The Show is UP: Don Rickles

Here's the latest show, which iTunes or Zune subscribers have had for days. Click on the date below to get it to play or right-click on it to download it to listen at your leisure. Enjoy. -sf

Oct. 18: A Very Rickles Friessmas

Rickles. His name is synonymous with the so-called insult comic, a label he alternately embraces and cringes over. He is, he insists, a whole lot more than that. For one thing, his voice is in this year’s top-grossing movie of the year, Toy Story III. Don Rickles is our guest this hour, discussing the late Tony Curtis, the pranks Sinatra and the boys played on him, how he first got to Vegas and how other so-called insult comics like Brad Garrett learned the craft from him. Also, find out where his toughest Vegas gig took place.

In banter: Zipline mania, Hoover Dam bridge mania, Harrah’s mania and more.

Links to Stuff Discussed:

Don Rickles’ website, we think
Zipline on Fremont Street
Steve’s story breaking the zipline at Gadling.Com
Yelp on the Triple George in downtown Vegas
Steve’s AOL News piece on the hula hoop controversy at Fremont Street Experience
VegasHappensHere.Com on the original Excalibur-zipline rumor
A photo of the Slots-a-Fun carpeting in our neighbors’ garage floor
Steve’s coverage of the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge and blog pictorial
A photo of the mammoth line outside the Pawn Stars shop
VegasHappensHere.Com on Harrah’s trifecta: the Petstay program, Wait Wait coming to Vegas and the All-Access Pass
Steve’s Las Vegas Weekly column on the Chip Lightman lawsuit regarding Donny & Marie
Tom Breitling left the Wynn month ago
Vegas native TJ Lavin’s big BMX accident in Vegas
Go here to sign up for a chance to meet Barack Obama
A link to what “eminence grise” means
Howard Schwartz’s podcast, The Gamblers Book Shop show
Get “Foul Play” on DVD on Amazon.Com

Breaking Exclusive: Fremont St Zipline Opens Friday

A couple hours ago on Gadling.Com, I broke a pretty fun one: By this Friday, the folks behind the Bootleg Canyon Flightlines attraction in Boulder City are slated to open a zipline that launches into the Fremont Street Experience from the plaza to the east of it with all that cool restored neon.

The Fremont Street Flightline is expected to go about 800 feet to the center of the Fremont Street Experience outside of the Four Queens and right by the main performance stage. See where Greenheart LLC owner Ian Green is standing by the pink X above to your right? That's where the landing platform is planned to stand.

If you look carefully at the top photo, you'll see the folks in the foreground with a tape measure, mapping out the location of the tower from which riders will leap from 60 feet and swing down to 14 feet up. Folks will buy their tickets ($15 from 2-6 pm, $20 from 6 pm to midnight) at an office on the ground level (the former office for condos at Streamline, in fact) and then ascend to the top floor of the FSE parking garage to get to the launch pad.

Greenheart LLC is spending $150,000 on a temporary four-line system that will hurtle folks a relatively genteel 20-25 mph over the FSE crowds and under the canopy. Yes, you'll be able to fly during the light show itself, although they're planning to time rider launches so that you go over Fourth Street when traffic is stopped at that light as a safety precaution.

If it goes well, Greenheart and FSE will go before the Las Vegas City Council for approval for a permanent attraction that they hope will span the entire length of FSE and land roughly in front of the Plaza Hotel. They got a 90-day temporary permit on Monday, just in time to get the thing up and running for Green's big Halloween idea -- a broom-racing championship. After that, he's looking at outfitting the lines with reindeers and such depending on the time of year.

Could be a lot of fun and definitely could bring a new crowd to downtown. My biggest concern is that the price is way too low and will result in very, very long lines. That will discourage people on the Strip from coming down. I wonder if some sort of a number or reservation or appointment system might not bring people down there and then set them loose in the casinos and such until it's their time.

I reminded Fremont president Jeff Victor that his folks contend that hula-hooping on the plaza is hazardous and distracting to tourists and could cripple old people and want that dastardly deed outlawed. I'll play his prickly response to that on Saturday's episode of "The Strip."

