Minutes before deadline, we did a Google news search on the terms “Oscar Goodman” + “Time Magazine.” After all, Time’s new cover piece about effed-up Vegas is just the sort of vandalism that reliably gets Oscar foaming. This time: No mayoral bluster popped up. Indeed, it’s hard to get more than tokenly worked up over the piece, which mostly rounds up all the sorry crap we locals bitch about: real-estate dementia, arrogance on the Strip, bad neighbors, bad government. Anyway, a city that positions itself to live and die by its image can’t be too surprised when the result is dying. Sure, you could argue with the mag—there are venal home brokers everywhere; for hubris, the Strip can’t match Wall Street; two words: New Jersey—but you’d actually be reinforcing Time’s standard line on Vegas, from its 1994 cover (on our boom years) to this one (on our end times): this city as a concentrated essence of America. From where we sit, that short-changes the weird, often desperate, always telling aspects of the city really worth Time’s attention.