GRAY MATTERS

By way of soliciting community input without having to actually listen to anyone talk, because you know how folks go on and on, the Clark County School District has posted an online survey to help select its next chief administrator.

Reached at www.ccsd.net (click the superintendent survey button), the questionnaire asks visitors to answer various questions from a menu of pre-selected answers. For example, you're asked to rank the superintendent's three most significant strengths, with possible answers ranging from accessibility to parents to dealing with growth to fiscal management to quality teaching.

In that manner, the survey asks you to rank the district's three top issues, the varieties of expertise a superintendent should have, his or her ideal administrative style (assertive? collaborative? financial management? visionary?) and leadership traits.

At no point can you answer "all of the above" or pick his or wardrobe. The survey will be up through September 7.

In an interview with Broadwayworld.com, Jeff Calhoun, director/choreographer of the Broadway flameout Brooklyn, says his musical is "about to announce a Las Vegas run." But Gotham critics lambasted the show about five homeless street performers putting on a musical play at a street corner under the Brooklyn Bridge. Said Talkingbroadway.com:

"Buried beneath the rubbish of the show's outward appearance is just more rubbish ... incapable of rising above the esprit debris."

Vegas theater fans on the site's chat board were similarly disenchanted.

• "YUCK!!!!"

• "The show didn't last in NYC and it certainly won't last here. Someone's going to lose lots of $$$."

• "The big question was how it got to Broadway in the first place. What a mess."

• "I was one of the five people who actually saw lots of good in Brooklyn. But then again, I'm severely brain damaged."

Maybe they'll have better luck with The Bronx, Queens, Manhattan or Staten Island.

Las Vegas is the mecca of gambling! (Yawn.) The entertainment capital of the world! (Zzzzz) The center of the convention center business! (What? I blanked out there for a second.) We're always on the lookout for a new superlative in Sin City, a fresh boast, and we may have one, courtesy of website e-Mot-ivationalSpeaker.com: Motivational Speaker Capital of the Entire World. (Well, words to that effect). The site tells us that, "because of the many business conventions that are held each year in Las Vegas, there are motivational speakers who work only there all year around. Las Vegas motivational speakers are highly regarded as some of the best in the business." So the next time you feel down, or want to change your life, forget the slots. Forget the shows. Listen out for the right rhetoric and be happy.

The latest issue of Blender magazine (named the best in the land by the Chicago Tribune, so pay attention) places Las Vegas at number 59 on its "Blender 100" list of hot people, places and things in music. Citing residencies by Celine Dion and Elton John, the emergence of the Killers and the cachet of the Palms, the magazine says that Vegas is "now a lucrative mecca for big-ticket, road-weary artists." The evidence? Palms owner George Maloof says that five years ago, buzz was all about roller coasters, but now it's about Good Charlotte. And here we thought things had improved.

The signs went up—Coming soon! New Student Union! New Rec Center!—and, really, who could complain? And yet ... For the entire 2004-2005 academic year, the question hovered over the UNLV campus: Since the signs were on the lots where people were parking their cars, where would people park their cars when the signs were replaced by the promised buildings?

This week, UNLV made its answer public: People will park wherever they can, and take a shuttle bus to where they actually need to go. Somehow the dream of a campus for pedestrians is giving way to ... more motorized transport! The general idea seems to be that there's a lot of parking around the Thomas & Mack, and that oughta do.

True enough, except the parking areas around the arena get smaller every year as campus buildings encroach upon them. This encroachment is a fundamentally good thing: A university is better served by university buildings than by mere parking lots. But the fact remains that this is a commuter campus in a town with no public transit options besides the venerable Citizen's Area Transit buses, an option that lacks ... well, it lacks any appeal at all.

If you listened closely around campus last year, you could hear a few politically incorrect grumblers wondering why the new buildings weren't being designed with underground parking. There were generally two theories about this: One ideological (they want to FORCE people to abandon car-commuting), and one practical (underground parking garages cost a lot of money). The second explanation, in our cash-strapped university system, appears to make a good deal of sense, and it seems we should simply sigh and praise the student government-funded shuttle concept (which cost $285,000, or a lot less than an underground parking garage) as a noble adaptation to difficult circumstances.

And yet ... One wonders if, during the next round of university expansion, a bit more sympathetic attention will be paid to the admittedly non-utopian idea that, for the foreseeable future, UNLV's students, staff, faculty and visitors will need places to park the cars that brought them there.