Carson Perspective: Dispassion over all but the vig gig

Dispassion, in short supply now despite reverence for facts feigned by many advocates, is the special province of bookies and the house.

Bookies, purveyors of gambling opportunities in the dwindling number of places where betting is illegal, take the vig and leave it to the patsies to care who wins. The vig is the 10 percent rakeoff for handling the book while taking the risk of being caught or some other reversal of fortune.

The house, in places like Las Vegas, relies on odds to provide a smaller slice of a larger pie and to offer up its vig-like take behind the fig-like covering of legality. That take builds palaces to keep those patsy players returning like automatons.

All this is by way of setting up a potpourri of items in which this column’s scrivener has no real stake, seeks only the vig of a regular paycheck and the joy of a front-row seat at the ring, and repeats a regular admonition that he has no dog in these hunts. Herewith the promised potpourri from disparate and dispassionate observations.

A move afoot in Carson City for public funding of all arts is gathering steam. It was seen quite clearly as the Cultural Commission put a stamp of approval on a public art ordinance to recommend to the Board of Supervisors. At the same meeting, performing arts people testified, supportive and signalling they want to be next in line.

The Brewery Arts Center’s John Shelton and Chris Bayer weren’t bashful. Shelton is BAC executive director, Bayer a BAC board member. Shelton pushed for support to lure an arts/business workshop to town in November, but didn’t seek funding. Bayer said he will seek money later for the BAC as an arts agency. The sales pitch: culture is good business.

Members of the Board of Supervisors served notice on the V&T Railway that city government wants something like equal billing on the train/tourism website and other railway information to lure people to the region to ride the rails between the capital city and Virginia City. They noted, pointedly, that Carson City is on the hook for railway bonds.

There also was considerable talk of needed cooperation involving the railroad, the city’s Convention & Visitor’s Bureau and city government to keep the rail tourism train on track toward growth that hasn’t yet materialized as it was sold years ago.

The talk came during discussion of planning issues on relocating the Carson City Eastgate V&T depot.

It’s anecdotal, but evidence of Californians lusting for new climes over the Sierra Nevada came during a Father’s Day weekend trip to the Golden State. The first man met at an event in Grass Valley said he was moving next month from Salinas, on the Pacific coast, to land-locked Sparks. Asked why, he said: “One word: California.”

The next day, your scrivener and his spouse met a woman disgusted that her rural Southern California land would be split by a proposed high-speed rail line despite her view there are better sites elsewhere. She said she had just been to Nevada’s Douglas County and was contemplating a move to this area.

The Carson City Planning Commission will meet at 5 p.m. Wednesday in the Sierra Room of the Carson City Community Center, 851 E. William St.

For more information, call 775-887-2180 or go to www.carson.org.