Good and bad from the weekend papers

I caught up this morning on the weekend papers, and this stuff is worth your eye:

* Howard Stutz of the R-J puts together the surprising detente between Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson, right down to the suggestion by Adelson that the epic rivals will soon dine together. Oh, to be a fly...

* Tom Gorman of the Sun has a most awesome Q-and-A with Sir Patrick Stewart on his plans to create a Vegas-set version of "The Merchant of Venice." It reminds me of the time I saw "Taming of the Shrew" staged as a Western starring Morgan Freeman and Tracey Ullman and put on by Joseph Papp in Central Park. (Side note: I once considered titling a podcast interview with Adelson as "The Merchant of Venice" but opted against doing so because because the play -- or at least the title character of Shylock -- is so notoriously anti-Semitic. I went with "Mr. Sands Man" instead.)

* J. Patrick Coolican, who has been refreshingly diversifying his columns from the monotony of politics that the Sun is addicted to, gives us a terrific piece on a 25-year-old kid living at Veer for $1,000 a month plus valet parker duties. Money quote to make Jim Murren, who pictured a different grade of humanity living in these units, cringe: "The amenities -- you can't beat 'em." Party on, dude!

* Adrienne Packer geeks out on data collected by an 81-year-old monorail obsessive who has empirically proven that, for the most part, it's faster and cheaper to walk from one casino to another than to ride the ill-placed transit system. What's more, the creative codger's analysis also indicates that the oft-cited panacea for the monorail's woes -- a link-up to McCarran -- won't work, either.

Of course, there are some jeers:

* Why does Sad Shermy still have a column in the newspaper he has legally imperiled and whose circulation he ruined? I'd much rather have seen them hold over ex-editor Thomas Mitchell's columns because at least they were (usually) original and smart meditations on a topic that doesn't get enough press, first amendment matters. Instead, we have Sad Shermy writing the same old predictable babble, only not as well or as thoughtfully as other conservative commentators who actually do some reporting.

* I adore the work of Adrienne Packer, so I hope she doesn't take this the wrong way, but the absence of any coverage of the passage and Sandoval signing of AB511, the bill that makes Nevada the first state to legalize DRIVERLESS CARS for road use, is simple dereliction. This is a major, major legislative and technological development. I understand why Carson City scribes would overlook it because they had the budget and everything else to cover, but transportation writers ought to be all over this. So should technology writers, but neither the R-J nor the Sun have one of any merit, a glaring problem. (I'm trying to get the link to my piece on this from the iPad-only The Daily.)

Check out this YouTube video on the driverless cars for background and some amazing visuals:

This could be real on the roads of Vegas a year from now, thanks to the law. Really.

* Steve Bornfeld of the R-J applied his typical staccato, sentence-fragment style to his coverage of the Daytime Emmy Awards in a piece that essentially chronicled the construct of the red carpet and the backstage post-win appearances. I do understand the instinct toward media navel-gazing (see this blog post or this whole blog!) and the desire to behave above and apart from the media silliness of such events. But in this particular case, he actually missed the story, which was how offended the audience and Emmy brass were that Oprah Winfrey did not show up for her own lengthy tribute. There was noticeable hostility in the Hilton theater as well as all over Twitter, and I'm pretty surprised that Oprah didn't just snubbed this crowd but also passed up a much-much-much-needed opportunity to plug her flailing network and its unwatched offerings. Didn't Oprah quit so she could focus on that? Also, why did they lie and pretend that Celine Dion was singing live from the Colosseum during the show when Celine's part was taped four days earlier? That sort of stuff would've made an interesting, Vegas-centric wrap-up.

* I'm completely puzzled that (a) this below is front page news, (b) that the paper misspelled the name of its own reporter of 426 years (It's Przybys, not Pyzybys, as it was corrected later online) and (c) that they ran with this thoroughly misleading headline:


What "history" was made? A California woman won a beauty pageant. She's not the first. She's not the last. She's not even all that interesting a woman, except she seems to have acquired a bit of Tudor lust thanks, probably, to Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. If there was some history made -- beyond the fact that every day is technically historic -- then John Pryzyzyzbys didn't tell us what that might've been.

* Journalists really must stop bitching, especially publicly on Twitter, about the quality of the free seats they get at various events. It truly embarrasses to them to behave so openly entitled, and it distracts from the quality of their coverage. Do they think their readers are sympathetic to the complaints of a group of people who seem to expect special treatment? This came up, too, during the opening of Celine's show at the Colosseum. The whiners' lack of self-awareness is kind of unbelievable.

* Finally, where the heck was the print coverage of the Starkey Hearing Foundation's mission to provide 100 underprivileged kids in Clark County with free hearing aids on Saturday? Those hearing aids cost probably $2,500 each, so that's $500,000 in donated, customized equipment alone, but more importantly there were some amazing and heartbreaking stories there. But never fear, I volunteered and I'll be columnizing about that this week for the Las Vegas Weekly. Also, because I know someone at KSNV, they did this:

Sahara's Short, Humdrum, Dry-Eyed Goodbye

On Friday night, I emailed my Las Vegas Weekly editors my idea for my next column, which I proposed to be a look at how little emotion has been stirred up by Monday's closure of the venerable Sahara.

Then, today as I read the Sun and Review-Journal's somewhat perfunctory coverage in the newspaper of this seemingly momentous event, I realized that's not really going to be much of an original thought by Thursday when the next issue of the magazine comes out. In fact, it's a measure of how little anyone seems to really care that it won't even worthwhile to meditate on why very few people seem to really care.

I do have a theory though: Old Vegas nostalgia is mostly just talk.

In fact, I suspect the last great moment for the Sahara already happened on Friday when they handed out free tickets and then drew from a drum the names of 63 people who each received $500 that was left over in the casino's progressive slot jackpot. Well, the 63rd winner actually got $507, but whatever. Here's my losing ticket:


...and the drum...


...and the last time this casino will be quite this packed, including on Monday afternoon.


There were very few nostalgists there, just lots of people who heard they had a shot at some free money and better-than-usual odds. Even our waitress at the NASCAR Cafe seemed dispassionate, although she also has a job at the Pink Taco at the Hard Rock waiting for her at least through the summer.

The newspapers felt similarly on auto-pilot, with Norm Clarke documenting the usual recollections of famous Sahara guests and performers and Howard Stutz giving voice to the obligatory longtime employee. But then there also was Stutz visiting with ex-owner Paul Lowden who isn't sorry to see it close and Mike Weatherford being uncharacteristically tart and snarky with this:

If the 860 seats from that theater are put up for sale, I recommend those from the balcony, which have never been touched by a butt.

