In Vegas, Woe Is Thee Who Relies On Google Maps

Take a good look at the images in this post. Click on them to enlarge and look closer. You'll be utterly amazed. I am.

I know others have taken note of strange glitches of Google Maps -- I believe Excalibur used to show up in the middle of the Wynn Golf Course -- but this is just insane. On the map above, Aria is north of Cosmo, the Crystals is south of Veer and there's a make-believe road called Business Lane.

At least those places are in the right vague vicinity on that one. Treasure Island...

...is north of Circus Circus! How unfortunate for them!

I feel for anyone who went out to this lonely spot to buy Lion King tickets...

...or thought they'd find the Las Vegas Strip east of Hooters...

...or looked for the Palazzo south of The Venetian...

...or tried to decide why there are two Wynn Las Vegases so they could get to their table at Alex:

Anyone else stumped as to where they got the name "Emerald Green Golf Course" for Bali Hai...

...or when anyone has ever referred to Interstate 15 as...

...as either the Mojave Freeway or the Barstow Freeway?

As for Vdara, which is what I was looking up in the first place, it's particularly alarming that their own paid Google ad provides this map...

...putting the hotel, umm, east of Eastern Avenue. Also, Google thinks...

...Aria is there, too. Hmmm. That could explain a lot about the hotel's occupancy, doesn't it?

Erich Bergen's Last Stand As Bob Gaudio

I found the YouTube clip of the Vegas "Jersey Boys" appearance on America's Got Talent earlier this month. This would turn out to be Erich Bergen's final performance as Bob Gaudio.



There he was at the end with the presence of mind to remind the millions in the audience that the show is at the Palazzo. That was a good and unrehearsed move because the host was so busy pushing the AGT show at P-How that he never mentioned where to see JB on the Strip. Right up till the end -- and beyond, really, given his statement -- Bergen was a persistent salesman for the production. All class.

10 Vegasish Questions For Monday

As you know, I collect images that are odd, funny or perplexing. So here's 10 head-scratching questions to start off your work week:

1. What "tram" is there now or ever was in the parking garage at Harrah's?


2. Did the rest of the word "Caesars" fall off of the Octavius Tower or did they just think, "Aw, screw it, we can't afford the rest of the name?"


3.What is this? It's immediately north of the Rio on the north side of Twain West. Never noticed it before.

4. Is this really fair warning of a spoiler?


5. How much money did the Steve Wyrick folks spend to put these Lord of the Dance ads all over town only to kill the show even before Mike Weatherford could review it?


6. Why is the Four Seasons allowing Baumann's Rare Books at the Palazzo to showcase its wares in its lobby?



7. Along the same lines, why is Beyonce on the cover of the summer issue of Caesars Player, a high-end glossy magazine for Harrah's high rollers, when she's playing this month at Wynncore?


8. Do you get it? Took me a couple of seconds.


9. Should I 'Friend' this man? Would he Friend me back?

10. Whose hair is more frou-frou-y?

Sands Bethlehem Pictorial 3: The Quirk

As always, there were other odds and ends from my exposure to Bethlehem and the Sands Bethlehem casino there to share. This, above, was among those, the fact that they charge $7 -- and I heard people said things like, "Oh, that's a lucky number" -- for valet parking. The only hotel that charges for valet parking in Vegas that I know of is the Four Seasons.

Let's see...what else. Well, I found it a bit shocking that Las Vegas Sands would build a casino in a jurisdiction where the state takes a 55 percent share of the gaming revenue. Did you people in Carson City trying to find a few more sheckels between the cushions hear that? LVS thinks it's worth it to spend $743 million to build a thing where they'll get 45 percent of the revenue!

