Russians no longer have to worry about being without casinos–a new one has opened up in the south of the massive county. From Fox News:
Half a year after Russia closed all of it's gambling casinos and slot-machine halls, the first new casino opened Saturday under a plan to limit legalized gambling to four comparatively remote areas.
About 500 people showed up for the opening of the Oracle casino in Above City, a gambling zone in southern Russia. But only about 100 of them appeared to be actually placing bets. The casino, in a large shed-like building in a snowy field, has about 200 slot machines and 10 table games.
The zone is about 60 miles from Rostov-on-Don, the nearest sizable city, and 120 miles from Krasnodar.
It's unclear how many Russians will be eager to travel long distances for a gambling excursion, but the casino's operators say they're convinced there's a market and they plan to start building a four-star hotel for gamblers this summer.
“There's a lot of gambling people here” in the region, said Valery Saparin, marketing director for casino operator Royal Time. “We hope that a lot of people will be drawn to us in the near future.”
Casinos mushroomed in Russia's cities after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and slot machines quickly spread beyond gaming halls to shops and malls. The spread of gambling provoked distaste among many Russians over the flashy cars parked outside glittering casinos in Moscow and the harm that gambling can do to society.
All the gambling operations were closed July 1 under a law that was signed in 2006, but that many had expected never would be enforced.
The law limits legalized gambling to Azov City, the Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea, the Altai region of Siberia and the Primorsky region of Russia's Far East.
via Russia Casino Opens Under New Gambling Plan – IFOXNews.com.
I did a little tooling around the Internets and I couldn’t find any other mention of an “Above City, Russia.” But I did find that Azov City, which is mentioned in the last paragraph, is right where “Above City” should be according to its description in the second paragraph. Whether this is a funny proofreading error or another name for the Azov zone, I don’t know.
How about some fun casino math?
With only 200 machines, and ten tables, the casino has 270 or so gaming positions. With only 100 folks playing at its big opening, that looks like a 37% utilization rate. I have no idea what the benchmarks are for win per position per day in Azov, but they’d better be pretty high to justify building a four-star hotel.
I mentioned before that I used to be pen-pals with a 20 year old Russian girl who first wrote me back in 1999 after seeing my website.
At age 20 she was basically the CEO for a very small Vladivostok casino called the El Dorado. The owners of the casino were Norwegians. She sent me a photo of her and the (apx.) 10 person staff. Oddly enough they all looked like they were under 25.
Vladivostok is on the east side of Russia on the Sea of Japan.
Her Norwegian casino owners later opened a second casino in a place called Khabarovsk (400 miles north)…where she said the waitresses take over 90 minutes just to deliver your food order from a very limited menu selection of either borscht or else borscht (which I think is red cabbage soup).
I learned a lot about modern-day Russia in the course of 2 years of co-responding with her.
What stuck me most about modern day Russia is the fact that many people in their forties aren’t even too much in the labor force (like her dad, who no longer could work as an oceanographer due to cutbacks in government funding). The labor force there now is very young and very Americanized. There knowledge or awareness of Russian history is minimal(for lack of a better word).
It’s like they don’t give a darn about what went before…since they are so focused on the future and the western-ization of their country. They have a strong desire for all things modern.
It was certainly enlightening to hear (read) the thoughts of a current-day Russian girl. Lots of the young men there are unemployed and there seems to be lots of resentment over all the women in the labor force there. Hence, the high amount of vodka use.
She was a brilliant young women who spoke and translated Russian, English, Korean and two variations of Chinese. I was happy when she told me she married an American guy who worked in Korea…and she now has a 3 year old girl…has finally seen San Francisco and LA…and intends to move to the USA full-time soon.
Hey. Guess what. I received my requested copy of DGS’ 2003 book (‘Suburban Xanadu’) from the Clark County library yesterday.
This book reads even better the second time around and its relevance is right on track with the New Vegas of 2010. I highly recommend that everyone re-read this book when you get the chance. This is important reading…and a good re-fresher on things a lot of us may have forgotten in the last 7 years.
