Gambling on Electric Dinosaurs

We use a very robust SPAM filtering service for our email at work. It blocks or quarantines thousands of solicitations a day saving employees the hassle of trying to decide if they need a "male-enhancement drug" from Supplier A or Supplier B.

Granted, no SPAM filtering system or service is perfect and even the occasional Viagra-type sales pitch will slip through if it conforms to standard email configurations.

That's why another solicitation got through our filter the other day and made it into the email inboxes of several employees including my own. However, this wasn't a pitch for erectile dysfunction cures, but for something completely unexpected:

Electric dinosaurs.

The subject line said "Chinese Dinosaur Plant" which was strange enough to make me actually want to look at the email. I figured it might be touting an herbal erectile dysfunction drug made from a long-lost-but-now-found prehistoric shrub that only grows high in the Himalayas.

But I was wrong. The email was from the manufacturer of large-scale dinosaur replicas. They included a number of photos of the very life-like-looking creatures along with what I hope is an abbreviated user manual. It was only 2-pages which seems kind of skimpy if you're buying an electric triceratops.

I have no idea why this Chinese dinosaur manufacturer sent people in our company this unsolicited email, but I can assure you that I was not the only person who thought the products offered by this firm were pretty darn cool. One of my co-workers even contacted them requesting more information.

Granted, I'm not exactly sure what the paper would do with an electric dinosaur. That's not something that very many businesses could invest in with confidence that there might even be a glimmer of a return on the investment.

However, it did occur to me that some of these creatures might be an excellent addition to the Isle of Capri Casino scheduled to open in downtown Cape in fall 2012. Having a herd of electric dinosaurs would easily differentiate their property from all the other casinos in the Midwest.

It wouldn't be the same-old, same-old. What is missing with casinos outside of the Vegas motherland are properties with snazzy themes like Caesar's Palace (Theme: Roman debauchery) or Treasure Island (Theme: Pirate debauchery) or the Mirage (Theme: now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't debauchery).

Isle of Capri's theme in Cape could be dinosaur debauchery.

I see all kinds of possibilities for these electric dinosaurs. For instance, visitors could be greeted in the parking lot by a full-scale electric brontosaurus that on the hour breathed fire and had a fight with a wooly mammoth and a saber tooth tiger. You can't tell me that wouldn't bring the crowds to downtown. I've seen the kind of traffic a mock pirate battle and a faux volcano can do in Vegas, and it is impressive.

And for the weekend slot-tournaments, Isle of Capri could have a pair of those wily electric velociraptors roaming the gaming floor randomly picking players to play in it. So as not to give any octogenarian gamblers a heart attack, we could friendly the raptors up a bit by adding ballcaps, sunglasses, and local sports team jerseys.

Isle of Capri could even take a cue from one of the old bars downtown that offered discount drinks every time a train went by. When the T-Rex bellows, bottles of Bud just a buck.