Hey, remember that big crane with the Sands logo on it? Well, look at what they've got attached to it:


This was what is known as a very, very soft opening. Besides the fact that they didn't have the hotel or mall ready -- and won't for more than a year -- the belly-up bar (as Hunter and Mike E call the central-casino bars) didn't even have matchbooks. So I was reduced to doing this for a souvenir:


They had a gift shop called Sands & Co., I think, which is a strange name. I did pick up a couple of T-shirts, a mug and a shotglass I plan to sell off to support the show for $30 or more. Something in the gift shop I did NOT buy:


As you can tell from my other posts as well as my radio, podcast and newspaper work on this story, these folks are very proud of their steel heritage. So proud, in fact, that when Mayor John Callahan took me to another part of the city to see a redevelopment project, I spotted this mural on the wall of a gym:


I also thought it was cute that Bethlehem's non-steel-related nickname is the Christmas City. People mail their mail there in December to get special Christmas-related stamps. Here's some:


Back at the casino, it was also interesting that there are designated nonsmoking areas such as this. That's what that yellow sign says.


You might recall from a recent post here that not only do none of the Vegas joints offer such a thing to my knowledge, but at the Palazzo (owned by LVS, natch) this sign stands in the casino...


...without giving any indication of where said corridor is.

Of course, I loved checking out the Express-Times, the local paper, as they celebrated and reported this opening. Here's the cover of the Exposed section, the Friday entertainment section:



Of course, everything is overdone with gambling cliches. The front-page headline, for instance, was "Today, all bets are on," for instance. That piece included some advice from Michael Bluejay of VegasClick.Com on how to beat the slots. His answer, essentially: You can't.

They might as well learn sooner than later, huh?

First Look: Sands Bethlehem

I can't write much right now because I've got to do a few more interviews for my NYT piece and then take a ride with the mayor to get an orientation of Bethlehem, but I did want to post a couple of shots and a promise of much more later. There'll also be a special video episode of The Strip coming and you can hear me in a taped segment on KNPR at around 9:40 a.m. PT at KNPR.org or 88.9 FM.

My initial impressions is that they've done a really lovely job with this place. In sum, they've built a steel-themed casino, see:


More on this later. Gotta run in a sec.

For those of you unaware, Las Vegas Sands (owner of Venetian and Palazzo) is opening today the casino portion of a $713 million project. They had to postpone the 300-room hotel, the convention space and retail because of the financial crunch. They are building all of this on the former ore pit that served Bethlehem Steel, the company that produced the steel that built skyscrapers like the Empire State Building as well as the the railroads and much of the military armaments. The company went kaput in 2003 and left Bethlehem, about 75 miles north of Philly, somewhat desolate.

Sort of. There's more to it than that, but that's all I have time for at the moment. But this is the very definition of a "soft" opening. The 3,000 slot machines are working great, but the bar has no matchbooks? There are so many cars, I'm told, that the company's top lawyer is working valet. Yikes!

Palazzo Falling Apart!?!

Eek! One of our listeners, Mark from Chicago, shot this from his 34th floor room and sent it along with this note: "I checked into the Palazzo today and while I was impressed with the room, the view was surprising. While my wife was playing with the remote shutters we noticed the molding coming off of the window."

Nicely done, Sheldon. Mark has more to tell about this in a voice mail we'll play on next week's show.

Sunday Foto Fun

I've been a bad blogger this week partly because I've been overwhelmed by deadlines and partly because all that traveling caught up to me with some exhaustion and possibly a cold. However, there's always room for some Foto Fun around here.

I don't even need to go far sometimes. This...


...was on my block this week. Do cement-mixing trucks in other cities sport paintings of those cities' skylines?

A few weeks ago, I took occasional guest-host Amy of GritstoGlitz.Com with me to a swanky soiree benefitting Families for Effective Autism Treatment of Southern Nevada at the Stirling Club at Turnberry Place. The event honored Tony and Jill Curtis, and Amy seemed nervous that Tony might be hostile toward me on account of my airing that interview in which he talked about semen on his leg and so on. He didn't even remember me. But this image...


...was creepily priceless, huh? Amy, that celebrity-stalking whore, also got this shot with Louis Anderson, who happened to sit at our table.


Meanwhile, I was at Palazzo a week ago for an interview for an upcoming Strip Sense column and saw this:


I might find all these umbrellas pretty is if wasn't so deritative of the Palazzo's neighbor to the north, Wynn Las Vegas, and the parasols hanging from the ceiling that were Roger Thomas' vision as seen here:

Also this...


