Good Readin's

A few good reads I've been meaning to mention...

* Ryan Nakashima of the Associated Press is mostly confined to writing in the staid, APish way. But they let him off the reservation in a big way last month to do a first-person account of bouncing around with Buzz Aldrin on a new attraction from Zero Gravity Corp that flies Vegas tourists over the Pacific and somehow makes them weightless in the process. Fun stuff.

* Kim Barker, who was editor-in-chief of the Daily Northwestern when I was a sophomore in college, is now a Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent in the Middle East. Most of her work is just god-awful depressing because, well, that's the news over there. But this genius story about -- get this! -- a transvestite TV presenter in Pakistan. Rarely does news from this region make you smile, so take it when you can get it. And Kim is as terrific a writer as I remember.

* Sonya Padgett of the Las Vegas Review-Journal nailed another excellent piece this Sunday, this time a profile of the surprisingly mundane lives of a couple who each make their living stripping. Padgett's been doing some really good stuff lately, which is why it's all the more puzzling that she's stuck writing these silly "Strip Tips" boxes every Sunday, blurbs about tourist attractions that everyone already knows about.

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.