If you haven't heard already, Las Vegas is a dangerous place. And not just because you can lose your life savings and contract something from a prosty in the same weekend, but that shit happened to a couple of my friends and now I won't drink after them. Except alcohol. That stuff kills everything. Most importantly, the pain.

A totally unforeseen and unpredictable consequence of building a 57-foot curved mirror in the desert, the Vdara Death Ray is the affectionate nickname given to a phenomenon that's been plaguing poolside loungers staying at the hotel / spa. Among the victims is one Bill Pintas, whose tale of woe was recently printed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

[A]fter a brief dip in the hotel pool, he was sunning on a recliner. He was on his stomach, relaxed, eyes closed. But suddenly, the lawyer became so uncomfortably hot that he leaped up to move. He tried to put on his flip-flop sandals but, inexplicably, they were too hot to touch. So he ran barefoot to the shade. "I was effectively being cooked," Pintas said. "I started running as fast as I could without looking like a lunatic." Then he smelled an odor, and realized it was coming from his head, where a bit of hair had been scorched.

Hoho, looks like money isn't the only thing burning in Vegas! Get it? Because goofus there scorched his domepiece. Now, here's what you do: put the hotel on casters so you can spin it around and burn all nearby hotels to the ground. BOOM -- monopoly. Which is exactly why the second Death Star was built. The Empire was tired of those Ewoks stealing all their tourist dollars!

Hit the jump for a diagram of the hotel explaining the deathray phenomenon in case you're better with pictures than words (aren't we all).

Vdara hotel 'death ray' claiming victims in the Las Vegas Strip [engadget]

Thanks to Blaqk Panda, Samuel and Daniel "whose chins are so long they stage lightsaber duels with them", ultrapony, Take Your Vitamins, Jessie, Mel and dirk, who know everything there is to know about tourism, including, and not just limited to: topless taxi service is the future. You watch.