Ouch. Over at the Sun, all we got in print on this Closing Eve Sunday was publisher Brian Greenspun offering some choice memories and then bemoaning the place's decline. He concluded:

I have missed the Sahara for a very long time.

What strikes me here, though, is how often I hear people whine about missing the Old Vegas and the classic haunts, blah blah blah. Here we have a pretty gen-u-ine Old Vegas article, and it's going bye-bye with a great big collective shrug. Not a single podcast listener or blog reader said they were making a special trip for one last drop-in, as many did for the Stardust and a few did for the Frontier.

What's more, unlike other demises -- the Aladdin, Stardust, Frontier, Dunes and Sands among them -- there's no actual plan for replacing the place. Very few take Sam Nazarian's recent blather that something new will replace it by 2014 seriously. Both Greenspun and Lowden reference this closure as a necessary passage to some sort of "progress," but nobody actually thinks that there's anything to rise in its place before, say, Lake Mead runs out of water.

On Friday night, we went over to see this weird cash giveaway thing. Just before that was over, Twitter follower Kara70 asked me: "Will you stick around after the drawings? Do you think there'll be a stampede out the doors afterwards?"

If there was any sincere regret over the Sahara's demise, people would've stuck around after the drawing ended around 7:30 pm. They would have soaked in the lore, appreciated the waning hours. And yet...


...they didn't.

The Show is UP: Corey Feldman & Expose

The latest show has been in the feed for several days, as iTunes or Zune subscribers knew. But here it is anyhow, so go click on the date below to get it to play or right-click on it to download it to listen at your leisure. Enjoy. -sf

Oct. 9: TOTALLY 80s...with Corey Feldman & Expose

It’s TOTALLY ‘80s Week! Former child star Corey Feldman is coming to Vegas this month to promote another sequel to “Lost Boys” with a screening of the original at House of Blues and an appearance by Feldman’s band. So Steve gets his thoughts on being a Strip headliner for the first time and his memories of his underage clubhopping in Vegas back in the day. Plus, the wildly successful girl and now reunited pop band Expose plays in Henderson this weekend, which seemed like as good a time as any to chat up lead singer Jeanette Jurado, a Las Vegas resident who also opened the short-lived but critically beloved New York-New York show, Madhattan.

In Banter: Our MGM Signature staycation, gaming numbers are up, Toni Braxton's chips are way down, the Plaza buys its furnishings, the Trop has a massive billboard planned and Jersey Boys is going Hollywood.

Links to stuff discussed:

Expose’s website
Corey Feldman’s Lost Boys Ball at House of Blues at Mandalay Bay
Feldman’s site and the site of the Truth Movement
Buy the Lost Boys films on DVD and Blue-Ray
A link to the MGM Signature
Yelp on Craftsteak
The LVCVA’s latest gaming and hotel data and Howard Stutz’s report of same
Resorts in Atlantic City will retheme in a Boardwalk Empire motif
Norm Clarke on Toni Braxton’s economic disaster and its Vegas relevance
VegasHappensHere.Com on the FBI saying we’re No. 3
The New York Times does a front page piece on Vegas’ economic woes
Geoff Schumacher and Doug Elfman cry a river over the NYT’s front page piece on Vegas’ economic woes
The Las Vegas Sun on the Plaza buying all the F-blew castoff inventory
VegasHappensHere.Com on the Tropicana’s ginormous billboard
Bali Hai might close
Corey Feldman’s site and the site of the Truth Movement
New York Comic-Con
Norm Clarke discusses the quandary of Tweeting at Tony Curtis’ funeral

Sunday #Vegas Readings

This, above from today's Pearls Before Swine, is my life. Click on the image to enlarge it.

OK, I'm a long way from worrying about my resume, but the premise is precisely what happens to me often. Like right now. I need to write an important L.A. Weekly cover story but, lo and behold, I feel maybe I ought to blog first, then I'll get to it. I swear.

Then again, I've got plenty of time. Miles is at work today, so the most momentous TV event I've ever cared about -- the series finale of "Lost" -- must wait until he comes home from work at midnight or so. That means avoiding Twitter, e-mail, the Internet at large or even text messages beginning at 6 p.m. PT when the East Coast feed commences. Hopefully that gives me plenty of time to write without the distractions so brilliantly depicted in the comic, right? (By the way, check out my AOLNews piece on the emotional trauma for "Lost" superfans represented by the end of the series. Yes, it's mildly autobiographical.)

Before my radio silence, however, some interesting stuff in today's newspaper.

* I was in it. I'm the guy in the blue shirt in the front row at the Conservative Leadership Conference held at the M, seated next to Nevada News Bureau's Elizabeth Crum, see?


I had to scan this in because the Sun didn't post this image online. Not evident: The gruesome stack of used tissues courtesy of my Great Cold of 2010. Achoo. [I was there to do a piece for AOL News that I won't finish until tomorrow because the aforementioned L.A. Weekly assignment takes precedence. I did Tweet a lot from it, though, and those Tweets can be found via this #clc2010 hashtag.]

* Arnold M. Knightly has a fascinating Q-and-A with Robin Haffner-Matos, the longtime guru behind the Flamingo's Wildlife Habitat. I've chatted with her before -- she's the one who told me about gay pink flamingo couple Bubbles and Pink Floyd and the sexually ambiguous penguin Turnip for my 2004 L.A. Times travel piece on Vegas animal exhibits. Yet until reading Knightly's piece, it never occurred to me to book her on The Petcast, which I will try to do tomorrow.

* Many have emailed asking why I haven't either bashed Andy Rooney for his snark about the worthlessness of blackjack dealers or bashed whiny, defensive Las Vegans for being offended. The reason is that (a) Andy Rooney is an idiot and (b) Andy Rooney is irrelevant. So yes, he's wrong but no, nobody should really care what he says nor be surprised. If I had written about it, it would've come out something like what the R-J's Howard Stutz said today. So if you want to know what I think, read Howard's version. Can we move on now?

* Mike Weatherford of the R-J is not known for eviscerating specific people the way I make it a sport. But boy, he sure pulled Steve Wyrick apart limb by limb in his column. It's pretty brutal. And all true.

