Do The VegasTripping Folks Smoke CRACK?

WOW. So I was having a pretty difficult Sunday, having gotten the call that my uncle, struggling with pancreatic cancer in New York for 18 months, finally succumbed and not being able to do anything but focus on the flooding in Fernley, Nev., so I could file this piece for the Times and then fly back to Vegas to see "Love" at 7 pm for a story I'm working on.

Then, in the midst of all that, I start seeing emails and text messages congratulating me and/or asking if I'd noticed that the fine folks at VegasTripping.Com had done this:


And this, too:


That's NUTS. And a great, great honor. You can read about the Person of the Year thing and the Best Blog write-up at those links or check out all the Trippies winners here.

A few other Trippies outcome observations:

* Readers voted The Bellagio both best overall and worst "swanky place." Odd.

* There's a great deal of hate spewed from the Trippies editors at all things Venetian. Worst overall, worst "swanky joint," worst value, worst rooms, worst nightclub (Tao), most overrated, Then, randomly, the Venetian get editors' pick for best room service.

* On the other hand, there's a ton of hate from readers for Circus Circus, from worst grind joint to worse eats to worst carpet.

* The editors are uniformly down on Vegas gambling in general, giving a "they all suck" to table games, slots and casino. I may need to dig deeper on that in the Weekly.

* The Deuce got editors' pick for best place to get laid. But they don't 'splain!!!

* Congrats to Tim & Michelle at Five Hundy for taking the best podcast categories, VegasTodayandTomorrow.Com for reader-voted best site and RateVegas.Com's iPhone edition for editor-selected best site. The reader-selected LeavingLV.Net for best blog was an inspired choice and evidence that, even in this saturated age of Vegas media, there's still room for an innovation to fill a niche.

Congrats and thanks to all!

Greetings from the Fernley Super 8!

Sunset over the Spring Mountain range northwest of Vegas, 1/5/07

Such is life that a levee breaks in a small town along I-80 about 40 miles east of Reno and the weekend takes a totally unexpected turn. You may have seen on the news that about 3,500 people were flooded out of 400 homes amid a nasty winter storm up here.

Well, The New York Times asked me to get up here to Fernley, Nev., and dispatched a freelance photographer from Sacramento. Both of us had serious access problems. The Reno airport was shut down because of weather much of the afternoon, so I rented a 4-wheel-drive Ford Escape (with an mp3 jack, natch) and drove the 400 miles north, snapping the pic above along the way.

Our photog got turned away trying to get over the Sierras for hours when I-80 was shut down. Both of us got here after midnight and will be up early Sunday looking for poor displaced souls to talk to for a piece for Monday's paper. It's a rather Herculean effort for a story that, I suspect, will not prove to be of great national importance as 400 homes isn't much, really, and nobody was seriously injured. But, to give you a sense of how silly the presidential campaign has become, both Hillary and Obama issued statements of solidarity with the suffering people of Fernley ahead of our Jan. 19 first-in-the-West caucuses. After that, something tells me they won't care so much about the good Fernleyans. Or, at least one of them sure won't, anyhow.

Meanwhile, I stopped for a potty break in the charming old-Nevada town of Fallon and thought you'd enjoy some pics of it. Fallon has a Naval Air Station but is best known as the scene of the most expensive cancer cluster investigation in U.S. history, which utterly failed to discern what caused several children to come down with leukemia. I covered it for Newsweek and the Boston Globe in 2003.


Don't think I wasn't tempted by the wares at Phat Tatz...


And finally, knowing how much Miles adores the snow, I figured I'd show him a little because, hey, nothing says romance like writing your partner's name in the snow collected on a garbage bin, am I right?