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New York Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Reno 411! A summer guide to the Biggest Little City in America
If everything you know about the Biggest Little City (pop: 275K) you learned from a certain 'Cops' parody on Comedy Central, here's a crash course on doing the college town right, post-ski rat season. Triple play 8 Enjoy nights at the round table. Reno-Tahoe Beautifully backdropped by the High Eastern Sierra foothills, Reno's the Row is hardly of the 'skid' variety. It's a troika of massive, hustling-n-bustling fancyish hotel-casinos perfect for us all-poker, no-powder types. Advertisement The Eldorado, the Silver Legacy and Circus Circus span six blocks wholly owned by Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (what Eldorado Resorts rebranded itself as after acquiring old Caesars and all its properties). Each has its own unique charms: Eldorado skews more upscale and sophisticated, Circus Circus has a giant arcade for kids. 8 Pick a hotel-casino, any hotel-casino, along Reno's Row including Eldorado, Circus Circus and Silver Legacy. — they're all corded umbilically attached via skyway. Insight Studio But we ended up at the dining- and night life-focused, 1,720-roomed Silver Legacy, home to a mood-lit Ramsay's Kitchen (warning vegans: best to avoid his delicious, had-parents take on 'lollipops') and the always queued- and gussied-up Aura Ultra Lounge. Advertisement Dromophobic? Not a problem. Enter any one of the three and you can easily visit the other two without ever stepping foot outside via the Row's skyways. Bonus: While the overly smokey, stale-smelling floors of the dizzying beep-booping, ding-a-linging casinos of yore could make non-gamers feel a certain kind of way, these days, the old rolled cigarette smog factor has been considerably reduced thanks to vape converts. Much obliged! Fin city 8 Jaws was a mere guppy compared to the draconic ichthyosaur. Chris Bunting Two hundred and fifty million years ago, Reno's scariest creature wasn't that angsty, 127-foot-tall clown named Topsy struggling to hold up the Circus Circus sign. It was the bowling lane-length prehistoric dino dolphin, er, sea reptile, called the ichthyosaur. Fitting, since back then, what is now the desertic Silver State was completely underwater (some yearn for those days over the summer). Advertisement Reno's groovy Nevada Art Museum has devoted 9,000 square feet — its entire third floor — to these lovingly nicknamed 'sea dragons' in an exhibit running through mid-January of next year called Deep Time. It features the world's largest collection of ichthyosaur fossils including a 33-foot Triassic Period skeleton of one, the most complete in the world, along with a life-size, e-wall-simulated sea dragon to swim-walk with, no trunks needed. 8 The museum turned bone-aquarium is as funky on the outside as it is within. Courtesy of the Nevada Museum of Art. 8 See the world as an Ichthy did in the trippiest of ways (use a safe word). Courtesy of the Nevada Museum of Art. Advertisement Kiddos will especially love (and maybe try to outdo — sorry, parents) the exhibit's room filled entirely with a massive collection of dinosaur toys; another room (possibly for less-sober grown-ups) lets you see the world, as an ichthy would see it, 'underwater.' GA is $15. The mural of the story 8 Reno is mad about murals; you're hard-pressed to find a naked wall throughout town. Handout Game respects game, and nowhere else is that better on display than in Reno's unusually cordial street art scene. Get used to the name Erik Burke, or rather his initials E.B., as you'll be seeing a lot of it on Pineapple Pedicab's art tours of downtown where the world-renowned and Reno-born E.B. has painted giant murals on the sides of several multi-storied buildings, including one of his wife (awww) and also signs them with his age at their time of completion. Best part: Local graffiti taggers respectfully leave them be and (mostly) undefiled, according to my no-fear pedaler guide Taz. You'll also come across other artists' trippy works like a flying bus formerly driven IRL, cut in half then glued back together on a rising stand, plus other sculptures and installations lucky enough to have been spared dismantling after a gig at nearby Burning Man such as the Space Whale (a 40-foot, stained-glass mommy cetacean and her calf). The hour-long tour of Reno's other nickname they hope to one day make stick — Art Town — is $55 per person, with each pedicab sitting up to three. Vroom with a view Advertisement 8 Gear heads will explode inside the wondrous National Automobile Museum. Universal Images Group via Getty Images Listen here, buddy, drop the spray paint and back away from the electric cars — these are non-Elon creations you've stumbled across at Reno's National Automobile Museum. In fact, the very first cars ever marketed were all electric, preceding gas-powered ones by years and years. You'll learn this and mucho mas at the multi-zoned (classic, race cars, celebrity mobiles, etc.) NAM, just a five-minute walk from the Row. Its exhibits come in large part thanks to the late William Fisk Harrah. There was only one thing the late hotel-casino magnate loved more than gamblizing the state, and that was cars (he owned 1,400 of them). He had an army of scouts scour the country for unique and classic ones, some literally uncovered beneath tarps and stashed away in barns in the middle of nowhere. 8 The cars are up for 'adoption' if you have the scratch. warasit – Advertisement Once Harrah kicked the can in 1978, his massive collection changed hands (mostly into those of then-hospitality giant Holiday Inn) but after public demand, private sales, auctions and the like, many found their way to this place, opened in 1989, now home to some 240-plus rare and restored vehicles from the late 19th century up until today. Ford Model T? Check. Elvis's Caddy Eldorado Coupe? Yep. That vehicular Frankenstein Jay Leno stitched together from two wrecks that's half-Jeep, half-Ferrari dubbed the Jerrari? Heck yes. And do you like the cut of that Doc Brown-worthy DeLorean's jib over yonder? 'Adopt' it, or any of the other cars on display (meaning, donate money to help keep it in tip-top condition and land your name on a plaque right next to it). Just no actual fiddling around with said foster. Tix are $15 for adults, $10 for kids.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Keir Starmer's war on quangos is doomed to fail unless he is bolder
