Who’d've thought bringing Bette Midler on board would hail a return of classic Vegas? But here’s a snip of Mike Prevatt’s upcoming review on the new show:

Midler is the latest big-money Strip headliner aimed at both baby boomers and gays willing to hand over ridiculous amounts of money to see a 90-minute show featuring overplayed adult-contemporary standards. On one hand, knowing how ribald and campy Midler’s show can get makes her Caesars residency a refreshing one. And yet, considering the growing list of multiplatinum headliners — Elton, Toni, Barry, Cher — it’s as if Vegas showroom bookers are merely conferring with my mother’s music collection, the bane of my childhood.

And yet, after catching the Feb. 29 performance — the media’s first official opportunity to have at The Divine One, who is the first replacement for former Colosseum resident Celine Dion — I must say that Bette Midler: The Showgirl Must Go On has appeal that justifies a gritted-teeth endurance of “From a Distance,” and the usual setlist and shtick familiar to any Midler fan. For, despite its modern Strip gimmickry, Showgirl feels like an old-school Vegas revue rather than just a concert or even a steroidal version of Midler’s typical stage show.

Everybody agrees that what allegedly happened at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada (motto: We Recycle!) is bad. Seriously, do we really need the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Julie Louise Gerberding, M.D., M.P.H., to tell us “This should never happen in a contemporary health care organization”?

Welcome to Las Vegas, Dr. G. It’s not the Mississippi of the West. It’s the Gabon of the West!

(We at Various Things & Stuff would like to apologize to the nation of Gabon, its president, El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimb, and its 1.4 million people for the comparison to Las Vegas. Yes, Gabon has a greater incidence of Ebola virus than Las Vegas, but other than that, we’re pretty much even.)

Anyway, according to a story in today’s Review-Journal, pretty much everybody is getting involved in the aftermath: Metro Police, the Clark County district attorney, the attorney general, the FBI, and, undoubtedly most effective of all, the Legislature, in the person of state Sen. Randolph Townsend, who said the possible exposure of up to 40,000 people to hepatitis and HIV at the clinic “may be the largest breech of public trust in the history of the state.”

So that means the state shut the place down, right? After all, the state licenses clinics like the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada via the  Nevada State Health Divison.

Nope.

See, even after the Southern Nevada Health District discovered the re-use of vials of medicine was taking place — something that doesn’t even go on at Doctor Barbie’s Malibu Dream House and Plastic Surgery Consultation Center — the clinic stayed open. The county agency can’t force a center to close; it can simply conduct medical investigations.

And state authorities say they cannot act until they have proof positive that the conduct of doctors or nurses is a threat to the public. So no help from, say, the state Nursing Board or the Board of Medical Examiners. (Hell, as Review-Journal columnist Jane Ann Morrison has pointed out, the Board of Medical Examiners won’t even put a doctor’s name on the website after he’s been found guilty of wrongdoing.)

Now, we’re not doctors, despite what it says on the fancy medical degree we created using our office laser printer, but even we know that re-using syringes in vials of medicine is something only a greedy, criminally incompetent physician demonstrating depraved indifference to human life and suffering would do. Allegedly. (We also printed out a law degree.)

“We need to let them [investigators] come up with what exactly is the problem. In the meantime, that place is closed,” said Dr. Javaid Anwar, president of the Board of Medical Examiners.

Yes, it is, doctor. But only because Mayor Oscar Goodman and the city of Las Vegas saw what was happening and yanked the place’s business license. (Clark County followed suit Monday, closing three other clinics owned by the same group.) If hizzoner hadn’t swept into action, the clinic would be open today. And the only assurance we’d have that the infectious practices weren’t still taking place would be the word of the guy who allegedly ordered the re-use of vials in the first place.

Yeah. We feel safe and well protected by our medical regulatory bodies.

And they wonder why everybody with disposable income goes out of state for health care…

Regular readers know we’re big fans of newspaper correction boxes. We mostly like them because, as the great writer Alexander Cockburn once said, they imply everything else that appeared in the previous day’s newspaper was correct.

Well, today’s massive, story-length mea culpa in the Las Vegas Sun was something to behold. (If you follow the link, scroll down to the bottom to read the appended correction.)

Now, we at Various Things & Stuff are old-school type newspaper readers, in that we actually read the version of the paper printed on dead trees. If we didn’t, we fear we would have missed this correction entirely, because unlike the Review-Journal, the Sun doesn’t seem to post its corrections in an easily discernable place on its website. In fact, we had to hunt for several minutes using advanced research techniques to locate the original story, to which the correction was later added.

Our free (and worth exactly that) advice to the Sun: Make your corrections easier to find!