* My Petcast co-host and future Knight-Wallace Fellow Emily Richmond has the most relatable piece I've ever read on the pitfalls of the No Child Left Behind rules in today's Las Vegas Sun. She focuses on one well-loved, well-regarded principal who has done some excellent things for a low-performing, highly transient Vegas school but still is likely to lose her job because of test scores. It's a really readable piece with a great deal of national relevance -- this story could comfortably have run on the front page of The New York Times -- and I read all of it. My big complaint is that Emily's story occupied nearly four full pages of today's Sun and yet the print edition carried no clear photo of the subject of the 4,500-word opus. Not one! The leading image has her obscured by a spray of a hose and there's a distant, shadowed silhouette of her holding hands with two kids. The Web version has one image of her holding a baby buried in a slideshow. This is very, very odd. What makes Emily's piece so engaging and unusual is that she dissects the life and humanity of a specific educator instead of weighing us down in data and legalese. I'd rather have seen images of this principal talking to students, photos of her earlier career which is detailed in the piece, pictures of her family and home. That's why this is such a good piece, because we learn about an educator's whole life. Why not show that, too? Instead, we get loads of cute-kid pix which could be taken at any school anywhere in the world.

* Las Vegas Sun uberpundit Jon Ralston once again shouts against the wind with his perennial column exhorting people not to vote early because something might happen between now when early voting begins and June 8, the proper primary election day. This is a nearly annual, totally tired groan by Ralston. Yes, in some select cases last minute information can be important, namely in the case of all that scandal that burst on Jim Gibbons in the waning weeks of his campaign for Nevada governor in 2006. (Likely result, by the way: Gov. Dina Titus would have been thrown out of office this year instead of Rep. Dina Titus. Pick 'em!) But early voting now accounts for as much as 62 percent of all ballots cast and, more importantly, in almost every race ever, the results from early voting have failed to vary substantially from those who vote on Election Day. That is, when polls close on June 8 and votes are tabulated for early voting, the percentages probably won't budge for the rest of the night in almost every case. This may seem obvious since most voters now vote early, but it was also true in 1998 when I was a political reporter for the Review-Journal and early voting was still a Nevada novelty. Ralston's theoretically correct that voters should have all the information they can possibly have before voting, but in reality the final weeks of most campaigns are more likely to be full of misinformation, lies, hyperbole, histrionics and distortions than legitimate revelations. So it's six of one, half dozen of the other to me.

OK. Now time to write that story. Really. Or maybe I should go early vote? Oh, look, a butterfly!

When Gaming Execs Can't STFU

Here's this week's LVW col, which avid readers of this space recall from its draft form two days ago when it was posted for a couple of hours before I decided to expand it into a full column. Enjoy! -sf

Casino execs: Why all the hatin'?
Vegas collegiality only seems to work in times of plenty

By STEVE FRIESS

"There is an unwritten rule within the gaming industry: Don't disrupt another casino operator's grand opening."

Review-Journal gaming scribe Howard Stutz's Sunday column about the decision by Boyd Gaming to issue its Station counter-offer on Aria’s opening day contained this hilarious line. It’s not hilarious because Stutz is wrong. He’s totally right. It’s hilarious because he wrote about Boyd’s untoward acts of last week, when he easily could have been talking about Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, Phil Ruffin, Steve Wynn or even George Maloof.

As Stutz wrote, Boyd did themselves no favors dropping a bomb that would've been front-page news on a normal day last week. But at least Boyd didn't try to steal the spotlight the same way Adelson, Trump and Ruffin did. Consider:

* Adelson gave his onceish-a-year in-depth interview to Forbes' Matthew Miller on Aria's Opening Day. It's a fascinating exchange in which Adelson goes on about how important his Forbes billionaire's list ranking is in a manner I've never heard any mogul speak. And as for CityCenter? "Even though there is a lot of publicity about it, I haven't heard anyone who's seen it tell me it is going to be a winner. They have no strategy. They have no obvious plan. If they try to compete in the travel and tour business, they will cannibalize all their other properties, like the Bellagio. They don't have a convention space big enough to make an impact. So they built it without a strategy. How ill-advisable is that?"

* Trump: He went on "Larry King Live" on Aria Eve to declare CityCenter ugly, "an absolute catastrophe." Norm Clarke of the R-J theorized that Trump was reacting to MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren's remark to me for my L.A. Weekly opus that the Trump tower in Vegas is hardly prime-time stuff. Either way, MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman had probably the most hilarious comeback of the year, telling Norm of Trump, "I can hardly imagine anyone's opinion that matters less than his." That didn't sit well with Trump, who couldn't bear to give his competitor the last word. He dashed off a hand-written note to Norm, who published it on Saturday, that read: "The CityCenter is architecturally unappealing -- It will be the biggest bust in the history of real estate -- good concept but badly designed and really badly executed. Too bad."

* Ruffin: The owner of the Treasure Island is painted in another Forbes piece out this weekend as something of a savior of CityCenter for buying the resort from MGM Mirage when they were desperate for cash. Ruffin's happy to play that role, sure, but then he drops this completely buried bomb: "They have so many billions of dollars of debt on that project. They are going to have to make so much money every month just to service that debt. That's going to force the MGM guys to go through a lot of pain again, and they'll have to renegotiate their debt but probably also sell off another property or two. I've got at least $500 million in cash and loans I haven't drawn down. And I'd love to own the Bellagio or Mandalay Bay." Shame, really, that he's putting Gilley's in the TI when it would've been so great where the underperforming Conservatory is, you know? But maybe he could get Cirque du Soleil to give him a "Cold Beer, Dirty Girls"-themed show for Mandalay Bay?

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

From the Files of It Had To Happen Eventually

The weekend papers contained three stories that were interesting, but not surprising to me. They just seemed preordained to occur one of these days.

1. Ex-dealer sues over exposure to smoke. Saturday's Howard Stutz piece in the Review-Journal about the former Caesars Palace blackjack dealer who is suing because after suffering precancerous stomach cells and told by her doctor she couldn't keep sucking in second-hand smoke on her job, the resort allegedly refused to reassign her to a nonsmoking gig. I hadn't even realized that Caesars had once had nonsmoking gaming areas until 2005, when Harrah's bought the joint and got rid of them. But this won't be the last lawsuit by a cancer-stricken dealer, to be sure. MGM Mirage's Alan Feldman told me last year he expects all Vegas casinos to be smoke-free within 10 years. Maybe they're hoping the courts force it so they don't have to take the blame from the public?

2. Liquor licenses for nightclubs denied. On the heels of the $500,000 fine to P-Ho for infractions at Prive nightclub, the club itself now lost its liquor license. Again, just the first of many chips to fall in a perilous business.