A few years ago I was taken on a tour of the innards of the Palace of Westminster, a place where I had worked for almost 20 years but had never seen its dark underside. In the bowels of Charles Barry's neo-Gothic masterpiece is a bewildering nexus of pipes, wires, cables and conduits which coil their way for miles beneath, above and around the 28-acre site. Over the years the Palace has developed organically, with bits bolted on as and when they have been required: gas pipes, electricity wires, phone lines, TV cables, Wi-Fi and the rest. Many disappear into a wall and emerge no one knows where. Each year the bill for essential maintenance runs into many millions of pounds, but it is all patching-up and bodging. The dangers are evident, especially in a building that replaced one that burned to the ground in 1834, but MPs have been unable to agree on what to do about repairing it. As a metaphor for the way we are governed it could hardly be bettered. The machinery of Whitehall makes a Heath-Robinson device look positively straightforward. Starry-eyed ministers, buoyed by an election victory, arrive in their departments eager to shine and implement their pet projects only to find that when they pull a lever there is nothing on the other end. The power they thought they possessed had been proxied out to an arm's length, non-departmental body, colloquially known as a quango. Back in the day their number could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The BBC was one of the first and biggest. But in the 1970s and 1980s they grew like Topsy, hundreds of them often replicating decision-making being undertaken elsewhere. Political hostility to quangos goes back decades. In 1995 the then shadow chancellor Gordon Brown said: 'The biggest question… is why our constitution is over-centralised, over-secretive and over-bureaucratic and why there is not more openness and accountability. The real alternative is a bonfire of the quangos and greater democracy.' Labour's 1997 election manifesto attacked the Conservatives for supporting 'unaccountable quangos'. Tony Blair even promised to dump them in the 'dustbin of history'. But by the time Labour left office in 2010 there were still hundreds of them. Perversely, given Brown's strictures, they included one of the most powerful – the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England which assumed control over interest rates from the Chancellor. The Coalition decided that a 'bonfire of the quangos' was needed and earmarked around 300 advisory bodies, consumer watchdogs and public service organisations for the torch. Out went the Audit Commission, the Animal Welfare Advisory Committee and Cycling England. Others, like the Zoos Forum, the Herbal Medicines Advisory Committee and the Air Quality Expert Group, were replaced by 'committees of experts'. Dozens were merged. Did it make any difference? Are we better or more cheaply governed? Apparently not because Sir Keir Starmer now wants another conflagration as part of his somewhat nebulous plan to 'rewire the state'. Pat McFadden, who runs the Cabinet Office responsible for Whitehall, has asked every department to justify the existence of quangos within their bailiwick. Those that cannot be sufficiently justified will be closed, merged or have powers brought back into the department. As a signal of intent, McFadden is drafting legislation that could shut down a swathe of quangos using a single Act of Parliament rather than requiring individual laws to abolish each one. The Government got off to a good start by closing down the mother and father of them all, NHS England. But the big, so far unanswered, question is what is to replace its functions and will it be an improvement or just as wasteful and unresponsive? Look at what happened when Public Health England was abolished during the pandemic. It was replaced by a new body, the UK Health Security Agency, which has seamlessly adopted the 'nanny state' mantle of its predecessor. We can expect this to expand further, like the nation's waistlines, as Wes Streeting unveils his NHS reforms centred mostly on prevention. But even as McFadden calls on departments to identify quangos for the chop, the Government is creating more of them, around 20 since July. They include Great British Energy, a Government-owned retail company that seeks to invest in, manage and operate clean energy projects alongside private sector firms. Then there is the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council and National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority. Great British Railways will soon be up and running alongside a Passenger Standards Authority. Then we have Skills England, a Regulatory Innovation Office, a Fair Work Agency, a Border Security Command, a National Centre for Policing and an Independent Football Regulator. There are others, and even more are in the pipeline. When Sir Keir talks about 'rewiring the state' it is not because he wants it to be smaller or cheaper to run. It is to make it responsive to his desire for 'active government', an old Wilsonian Labour belief in the paternalistic nature of the state. We are not going to be governed less – quite the opposite – just in a different way. But even then Sir Keir will still have his hands tied. The quangos that have the most power are those that effectively determine core economic policies – the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Monetary Policy Committee and the Climate Change Committee. In one of its first acts Labour gave the OBR more powers, not fewer, putting the Chancellor in a budgetary straitjacket from which she cannot escape. If Sir Keir really wants to reform Whitehall and save money then he could do worse than scrap a few departments in their entirety. What is the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology for if there is an array of quangos doing the same job? Why do we need a Department for Culture, Media and Sport which works with 42 agencies and public bodies? Sir Keir may be determined to 'rewire government' but without a clearer, bolder idea of how to do it he will end up in just as big a tangle as still exists under the Palace of Westminster. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
