Seven Other Media Odds & Ends

A few other thoughts and stuff from what I've seen around the press this week...

1. It's a publicity stunt, people: I thought the El Cortez room design contest was cute, too, and we mentioned it on The Strip. But, seriously, folks, it's a very clever pr gambit. Everyone seems to think it's news and that there's some bigger truth to be gleaned from it. It's not and there isn't. Look for every hotel to copycat this because, damn it's good for free advertising.

2. Musta missed that: So the NFL came down from the heavens just before Super Bowl kickoff to force its Fox affiliate here to kill $360,000 in Station Casino ads, and the local media was silent. Not even in Steve Bornfeld's TV column. More proof that if I cover or break something, our MSM ignores it. Shameful, unprofessional and shortsighted.

3. Musta missed that, too: So Steve Wynn goes off and tells the world how delighted he is that the Chinese meddle in and micromanage his business and nobody in the Vegas MSM even reports it. Again, Mr. Wynn, who believes Barack Obama is a Socialist, sings the praises of a dictatorship that can actually, tomorrow, confiscate his enterprise. That's not even worth putting on the record?

4. Ravella's reverie: There's a new owner/operator in Lake Las Vegas, and they opened up this week. Great. But, still, I found this passage from the R-J pretty funny:

[Ravella owner] Dolce reached out to the six restaurants in the adjacent MonteLago Village, developing a system that gives Ravella guests preferred dining reservations and the ability to charge meals to their rooms.

The charge-to-your-room part is smart, but seriously, when has it ever been difficult to get a seat at a restaurant in the ghost town known as MonteLago?

5. And nobody said, "Huh?": The R-J had a piece up on Saturday about the fiscal and ridership woes of the Las Vegas Monorail and this is part of it:

The number of people who boarded the train last year fell 13 percent compared with 2009 to 5.2 million, just more than half of what the monorail carried during its first full year of operations in 2005. Ticket sales also declined 13 percent, to $23.2 million.

Advertising, which brought in $2.3 million as recently as 2007, dropped to $190,000.

Now, I'm no ad genius, but they've still got 5.2 million riders on the system and millions more who see the train snaking along its tracks every day. They can only get $190K in ad revenue from that? Huh? WTF?

6. Steve Sebelius, Nazi? Actually, I'm greatly enjoying Steve's new political column in the Review-Journal. It really feels like, relieved of the pressure to oversee the CityLife staff and production, he's doing better, more interesting and better-written pieces that feel far less predictable than what I found in CityLife. I'm particularly impressed that the R-J is giving him -- a liberal! -- the most prominent position in its Sunday Opinions section, one previously occupied by former publisher and failed Reidslayer Sherman Frederick.

Still this, at the bottom of his column today, made me giggle:

7. Equal Embarrassment Time: OK, the R-J isn't the only ones with some typographical challenges this week. This, from an ad in my own Las Vegas Weekly, is a little embarrassing: