MINI-EXCLUSIVE: Oscar Will Have A Glass Office At Oscar's

It's a small detail, but it's one that makes me mildly more optimistic that any steakhouse, even one "licensing" the name of our wildly popular former mob attorney/mayor, can work at the Plaza.

A Plaza source told me today they're building a glass-walled office for Oscar Goodman off from the bar area in the famed glass-dome space that is soon to open as Oscar's. In it will sit his famous mayoral furnishings, including this:


I'm told it'll be sort of like the Oscar Goodman Zoo where visitors will be able to witness the famed leviathan himself in his natural habitat. Interesting. You can see my pictorial of Oscar's City Hall office from 2009 here.

I'm still fairly dubious of how well this concept will work. As I'm hearing it, this steak place is going to be sort of a Vegas-themed Hard Rock/Planet Hollywood kinda thing, decorated with Oscar's likeness and artifacts of his illustrious careers. There's even talk of opening Oscar'ses in other cities after this one establishes itself.

Ultimately, though, gimmick-driven restaurants usually don't succeed, not even in the case of Switch at Encore where the kitchen is run by exceptional chefs. So Oscar's will have to serve up great food that is, because this is still Downtown, inexpensive. And cheap steaks usually are not terribly good steaks. So there's the conundrum.

Still, if Carolyn's husband is actually there hamming it up a lot -- and I mean A LOT -- then maybe it could work. I question, though, how often Oscar Goodman might toil in his office doing whatever "work" he has to do after, say, 6 p.m. when the dinner rush takes place.

Magician Steve Wyrick Postponed Again; Will He EVER Open?

That's not just my question. It's the one stalking the folks at the Las Vegas Hilton, too. There's some snag going on over there that goes beyond needing more time to perfect the show, and now I have a Hilton source telling me there are financial problems. Before it even opens, there are financial problems?!?

I had exclusively reported on July 26 the the journeyman magician's new headliner gig had been postponed from a 7/27 opening to an 8/5 opening, and the other day a ticket agent told me its new opening date was 8/6. Well, that's today, and the Las Vegas Hilton website has scrubbed those dates and a ticketing agent said it's supposed to open 8/9 but "I can't really predict the future."

Indeed. Don't hold your breath on that, either, because the resort's website shows Wyrick scheduled to appear EVERY SINGLE NIGHT UNTIL JANUARY 31, 2012 WITHOUT A SINGLE DAY OFF.

Yeah, right.

[Aside: By then will it even be "the Hilton" by then?]

If you try to book tickets for any of these dates, you evidently can do it, though. They're $39.95 to $125. Something tells me there'll be plenty of seats available on a walk-up basis, though, so I'd hold off on that.

Why does this even matter? Well, Wyrick's face is already plastered on a 20ish-foot-tall banner on the side of the resort where Barry Manilow's visage once gazed down upon the masses. Has there ever, in the history of Las Vegas, been a show advertised and promoted like that that has simply never opened?

Wyrick, of course, has a long history of financial troubles and disappointing shows. Most recently, he went bankrupt after the $35 million Wyrick Theater and bar complex in the Miracle Mile Shops failed miserably. And yet he keeps trying to come back, and that spirit and effort deserves a certain admiration from even those not impressed by his tricks.

There's one more bit of proof, though, that Wyrick is clearly not ready for primetime at the Hilton. This...


...is what you find out front at SteveWyrick.Com. Maybe that's a time-traveling DeLorean? THAT would be an awesome trick.

KSNV's Beautiful Tribute To Miles

Yesterday was Miles' final day at KSNV, the NBC affiliate in Las Vegas. He worked there or at the company's Reno station for 12 years, finishing up as the executive producer overseeing the entire news operation for the past four years. To commemorate the occasion of his departure -- he's coming with me to Ann Arbor to partake in my fellowship -- his friend and anchor Jessica Moore offered these truly lovely words at the close of the last newscast he produced, the 5 p.m. show:

FYI, we're having a little party at Piero's on Aug. 13 from 2-5 pm where friends, colleagues, listeners, readers and viewers are welcome to swing by and visit with us. Hope to see you there!

Gay Golconda: Nevada's Homo Haven?!?

Lots of folks are slicing and dicing 2010 Census data, including those interested in tracking the lives of gays and lesbians. The Census does not ask sexual orientation so there's no raw count of how many gay Americans there are, but it does track same-sex households by allowing gays to check either "married" or "unmarried partner" when indicating the second adult's relationship to whomever is Person No. 1.

