The Show is (has been) UP: Louie Anderson & Peter Sagal

In all the hullabaloo surrounding my Eating Las Vegas column and then preparing for the big Thanksgiving feast I just blanked on posting the show to TheStripPodcast.Com. It was in the feed for iTunes or Zune subscribers as early as Tuesday. That's free, y'know, as is the iTunes software. But today I caught up, so here we go. You can click on the date below to get it to play or right-click on it to download it to listen at your leisure.

Nov. 22: Wait Wait, Don't Tell Louie
SPECIAL AUDIO: TSA DIRECTOR TALKS ABOUT
ENHANCED AIRPORT SCREENINGS

Louie Anderson may spend a lot of time joking about his weight, but he’s also getting serious about doing something about it. The legendary stand-up comedian, whose act is suddenly fresher and funnier now that he’s left the Excalibur for a eponymous showroom at the Palace Station, is focusing on new material, new endeavors and a new emphasis on living healthier. He explains to Steve this hour what incidents and family tragedies have prompted this as well as why he plans to chronicle his battle of the bulge in daily video blogs. Plus, which line of Steve’s questioning really annoyed him and why are the Louie-hosted years of the Family Feud not available for reruns? That’s coming up. Also, the NPR show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” came to the Paris Las Vegas this week and Steve, fan boy that he is, sat down with host Peter Sagal in, of all places, Barry Manilow’s dressing room to find out what questions he decided NOT to ask Wayne Newton.

In Banter: Wait Wait in Vegas, a new dining "guide," the slot business ponders you, Cosmo images leaking, Harrah's cancels its IPO and the Wayner gets approved for his museum and tour plans.

Links to stuff discussed

Get tickets to Louie Anderson’s show at Palace Station
Louie’s site, Twitter and the correct Facebook page
Hear the Vegas edition of Wait Wait
Faith Salie’s site
VegasHappensHere.Com sneak-peak pictures of Cosmopolitan
Wayne Newton wins approval for his planned tours and museum
The Strip episode of audio of Steve’s G2E panel from 2009 on Encore design
Our 2006 interview with Louie Anderson
The Amazon.Com listing for the book “Eating Las Vegas”
Harrah’s is delaying its big plans and canceling its IPO
Yelp! On Hash House A Go Go, Rosemary's, Bouchon and China MaMa

"Wait Wait" Coming To Vegas!

It's been a while. A few years, I'm pretty sure, and I seem to recall they taped somewhere off the Strip back then. But Miles and my favorite NPR program, "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," is slated to tape the Nov. 18 episode here in Vegas at the Paris resort.

Tickets are a little pricey, though. When they record the shows in Chicago, all seats are $25. In Vegas, they're charging $50, $75, $100 and $150 plus fees/taxes. And so far as I can tell, all the money goes to Chicago Public Radio and NPR, not to our Vegas affiliate, KNPR.

That said, this is a really big treat and, while high for public radio prices, it's about right for a decent Vegas show these days. Buy them at Ticketmaster, in person at the Paris box office or at 800-745-3000.

No word yet who the guest panelists are, but Paula Poundstone would seem a natural seeing how she plays Vegas every so often and she is the big favorite for show listeners. And if they're smart, they'll invite Barry Manilow on for "Not My Job" and quiz him with questions about, I dunno, Barry Bonds or something. No offense to Mayor Oscar Goodman, but I really hope they resist the itch to haul him in there.

I'm eager to interview Peter Sagal if only to tell him about the times they'd turned my stories into jokes, the transplanting-scalps-of-cadavers thing and the Fremont Street hula hoop drama. You know I'll be on the prowl for something spectacularly weird the week before this show.

R-J's Angle Suit Tops Top Journalism Blog

OK, so the headline above is a little off, as the R-J hasn't endorsed the Republican candidate ... yet. But Jim Romenesko of the Poynter Institute, the world's original media-watching blogger, prominently highlighted this morning my PoliticsDaily.Com piece posted over the weekend that raises three critical questions for the Review-Journal and Nevada politicians going forward now that the R-J front company Righthaven LLC has taken the unprecedented step of suing (for anything) a major-party candidate in the heart of an election season:

* Must Nevada's largest paper now include a passage in every news story it does on Angle's race against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledging that its owners have sued her?