Unlike the Boulder City attraction, where the attendants are willing to shoot your photos and such for free, Cashman Photo will be shooting pictures of riders on the line and selling them at their kiosks. Green hopes the visibility will spur more interest in the Boulder City attraction which is, by the by, awesome. Here was my YouTube video from my day out there with my friend Trevor:

Next up, they hope: the long-discussed zipline at Excalibur. Hear on this coming weekend's episode of "The Strip" where Green might go, too.

[h/t to Sparky of LV.]

A Zipline for...Excalibur?

I didn't want this to get buried in the other post about the Bootleg Canyon Flightlines, but during my interview with Ryan Geene, the manager of the attraction, he revealed that Greenheart LLC, which owns it is in negotiations with Excalibur to build one there, too.

They two sides are in early negotiations, but one issue, Geene acknowledged, is that they still want tourists to want to come to Boulder City to ride that system. Here's what he told me:

"We’re trying to see if we do one line, a teaser line, so you fly out and when you get off there’s a kiosk where you can sign up to go do the real deal out in Bootleg Canyon. ... But it would have to be exciting, too. If it's just a slow line, it’s no fun, why would you want to do a boring thing? So it would have to be exciting and leave you wanting more."

Geene said they're scoping out places to erect the steel cables, maybe "somewhere above the drawbridge where you walk in so you’re flying over everybody as they’re walking in."

He also said they're talking to the Hualapai Indian tribe in northwest Arizona. They're the ones who built the Grand Canyon Skywalk and they're always looking for new things to build to give tourists more to do. Also, because the Hualapai aren't beholden to the environmental regulations on their portion of the Grand Canyon that the US Parks Service are, there's more opportunity to create a zipline across some portion of the big hole. That said, it doesn't strike me that ziplines are all that harsh on the environment but I doubt the U.S. government would permit it given that they reject most everything else including the Skywalk.

Anyhow, more of these things are coming.

A Day On The Zipline

I've got a story to write for a regional publication on the Bootleg Canyon Flightlines attraction in the hills outside of Boulder City. I took a break from a busy week of MJ-benefit-mania on Thursday to ride it with my friend Trevor. For those unfamiliar, a zipline is steel cable that you glide -- sometimes pretty fast -- down while attached by a harness. These things...


hold what we're attached to. See?


Boulder City, as I reported in my New York Times piece earlier this year, is repositioning itself as an outdoor-adventure hub and this attraction from Greenheart LLC part of that. I'm not a person who likes roller coasters or bungee jumps or anything involving being nauseated, so I was very nervous about this until I got in the harness and hung from the line waiting to be launched. It all feels very secure and 10,000 tourists have done it so far without any injury.

Part of it involved carrying our equipment up part of the hill, which had these views of Lake Mead and the Strip respectively:


Bootleg Canyon is so named because bootleggers would distill alcohol for residents of Boulder City, where liquor was still outlawed even after Prohibition ended in the 1930s. Today, it's known as one of the nation's top places to go mountain biking. Here's some of the ramps and stuff they have.


The deal with Boulder City was that the city gets $10 from every tourist fee on the zipline. Greenheart also gives $2 to a conservation group that cares for the hills. Greenheart has also build ziplines in Haiti, Canada and San Diego, although none have four runs except the Vegas one. You can visit BCFlightlines.Com for more on how long each line is; I can't recall.

I was pretty nervous on that first leap, but it was just so exhilarating and such a stress releaser! Two of the four lines have negative grades at various points and Trevor and I ended up not going fast enough to hit the platform because we encountered very stiff wind. As a result, as you can see in this 4-minute YouTube movie I made, we drifted back and had to be towed in later:



Much of that video was shot by the Bootleg Canyon staff. That was something fascinating to me, that they don't try to soak you by taking your $150 a person for the experience and then charge you for pictures and videos and stuff like that. The guides are only too happy to shoot with your camera as many times as you like. I can't recall that kind of customer service at any similar attraction I've done of this ilk.

My camera battery was dead, but Trevor has lots of photos and has set up a Flickr photo album that you can browse. Here's a fun one of him taken by me...


...and of me taken by him!