3. Player heaps scorn in Series' suits. Stutz's column today about the WSOP finalist who is attacking the tournament itself was a great read. Card Player magazine editor Jeff Shulman is presently in 4th, has already won $1.26 millon and now waits with the other eight for the Final Table in November. But while the WSOP chiefs wanted the November Nine to spend the time talking up the tournament and game, Shulman says he'll toss his bracelet in the trash or auction it for charity if he wins. That it would be the editor of a publication in direct competition with the magazine that is the official sponsor of the WSOP is a script we could never predict, but it seems now predictable that sooner or later someone would use their position to devour the hand that is feeding him. Shulman's complaint is the tournament is too big, to reliant on luck, too corporate. And yet he still plays in it, covers it in his publication, took his $1.26 million? Here is again one of the charms and problems of the WSOP -- anyone can win. And anyone who can win can say and do whatever they wish. A member of the Yankees who speaks out about what an asshole Steinbrenner or a Wimbledon player who tells a reporter the Queen of England is a hoary bitch can face consequences. But the World Series of Poker has no such control over its players and that's both a good and bad thing. What a total nightmare for them if Shulman wins, though.

Mass panic at Bellagio on March 27?

The Review-Journal's Howard Stutz did a fine job illuminating some of the machinations behind the curtains at MGM Mirage in late March when CityCenter dangled perilously on the brink of bankruptcy. In fact, between that piece and Arnold Knightly's piece in which Harrah's CEO Gary Loveman defends the decision to go private, today's business section is full of important comments by which we will be measuring the success and failure of the corporate powers-that-be in town for a while.

But.

This dramatic detail in the MGM piece is quite baffling and difficult to believe:

Inside MGM Mirage's corporate headquarters at the Bellagio, Chief Financial Officer Dan D'Arrigo sat at a conference table with company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jim Murren. They were waiting for word that a majority of the company's banks were willing to let MGM Mirage make the payment.

Suddenly, the floor-to-ceiling windows aligning the spacious office that once belonged to Bellagio builder Steve Wynn began to shake.

News helicopters from Las Vegas' television stations were hovering overhead, waiting to capture the exodus of construction workers when the CityCenter site was shuttered.

"It was pretty surreal," D'Arrigo recalled.

I bet! So surreal, in fact, that it's hard to conceive of how this could possibly have actually occurred without the helicopters coming so close to the building that thousands of guests who were much higher up and thus closer to the choppers didn't freak out and stampede out of there. I don't recall hearing about that, did you?

As it happens, I'm married to an expert of sorts, the executive producer of one of the local stations, so I asked whether it made any sense to him. My partner was dubious. Unless the helicopter was actually landing on the building, it wouldn't make it shake. That happens at the Miles' studio, for instance, but that's a pretty little building, not the massive fortress that is one of the largest resorts in the world.

Beyond the legal air-space issues involved with a helicopter coming so close to any structure that it would make it tremble, it's also questionable that the local TV news stations would have their helicopters hanging out over CityCenter for any length of time anyway. It just costs too much. It's possible they were grabbing some fly-by footage, but to linger is not a terribly effective use of scarce resources -- the local TV stations get only a certain amount of fly time each month before they have to pay extra -- when they could be over CityCenter in minutes if workers were suddenly streaming off the job site. Or, since this was occurring in the morning, could it be the choppers were just observing traffic conditions on I-15 as they are wont to do?

Finally, there's a logistics question here. I could be wrong -- and I'll happily correct myself if so -- but the corporate offices at the Bellagio have no real view of CityCenter. They are located back by the art gallery near the pool in the middle of the resort. If they even face south -- I just can't remember and this photo doesn't help me much -- they surely have a pretty lousy sightline of CityCenter, what with the Spa Tower and Cosmopolitan standing in the way. For news helicopters to be so close to those offices in the inner sanctum of a place like Bellagio that the windows would shake would mean even they were in exactly the wrong place for whatever shot they were supposedly seeking.

My suspicion is that someone heard a chopper or two, maybe even saw it, and drew the conclusions that Stutz reported D'Arrigo as claiming. It's not a big deal, just something that the more I thought about today, the more I wondered about.

How big, and how much, is CityCenter?

Sorry to revisit stuff we've covered before here, but I was struck this morning once again by the fact that the media is all over the place with the price of CityCenter. Howard Stutz in the Review-Journal refers to it as a $9.1 billion project, but Liz Benston and Lisa Mascaro, both of the Las Vegas Sun, put the figure at $8.7 billion in different stories.

Benston's piece even includes this explanation:

Dubai World says at the time of the joint venture agreement, MGM Mirage estimated CityCenter would cost $7.5 billion. MGM Mirage has since increased that estimate by about $1.2 billion, with further increases likely despite recent moves to scale back some aspects of CityCenter, the lawsuit says.

So I wrote to Alan Feldman, MGM Mirage's spokesman. As recently as Jan. 8, he told VegasHappensHere.Com: "The safest apples-to-apples would be our previously stated $9.2b less the just announced $600m in savings" from shortening The Harmon. I asked at the time if that meant $8.6 billion was the current figure and Feldman said yes.

Well, that was two months ago. Today, inquiring about who's right now, Feldman replied via e-mail: "The Sun is correct. $8.7 total, $1.2 of which we are hoping to finance."

Okey dokey, then, although the Sun and Feldman can't both be correct because the Sun was operating off of figures given to Dubai in 2007 and Feldman said two months ago that the figure was $9.2 billion less $600 million. See how this can make you crazy? And this is a PUBLICLY traded company!

To Feldman's credit, back in January he did offer this caveat: "This is a number that you need to understand is moving. We continue to bid stuff, we continue to get new pricing. We talk about these numbers as if they're fixed but they're really not."

I am not casting aspersions on Stutz or any other reporter here, so please don't take it that way. These numbers change by the week or month. It's dizzying. Especially when you receive two newspapers in one every morning and the same thicket of newsprint offers different numbers. So the best I can suggest is that journalists, every single time they write about this project, ask Feldman what the current figure is.

MEANWHILE, how BIG is CityCenter? Well, in April 2007, VegasHappensHere.Com puzzled over that, too. Different reports had it at 76, 66, or 67 acres. MGM Mirage's original literature when the project was announced said 66 acres, a New York Times reporter called it 67 acres and other media were using 76 acres.

At that point, Feldman responded: "Please use 76. There's some technical debate internally, but 76 is in use far and wide and it's not inaccurate."