* Can the R-J, whose publisher and editor have been outspoken supporters of the Tea Party darling, actually endorse her for Senate after having publicly accused her of stealing from them?

* Will they sue candidates who reproduce their endorsements in other races, long a de rigueur campaign practice?

My favorite part of the piece is UNLV J-School prof Mary Hausch on how exactly Shermy Sherm & The Funky Bunch will address the lawsuit in their forthcoming endorsement of Angle: "I guess they could say, 'We think she's a thief, but we like her a lot.' "

Let's see how long Editor Tom Mitchell and Sherm Frederick can duck the journalistic questions herein, if they can sober up long enough to remember that that's what their enterprise is actually supposed to be about. What I'd love is for Brooke Gladstone or Bob Garfield to cross-examine them on NPR's "On The Media." More than likely, the Bonanza Road bosses are much too craven to subject themselves to that or will squawk about "pending litigation" or, best option yet, turn it over to their journalistically clueless PR disaster, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson. (Gibson didn't appear on Dave Berns' Nevada Today talk show on KUNV on Thursday, claiming he was tired of talking about this in the media.)

By the way, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has removed its R-J stories from its site since I made mention of it here on Sept. 3. And Steve Green of the Sun reports today two more entities settled confidentially, including the prominent blog Sweetness & Light. S&L owner Steven Gilbert -- goodness there are too many Steve/ns involved in this story, although not the thin-skinned one who prizes himself as a (cough) crack TV investigative journo and editor of a (cough) muckraking (cough) alt-weekly -- offered up this:

When a reader asked Gilbert, "What’s to keep them from tapping you again and again?," Gilbert wrote: "I have blocked all of their current holdings from my various browsers and they are blacklisted on S&L. I would advise anyone with an Internet site to do the same."

Can someone explain to me technically how that would work? Does this mean that R-J reporters at work can't access that website? And does this really and truly mean that the R-J has sued itself altogether out of view of one of the Web's largest conservative audiences?

Wait, Wait Does Hula Hoops!

Yes!!!

For the second time in my career, I've achieved a supreme honor: "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR used one of my pieces for humor. Given that I cover Vegas, it's sort of stunning that it doesn't happen more often. Certainly, more stories I've handled have hit the national joke circuit before, but it's not that big a buzz when they're stories EVERYONE covers.

In this case, it became clear my AOL News piece on the potential hula hoop ban inspired this week's "Bluff the Listener" segment when Paula Poundstone (!!!) cited the quote Las Vegas City Councilman Stavros Anthony gave me: "These aren't little Hula-Hoops. They're big Hula-Hoops." (Fair's fair, though: The Review-Journal's Alan Choate covered it first, leading to my piece. But the use of my quote indicates the NPR show didn't know.) They even went back to Anthony for a version of this comment for radio.

Listen to it by clicking here. It's about six fun minutes long. Go ahead. I'll wait.

It's particularly fun because I'm in New York at my aunt's and we've got NPR on live as we get ready to depart for Fairbanks, Alaska, on some family business. After thousands of bylines in all these major publications over all these years, my aunt's glee over this odd achievement was still a kick.

In case you're wondering what the first time was for me and "Wait Wait," it was in October 2007 when I wrote for USA Today about a new technology to perform full scalp transplants for bald people using the scalps of cadavers.

[Earlier: My blog post on the original story.]

No Outrage Over Gay Slurs At NV GOP Event, On NPR?

Let's play a little game.

Suppose that at the Nevada Republican Party's annual convention, the speaker appearing between the candidate for U.S. Senate and the GOP's national party chairman called Barbara Mikulski a bitch. Or Brian Sandoval a bean bandit. Or, even, Barack Obama, say, a Negro.

Would be kinda a big deal, right? Would probably lead the news, no?

Here's a startling passage deep, deep, deep inside Laura Myers' account in the Review-Journal of the GOP confab at Green Valley Ranch:

Between Angle and Steele, impressionist Rich Little entertained the crowd with an act that included a George Burns impersonation, lots of Harry Reid jokes and a gag with a punch line that referred to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who is gay, as a "queen".

