We went to see Phantom - The Las Vegas Spectacular last night. It is an outstanding Las Vegas show. The quality of the music, signing, dancing and music is fantastic. And it is Las Vegas. That is it's somewhat like restaurant chains in Las Vegas - take the best restaurant chain in the world and put one in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas version will be more expensive, not as good and you'll feel rushed. That describes Phantom in Las Vegas. It is a great production of a great show, but it's been cut down and lost some of its beauty in doing so. With many scenes cut in half, and some cut all together it becomes more a frantic race to the end. Gone are the moments to pause and catch one's breath and really enjoy the show.

This comment may seem a little odd at first, but one of the things that I didn't care for was a little too much detail and not enough left to the imagination. With the exquisite theater built for the production and the fantastic special effects, combined with the speed of the show, it's tougher to get to a place where the mind is completely carried away into the fantasy of the show.

There are much better productions to be certain, but this one is pretty good. It would be helped greatly by adding the Overture back in to the production. WIthout the intermission it's a little tough to add the Overture to the second act back to the score but at least the Overture to the first act would help a lot. It is also great to see a new show in Vegas that has live music.

The Clark County Commission will consider a change to the county's land-use code, Title 30, allowing accessory apartments in several single-family residential areas. Accessory apartments would be limited to 30% of the square footage of the main residence and in the urban and suburban areas could not exceed 1000 sq. ft. In rural areas the maximum size, also limited to 30% of the main residence, is 2000 sq. ft.

In rural areas the accessory apartment can be the building that was originally the primary residence but the accessory apartment cannot be rented or leased until the principal residence is occupied by the property owner. A condition of the accessory apartment proposal would require that the property owner occupy either the primary residence or accessory apartment and that a deed restriction be placed on the deed listing and acknowledging the conditions of the accessory apartment provision.

Perhaps I should start a list of places to avoid. These are businesses that don't understand customers. For several months I'd regularly shopped at an ARCO station at the corner of Paradise Road and Tropicana Avenue. Tonight there was a new sign on the pump saying credit cards had to go inside to pay. If I'll pay the ATM-tax imposed by the station owners I can pay at the pump, if not I have to go inside.

It seems this is probably to get more customers to use the ATM instead of the credit card function of the pump and to shift the costs from the profitable company to the individual consumer. With a little good luck the plan will fail, however. In my case at least, they have gone from a customer spending a few hundred dollars a month at their store to a non-customer. I'll gladly stop a block away and not have the hassle of going inside to pay.

We spent the last couple of days at the various Cowboy Christmas shows in Las Vegas. It is amazing how difficult these places make it to find information. There is a Cowboy Marketplace at the Mandalay Bay convention center. There are ads on plenty of taxi cabs in Vegas, but not a single page on their website says a word about it.

So I'll say a word about it. Skip it. The Ariat Country Christmas at the Sands Expo Convention Center is great. There's something for everybody and some great booths. The Marketplace, however, is more of the home shopping informercial in 3D than anything truly western. Sure there are some of the herbalist quacks at other places, but they, along with the massage pillows and food-processor sales make up most of the booths at the Marketplace.