The first time this was done was in 2000. Before that, the computer automatically changed the gender of Person No. 2 to make hetero-sense of the responses. When the data came out in 2001, it was significant because it was statistical proof that gays literally, truly, are everywhere. Same-sex couples lived in more than 99% of counties in America, meaning we lived among the rest of you even in the reddest, most conservative and religious nooks.

Thus, it's not surprising that on this go-around, the data similarly shows there are same-sex couples in all 17 counties in Nevada. It's equally unsurprising that the percentage and raw numbers of them is high in the Vegas and Reno areas as well as Pahrump. You can see the various breakdowns, including by gender and percent with children, for Nevada and almost every other state here.

But take a look at this map from the Williams Institute at UCLA's Law School:


What, pray tell, is that darker blue splotch that suggests a concentration of The Gay up there in the middle of Northern Nevada's mining country? At first, I thought maybe it was third-largest-"city" Elko, but it's not. I consulted a Silver State county map so I could determine...



...that it sits in the southeastern corner of Humboldt County. This graphic shows Winnemucca, which would be of gay historical significance because one of the most beloved characters in the great novelist Armistead Maupin's "Tales Of The City" series, Mrs. Madrigal (played by Olympia Dukakis in the PBS mini-series) was raised there in a brothel. Her mom's character, in fact, is Mother Mucca.

I digress, though. I got Dr. Gary Gates, the demographer responsible for tabulating and analyzing these numbers, to make sense of that splotch. We worked out that, in fact, the census tract that is that shape doesn't even include Winnemucca. Rather, according to the Census website...



...it just misses that metropolis. Instead, there's another colored bubble therein that implies some sign of life. Let's look closer:


Golconda!

Uh, what?

Golconda. Duhhh! Everybody open your Internet hymnals to Wikipedia:

Golconda is an unincorporated community in Humboldt County, Nevada, United States. Located along Interstate 80 in the northwestern part of the state, it is named for the ancient diamond mining center of Golkonda in India. The community lies east of the city of Winnemucca and the Golconda Summit, a nearby mountain pass. A post office is located in the community.

Golconda was built when discovery of copper, silver, gold, and lead brought entrepreneurs who opened mines and mills in the district. The town was a diverse society including both native-born Americans as well as foreign populations including individuals of French, Portuguese, Paiute, and Chinese descent who all lived and worked in the small community. During 1898-1910, the town had a train depot, several hotels, a school, businesses, newspapers, and two brothels. Its population peaked at about six hundred in 1907-08. Although boosters predicted growth for Golconda, after 1910 the mines played out, leaving the region as an area of ranches and farms. Most of the town's buildings from its mining heyday are gone, and Golconda today is a minor stop on Interstate 80.

And that's all she cut-and-pasted, folks! A short, dry passage, nothing to indicate a love of rainbows or show tunes or Subarus. I may go and update this page shortly, however, to provide the BREAKING NEWS that it's also, according to the data, the GAY CAPITAL OF NORTHERN NEVADA.

Gates and I had quite a chuckle over this. He said that sometimes anomalies arise because people live in complicated households of multiple adults and shared-custody children and don't fill out the forms right. But he took a careful look at what Census gives us for that tract and he found that there are 17 same-sex couples among the 1,824 households reported. (The Wikipedia entry indicating that the population peaked at 600 more than a century ago could refer to a peak at that time and not more recent population data. I'm further baffled by the 1,824 households, though, because this also implies far fewer people up there than what Census came up with.)

Either way, 17 pairs is obviously not a particularly large number, but proportionately -- that is, per capita -- it puts Golconda in league with the Reno area and makes it significantly gay-coupleier than Pahrump. And Pahrump is holding its first gay pride event in a couple weeks!

Here's a cute old picture from the UNR library showing Goldconda in its heyday:


I've put in a request with the Nevada Secretary of State to see how many same-sex couples are registered domestic partners in those parts. (You can be counted as a couple on the Census but not be registered with the state.) I can't wait to ring some of them up and ask them: What gives? Is there a hummus place up there to die for or something? Did "Brokeback Mountain" inspire some sort of retro, head-for-the-hills migration boom? D0es the County Commission hand out free Birkenstocks?

Why do I feel I've got one last Nevada reporting trip in my future?

P.S. Thanks to whomever it was who put that uber-gay-looking Golconda ballcap pic on the Interwebs. God only knows why, but bless you.

