Alien Brothel to Open; MGM Lion Leaving Town; Bellagio Too Dark on NY Eve
Sci-fi brothel Alien Cathouse to open in Southern Nevada
by Rick Lax
Read more articles like this at the exciting Vegas website www.lasvegasweekly.com
Need more proof that the world will end in 2012? Here you go: Southern Nevada is opening a sci-fi brothel. Alien Cathouse, it’s called, and if there was ever a way to piss off our secret alien overlords, this is it.
It started in comic books. Our hero would fly to some faraway planet where all female aliens were super-hot. Oh, they might have had seven breasts and blue skin, but they were hot nonetheless.
So readers wondered what these alien women looked like without clothes. Enter alien porn. If you’ve surfed the Web for porn in the past decade—people do this, apparently; I wouldn’t know; I’m too busy rescuing orphaned puppies—you’ve probably “accidentally stumbled” across it. So really, an Alien Cathouse—a place where you can pay to have sex with women in alien costumes—was inevitable.
The man designing the sci-fi bordello, of course, is Moonlight Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof. He’s also converting the nearby bar, gas station, and convenience store into an Area 51-themed Alien Travel Center. He’s getting help from his “chief alien design queen,” Heidi Fleiss. Which is probably a mistake. She doesn’t exactly have nerd street cred. And for nerds, if there’s one thing harder than getting a girlfriend, it’s accepting an outsider.
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MGM Closing Lion Habitat
By Delen Goldberg
Article courtesy of www.lasvegassun.com
The MGM Grand is losing its lions. Resort officials announced Wednesday the property’s iconic lion habitat will close permanently Jan. 31.
“That is part of an overall property-wide renovation project,” MGM Resorts spokeswoman Yvette Monet said. “There are going to be significant changes in the casino and hotel.”
MGM officials would not say what will replace the $9 million, 5,000-square-foot, glass-encased structure.
“We’re always assessing our properties to determine how we can provide a new and fresh product to our customers,” Monet said.
MGM Resorts in October began a $160 million remodel of the MGM Grand. Each of the main tower’s 3,570 hotel rooms and 642 suites will receive a makeover, and operators plan to overhaul the property’s casino floor, restaurants, clubs and showrooms. The project is expected to take about a year.
The lion habitat opened in 1999. Twenty lions rotate in and out of the exhibit, where they nap, wrestle and play. Visitors can view them from the perimeter of the habitat or through a glass tunnel that cuts through the exhibit. The free attraction is open daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Come February, the out-of-work lions will return to The Cat House, an 8.5-acre ranch outside Las Vegas where they live with trainer and habitat designer Keith Evans. He cares for 40 lions that have appeared at the hotel at some point in their lives.
Monet said there are no plans to return the lions to a different part of the MGM Grand.
Evans said he found out that the habitat was closing through an email. His contract with the hotel group was due to expire in 2009 but had been extended several times.
“We were just caught off guard,” he said. “I never understand corporate thinking. The lion is the hotel’s logo, but times change I guess, and we’re a free show.”
Evans plans to open The Cat House to the public or to private tour groups. He has received the permits he needs but is still working out operating details.
“To have it open daily requires more employees,” said Evans, who cares for the lions with his wife and 14 workers. “But if you don’t have enough tourists, then it’s an even bigger hit financially.”
As it stands, Evans said, he may have to downsize his operation and let some employees go now that he has lost his contract with MGM. He no longer needs workers to transport the animals to and from the Strip.
The lion has been a part of MGM’s brand for decades, and Evans’ lions are reportedly descendants of Leo, the most recent lion mascot used by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
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NY Eve Power Failures Plague Bellagio
By Dave Berns
Find more at www.vegasinc.com
The west wing of the Bellagio’s main tower had intermittent power outages throughout the afternoon and early evening Saturday, leading to the New Year’s Eve day closure of the buffet and the loss of power to
several hundred hotel rooms, said Gordon Absher, vice president of public affairs for MGM Resorts.
Despite the outage, which lasted from about noon until 7:30 p.m., all of the property’s fine-dining restaurants remained open. All New Year’s Eve events went off as scheduled, as did the opening of the
property’s newest nightclub, Hyde Bellagio.
Lights remained on within the casino, although a bank of slot machines temporarily lost power, Absher said.
Some hotel guests were moved to other rooms within the 3,933-room hotel. Others were transferred to MGM Resorts’ properties elsewhere on the Strip. Some guests were permitted to use the Bellagio spa to
shower for the evening.
“It was something within the Bellagio, itself. Our engineers discovered it and addressed it as quickly as they could,” Absher said, noting that he was unaware of the cause of the outage.
“It was not a blackout. These sorts of things happen at your house, your business and at resort hotels,” he said. “The key thing is to measure how the staff responds.”
Beginning on April 11, 2004, the Bellagio’s hotel and casino lost power for three-and-a-half days, forcing the property’s temporary closure and the transfer of guests to hotels throughout the city. That
outage began at about 2 a.m. on Easter Sunday.
Investigators from the Clark County Building Division later identified the cause of that incident as a “degradation of material” used to connect power cables that ran alongside the resort.
