They MUST Do This For Me

Doesn't really look like she's better for the wear, does it?

My favorite section of the R-J, the weekly View section, is back with yet another Leno-worthy pairing of headline and photo. The photo above is actually connected to some other nugget about the common cold, but...come on, now. Someone is having fun.

Remember, these are, after all, the same folks who did this:

A Weird Vegas/CES Day In Pictures and Snark

Yesterday was a weird one, even by Vegas standards. It started with me heading to the KSNV studio to tape an upcoming episode of Nevada Newsmakers, Sam Shad's Reno-based TV show. This, above, was idling next to me as I waited at a light. I had no idea Monte Rock III rides a moped!

Then I get to the studio -- the one where Miles, who was coming in late because he had been in Carson City on Monday, is executive producer -- and the tech guy who lets me in sees me craning my neck as we pass the studio. "Oh, I can show you around and show you how we do things if you'd like after your interview," he said. I giggled to myself.

Next I'm in the chair ready to take Shad's queries about Cosmo, CityCenter, Vdara death rays and Frank Sinatra Jr. (Shad's a big fan of The Strip and my interviews.) Sam and his crew were in Reno and I had an earpiece. So naturally, I shoot this:


Before we began, Shad told me there'd be a slight audio delay and they would edit out the pauses. That comforts me. My ear canals must be awful large and slippery -- 32 years of wearing hearing aids, maybe? -- and the ear piece kept sliding out. They tried to adjust it, kept happening. But now it's time to do the interview.

Except during my first response, the thing falls out again. So, knowing it's taped and not live, I stop talking, try to get it back in, it won't stay and I mouth the word, "SHIT." That four-second delay was priceless, because a few beats later, there's this raucous laughter coming from the other end. I apologize profusely and they decide they have to start over and Shad is in my ear -- they brought another, equally ill-fitting ear piece -- begging me not to cuss again. One of the things Sam seems to love about our show is the fact that we can curse -- no FCC, woo hoo! -- so he has this impression that I've got this real potty mouth. I actually don't, but it was entertaining anyhow.

So we do the rest of the interview, I think it went well despite having to futz with my ear thing every time I wasn't speaking, and off I go to interview Shae Wilhite, a Vegas comic-turned-baker whose "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" appearance from 2001 aired on GSN a couple weeks ago. Oddly, both Shae and I must speak really loud because on several occasions, other people at the Omelet House interjected to clarify or correct something. "Um, Lana Turner wasn't discovered in a drugstore, that's a myth," one guy advised. I'd never had group participation in an interview before.

Anyhow, I go home and I'm working on some stuff and I turn around to find our new dog, Aces, has chewed on my property tax bill:


Evidently, the little Mexican dog didn't get the memo from Harry Reid that Hispanics can't be Republicans.

Next I read the newspaper and my favorite section, The View, offers this unfortunate pairing of headline and photo:

So then I'm off to the Venetian for the press preview of the Consumer Electronics Show. And while everybody else is agog about 3D television -- which I can't quite imagine ever needing but I once said that about Twitter, too -- I liked the gizmos that help you find your car or at least your car's keys:



This also seemed practical, a camera that beams your baby's activities (or your college roommate's?) to your iPhone:


This clunker below fascinated me, particularly because it got an innovation award.



It's a $3,000 oven, see. And I thought, "Oh, you can control it from your computer so you can, say, look in on what you're cooking from another part of the house and adjust the temperature or something." That would be cool, right? Nah. For $3,000, it cooks stuff faster with some sort of steam induction thing.

I asked the guy if this was supposed to be someone's main oven. He said yes. I asked if it came in any other sizes. He said no. I asked how anyone was going to get a baking sheet in there. He had no clue.

Why am I telling you all this today instead of via Twitter yesterday? I mean, this is the most sophisticated tech conference and the whole world is wired to transmit every thought instantaneously, right?

Well, this...


...is why. For hours yesterday at the Venetian, I couldn't get email or Tweet except for occasionally via text-message. I couldn't even use my AT&T air card to get online on my laptop with any reliability.

As one of my Facebook friends responded, "Oh, the irony." Way to represent, Venetian!

The Strip is LIVE at 7:15 pm PT!

We're doing things a little out of order because Miles has to stay at work till 7 but our interview with Michelin director Jean-Luc Naret cannot be moved from 7:15 pm. SO... I'll do that interview, then we'll start the show properly at 7:30.

Come on down to LVROCKS.Com and join the chat! Or listen to the podcast in its proper order when it's posted on Thursday. The celebrity guest is a somewhat crabby Joy Behar of "The View."

Next week: Ellen DeGeneres and Wolf Blitzer.