LVW Col: The Weight Watchers Guy From Vegas

Evidently, there's just no way for me to move through life without smacking into a good story. About two months ago, I started Weight Watchers. At my third meeting, our leader was excited to report that WW Magazine would have a man on the cover for the first time, and that he was from Vegas. So my tentacles went up, and here's that column. God knows what I'll do with myself when that happens during my fellowship. Yikes! P.S., I'm now down 17.6 pounds as of this morning's weigh-in. Woo hoo! -sf

Las Vegas Loser
By STEVE FRIESS

Years ago in San Francisco, I met up with some vacationing British friends. The guests were surprised that the people of the City by the Bay seemed so fit, and one friend asked, less-than-half-jokingly, “Where are all the fatties? All we hear about is how fat the Americans are.” Before I could reply, another Brit fired back: “They’re at the buffet in Vegas, ain’t that right, Steve?”

I couldn’t protest. Men’s Fitness has, after all, dubbed Vegas America’s fattest city, and clearly our girth precedes us. We are huge, and not in a good way.

That’s why the accomplishment of math teacher Chris Smith ought to be trumpeted. Not only has he shed 117 pounds in about two years, down from 322 pounds, but this month he becomes the first man to grace the cover of Weight Watchers magazine. You’ll also see him holding one of his “before” photos on new TV commercials with, among others, newly svelte Jennifer Hudson.

The actual news in there is that Weight Watchers is finally highlighting the importance of weight loss for men. Guys don’t realize it until we try to drop a few pounds, as I recently have, but the diet industry focuses obsessively on those with the milk-producing variety of breasts. When a man who isn’t gigantic decides to diet, people actually ask why.

That’s what I’ve found since I began WW in June.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

The E-Mail That Got ex-R-Jer Corey Levitan Fired

A few weeks ago, the Review-Journal let one of its highest-profile writers go. Corey Levitan is especially sensitive to having it said that he was "fired," but that's what it was, of course. Not surprisingly given how legally vulnerable the R-J could be for discussing the matter, I only have his side of the story.

But what a side it is.

I didn't cover this at the time because I'm generally uncomfortable digging into the personal labor strife of individual journalists unless they do something truly offensive to the public, as KTNV's Nina Radetich did when she tipped off a car repair shop about an investigation her colleague was about to break. Radetich's motive, it seemed from leaked phone messages, was to help her now-husband get some crisis-management work, an effort at personal enrichment that violated the public trust. Channel 13 didn't care about that, unfortunately, and Radetich still taints their airwaves.

The dispute between Levitan and the R-J, however, had nothing to do with any violation of the public trust. Levitan was a features writer at the paper whose most prominent gig was doing odd jobs around town and writing about them, at first weekly and later once a month. By getting that kind of real estate in the paper for pieces that focused, essentially, on himself, he earned both fans who found him amusing and detractors who found him irksome. He also was an early adapter to web video at the R-J, which I admired, of course.

He officially was no longer employed at the R-J on June 14. He had had epic battles with his boss, Features Editor Frank Fertado, for years; others in the newsroom recall public rows. To hear Corey tell it, Fertado hired him at the behest of former editor Thomas Mitchell but quite quickly came to dislike him. There's obviously more to it, but because neither R-J publisher Bob Brown or new editor Mike Hengel responded to requests for interviews, I'm loathe to get into all of the frustrations Corey has vented.

That said, Corey -- right, in the photo on the front of his current website -- had already gone public with his anger and sadness about the loss of his job. He has a newborn, so it came at a perilous time for a young family. He's been shopping his odd-jobs column, or some cousin of it, to various publications around Vegas and last week wrote on Facebook that a deal to do something for Las Vegas CityLife was scotched at the last minute because Stephens Media, which owns the alt-weekly as well as the R-J, wouldn't let CityLife editor Scott Dickensheets hire him. Dickensheets declined comment, too.

That Facebook post, as well as one that simply showed his daughter in a car seat with the words "Thanks, Stephens Media!" appear to have been taken down. To me, he said of the CityLife snub: Stephens Media "fired me twice. This is something of a personal nature. And I don’t get it."

