask, was not necessarily self-inflicted.

When Williams’ friend, the multi-instrumentalist Johnny Watson, arrived in early ‘50s Los Angeles, he’d already gigged with Houston bluesmen like Johnny Copeland and Albert Collins. Still in his teens, Watson toiled in Los Angeles as a session guitarist and, a year or two later, he’d begin making – now as Johnny “Guitar” Watson – a string of gutsy R&B singles. These included, amongst many others, the stratospheric 1954 instrumental “Space Guitar,” his autobiographical “Gangster of Love” (re-recorded in 1963 and again in 1978), and his biggest ‘50s hit, the swamp pop-flavored “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights.” Watson would continue recording and performing in the ‘60s in a more uptown, sophisticated soul style. It wouldn’t be until the ‘70s that Watson would finally find his enduring fame, however, with his funky Southern blues persona: the “Gangster of Love.”

In the mid-‘60s Williams and Watson joined briefly together for a few fine duet releases on the Okeh label. There were obvious similarities in their career trajectories up to this point. Both were hardened, Gulf Coast-born R&B musicians. Both maintained ties to the criminal underworld: as a musician, Watson earned money on the side as a pimp (or vice-versa, according to Peter Guralnick), and Williams had a criminal record for dealing drugs and extensive involvement, it was rumored, in prostitution.

While looking for information to post to the recently revived Watson thread on ILX, I ran across a Metafilter post listing some goodies on YouTube – the best being this unreal version of “Gangster Of Love” (the YouTube poster disabled embedding on this, so you might need to go to the page directly)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk31242CnkU[/youtube]

Do not try to apprehend – simply say “it’s cool.”

Watson died in 1996 while on stage in Japan. Apparently, he said that where he wanted to be when it happened.