Most Churches Per Capita? God, No.

There are some cannards that journalists like to employ to show something ironic about Las Vegas, and the most frequently used one is the notion that Las Vegas has "more churches per capita than anywhere else in the country."

It popped up again in a Q-and-A by Jerry Fink of the Las Vegas Sun conducted with comic Lewis Black. He asks Black for a thought on this apparent paradox, and the comedian gave a standard-issue response about Sodom and Gomorrah hedging its bets.

Except it's not true. This 1997 piece from the Review-Journal takes us through some of the numbers, figuring that at best we had, at that time, a ratio of 1 church/synagogue to 1,700 people. Memphis, Tenn., by contrast, had about 875-to-1. And that was a decade ago, so add another half-million Las Vegans which would have necessitated about 300 new Houses of Worship just to keep at that old pace. I can assure you that if Vegas was opening 2.5 new churches every month, somebody would've noticed.

What's more, do a simple Google search and you'll find countless American cities wishing to, without any further statistical backup, claim to be the most pious city in these United States. Among those is Nashville, Grand Rapids, Mich., Waco, Texas, Wheaton, Ill., and Berkeley, Calif.

Interestingly, there's no such bragging-rights war going on in cities overseas. But either way, Vegas doesn't win this title. And thank God for that.

Let the Bette puns begin

So far, the media's been awful restrained in employing the predictable "Bette on Vegas" puns. A newspaper in Adelaide, Australia -- where Google Analytics tells me this blog seems to have a number of readers -- ran with "Best Bette To Replace Dion" and the Dallas Morning News screams "Vegas puts money on Bette." But otherwise, no major fouls. Well, Robin Leach did use "Bet on Bette" which isn't so much a pun as a redundancy. Sigh. But it'll get worse. Midler starts rehearsing her exclusive gig at the Colosseum in October and opens in February 2008 and will stay at least into 2010.

The press event was surprisingly simple and sweet. The director of Celine's show and "Le Reve" put on an adorable two-minute dance to the instrumentals from "Miss Otis Regrets" in which six of Celine's dancers, dressed as bellhops, roll out Bette's signature Louis Vuitton luggage and then Bette popped out from behind some curtains. She sat down and confirmed what you read here yesterday. (Photos by Jae C. Hong, Associated Press).

I'm not posting the audio because it turned out terribly, but she was her witty, charming but brief self. If you want to read some terrific interviews with her, check out ones that ran today in the Review-Journal by Mike Weatherford, the Las Vegas Sun by Jerry Fink, on Robin Leach's blog, in USA Today and on the Associated Press wire by Ryan Nakashima. There are probably a few more out there, but that's probably more than enough.

See? I'm a good sport after all. At least all these writers did something worthy with their access.