Re-reading books is an important thing to do. I found this out when I re-read the 1970 book ‘Future Shock’ again…30+ years after it came out.
Books hardly ever go out of date (not like magazine’s or newspapers). And like a ‘good movie’ certain books are definitely worth seeing a second time. I’m having lots of fun with this one.
Dave’s observations are brilliant. My hat goes off to Joe & Carmela Curinga for producing such good off-spring.
:>))
‘Suburban Xanadu’. It’s a 12 star book! (on a scale of 10).
I still re-read “Prepare Now for a Metric Future” each year in the hopes that some day I will look extraordinarily superior to all my backward countrymates who will still be thinking in gallons, pecks, and bushels, whilst I will be breezing from centi to kilo and back with but a mere blink of an eye. However, I am having quite a time working up the courage to tackle “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader” again (it has a picture of a casino in it).
Good advice, especially on those days (more frequently now) that libraries are closed.
I wish I’d follow my own advice to re-read certain books. I have my 1988 textbook ‘Basic English for Business & Technical Careers’ sitting on my ‘reference shelf’….practically begging me to come back and re-learn proper punctuation.
Once upon a time I actually knew where to properly place a comma (believe it or not).
I wonder if there’s a software program that knows how to do that for me.
Until I re-read that Englis book expect me to continue the “….” thing.
hahaha
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You funny, Schopie
A religious book with a casino picture? hahaha
The update for this one is at http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/lawmaker-killed-in-car-crash-after-opening-of-first-casino/398655.html :
“A senior Krasnodar lawmaker died in a weekend car crash as he was traveling home from the opening of the first casino in a new gambling zone, an accident that promises to raise new concerns about a government decision to limit legalized gambling to four remote areas.
Nikolai Kotlyarov, speaker of the Krasnodar city legislature, and his driver were killed on the spot when their Toyota Camry crashed into a car parked on the roadside of the Krasnodar-Eisk Highway at about 1 a.m. Sunday and slammed into a guardrail, Interfax reported.
…
The car crash highlights a risk of placing casinos in the remote zones, and it draws new attention to Russia’s dangerous roads. President Dmitry Medvedev has described the high road-accident rate as a national problem and resolved to make roads safer.
Investigators said Sunday that they believed that a violation of traffic safety rules was responsible for Kotlyarov’s accident and had opened an investigation, Interfax reported.
Kotlyarov, 72, was born in the Krasnodar region and had served as speaker of the city legislature since 2005.”
Just the fact that he was a Russian driving home from a huge party in the middle of the night makes me NOT think it was foul play. But then again, it IS Russia, where officials of any type are always at risk for such “accidents”.
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The region around Krasnodar and Azov appears rather attractive in a rustic way, with lots of small farming villages with Soviet holdover names–cities named Karl Marx, Labor, Example, May Day, October, Red Guerilla Fighter, Komsomolyets (Young Communist League Member), Lenin, Freedom, Proletariatville, Field Marshaltown, and on and on. (In other words, rather like the sticks of Slovenia, with which I am familiar.) If anybody is offering any study abroad scholarships this summer, I’d take them up on it if I could explore and practice my русский скиллз!
That list of Russian city names is the perfect example of why I think ‘the Russians’ have a very odd mentality. (To me) they always seemed too fond of commemorating polical events, ideals and leaders thru their symbolic names and those super-strange 500 foot public posters of Stalin & Lenin (etc).
I’ve never liked societies that over-admire their leaders (China with its huge Mao posters, Iran with its gigantic Ayatolah images, Iraq’s worship of Saddam Hussien’s image, Nazi Germany and its weird idol-worshiping of a ranting little mustached man with a greased down surfer-haircut (King Adolph the nut-case, goose-stepping, loony).
There was an early Nazi party in the USA that also started using those king-sized, Idol Worshiping posters when they held a convention in America and had giant posters of George Washington on the auditorium walls. Now that was really weird…cuz, ‘regular’ Americans would never think to idolize a political leader so much.