Rosie O'Donnell is riveting, like it or not

And so she goes.

I'm not really a Rosie O'Donnell fan per se. In fact, in 2002 when she went all super-dyke on the world, I wrote this piece wondering why she was faking a radical persona. (Apologies for the syntax problems there.)

But it's hard to see that her departure from "The View" won't harm the program, which has seen its ratings boom since she arrived with all her attendant, constant controversy. Particularly interesting is that, except for the Kelly Ripa-Clay Aiken thing, none of the many Rosie flaps really had anything to do with her sexual orientation.

That said, I find the American public's refusal to admit they're fascinated by Rosie so odd. There's an AOL poll up now asking (a) whether you're glad Rosie is leaving "The View" and (b) whether you think the ratings will suffer. So far, more than 207,000 people voted -- by far the largest number of votes on an AOL poll today -- and 77 percent said they're glad she's gone, 69 percent say it won't harm the show's ratings.

What's so odd there is that 207,000 people opted to read the story and vote. That's a lot of people. And three-fourths of them are acting like they don't care, aren't interested.

Oh, and one more thing. If Rosie cared what Trump thought, she'd have taken the one-year deal if only to shut him up. Just a thought.

Oh, one more thought. Rosie on a show of her own won't be nearly as fascinating as Rosie on an all-girl gabfest.

Bad Readin's - and a couple of goods

Fact-checking these days isn't really that hard. You start with a search engine. Which is why the following two errors -- regarding search engines! -- are especially befuddling:

* In an L.A. Times review of ABC's all-girl gabfest "The View" that is online now but in print on Sunday, author Mary McNamara writes: "If you employ one of (Rosie) O'Donnell's favorite research tools and Google "The View," you will, on most days, come up with a list of "recent news" entries long before you hit the show's website." I tried it. Didn't happen. Will keep trying, but it seems like an ill-conceived cheap shot aimed at Rosie's reference to Donald Trump's alleged bankruptcies several months ago and where she claimed to find the information. As if Mary McNamara herself doesn't also, as a journalist every single day, use Google to start her research. (Another L.A. Times piece posted today, profiling "View" host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, is terrific and well worth a read.)

*In yesterday's Doonesbury -- which I've taken to reading online because the Review-Journal buries it somewhere behind the Classifieds for no apparent reason -- Garry Trudeau is mocking the shifting political positions of former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney. In the third frame, Mike Doonesbury asks Mark Slackmeyer, "Mark, what happens when you do a search on 'flip-flop' and 'Mitt Romney?' " And Mark replies: "You get 5,435,000 hits, Mike." You try it. I just did. I got 106,000. Probably a lot of repeat results in there, too.

Elsewhere in the media this morning, the Review-Journal ran a completely ridiculous story about a complaint hotline at McCarran Airport that led callers to the wrong place. This was the TOP local story in the newspaper's estimation, based on where it placed it. Did the errant information lead callers to a Chinese take-out? Maybe a little old lady who is getting sick of having her "Wheel of Fortune" interrupted? Perhaps, this being Vegas, a phone-sex line? No! Any of those things would've been fun, interesting, newsy. In this case, it sent callers to a recently disconnected FAA number and the cell phone of a Las Vegas city public information officer. So? The airport spokesman, a former R-J scribe himself who must be appalled now to be on the other end of this stuff, says it was an honest mistake. But what kind of a story does that make?

I know how these stories get done -- a reporter stumbles over the glitch and calls around for comments or somebody in the public calls the reporter. Doesn't make it a real story, even if you can get the mayor to opine on it in a way that suits your narrative which, in this case, is that the airport hates people.

This journalistic tactic only works if there's a legitimate problem. Like this story I did for the R-J in 1997 when I was alerted by a parent to the fact that the Clark County School District's own website on how to enroll kids in kindergarden was riddled with appalling spelling errors from top to bottom. I opened the piece with my favorite lead ever: "To enroll you're childeren in kunderfarden, it is improtant and nessary to bring a coppy of a utility bull, even in outlaying areas." All of those mistakes were on the site. Now that is irony and news.

Today's Las Vegas Sun, meanwhile, had two excellent pieces, both of which I may end up using for stories of my own. One, by my "Petcast" co-host Emily Richmond, looked into early signs that the school district, which is chronically understaffed even as it opens new schools every year to keep up with population growth, has seen a plummet in the number of teacher applications to date, portending an even greater crisis this year than ever before. See? A little more important than a screwy phone line, no?

And Mike Trask writes about this guy in Henderson, Nev., who is digitizing a huge collection of vintage TV shows and tossing them up on the Internet at TV4U.com. The site, by the way, is brilliant and free!