And that's it. Myers didn't think it necessary to ask the GOP leadership if that was appropriate or offensive speech. She didn't think it was worth breaking out as a sidebar or moving up in the story as you know she would if any of the three examples I provided earlier had occurred.

According to Steve Sebelius' Tweet, the hilarious Rich Little quip went something like: "I performed for a queen. Barney Frank." Nevada News Bureau editor Elizabeth Crum, herself a conservative, nonetheless also seemed appalled in this Tweet: "Rich Little on stage. Cracks joke about Barney Frank that I will not repeat. Tweet. Whatever. #nvgop"

Except it's NOT a "whatever." It's a WTF? This is still OK? I wasn't there, but I betcha Steele and Angle and the rest of the room roared in laughter. That's funny, those queers, err, I mean queens.

And, yes, I call liberals to task when they refer to Rush Limbaugh's girth. That's not acceptable or relevant either. Remember back when Wanda Sykes and everyone else who laughed at her got bashed for wishing Limbaugh would die? So the fact that Little is a comic -- and that's quite a generous term for Little these days -- does not absolve him or his amused audience.

This doesn't yield an apology from Nevada Republican Party Chairman Mark Amodei? Or from the party's titular leader of the moment, Sharron Angle? Or any follow-up from the mainstream media? Can you imagine if the same sort of thing was said about ANY OTHER GROUP?

P.S. My partner, Miles, has been wanting me to note that this week NPR's Fresh Air goddess Terry Gross aired a clip -- unbleeped -- from comic Louis C.K.'s TV show containing five instances of the use of the word "faggot." Gross and the comic use the word five times each in their conversation, too. The sequence goes from 11:51 to about 19:00. As Miles notes, it's fine to have a discussion of an offensive word, but if this were nigger, it would have been bleeped in the clip and the talkers would have said "the 'n' word" instead of the whole slur.

So NPR's conduct, too, is pretty outrageous. And one way you know Miles is right is that in the TRANSCRIPT of part of the sequence on Fresh Air's website, the word "faggot" is removed for "[the slur]". So it's OK for broadcast but not for writing on the Web? Huh?

Two Things That Shocked Me Yesterday

I am not easily shocked. I am, after all, the guy who just posted an interview with Tony Curtis in which the 83-year-old talks about walking around Central Park with spunk dripping down his leg. So, really.

But yesterday, two things stunned me.

First, I was en route to the Bellagio for lunch with sources and I'd forgotten my iPod, so I was stuck listening to KNPR's fall membership pledge drive. On comes Ira Glass, the host of "This American Life." Glass calls up some guy who Glass has been told is a non-contributing listener. Ira gets the poor fellow on the line and proceeds to humiliate him, getting to him to admit how cheap he is and how he loves getting away with free stuff. The ne'er-do-well listener, clearly a Glass fan who is both thrilled to be speaking to him and crushed this is how that came to happen, repeatedly stutters his apologies and vows to send in some money.

Uh, holy crap. It was shocking. Impossible not to listen to and entertaining in a Jerry Springer way, but shocking. And people don't listen to NPR for that kind of entertainment, do they? It seemed like this was a national fundraising segment Glass had produced and not an attack on a specific Vegas-area listener, but he did conclude by warning that people should give since, "Aren't you a little bit like that guy?" And I'm sitting there telling the radio, "Uh, no. I give every frigging month."

I do wonder, though, how a non-giver would actually react to such an admonition. These pledge appeals don't ordinarily wander into blatant "You're a BAD person if you don't give" territory. They just encourage giving by positive reinforcement and, yes, some carefully worded guilt. This went beyond that motif into shaming people.

Speaking of guilt... the second thing. Miles and I were watching Fox News last night and this ad comes on. Watch it. Now.




Wow. Yes, this is a site for heterosexual adulterers being advertised prominently on a news channel that shills for the "family values" agenda! Evidently, ESPN actually banned the same company from advertising recently. Here's a Reuters report about that:



I love the part in that report where the AshleyMadison.Com dude claims this sort of activity is no different than ESPN accepting "What Happens Here Stays Here" ads for Las Vegas. Somehow I think this is a wee bit different.

