Sunday Foto Fun

I've been a bad blogger this week partly because I've been overwhelmed by deadlines and partly because all that traveling caught up to me with some exhaustion and possibly a cold. However, there's always room for some Foto Fun around here.

I don't even need to go far sometimes. This...


...was on my block this week. Do cement-mixing trucks in other cities sport paintings of those cities' skylines?

A few weeks ago, I took occasional guest-host Amy of GritstoGlitz.Com with me to a swanky soiree benefitting Families for Effective Autism Treatment of Southern Nevada at the Stirling Club at Turnberry Place. The event honored Tony and Jill Curtis, and Amy seemed nervous that Tony might be hostile toward me on account of my airing that interview in which he talked about semen on his leg and so on. He didn't even remember me. But this image...


...was creepily priceless, huh? Amy, that celebrity-stalking whore, also got this shot with Louis Anderson, who happened to sit at our table.


Meanwhile, I was at Palazzo a week ago for an interview for an upcoming Strip Sense column and saw this:


I might find all these umbrellas pretty is if wasn't so deritative of the Palazzo's neighbor to the north, Wynn Las Vegas, and the parasols hanging from the ceiling that were Roger Thomas' vision as seen here:

Also this...


...is a bit of a shame. The reflecting pool in the foreground is now completely crowded by potted plants used to be a lovely place to sit and eat an ice cream or sip a coffee. It's like they decided to copy all the best ideas at Wynn -- parasols, lots of live plants -- but in the lamest possible way.

Also, I thought this sign in the casino was strange:


It says "The Palazzo Offers A Smoke-Free Corridor." But what it doesn't say? WHERE. Didn't someone making this sign think, "We should probably give someone directions." Yeesh.

Last week, I was at the Hard Rock Hotel to take a glimpse at the new Joint. It's a much bigger venue than the old one and it looks like it'll be a great place to see a concert. It was neat that they preserved a piece of the old place with this...


...a plank of the old floor. Fun!

I am a little baffled, however, by something. This is the view from most of the balcony...


...but then here below is the view from the top four rows of the balcony:


You can see the stage but not really the video screens which, it would seem, would be MOST useful to patrons seated the farthest away. The overhang is the exposed ventilation and piping in the ceiling, part of the look of the place. But they couldn't make the ceiling of this new $60 million space a few feet higher so that the folks in the cheap seats -- otherwise known, often, as the biggest fans -- could see?

After leaving the Hard Rock, I drove west on Harmon toward the Strip to get where else I was going. And I must say that for as much as I ponder whether CityCenter was a good idea from a financial point of view, I am always awed by what they have grown on that plot of land:


I know some think it's kind of cold-looking, but there's something about standing in front of it that makes me gasp in wonderment. The piece of the equation nobody can foresee is whether, like real big cities, there will be lots of people creating the vibe and energy to make these skyscrapers hum.

While I have the floor, can anyone identify for me what kind of birds these are? I saw 'em in Hemenway Park in Boulder City while working on a travel piece for the Times earlier this month:


And, finally, I wasn't going to bother with this except that right now the Classiest Publisher in America is picking on me and Jon Ralston on his "blog" (it's still not indexed in Google's Blogsearch) for some banter we had on VegasPBS's "Nevada Week in Review" over the weekend. Conservatives have taken to use the term "teabagging" to refer to their recent protests against taxes and, in fact, that's also a term for a certain sex act. So Ralston and I had a little humor about that and the Classiest Publisher in America attacked us for it.

I'm not going to defend our banter because it was admittedly childish and probably a little baffling to the audience because part of the off-camera context was that we were running out of time and weren't going to get to discuss Gov. Gibbons' threatened veto of domestic partnership legislation pending in Carson City.

But being called out on it by a man who has essentially been called "really dumb" by Steve Wynn and "not sophisticated" by Elaine Wynn was odd. I don't know if he's either. But dishonest comes to mind.

Y'see, the Classiest Publisher in America has been claiming his abysmal disaster of a website to be this towering local success using data from a company called Hitwise that is the joke of the Web.

Of course, the Review-Journal's Web traffic is proprietary, so it's impossible to know what's really happening. Except that they just finally got themselves a YouTube channel for their ridiculous daily RJTV program. That means that there's some public information about interest in their content.

And guess what?


NOBODY'S WATCHING. OK, they've had a total of 10 views on nine episodes. And, full disclosure, I account for four of them. Sad. What's even sadder? Something tells me the Classiest Publisher in America -- or his employees -- account for the rest.

[P.S. to the Classiest Publisher in America: It's Friess, not Freiss. Check your archives. You've published that name hundreds of times.]