If we Americans are going to post huge posters of our idols…we do it with giant posters of Elvis, Celine, Britney, The Beatles or Bruce Springsteen. I’d much rather see idolatry of entertainers than of politicians, any day.
When I was in elementary school (circa 1961) Commie bashing was all-the-rage with my school-teachers. The over-kill was kind of funny.
And when we had those idiotic ‘Atomic Bomb Drills’ where we would crawl under our desks for protection against possible H-bombs landing on our school…me and my buddies thought it was hilarious. It sure wasn’t frightening like the overly-dramatic ‘Duck-and-Cover’ newsreels make it appear to be. In fact, us kids kid of looked forward to fire-drills and air-raid-drills. Kids like anything that breaks the routine.
My sixth grade teacher would have morning political-rants, everyday, saying really weird Anti-Everybody things. He’d say stuff like “if the people in India are starving to death they should eat their sacred Brahma bulls”.
I learned a lot from him….about NOT listening to ANY form of propaganda (whether coming from on our side or the Russians’ side).
I realized my sixth grade teacher was as big of a propagandist as Adolph Hitler. My sixth grade teacher was coo-coo, crazy.
I didn’t need my elementary school-teachers’ Anti-Commie Propaganda to learn to dislike the Russian Way. Russians scared me all on their own. The architecture of the Kremlin scared the heck out of me. It was so ugly. Those gigantic Stalin posters scared me. Their military parades (where they showed off their bombs) scared me. They looked like a bunch of backward, mindless, retards.
I didn’t need American Anti-Commie propaganda to convince me that Russia sucked. Russian architecture alone had already convinced me of that. And when Kruschev (obviously a drunken imbicile, who reminded me of W.C. Fields) banged his shoe on the podium I was completely convinced that JFK was a much cooler leader. After-all…JFK was the first president to wear a (pre-Beatles) ‘dry-look’ Surfer hair style. How cool was THAT?!
I have to admit that the Cuban Missle Crisis actually WAS a scary time…especially since my step-dad (a full-time member of the National Guard) had to go on ‘High-Alert’ for about 10 days, in real preparation for a possible war.
I remember that the American propaganda of the 60s focused a lot on what country would get to the moon first…mainly because it was believed that if the Russians ever ‘owned the moon’ that they could launch missles down on the USA and totally dominate us. (Was that even true or possible? I still don’t know).
Anyway. America out-did the Russians in every arena…from its cool architecture…to its cool president…its space program…and everything else.
The Russians never DID “bury” us…as Kruschev said they would.
Their antiquated society sucks big-time. They have the most corrupt mentality of any people I know. Even when I drove a taxi, I argued with the Russian immigrant drivers a lot.
They tried (and succeeded) in claiming the Paris Hotel as their own (in spite of my 8 month protests). I went ballistic when they wrote anti-American-driver graffiti in the underground taxi-waiting-line at the Paris hotel. They eventually bugged me so much that I moved over to the Palms full-time.
They are a bunch of corrupt, rip-off, ‘take-over-artists’…and I dislike (most of them) immensely. On New Years Eve…the Rusky drivers extort lots of money from tourists for rides home on that super-busy night. Buncha, creepy “let’s make a deal” rat heads.
Don’t blame me for not liking them. They kicked me out of Paris.
Old school buffoons.
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Sorry if I might have offended any Ruskies out there, who are reading Dave’s blog.
Even though it’s a week-end and nobody is even here on this blog and this post is old and I divert from the main subjects anyway…I feel like added another note about my psychotic, mental case of a sixth-grade teacher…because I feel like taking a break from my regular computer work…{and also wanted to see how long of a single sentence I could write}.
My sixth grade teacher was one of the weirdest people I’ve known in all my life.
One thing he did still bothers me. I still feel ashamed that I didn’t stand-up to him over the way he treated a few of the weak students in out class.