Fox News, however, evidently does not. When ESPN ran these ads, they did so after 11 p.m. Fox News, however, had them airing even earlier.

Twas A Very Merry Friessmas!

Since a few of you asked, I'm not sure when I started referring to my birthday as "Friessmas," although I think it was back in grammar school when I fantasized that someday my birthday would be a holiday. Yes, even then I thought an awful lot of myself or, at least, my future self. Silly, I know, but when you're as an unpopular and weird a little turd as I was back then, you relish your birthday as the one day off from misery. (Awww. Tragic.)

Of course, I've built up a whole ritual, complete with requiring my partner to play "Once A Year Day" from Pajama Game on Friessmas morning even though it's actually a song about the annual company picnic. (I'd been with Miles two weeks when our first Friessmas came around. Amazing, isn't it, that he didn't open the escape hatch then and there!)

Anyhow, it was a lovely Friessmas. I got to do another NYT piece, this time about a stay of execution in Nevada for a killer who, strange as it seems, actually did not wish to see another Friessmas. And I discovered that one of my more pathetic dreams had been fulfilled, the NPR show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" used one of my stories as fodder for a joke! I'll play the segment on this week's "The Strip," so tune in when it's up tomorrow night. I suppose I should've known the idea of transplanting the scalps of cadavers would tickle them, but I sort of thought Rock, Paper, Scissors professionals might, too. Ya never know. I just learned it also made a Leno monologue! Woo hoo!

I heard from my family via phone, our ritual in lieu of cards and gifts for adult relatives, and Miles left me all day with a tempting stack of wrapped gifts on our gorgeous new kitchen table. I did not cheat, either. We dined at Joyful House, the most authentic Chinese restaurant I know in Vegas where I don't have to use my now-overrusted Mandarin skills to order. We came home for our little gift-and-cake ceremony, as you can see. The puppies enjoyed it too!

The loot consisted of a Norah Jones CD, a new Ruth Rendell book and a beautiful new winter jacket (see left) from Saks that Miles seems to have spirited out of the store without having the alarm tag removed. There I am modeling. My friend Walt gave me a season of "All in the Family" on DVD and my mother says a gift is en route. And, of course, there were many e-cards, calls and other well-wishes. So thanks to you all for all that!

Paula Poundstone's Pet Parade!

Comic Paula Poundstone has "11 cats, a big stupid dog, two tadpoles, a bearded dragon lizard, and a bunny." The "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" regular panelist joined "The Petcast" to talk about her brood and to explain the difference between being a cat enthusiast and being "the cat lady."

She's really sweet and we had a terrific pet-oriented chat. Listen by clicking here or right-click here to download the show and hear it whenever you want.

Also, subscribe to the show at iTunes by going here.

Mel Brooks - Today

I'm 40 mins away from my exclusive interview with Mel Brooks, which explains why I've been quiet on the blog the past day. I've been going over his two best films, "Young Frankenstein" and "Blazing Saddles" as well as interviews with Terry Gross from NPR's "Fresh Air."

The results of this interview will include airing the audio by 11 pm PT tonight on this week's episode of "The Strip," posting a Q-and-A for Newsweek probably tomorrow and writing a long piece for next month's Vegas magazine.

I've fought hard (ok, begged hard) for many months for this opportunity; he gave no interviews that I know of to anyone in Vegas as "The Producers" debuted and spoke only at a 20-minute press conference. From what I gather, this may be one of his only interviews before the media blitz to open "Young Frankenstein," the musical adaptation of his film, which is expected to star "Will & Grace" alum Megan Mullally, "Desperate Housewives" and "The Producers" star Roger Bart and "Thoroughly Modern Millie" Tony winner Sutton Foster. I'm hoping to find out more about the rest of the cast, including who's playing the Gene Wilder character of Frederick Fronkensteen.

And, of course, any insight into hamburger-eater David Hasselhoff, formerly of the Vegas company of "The Producers."

Wish me luck.