The correction apologized first for quoting comments from a website and implying that residents of Summerlin hold racist views:

The problem was that the quotes were anonymous and, because of the way the Web works, could have come from anywhere in the world. Although some people in Summerlin may hold racist views, these quotes, because of the lack of identity of the writers, in no way proved that possibility.

Yes, indeed, those comments could have been posted from anywhere in the world. (This was a revelation?) It’s not to say that there aren’t racists in Summerlin — we happen to have heard accounts from at least one source of some ugly reactions to the school shooting at the heart of this story. The Sun promised subsequently not to run comments from anonymous websites any more, so all you readers can stop bombarding the newspaper with your “Various Things & Stuff is the best blog ever” messages. It’s just not going to end up in the paper.

After also apologizing for conflating “incident reports” with actual incidents of crime, and comparing those erroneous crime stats from a populated area with an undeveloped one, we come to the heart of the correction:

All these errors tended to give the story an anti-Summerlin tone, which was not intended and which the Sun regrets.

Now why was this line included? It’s usually sufficient to explain the mistake, apologize and move on, isn’t it? Could it be that the fine, upstanding community of Summerlin was a little peeved at perhaps being portrayed as a crime-ridden, racist enclave where bullets fly like epithets? And if so, might not it be better to stop the bullets and epithets rather than the stories about the bullets and epithets? We’re just saying.

FULL DISCLOSURE: We at Various Things & Stuff are married to an employee of Faiss, Foley Warren, a public relations agency whose clients include Summerlin and the Howard Hughes Corp., which developed Summerlin.

UPDATE: Other online media has taken notice of the correction, too, including Las Vegas freelancer and podcaster Steve Friess. (That piece was also featured on Romenekso, a blog on the Poynter Institute for Media Studies’ website.)

Today the business world learns an important lesson about the limitations of tits: They can sell cars, beer, deodorant — and even cynically overmarketed chicken wings that taste like chalkboard erasers covered in Taco Bell hot sauce — just fine, but as far as luring men-children to the numby vortex of video poker … not so much.

Looks like Hooters is due for a radical, er, enhancement as owner Hedwigs Las Vegas Top Tier readies to re-theme the place as a fance-shmance boutique hotel to the tune of $130 million. I won’t lactate much over the loss of a casino whose very existence creeped me out with the abiding hyper-awareness that I was sharing a city with a sleeveless zombie army of Larry the Cable Guys, but then again, this plush wave of upscalification is assy on multiple fronts — mostly because it makes me weepy for the future when I pause to wonder how much of that ghostly high-rolling casino lucre is borne on the plastic camel’s back of MasterCard Nation.

That and I’m broke.

We see the Review-Journal weighed in today on the Nevada Tax Commission allowing the Las Vegas Monorail to keep its tax-exempt status at a Monday hearing. It wasn’t a big surprise, despite the revelation in the Feb. 28 edition of CityLife that the troubled train claims to be a 501(c)(4) charity, but has never formally been granted that status by the IRS.

But the R-J story contains a fairly grevious — and fairly obvious — mistake that goes to the heart of one of the key underpinnings of the monorail’s tax-free status. It’s this line:

The state has recognized that since the monorail provides transportation in the busiest corridor in Nevada, the Strip, it is providing a needed service not provided by a government entity.

Wait, so we just imagined those Citizens Area Transit buses plying the Strip and nearby streets? The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada isn’t a government entity? Those double-decker, London-style “Deuce” buses doesn’t really exist? Who could read that sentence and not realize immediately it’s simply untrue? Hell, even the monorail once admitted that competition from “a needed service not provided by a government entity” was cutting into its ridership!

But let’s use this as a teaching moment, shall we? Because this mistake does bring up a good point.

The monorail first achieved its sales tax exemption back in  2003, based partly on the claim it was a private agency providing a service that government would otherwise be required to provide. We are always amused by this, because:

• As far as we can tell, the law doesn’t require any government agency to provide a system of public transportation. The Nevada Revised Statues generally use the permissive “may” when talking about the issue.
• Despite that, the government already is providing a system of public transportation in Clark County, which serves each and every destination served by the monorail.

And that means the state granted the monorail tax exempt status for a completely duplicative service that government was already providing, despite no legal mandate. The decision to grant that tax-exempt status, therefore, was and remains highly suspect.

Another reason the state granted the monorail tax-exempt status was its claim to be a 501(c)(4), a status the monorail now frankly admits it has never applied to get. And it was this federal tax status that helped persuade the state — and later Clark County — to similarly exempt the monorail from paying its taxes. (Anybody who says this “privately funded” monorail costs taxpayers nothing is thus made a liar.)

Here endth the lesson.

Today’s balloting has us excited, but not because of Clinton vs. Obama. Residents of a tiny Vermont town are voting today on whether or not President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should be indicted for violating the Constitution.

Sustainability … sooo last century.