Okey dokey again. But then I noticed recently that the press was using 67 acres and the signage at the condo-sales kiosk for CityCenter at the Mirage said 67 acres, too. So today I asked again. Feldman's response: "Acreage: 67 acres."

Well, where'd the other 9 acres go?

"I believe some land was transferred to Monte Carlo for a parking garage."

Must be some parking garage at 9 acres. I pressed Feldman to explain further and he said he didn't have the time. I suggested holding off on this post until tomorrow if it would make a difference. He said it would not.

So there you have it. Make of that what you will. What I make of it is that numbers are very loosey goosey in this project so critical to the welfare of Nevada that U.S. senators need to get involved in to saving it even as MGM Mirage also insists it is totally capable of paying to finish construction so chill out, Mr. Dubai Dudes and Mr. Wall Street Dudes.

No wonder, then, Dubai is so uncomfortable. None of the numbers MGM Mirage provide ever come with comprehensive explanations. The 10,000 employees that CityCenter will hire? Who knows if that's a real figure, either?

R-J Finally Realizes Its Own Scoop! Well, Sorta.

[UPDATE, 7 a.m. PT, 3/24: The Sun's Lisa Mascaro has a piece in today's newspaper that fails to acknowledge the origin of this controversy, the R-J column by Howard Stutz. That, too, is inappropriate. If it had originated from the AP or Politico or the LA Times, she absolutely would have. Print media for far too long have been incapable of acknowledging their competitors' roles in how fast-moving news breaks. It's one reason the print media's credibility is losing ground to the Web, where even news-gathering bloggers almost always link to one other's work. -sf]

Sigh.

So here I am, getting MGM and the Sen. Reid on the record deciphering the tale that was merely hinted at in Howard Stutz's Review-Journal column yesterday. And between Jon Ralston and me, we bring it out that the Senate Majority Leader did, in fact, call banks on MGM Mirage's behalf to try to finance the rest of CityCenter.

The world starts to take notice. The Los Angeles Times and Politico.Com both write about it, crediting Ralston and/or me.

And finally, FOUR hours after I break this news here, along comes the R-J not just declaring this "Breaking News" but also pretending as though nobody else had done any journalism in the matter. Remember, of course, that I *always* provide credit for what the R-J or anyone else has come up with. If I discover I'm wrong in claiming to be first on something, I fix it with ALL-CAPS RED TYPE.

But there's the R-J, still pretending it's the only entity in the media universe. If Stutz had understood what gold he possessed, he would have called MGM and Sen. Reid's office before he even ran the allegation. So, Howard, don't go pretending that you had this awesome scoop and knew it and did all this great journalism to advance it. You get credit for mentioning the hint of the controversy first but not for realizing it was controversial or doing your due diligence as a journalist to ferret out the rest of the story.

And what's more, Stutz once again misses the news that he has. You see, by the time he wrote this it wasn't news anymore than Reid had made these calls. I'd reported that. The news he DID have was that MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., had done the same thing.

Of course, it took Ralston to fill in the details on that, getting this e-mailed remark from Feldman and blasting it out to the universe via e-mail:

Wouldn’t you also be outraged if a Senator DIDN’T stand up for the largest employer/taxpayer in his/her state and try to inquire about what issues stand in the way of financing the largest investment in US history and the largest job-creator in the nation? What Senator wouldn’t do that? Our two certainly did. There were public hearings on what the banks were doing with all the bailout funds they had received and the banks all claimed they were lending money. Have you seen any? We haven’t. As the nation experiences an unprecedented credit freeze on Wall Street, a politician calling on a bank to get funds moving again seems the right and appropriate action, not something deserving of scorn.

If I sound angry, this time I am. Normally, I comment on the R-J's shortcomings with a certain amount of humor and in the hopes that someone over there might once in a while take a suggestion or realize a mistake. This time it's personal. Stutz and his editors are absolutely aware of how badly they've stumbled on this story and they want to pretend they didn't, that they were on it the whole time and that that those shitty little pajama-clad blogger assholes don't exist. And yet, if we didn't exist, Stutz still would have no clue what he overlooked.

Sen. Reid calling banks for MGM Mirage?

Just one article into this morning's Review-Journal, already I'm struck by something that seems like it could be an enormous scandal and right-wing outrage if true. But I wonder if it is because R-J gaming reporter Howard Stutz buried it so deep in his column that either he doesn't see the implications or he's not all that confident about his anonymous source.

Stutz's column is mainly about what Kirk Kerkorian is up to now that his company is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy or worse. After MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren says point-blank that Kerkorian is not involved in negotiations with lenders, here's the passage that grabbed me by hte collar:

One gaming analyst said Kerkorian and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a close friend, have been calling financial institutions to try and raise the remaining $1.2 billion needed to complete the $9.1 billion CityCenter development.

Um, wow. The nation's most powerful legislator is ringing up investment houses big enough to pony up $1.2 billion and pleading with them to save a massive Strip casino development? Really? Does that sound sane to you? Sure, Reid has to be worried about what an MGM default could do to the rest of the already-tattered Nevada economy, but he's also in the throes of attacking the same institutions for the risky, lousy investments that led the nation to this precipice. And he's already taking some heat for possibly sheltering AIG prior to the bonuses scandal. Such phone calls would seem to be laden in all sorts of ethical and political minefields.

I just had this text-message exchange with MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman.

VegasHappensHere: Howard Stutz reports today that Reid has been calling banks for MGM trying to help get you loans for CityCenter. Is that possibly true?

Feldman: Not the way Howard wrote it. We (and hundreds of other businesses arond the country) have tried to use any possibly avenue to get banks lending again, including asking politicians to weigh in. They're not being asked to involve themselves in any of the detail, just to emphasize the larger public interests at play in making loans and getting the flow of credit started. This is very similar to the dialogue on Capital Hill in House and Senate banking committee hearings."

VegasHappensHere: So do you know of an instance where Reid has called a bank to ask them to give MGM or any other gaming company a loan?

Feldman: No.

I'm waiting to hear back from Sen. Reid's office as well. But such a claim is so incendiary and controversial that I'm a bit surprised the newspaper would run with it if Stutz didn't have at least a few sources claiming the same thing. Still, he clearly states it's the speculation of "one gaming analyst" who is granted anonymity. So it's either true and a huge scandal or it's irresponsible journalism.

Some Sunday Media Musings

(UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that Jon Ralston actually broke the payments-to-witnesses story on the Feb. 13 episode of his LV1 program, Face To Face.)

