Death Ray Holiday

Like dinosaurs and Quentin Blake and breakfast covered in chocolate, death rays seem a lot more central to life when you're young. You'd get up in the morning, eat some chocolate for breakfast then fantasise about death rays until all the decent TV comes on and you have to go to bed.

Well, in Las Vegas – the home of the childish dreams becoming garish reality – at the Vdara Hotel, death rays are a reality which threaten the safety of holidaying gamblers.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Bill Pintas, a lawyer from Chicago, Illinois nearly had his head burnt off by an architectural anomaly called The Death Ray. Apparently, the south-side of the tower is so curved and reflective that at certain times of the year, when the sun hits it, the rays are concentrated into a single beam of white hot doom. Not unlike the solar death ray from The Man With The Golden Gun which Britt Ekland sets off with her ass.

Bill Pintas' hair was set on fire by the death laser. He said: "I was effectively being cooked; I started running as fast as I could without looking like a lunatic."

Don't worry though, the hotel have a master plan to deal with this: quietly wheeling guests' sun loungers around the pool area, avoiding the pendulum swing of the scorching laser light.

BILL MOORAY