Las Vegas Weekly

January 30, 2009 · 5:42 PM

Hide behind something solid: The Kats Report debuts

By John Katsilometes

This is me, on the left, proving that I can talk to important people by chatting up Mayor Goodman at the opening of Poker Lounge at the Hard Rock Hotel.

Photo: Allison Duck

I started January by rambling around Fremont Street and Salvatore’s Italian Steakhouse with Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and a host of his favorite security guys. It was New Year’s Eve, Vegas-style, and a martini-filled Goodman, just oozing the good cheer, counted in 2009 for 30,000 imbibers under the Fremont Street Experience canopy. I end January at UFC 94 and at the Las Vegas Hilton for Super Bowl XLIII (43, to you and me), and in between there was CES and the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo and Miss America. There was brush with Bette Midler at the Nevada Ballet Theatre at the Bellagio, a couple of interviews (one on radio and another at a made-for-TV anti-budget cuts rally at UNLV) with Chancellor Jim Rogers, and an informative if meandering Barrick Lecture Series PunditPalooza starring E.J. Dionne, J.C. Watts and Gloria Borger hosted by Sun political columnist Jon Ralston, and a small, subdued inaugural party at the home of progressive activist Peggy Maze Johnson, a right-fighter whose heart and head are always in the right place.

Tonight I’ll be at the Las Vegas Wranglers-Bakersfield Condors game at the Orleans Arena, billed as Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich Prison Uniform Night. It is what it sounds like. The Wranglers will be wearing black-and-white striped jerseys, the visitors bright-orange togs, the refs will be wearing blue prison guard tops and I’ll be wearing a mask of astonishment. In the spirit of Blagojevich’s method of monetizing U.S. Senate seats, the team will auction the seat between the teams’ benches to the highest bidder.

Let’s see. What else. Ah. Last night, I was at Rush Lounge at the Golden Nugget, watching Frankie Moreno’s last performance there (at least for a while), and in walks violin virtuoso Joshua Bell. He likes Frankie, and vice versa, and Bell walked in practically unrecognized and wow what another night in Vegas.

The point is not to purge for you my social or professional calendar. But I do have a friend who often asks, “Who lives like you?” No one I know, honestly. As I was telling Moss, owner of Frankie’s Tiki Lounge and Double Down Saloon, yesterday as I chatted with him at the lounge, I pride myself on dexterity (and my seamless willingness to drop names) in my movements around Las Vegas. I feel equally at home at the Samaritan House and the Social House, and once I actually visited both houses in the same day. The disparity in environments made me so dizzy I nearly dropped.

But I love it here. And if you don’t love it, hey, grab yourself a plastic football full of beer on Fremont Street and relax. Or, better, check in here as often as possible. I’m calling this new multimedia, blog The Kats Report. It is a boundless blog, in which nothing is off-limits. I’ll be pulling in different elements as we go forward and nodding to the past – I am still receiving vanity license plates from readers who remember the plates that capped my old column in the print edition of the Las Vegas Sun. We’ll incorporate video of interesting subjects and people, of me and maybe of you; we’ll link to my radio show, Our Metropolis, (6 p.m., Tuesdays, KUNV 91.5-FM) and all the other multimedia projects in my little corner of the new media world will appear here, with some of that stuff making its way to sister sites LasVegasWeekly.com and the Robin Leach-driven VegasDeLuxe. I’ll also worm my way back into print, as The Kats Report will appear in the new News publication, which you should really pick up from your driveway if you want to know what’s happening in your own VegasVille.

That is all for now. To borrow a phrase from my new BFF, Robin Leach, beer football wishes and shrimp cocktail dreams …

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