There’s a sign as you drive down South Virginia Street that proclaims Reno, Nevada special.  No, the police don’t wear hot pants as in Reno 911, a huge disappointment.  There aren’t many people walking on the streets in this place plopped in the middle of nowhere. 

It appears that Reno consists primarily of two things: tired old casinos behind walls that look like they were once built to be flashy, but were left to decay after someone realized that no one was looking.  And there are pawn shops.

The casinos speak for themselves, no clocks to be seen, music blaring, the pretense of excitement surrounding a few people slumping over game tables or putting coins in slots as if there was a rule that they had to eventually come out.  Hope springs eternal. Odd don’t seem to compute to folks in casinos.

The pawn shops seemed interesting, now that I’ve become intimately familiar with the cool things that come into Nevada from watching Pawn Stars.  Apparently, Vegas must get all the really fascinating items, as the shops in Reno had drecht, inconsequential crap that would barely buy someone another roll of the dice.

The only other point of interest was notable atop the taxis, most of which advertised the Mustang Ranch and museum.  We like to go to museums as we travel the nation to fence on the North American Cup circuit, so my son wondered if we should take in this one as well.  I explained what the Mustang Ranch was and told him it was his choice. 

One point of sincere interest is the National Automobile Museum at Harrahs, which is well known as being one of the best car museums in the country.  We will certainly be able to spend some quality time there, and anticipate it to be the height of Reno culture.  Not bad, as culture goes.

One of the strangest tings about manifest destiny is that all the clocks are wrong.  When the body says it’s had enough sleep at 5:00 a.m. New York time, but the clock says it’s 2 in the morning, it’s hard to figure out what to do.  My solution is to finally read  Dan Solove’s ambitious new book, Nothing to Hide, which first debunks the arguments used to trick people into trading off freedom for security, and then goes on to offer Dan’s idea of how, in the internet/terrorist age, we should approach the protection of personal freedom.  A review will be coming soon.

I have no idea what would make Reno the “Biggest Little City,” or a city at all.  It bears none of the indicia of real life with real people living here doing the stuff real people do.  Unless real people sell off their trinkets to gamble and then salve their wounds at the Mustang Ranch.  But that’s not how the real people I know behave.  Then again, maybe I hang out with the wrong sort of people.