There wasn't a whole lot of interest to out-of-towners in the Sunday newspapers, although the piece by the Review-Journal's Carri Geer Thevenot on prosecutors paying crack-addled defendants for their questionable testimony was so surprising that I may be able to build upon it for a piece of my own.

That is, after all, how my piece in today's New York Times on the national debate over shifting from a gas tax to a road-usage tax came about, because I'd caught a small piece in the Las Vegas Sun in January about a study planned for Reno. A little scratching into the matter made me realize that this was actually a massive potential story and, as luck would have it, President Obama even weighed in while I worked on it.

I really enjoyed Jennifer Robison's Nevadan At Work Q-and-A with the chief pilot of the M Resort blimp. Often these Q-and-As are dry, but this fellow, Terry Dillard, played along and provided some really fun insight into what it's like to fly one of these things. A good read. (Also a good read is Norm Clarke's excerpting of this blog regarding Montecore and the 20/20 special. Thanks!)

More puzzling from the same business page as Robison's piece was Howard Stutz's summary of what's happening at MGM Mirage. I don't pretend to be an expert on this, but this is the second or third time where I've wondered if he -- or I -- misunderstand the term "a going concern."

Stutz wrote today: "Last week, MGM Mirage told investors it might be labeled a 'going concern' by auditors and could default on $13.5 billion in debt."

My understanding of a "going concern" was that it was a phrase that is meant to say that a company is still perfectly functional. In fact, Stutz's boss, Sherm Frederick, used the phrase recently in an interview with the media trade publication Editor & Publisher. To wit, the passage went: Frederick, meanwhile, says that the R-J is doing fine financially even though he wouldn't put a number to it, citing that the company is private. "Let me put it this way, we are still a going concern," he laughs.

From what I can see from other clips in the financial press, MGM Mirage said it may have its auditors indicate that it might cease to be a going concern. That is, if it IS a going concern, it continues to operate normally. If not, the whole house of cards collapses. That's what's freaking out investors.

The website InvestorWords.Com seems to back that up with this definition for the term: "The idea that a company will continue to operate indefinitely, and will not go out of business and liquidate its assets. For this to happen, the company must be able to generate and/or raise enough resources to stay operational." Now, I'd love nothing more than to discover Frederick didn't know what the term meant and was actually admitting he'd run the business into the ground. But I doubt that.

One last thing I just noticed. Someone named Hunter (Hillegas from RateVegas.Com, perhaps?) tried to correct Stutz on this point in the comments section of a March 6th piece. Hunter wrote on 3/6 at about 9 a.m.:

The term 'going concern' means that they believe they will remain functioning as a normal business entity. The filing indicated there was a possibility they may *NOT* be a 'going concern', which means the auditors made them put in language indicating they might have to go bankrupt. The article gets it backwards above.

Anyone out there who knows more about these things care to weigh in?

This week's LVW col: Defending the mob...museum

Here's this week's column in the Las Vegas Weekly defending not the idea of stimulus money paying for the mob museum but the idea of the museum itself. Believe it or not -- and I didn't quite believe it at first -- lots of people think it would be a clunker with tourists.

Lawyers, guns ... and money

Why a mob museum in Las Vegas would be criminally successful

By STEVE FRIESS

Every so often, I’m surprised to be holding a minority opinion among friends and journalism colleagues. There are truths that seem so blatantly obvious that it doesn’t even occur to me that anyone would disagree.

So here’s one: A legitimate mob museum at the beautiful, restored historic old federal building Downtown would be an enormous success for Las Vegas.

Now, that’s not the same as saying I support using money from the federal stimulus package to pay for the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. Aside from the fact that I can’t touch that matter because I’ve been covering it as a controversy for some of my newspaper clients, I don’t have a strong opinion anyway.

As I’ve covered that debate, though, I’ve been stunned to realize people actually question whether it could be an appealing tourist attraction.

U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, for instance, was such a full-throated advocate for the Atomic Testing Museum that there’s a room that bears her name in the same building. Yet she detoured from the funding question in my interview with her to groan, “You know, we’re trying to show the world that Las Vegas is moving beyond its past, and then we do something like a mob museum.”

A few days later, my Las Vegas Weekly colleague Richard Abowitz came out on his Los Angeles Times blog as believing a mob museum “is a horrible idea. In 2009, Vegas has reinvented itself in so many ways and so many times that a mob museum already sounds quaint and dated.”

But the big epiphany came during last Friday’s taping of Nevada Week in Review, when I went 4-on-1 on this very question in a fiery scrum that resulted in 10 unusually entertaining minutes for PBS. Fox 5’s John Huck called a mob museum a potential “white elephant,” the Review-Journal’s Howard Stutz suggested it was Oscar Goodman’s legacy hail Mary, and show host Mitch Fox was baffled over what one would even put in such a place. And, most fun of all, Las Vegas Sun political maestro Jon Ralston nearly shouted his belief that people aren’t going to go Downtown for something like this.

Read the rest HERE

Of Lobotomies, Heart Attacks, and Fellatio

The Sunday papers were full of long pieces about how awful the economy is and who it's hurting now, which I find depressing and redundant so I passed them by. There were three bits of interest to discuss, though:

1. Poor Employees of Tom Mitchell. There was a sadly amusing and maddeningly clueless column by blog-hating R-J Editor Tom Mitchell explaining why the newspaper business is in such dire straits. True to form, he wanted to "offer some insight into the century-old business model for the modern daily newspaper" without seeing how ridiculous and paradoxical that phrase is. He does, in fact, still cling to a 100-year-old business model for a "modern" newspaper without ever acknowledging anywhere that that very century-old business model is going out the window in the new era. He describes his company's troubles as though it is merely being buffeted by the standard-issue problems of a slow economy, never once noticing that other important societal shifts are taking place that will never be undone even when the economy improves. He also continues to deliberately play fast and loose with data, referring to a tiny recent daily-newspaper circulation uptick while never admitting the paper's circulation is about the same as it was a decade ago and that his regime failed to capitalize at all on Las Vegas' record-setting population growth.

It depresses me because Mitchell and publisher Sherm Frederick will go on insisting as they run their newspaper into the ground that they are being harmed by forced beyond their control and take comfort in the fact that other major papers are struggling, too. Yet they have a singularly hideous and anti-user website that blares as breaking news such things as first-quarter football scores, they have bloggers who don't blog, they have video programming that can't be downloaded to any portable media device and their idea for cutting edge is to have a middle-aged weatherman read the news on a smartphone. They play victim of circumstance when, in fact, they are actively incompetent at using the Internet in a meaningful way that could put them in a position to capitalize once a viable Web-based business model develops. And besides the fact that I love newspapers and good journalism and want it to persist and thrive, I mostly worry that several fine journalists will end up jobless thanks to their bosses' myopia.