...is a bit of a shame. The reflecting pool in the foreground is now completely crowded by potted plants used to be a lovely place to sit and eat an ice cream or sip a coffee. It's like they decided to copy all the best ideas at Wynn -- parasols, lots of live plants -- but in the lamest possible way.

Also, I thought this sign in the casino was strange:


It says "The Palazzo Offers A Smoke-Free Corridor." But what it doesn't say? WHERE. Didn't someone making this sign think, "We should probably give someone directions." Yeesh.

Last week, I was at the Hard Rock Hotel to take a glimpse at the new Joint. It's a much bigger venue than the old one and it looks like it'll be a great place to see a concert. It was neat that they preserved a piece of the old place with this...


...a plank of the old floor. Fun!

I am a little baffled, however, by something. This is the view from most of the balcony...


...but then here below is the view from the top four rows of the balcony:


You can see the stage but not really the video screens which, it would seem, would be MOST useful to patrons seated the farthest away. The overhang is the exposed ventilation and piping in the ceiling, part of the look of the place. But they couldn't make the ceiling of this new $60 million space a few feet higher so that the folks in the cheap seats -- otherwise known, often, as the biggest fans -- could see?

After leaving the Hard Rock, I drove west on Harmon toward the Strip to get where else I was going. And I must say that for as much as I ponder whether CityCenter was a good idea from a financial point of view, I am always awed by what they have grown on that plot of land:


I know some think it's kind of cold-looking, but there's something about standing in front of it that makes me gasp in wonderment. The piece of the equation nobody can foresee is whether, like real big cities, there will be lots of people creating the vibe and energy to make these skyscrapers hum.

While I have the floor, can anyone identify for me what kind of birds these are? I saw 'em in Hemenway Park in Boulder City while working on a travel piece for the Times earlier this month:


And, finally, I wasn't going to bother with this except that right now the Classiest Publisher in America is picking on me and Jon Ralston on his "blog" (it's still not indexed in Google's Blogsearch) for some banter we had on VegasPBS's "Nevada Week in Review" over the weekend. Conservatives have taken to use the term "teabagging" to refer to their recent protests against taxes and, in fact, that's also a term for a certain sex act. So Ralston and I had a little humor about that and the Classiest Publisher in America attacked us for it.

I'm not going to defend our banter because it was admittedly childish and probably a little baffling to the audience because part of the off-camera context was that we were running out of time and weren't going to get to discuss Gov. Gibbons' threatened veto of domestic partnership legislation pending in Carson City.

But being called out on it by a man who has essentially been called "really dumb" by Steve Wynn and "not sophisticated" by Elaine Wynn was odd. I don't know if he's either. But dishonest comes to mind.

Y'see, the Classiest Publisher in America has been claiming his abysmal disaster of a website to be this towering local success using data from a company called Hitwise that is the joke of the Web.

Of course, the Review-Journal's Web traffic is proprietary, so it's impossible to know what's really happening. Except that they just finally got themselves a YouTube channel for their ridiculous daily RJTV program. That means that there's some public information about interest in their content.

And guess what?


NOBODY'S WATCHING. OK, they've had a total of 10 views on nine episodes. And, full disclosure, I account for four of them. Sad. What's even sadder? Something tells me the Classiest Publisher in America -- or his employees -- account for the rest.

[P.S. to the Classiest Publisher in America: It's Friess, not Freiss. Check your archives. You've published that name hundreds of times.]

Vegas Says Politics is Hip

This is kind of amazing to me. Those who followed politics and those who partied hardy in Vegas never used to be the same group. But in this weird year, when the World Series hopes for a ratings bump from tonight's Barack Obama Show, when US Weekly covers the candidates as if they were pop-culture celebrities and when Paris Hilton offers a more sensible energy plan than either O'Biden or McPalin, I supposed it makes sense that the Strip would get in the act, too. This is, after all, the Greatest Reality Show Ever.

Beyond the Get Out The Vote event noticed above for Saturday night involving Amy Smart and will.i.am, LAVO at Palazzo is also hosting an election-night results party on Nov. 4 starting at 5:30 p.m. (Click here to get on the guest list.) According to the email invite I received, "the most influential movers and shakers" will be there. With the Democrats gathering for their party's party at the Rio and the GOP gathering for theirs at the sportsbook formerly known as the 40/40 Club downstairs from LAVO, it really all depends on who they count as "movers and shakers."