After asking for a few weeks, Corey finally sent me the dramatic email he sent to Brown and Hengel on June 9, the event that precipitated his dismissal on June 14. Corey called it "a total fuck-up" but, to his mind, not one "that rose to the level of retribution." Yet Corey also claims he knew as far back as May that his employment could be shaky anyway because "efficiency experts" had evaluated the features section and decided the 9ish-person staff could be reduced to, perhaps, 4.5 full-time writers. Evidently, disgraced former publisher Sherman Frederick has left the paper's financial ship in disastrous order, and reporters at the paper have recently been informed their 401(k) match would be reduced or eliminated and that layoffs are imminent. I'm sure Frederick blames Harry Reid and Barack Obama in some way.

Anyhow, here's Corey's email. Stephen Slater he's not, but it's certainly unusual to get to read a correspondence like this, so I found it newsworthy:

Bob and Mike,

I so wish I didn't feel the need to write this. This is not your fault, or your problem, but it is a problem that the readers are experiencing that you have the power to solve.

Have you noticed the most popular search term on this report? Of all the things people search for on our site because they have no idea how to find it, I am number one.

Each week, my column is progressively harder to find on the website, and in the print edition. (Check out how small it ran last Sunday, without even a photo on the Living front page.)

Thanks to my initial success, I am still constantly recognized whenever my wife and I are out in public. But, almost to a person, what I get now is: "Why did you stop writing your column? I loved that!"

Since "Fear and Loafing" was demoted in July 2008 from every Monday to the first Sunday of every month, it has never run above the fold, and never once has a house ad explained to readers when and where the column could now be found.

By the way, the very week it was summarily demoted, it won first prizes for Best Local Column from the Nevada Press Association and for Best Specialty Reporting in the AASFE.

I have raised these complaints to Frank, but he doesn't want to hear them. He has called the column "stale" and thinks I am of greater value to his section by fleshing out ideas that he comes up with, such as Easter egg painting, Henderson arts festivals and a day at the Broadacres swap meet.

Until now, I have shut up for fear of appearing insubordinate, and because if it got back to Frank, he can and probably would make my life a living hell. Also, both of you have bigger problems on your plate.

However, in the current climate, with every reporter's worth to the paper being evaluated, I have decided that it might be a good idea for me to quit shutting up.

All this talk about making the features section more edgy and exciting is particularly frustrating to me, because I know I would do exactly that in my former position of prominence.

I LOVE this paper, and there's nothing I want to do more than help you make it more entertaining.

Your pal,
Corey

Needless to say, Bob and Mike didn't think of Corey as their pal. They immediately forwarded the missive to Fertado, and Levitan spent that weekend popping Xanax to calm nerves over what might happen next. From my interview with Corey, it seems clear to me that he believed the higher-ups would, perhaps, reprimand his boss.

"I don’t fault them," he says of his bosses. "They were misled. They were misguided. . . . I didn’t think it was a viable option, getting rid of the most popular writers."

The Strip IS live tonight...with a Mystery Guest

I don't want to announce who our guest is this week because Miles doesn't know yet, either, but let's just say that we're taking care of some old business from the earliest days of Vegas S&MThe Strip. So join us at about 8p at this UStream site to hear the interview, then stick around for Miles to come home for the live show.

And, no, just to head off needless speculation, it's not Steve Wynn. I think he's still peeved that I was first in both the print media and the blogosphere to call out his anti-Socialism/pro-Sinophilia contradiction.

Anywho, we're running out of time, folks, so come on down for the live show and watch the puppies eat their snacks. It'll be grand. Or wait for the podcast version. That's great, too.

Wolfgang Puck Departing Springs Preserve?

Just got word that Wolfgang Puck appears to be about to relinquish control over the food service at the Las Vegas Springs Preserve Cafe. The replacement is actually pretty interesting, too.

Here's what employees of the water district, which oversees the 4-year-old Spring Preserve, were told today in an e-mail blast:

"The LVVWD Board of Directors today approved a staff recommendation to negotiate a contract with the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas to operate the Springs Preserve's restaurant and onsite catering. If the Board approves the contract at a subsequent meeting, the Culinary Academy would replace Wolfgang Puck as operator of the Springs Cafe. The Culinary Academy of Las Vegas is a nonprofit partnership—between Union Local #226, Bartenders Local #165 and Las Vegas Strip properties—which provides employment and training for hospitality-industry workers."

That's kinda cool, right? The local cooking school will manage this? It's sensible, undoubtedly less expensive and a smart partnership between two educational institutions.

Still, it can't be a good sign for the Springs Preserve's visitation numbers. And for Puck is like the Cirque du Soleil of food around these parts; he's only previously closed one restaurant in Vegas that I know of, Chinois.