Las Vegas - FAKE

I will begin by saying that I intend to use the word "fake" in as neutral a fashion as possible. This post is simply about the gigantic fake things that make up the major attractions on the Las Vegas Strip. I have heard about them and seen them on TV and in photographs, and now I have seen them in person. In all their non-pejorative fakeness.

We are staying at a hotel with a fake lagoon and fake pirate ships. Four times each night. 1,000 passers-by stop to watch the "Sirens" show, in which women in lingerie battle from one ship, with a bunch of pirate men in another ship. There's a fake cannon battle and fake fires. The pirates torch the lingerie ladies' closets, and the ladies retaliate by singing fake Spice Girls songs and doing sexy dances. "Watch out you mean prates! just for that we are going to sing another sexy pop song!" SPOILER ALERT: At the end the pirates' ship sinks, and the pirates swim over to the lingerie boat where they live happily ever after.

At the hotel next door there is a fake volcano that erupts on the hour from 8pm to midnight. Down the street there is a hotel with fake Venetian canals. For $20 you can sit in a gondola and be paddled around the canals by a singing gondolier. Beside that hotel, there is a hotel with a fake Eiffel Tower and a fake Arc de Triomphe with a banner of TV chef Gordon Ramsay nearly obliterating it. That is one big banner. Farther down the strip I went inside a fake Great Pyramid, saw a fake Sphynx and a fake Statue of Liberty and a fake Chrysler Building, Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building.

On the sidewalks there are fake Disney characters, who pose with tourists for photographs for tips. There are also fake Sesame Street characters, fake superheroes, fake Star Wars characters, and a fake Elvis and a fake Zach Galafianakis. There's also a wax figure of Johnny Depp dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow. That's an ad for the wax museum, where you can see lots of fake celebrities made out of wax.

Once there was a desert. Somebody got an idea to build a city there. The city was there for no reason other than to attract people to spend money. To attract people, the city-builders made lots of interesting and unusual things. They found that this was very successful, so they kept going, which led to a place so excessively spectacular and mind-boggling in its over-the-top fakeness, you just have to give it credit for being the best and truest of all of the fakers everywhere, for all time. But I had better not say more. I am trying to remain neutral.

question: What's the most convincing fake you have ever seen?

mompoet - really