Regardless, what a fascinating approach. I suspect we'll be seeing more of these events planned for Nov. 4 in coming days. Surely, for instance, the gays will gather at Krave? Oh, and Obama's coming back to Vegas for the 20th time -- and second time in a week -- on Saturday. So I guess our measly 5 electoral votes really matter.

Why 40/40 @ Palazzo Was A Bad Idea

UPDATE: PLEASE SEE THE EXPLANATION AND APOLOGY FOR THE INAPPROPRIATE WORDING IN THIS POST HERE. I AM NOT REMOVING OR ALTERING THIS POST OTHER THAN TO PRESENT THIS UPDATE BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO BE ACCUSED OF COVERING UP THE ERROR.

The Review-Journal has broken news today confirming longstanding rumors that Palazzo would buy back the Jay-Z sports bar/restaurant the 40/40 Club and turn it into a sportsbook. This blog claims the deal could be worth $44 million to the music mogul.

I'm going to say something very un-PC here, but somebody should. This wasn't a surprise. The surprise was that anybody thought that a place that elsewhere is known for drawing large numbers of black customers would fit in well in a $2 billion resort like Palazzo where the only minorities they're really aiming to please are Asian whales.

Is that a racist statement? I don't mean it to be. I mean it to be an objective look at an inappropriate pairing between the aesthetic of a resort that envisions itself and markets itself as the lap of luxury and a place known for being popular among rappers and folks who like a good chicken wing. Do you think that Palazzo has ever taken out an ad in Jet or Ebony? Hell to the no! They're busy advertising in Conde Nast Traveler and Forbes.

This isn't the first time there has been a poor marriage of this sort. Avenue Q, the Tony-winning Broadway show, could have been a success in Las Vegas. Just not at the Wynn, which is similarly pursuing the middle-aged upper-crust, not the young urban professionals. In a smaller theater at a resort that draws a more liberal crowd -- the Palms or, even more appropriately, New York-New York -- it could have had a long, successful run. But as Wynn realized much too late, it was "an inside piece of business." Ditto to Spamalot; did you really think the mimosas-and-caviar crowd would have a taste for silly, sardonic British humor?

I know there are other examples. Hans Klok might have...oh, wait. Never mind. He would have failed even if he were at the center of a Cirque show.

Of course, there's one other reason why 40/40 failed: Nobody could find it. It's tucked below the front valet and the most the Palazzo could bother to indicate it by signage was to put out foam board signs on easels in the casino. Hard to sell chicken wings, even to the CEO of China Mobile if he's got a hankering, if nobody knows where you are.

The Blue Tape, A Love Story

(UPDATE, 9:10 a.m. 7/3: Bob's removed his post. See his comment, No. 9, here.)

Some guy named Downtown Bob claims on his blog he paid some maintenance men at the Palazzo $100 to fetch him the blue tape. I'm dubious but amused nonetheless. Do you believe him? Read all about it here.

BREAKING!!! THE BLUE TAPE IS GONE!

As pathetic as it may sound, I am on my laptop using the somewhat unreliable free wi-fi at the Palazzo lobby to bring you this news flash: The blue tape is GONE! OK, I'm also trying to shed the impact of a delightful Pimm's Cup cocktail I just had to try at Cut for a Vegas Magazine story on Vegas mixologists before I drive home so I went to the atrium connecting the casino to the lobby to look for the infamous BLUE TAPE.

That such a high-end property would forget to remove such an obvious symbol of its construction has been mock-worthy for months. My first reference to it came in March thanks to astute reader Troy, who shot the photo in this posting.

It was there as recently as May 27 when I posted this, but now it is GONE! See!


It used to look like this:


I took a shot of the whole atrium just in case I was missing something. See?


Who knows how they realized they had to remove it, but the only place where I know of that it was discussed was on various Vegas blogs and various podcasts.

Now that that's resolved, we need to move on to more important matters: Why on EARTH does it sound like a church organist is having an orgasm in here? God, this music is hurting my head. Wait, is it that music? Is there such a thing as a pre-hangover?