2. Viva Las Vegas for heart attacks: Parade Magazine ran an excerpt from a book by ex-Good Morning America executive producer Ben Sherwood in which he claims that the best place to have a heart attack is in a casino because everyone's watching and all the security personnel are trained at defribillating and CPR and stuff like that. That makes some sense, but Sherwood doesn't explain here the source of his contention that "the heart attack survival rate in Las Vegas is 53 percent." Does he mean at Strip casinos? Or citywide? He points to Seattle (16 percent) and Chicago (2 percent) as comparisons, but there isn't really any explanation as to why away from the casino floor Vegas heart attack victims would be any better off. It sure as hell ain't because our health care system's so terrific.

3. Not Howie Do It. Howard Stutz, the usually excellent gaming reporter for the R-J, had an off-day today. He did a lengthy piece on the departure of MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni that was full of nothing but praise for Lanni's tenure. Besides the question as to why this is worth a look now, nearly two months after Lanni left, there is nothing anywhere in the piece that examines Lanni's role in overleveredging this company into the challenges it currently faces. In fact, the troubled condition of the company at the time of Lanni's resignation is never mentioned and instead the focus is on the non-story about Lanni's phony MBA. That's odd; Lanni himself acknowledged that it seemed like a good time to go because the problems needed fresh eyes and new ideas. What's more, while everyone in the piece -- Gary Loveman, Bill Weidner, Jim Murren, Bill Boyd, Bill Bible, Dennis Neilander, Frank Fahrenkopf -- sang Lanni's praises, a tiny bit of balance could have easily been achieved by noting that Steve Wynn has been very critical lately of Lanni and others for making deals they shouldn't have. Wynn said as much to several news outlets in the rush surrounding the opening of Encore. And Wynn's not the only one who could have provided an alternative assessment of Lanni's tenure; someone on Wall Street easily could at least have been called upon to explain why the MGM stock had tanked so dramatically in Lanni's final year. Sure, most of Lanni's career was bountiful, but most of Alan Greenspan's career was bountiful, too, and we're all now taking a second look at that as well.

Something new among the old

I just finished leafing through today's last-weekend-of-the-year 2008 news rehashes in the Review-Journal and Sun. Oddly, the most notable thing I spotted was this advertisement for the Silverton Hotel-Casino a little ways south on Las Vegas Boulevard:


I've never heard of Vegas casinos offering anything other than free cocktails to players. Starbucks coffee sounds like a smart move. I do recall popping in at the Fernley Nugget in Fernley, Nev., recently to check out the state's first casino to open as a non-smoking joint and noting they had a self-service soft-drink fountain. I wonder which is more effective in parting you from your money, free alcohol or free caffeine? Red Bull and vodka anyone?

On a related front, the papers were largely reiterations of old news and, given this annus horribilis, not terribly happy news at that. But in and among all that, the Las Vegas Sun's Charlotte Hsu provided a must-read, a in-depth, enlightening and wonderfully long piece on a local Iraq veteran's war experiences. Plus, of the year-end fodder, Howard Stutz gave a compact recounting of Sheldon Adelson's miserable year that reminded me that his failures were not exclusively about his company's woes. And I agree almost entirely (I still don't get the Cher thing) with Mike Weatherford's Top 10 shows of 2008, especially since he allows us to swap out "Love" or "Ka" if we're not enamored of "O," as I am not.

If I have a bone to pick this morning -- and there ought to be one, right? -- it's with R-J food critic Heidi Knapp Rinella listing the Capital Grille at the Fashion Show Mall as her sixth favorite of the eateries she reviewed in Vegas this year, exhorting us to "take in the unmatched view."

Unmatched view?!?!? Perhaps, if by "unmatched view" she meant of empty lots, stalled construction projects, a neon McD's sign and, off in the tantalizing horizon, the Naked City. (I'm feeling a future Stripper Poll coming on here, best restaurants with views. I wouldn't have even thought of putting CG on that list, though.) I like the Vegas Capital Grille, actually. But when I'm there, the view is the one thing that always seems unfortunate; if only they had gotten a perch facing south, the big windows and pretty architecture would be put to good use.

Finally, I'll be heading out shortly to pick up the Sunday New York Times. The NYT Sunday Magazine on the last weekend of each year is my favorite, a series of obituaries of highly influential individuals who died this year that always includes several non-famous names you never heard of but whose lives altered the culture in some way. One year, I discovered that the guy who invented the high-five was gay. Can't wait to find out what I didn't know this year.

Glory Be! The R-J Gets RSS!!!

Since I just took my customary shot at the R-J for their lack of RSS feeds in the last post, I feel compelled to withdraw the snark and congratulate them for finally figuring it out. You can click here to see all the features they've got set up for feeds.

Oddly, though, it's like this carefully held secret on the site, with nothing indicating any RSS feeds on the hideous home page. Nowhere is that familiar orange RSS logo present, just a tiny thing atop each story that's odd because, unlike the other choices (email, save, print, comment) this has nothing to do with the specific article you're staring at. It's so small, in fact, that a screenshot comes out like this:


Also, not all the feeds work as seen below:


But the other oddity is that the only blog set up for RSS is an intermittent one by an obscure local political columnist. How come no RSS for the consistently updated and interesting Vegas Voice blog or their marquee columnists Norm Clarke, John L. Smith, Erin Neff and Howard Stutz?

Ahh, well. Rome wasn't built in a day. Vegas sort of was, relatively speaking, but whatever. I'm sure they'll work out the rest of it. And I do like the RSS for "most popular" under various headings that allows you to choose from four different forms of popularity. That's a nice touch.

Now, how about some embed codes for the video...

Sunday Readings...

I finally caught up on the week's worth of newspapers, plus some from earlier in July that just sat there forever, last night. A few thoughts:

* Two Studies in One, Or Something. Read these two pieces side by side, Howard Stutz's from the Review-Journal and Liz Benston's from the Las Vegas Sun, both from the July 23 papers. You're forgiven if you thought for a moment they were writing about different studies on Internet gambling coming out of UNLV. I truly did for a minute. Benston focuses entirely on findings that people in online poker rooms are ruder and meaner than gamblers at live casinos and this makes some people feel bad though not bad enough to stop playing and get a life. The "potential to be more addictive than gambling in a casino" is one that this study "largely side-steps," she writes. Stutz, on the other hand, writes that "the results of the study show that online gamblers wager more frequently and more aggressively." The author is quoted as telling Stutz that "online gamblers are much more prone to suffer from all the negative aspects. The activity lacks social interaction, which can increase the risk of addiction." Very strange.