We only had one Oriental (Asian) girl in our entire school. She barely talked at all and obviously felt out-of-place…plus was from a more timid (Japanese) culture than ours.
My teacher (Mr. Bill S.) used to terrorize this pitiful little girl. He always chastised her for not speaking loudly enough. One day he decided to scold her for not singing the Pledge of Allegance loud enough. He decided to spend 40 minutes making her try to recite the pledge by herself in front of the entire class. He shouted at her the entire time “Louder!”…making her shake and reducing her to tears and them badgering her even more.
It was one of the cruelest things I’ve ever seen. All us kids knew it was completely wrong. (Sigmund Freud once wrote a report about kid’s inborn sense of right & wrong…which is so correct).
We all knew it was extremely abusive yet said nothing. All we did was try to avoid looking at this poor girl…until the bell for recess came.
Mr. Bill also had a few other students he chose to abuse. Like my friend Dennis, who was super-talkative and mildly disruptive. Now-a-days he’d likely be diagnosed as having a high-sugar condition, dsylexic and possible, mildly mentally disturbed. When Dennis would talk to much, Mr. Bill would place a huge, empty, cardboard refrigerator box over his entire desk and body for three hours. Luckily it had air-holes in the top.
Another time, Mr. Bill had a temper-tantrum and decided to abuse Norman K. (the softest spoken kid in the class). He actually placed his two hands on Norman’s head and lifted him out of his school-chair and started spinning him around by his ears. What an awful sight. Physical punishment for not spelling all his words right.
Oddly enough…Mr. Bill treated all his other students super-well…which in it’s own way…compounded his mental-case manipulation…and causing confusion for all of us.
What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and confront him for his cruelty.
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When JFK got assassinated Mr. Bill also over-reacted by sobbing, ranting, sobbing, ranting and sobbing some more.
That JFK Friday WAS a very sorrowful day..and Mr. Bill’s twisted reaction was way too over-the-top (while all the other faculty were somber and mostly just silent).
I walked home 15 minutes after that 11:45ish morning announcement. And I STAYED home and watched the network news. I’d had my fill of Mr. Bill….and needed to listen to Walter Cronkite’s ‘voice of reason’ and appropriate behavior.
My military step-dad was away (and would be an honor-guard at the Arlington Funeral a few days later). So, Mr. Cronkite was the one-good man who carried us thru that time. Thank goodness for Mr. Cronkite.
How strange it was to see Lee Harvey get gunned-down live, on TV, that Sunday morning. And how sad to watch the funeral and see John-John saluting his dead dad.
The next month was a somber time. Luckily, The Beatles arrived just about 42 days later and gave us 12 year olds something young, fun, optimistic and hopeful to think about. The Beatles were a God-Send to my generation.
Of course…Mr. Bill told us how stupid he thought Beatle-Mania was.
Three years later, he saw me at the grocery-store as a 15 year-old hippie. I could almost see the steam coming out of his ears. His Korean War, flat-head, crew-cut mentality nearly caused him to go into spasms.
The moral of this story? Try to find out what your kids’ school-teachers are teaching them (or telling them and doing).
And if your kids have a (Beavis & Butthead) Mr. Van Drissen type of teacher…thank your lucky stars. That’s better than them having a Nazi for a teacher.
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RECOMMENDED READING:
Jim Bishop’s:
‘The Day Kennedy Was Shot’
‘The Day Lincoln Was Shot’
Two excellent accounts of two of the strangest, 24 hours in US history.
Your story made me have literal nightmares about little Asian girls in grade school. (Except it was in the cafeteria, where the lunchlady forced the one Asian kid to eat the Asian food, which was a sorry American replica anyway, even though she was a vegetarian, and the Asian food was “heart of pork”.)
That era of teaching is over, but the replacement–”A for effort” and “emotions over education”–is no better. At least, if it is as bad as the demonized caricatures of it are. I haven’t been in a sixth-grade classroom for a while (but last time I visited one, the desks were so small!).