In addition to the big George Maloof interview, I’ve got two other pieces in this week’s http://www.weeklyseven.com.
The first is my usual Green Felt Journal column, in which I ask the question “How do you clean sheets from 250,000 beds, 365 days a year…and get a fascinating answer from Brady Industries’ Travis Brady:
Keeping Vegas clean is big business. Brady estimates that, after payroll and possibly the power bill, the laundry tab might be a casino’s biggest expense.
Each hotel room generates between 10 and 20 pounds of laundry a day. Once the housekeeper tosses the linens down the laundry chute to the ground floor, linen-filled carts are loaded into trucks that speed off to one of the Valley’s six Brady facilities. Together, these plants process about a million pounds of laundry a day, 365 days a year.
I love the title the editor gave the piece. And the photo gives you a sense of the industrial scale of the laundry facility. Not having spent a lot of time in factories, it reminded me most of some out of Willie Wonka. Without anything edible. Or Oompa Loompas. OK, that was a bad analogy, but it’s a very advanced, very large, and very complicated operation.
My third piece for the week is this week’s The Week, about tomorrow’s 11-11-11 exuberance:
This kind of obsession is mostly a post-millennial phenomenon, fit for our information-age tribalism—a world of logos and symbols and magical thinking. Las Vegas’ first 11-11-11, Nov. 11, 1911, passed without any discernible hoopla—no 11-cent horse rental promos from the Las Vegas Livery or $1.11 union suit specials from Will Beckley’s men’s store. Likewise, another date that would seem to have a natural Vegas connection, July 7, 1977, didn’t cause much of a stir. Blame it on the Carter-era malaise.
So I had a busy week, writing wise. And it’s not over yet.