* Trump Is A Silly Dilly. Or A Fabulist. Speaking of Stutz, he had a follow-up to the KVBC report on the Trump layoffs that started with the, uh, company line: "Don't call them layoffs." Trump is totally unconvincing, as he is when he called KVBC's Steve Crupi to cuss him out over the piece. Crupi and KVBC stood their ground. When you relieve a fifth of your workforce of their jobs, it's not really a reassurance that they'll get them back whenever you're ready to have them. Those people are out of work. They had jobs, then they didn't. Those are layoffs. It's also not credible, when that happens, to pretend you've got an "incredible success" on your hands.

* Mike Weatherford's Good Week. First, he broke an interesting piece about a live poker show at the Venetian featuring amateurs going up against well-known pros. And then he offered some terrific insight I hadn't thought about as to why the soon-to-close Second City didn't do as well as it should/could've at the Flamingo. The bottom line seems to be that the SC folks failed to deliver on the promise of guest appearances by its famous alums.

* I Didn't Know This. Did You? F. Andrew Taylor of the View, the weekly freebie section of the R-J, had a really fun, revealing piece in honor of National Drive-Thru Day, which was last Thursday. (Aside: Isn't it always drive-thru day?!?) All the basics were in there -- the drive-thru chapel, pawn and smoke shops, sexy cafe -- but did you know that they have a drive-thru sportsbook at the Fiesta Rancho casino? I sure did not. God forbid you find yourself behind ditherers like those folks who stand in front of the $1 movie rental machines at the supermarket forever, though.

* Monday Sadness. Remember how gangbusters great the R-J was doing, per its publisher Sherm Frederick, who claimed a circulation gain that didn't exist? Then why, as of today, does the paper no longer have a Living section on Mondays? Mondays were one of that department's best, most original days with Carol Cling's Shooting Stars column and Corey Levitan's sometimes-funny, sometimes-grating stooge-in-odd-jobs "Fear and Loafing" columns. Levitan sent an email out last week that a friend forwarded my way indicating that he'll be doing one of those a month from now on instead. So, Mr. Modesty noted, "the silver lining is that, with only 12 columns a year, all of them will be astonishingly great." Uh, OK. Levitan was mysterious about the switch -- "I am not permitted to tell you any more" -- but it's clear what's going on here. I just got through praising Cling's long-running weekly Shooting Stars column, in which she took note of various TV, movie, commercial and other crews filming around the city, as her "very best, most Vegas-relevant material." So, of course, they had to dismantle the entire page. Sorry, Carol.

Carol's final print SS column indicated that she'd be blogging her Shooting Stars material on the R-J's website here. So far, though, she has not done so, but here's hoping.

Told Ya So: 73 Fired At Trump

KVBC-TV's Steve Crupi reported last night a terrific scoop -- the Review-Journal doesn't even have it today -- that the Trump International Hotel & Tower is in such doldrums they're firing 73 employees. That's a fifth of the workforce. Me thinks this is more proof that they'll never build the second tower in the image used below behind the anchors.


Gee, what's that I wrote in the Weekly just last week? Oh! That's right: "We in the media will also be writing many stories in coming years about the struggle of this property. It is the best-executed version of the worst-considered idea in Vegas today."

Crupi reports that the layoffs are due to the lack of closings caused by the mortgage meltdown. But didn't Mr. Trump tell Howard Stutz in the Review-Journal a month ago: "Some of my buyers are richer than the banks! We're working with people and I think we're doing pretty well!"

And, of course, there's this little gem of a bald-faced lie from The Apprentice champ Stefanie Schaeffer, marketing veep for Trump’s Vegas project, on "The Strip" in March when asked about the impact of the credit crunch:

“We’re in the process of closing right now, and thus far we haven’t really had a problem. Everything’s been going pretty smoothly. Then again, when you talk about Cosmo and you talk about some of these other projects that stopped mid-construction or even pre-construction, you’re not talking about the Trump product, and the Trump brand carries again the Trump name, which pretty much says it all. People know they’re getting a level of excellence that is not only unsurpassed anywhere in the world but is something that speaks for itself. So even in a poor market, we’ve really been relatively unaffected.”

Ya don't say. If it wasn't for her hubris in talking smack about another project when she had to have known they were facing a rough road themselves, I might not rerun this quote so often.

(Disclosure: My partner, Miles, is executive producer at KVBC. He's also away tending to a family matter, so he was uninvolved in this post.)

Sunday Reading

Some Sundays, the newspaper is so empty that I'm done before my first cup of coffee is gone. This weekend, though, there were lots of good stuff:

* Howard Stutz reports (second item) that Harrah's -- or whatever it's called these days -- has stopped "making the Review-Journal available" to its hotel guests. Stutz surmises it's because of the paper's coverage of the safety-code violations at more than one property. The Harrah's spokesman says it's a "cost-cutting measure." That's odd. What's it cost a company to offer the local newspaper for sale? The real shocker, though, was that the paper only sold 600 copies a day in the eight resorts that has tens of thousands of rooms occupied by twenties of thousands of people. What's THAT tell ya?

* Geoff Schumacher's column today looks at the very Kevin Bacon-ness of Henderson recently banning 18-and-under dance clubs. I hadn't noticed this April 2 news story in the paper, but it's a good one and probably deserves some national attention.

* Hubble Smith of the R-J and In Business Las Vegas had a solid round-up of all the foreign countries buying up Vegas.

* Norm gets threatened by Criss Angel. Don't ask. Just read.

* Liz Benston from the Las Vegas Sun did a really nice job examining the process and the personalities behind a Vegas couple who got rejected by the Gaming Control Board for an unrestricted gaming license. They can't get one of these, despite having a squeaky clean background, but Pansy Ho can? Hmm. (OK, this was Saturday's paper. I just got to it today.)

* Sometimes we're too close to the flame to realize how good a story is. How many times on "The Strip" podcast and elsewhere have we engaged in the parlor game of what other musical act could pull off a Celine-like Vegas run? And then USA Today's weekend edition goes and does exactly that story. Some of the answers from experts may surprise. (Fair warning, USAT's site seems to be down at the moment.)