Tag Archives: las vegas

HONORING CONFEDERATES ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES.

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The University of Nevada Rebels. Confederate statues are being removed from college campuses all over the United States, but what about their sports teams and mascots? Have you ever heard of Hey Reb? The official nickname of the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) is The Rebels, and the team’s mascot is Hey Reb. Whenever I go to Las Vegas, I see people wearing Hey Reb t-shirts. I also see them at gift shops at the airport and in hotels. Hey Reb is an old Confederate soldier with a huge white mustache. Hey Reb is often depicted carrying a Civil War era rifle. He sometimes also has a cannon. But why?! Nevada was a Union state, and slavery was never legal in Nevada. During the Civil War, Nevada Territory contributed significantly to the Union war effort. The 1860s was the height of the Comstock Lode, the biggest concentration of silver ever found in one place in all of history. The mines in and around Virginia City shipped hundreds of millions of dollars in silver back east to finance the Union war effort. Nevada was admitted into the Union in late October 1864, one week before the presidential election. There weren’t enough people living in Nevada at the time to qualify it for statehood, but Nevada was admitted into the Union anyway in order to give Lincoln a few more electoral votes. So, considering its history, why is the mascot of UNLV an old Confederate soldier? In 2016, after a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina; the UNLV student newspaper changed its name from ‘The Rebel Yell’ to ‘The Scarlet & Gray Free Press’, but that was as far as they were willing to go. The majority of the players on UNLV’s football team are black. What do you suppose those black football players are thinking when they win a game and then a guy runs out onto the field dressed up like an old white Confederate soldier to congratulate them and do a victory dance?

Update: The University of Nevada Las Vegas has just announced that they are considering replacing Hey Reb with a new mascot. Well, I have a suggestion. I think that their new mascot should be named Hey Sucker! Hey Sucker! would be a bankrupt gambler with his pockets out to show that there is nothing in them. Hey Sucker! could be of any race. Las Vegas casinos will accept the life savings of anyone, regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. They are very democratic about that. What do you think of my idea?

LAS VEGAS REALLY IS GETTING HOTTER.

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I recently returned from a convention in Las Vegas. It was 110 degrees every day I was there. A lot of long-time visitors to Las Vegas say that it seems that Las Vegas is getting hotter, but most of them assume that its just their imagination. It isn’t. Las Vegas really is getting hotter. According to the U.S. Weather Service, the average daily temperature in Las Vegas has risen by 6 degrees since 1970. That is a very big increase for 50 years. You might assume that this is because of global warming, but that isn’t the reason. Las Vegas is what climatologists call a ‘heat island’. In 1940, the population of Las Vegas was just 8,000. When I first visited Las Vegas in 1970, the population of the city was a little over 100,000. Today, the Las Vegas metro area is home to 2 million people, and the temperature has risen with the population. Here’s why:

1.    Building materials. As the city grew, more and more of the desert was covered with concrete, asphalt, and buildings. Buildings and paving materials absorb heat during the day and release that heat more slowly than the sandy desert that they covered over.

2.    Color. The desert around Las Vegas is mostly light-colored sand, which reflects much of the sunlight that falls on it back into outer space. However, the streets of Las Vegas are covered with asphalt, which is black, and there are tens of thousands of houses in Las Vegas covered with dark colored roofs, which also absorb heat.

3.    The air. As the city grew, so did the number of automobiles, trucks, and smokestacks. When Las Vegas was a small town, the air was thin and clean. Now the air is much denser and full of smog. The air in Las Vegas now absorbs more heat than the air in the desert around it.

What is happening in Las Vegas is also happening in Phoenix and several other fast-growing cities in the southwest. Some long-term real estate investors (including people I know) will not invest in Las Vegas. It can take 15 to 20 years to recover the cost of building an apartment house, and what will the climate in Las Vegas be like then? What will the air be like? What will the traffic be like? Will tourists still want to visit there if the average daily temperature in summer is 120 or 130 degrees? Las Vegas is heading in that direction now. I’ve been in Las Vegas when it was so hot that you could get a first-degree burn by touching something made out of metal, and that happened to me. I once tripped on the sidewalk in front of Circus Circus and put my hand on an aluminum lamppost to break my fall, and I burned my hand. Now, I don’t touch anything outdoors in Las Vegas that is made out of metal on hot days unless it is in the shade.

THE LAS VEGAS MONORAIL.

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This is the stupidest mass transit system in the U.S. The Las Vegas monorail runs behind the big hotels on the east side of the Las Vegas Strip; however, the majority of the big hotels are on the west side of the Strip and set back from the street. As a result, monorail stations are a long walk from most hotels. For example, from the entrance of Caesar’s Palace to the Caesar’s Palace Monorail Station is over 1/2 mile. From the Mirage, the monorail station across the street is over a mile away. How many tourists and convention goers are going to walk that far? But the route isn’t the stupidest thing about the monorail. The stupidest thing about the Las Vegas Monorail is that it ends across the street from the airport. The last station on the monorail is the MGM Grand hotel. From the MGM, you can see the airport across the street, but you can’t get there on the monorail, and you can’t walk there either. The entrance is on the opposite side of the airport, almost 2 miles away. The reason that the monorail doesn’t go into the airport is because the taxi and limo drivers in Las Vegas objected to the monorail going into the airport; however, the investors decided to go ahead and build it anyway. This is another example of: ‘What were they thinking?’ Predictably, the Las Vegas monorail went bankrupt after just a couple of years of operation, and there is still no plan to extend the monorail into the airport across the street from the last station.