Las Vegas News from around the web

The Killers were part of an epic moment in music this week in London.

Coldplay’s Chris Martin dubbed it “the best encore you’ve ever seen.”

Coldplay and The Killers had finished their co-headline gig when Martin made the announcement to the crowd of 2,000 at the War Child charity at Shepherd’s Bush Empire music venue.

“Bite” replaced its lord vampire, but the former one will “Ignite” the Greek Isles with a new revue.

Antonio Restivo leaves a big cape to fill as the star who always kept his scary-horror game face amid the campy topless shenanigans surrounding him in the Stratosphere late show.

Restivo says he found out his contract wasn’t being renewed when a security guard offered his condolences, having apparently overheard the news in a post-show cocktail gathering. The new lord vampire is dancer-choreographer Russell Hines.

But Restivo still has his other bad-guy gig as the villain in the “Tournament of Kings” at Excalibur, and will test his mettle as a producer with “Ignite.” He and his brother, Joey, operating as the Restivo Brothers, launch the dance revue with pyrotechnic effects and illusions at the Greek Isles March 13.

Once called the Spanish Steps, a steakhouse has been located on this corner of the sprawling Caesars casino as long as ELV can remember. For some reason (mainly having to do with his abhorrence of mediocrity), he had always avoided eating here.

But then he started hearing (first from uber-pr guy Ken Langdon, then from others), that this in-house operation was actually dry-aging its beef on the premises. “Really?” he thought to himself. “Actually hanging sides of beef and steaks in a refrigerated locker for weeks to allow natural evaporation and enzymes to work their magic on the meat, turning it from flabby steer muscle, into funky fabulousness?”

When these questions were confirmed in the affirmative, and all doubts quelled, he was in faster than you can say postmortem myofibrils proteolysis.

Riddle: What do you get when you cross a living statue from The Venetian with the animatronic fountains at Caesars?

Answer: The Living Garden at Palazzo.

Riddle: What’s the Living Garden?

Answer: See first question.

It may sound like it, but this isn’t one of those lateral thinking puzzles that makes your head feel like it’s going to explode. But to some, the Living Garden might be an enigma.

For 50 minutes, dancers dressed as statues and grape-bearing vines put on a free show for people passing through the Shoppes at the Palazzo.

The first time you watch Cirque du Soleil’s $200 million spectacular “Ka” at MGM Grand, you marvel in stunned silence at the gravity-defying production and simply think, “That’s unbelievable!” The truth, though, is that the impossible has become possible, and the 80 cast members have performed the miraculous for the past four years. In fact, at tonight’s second show, they celebrate their milestone 2,000th performance.

We’re going to join them for celebration champagne and cake after the finale of the late show in the lobby of their MGM theater as they meet special guests. Some 38 of the cast and 81 of the behind-the-scene technicians have been with Ka since the opening-night performance Feb. 4, 2005.

The Victor Chandler casino has a game called “Challenge Poker,” which plays like MultiStrike video poker, with two differences:

1. No “Free Ride” cards.
2. The base game is different at each level, all of them over 100%.

What is the return of this game?

More…

Sinatra. Singer, heartthrob, movie star, legend, icon and now restaurant. But it wasn’t always this way. Sinatra - the restaurant - was originally Theo’s, named after chef Theo Schoenegger. However, a social visit between Steve Wynn and members of the “Sinatra Family” during the final months of Encore’s construction resulted in an agreement to rename Theo’s’ Sinatra.

Four of Sin City’s leading architects and urbanists join the Weekly for a spirited discussion about building a better city

We tend not to see the built environment, though it’s all around us, and of all the arts forms, architecture is the one that tends to have the most tangible impacts. Books and movies and music will come and go—we cherish those we love, and we ignore those we don’t—but we’re stuck with buildings, good or bad, for a generation, or a lifetime. Buildings are the physical manifestation of who we are and what we value—and this is no more true than here in Las Vegas.

With an economic downturn that has brought construction to a near halt, now is the time to celebrate the city we’ve built over the last 100 years and consider the direction we want to go from here. To that end, over the next seven pages we’ll sit down with several of Sin City’s best architects and urban thinkers for a stimulating roundtable about how the city can improve its architecture, urban planning and efforts to be more sustainable; we’ll introduce you to several of the unheralded buildings around the Valley that prove that between mammoth casinos and endless tract homes quality design abounds; and we’ll profile an architect from Washington, D.C. who dreams of radically rethinking Las Vegas’ most famous street. Las Vegas will grow again, but its long-term prosperity depends on thinking more seriously about how to make a more vibrant, resource-efficient community. So sit back, relax and enjoy and remember—none of these buildings bite.

ND’s upscale Latin swoops in to class this joint up a bit!

Club Rio, which opened in 1995 and closed in 2006, has been something of an eyesore the past few years. I can say this because I used to manage that big, round, purple behemoth. Apart from a short stint between October ’06 and March ’07—when the then-closed showroom/club was reopened and renamed 3121 by the man formerly known as [Symbol]—the club formerly known as Club Rio has been summarily benched until tonight’s soft reopening as ND’s Fuego, an upscale Latin nightclub.

I’ve played a lot of Quick Quads. It quickly becomes obvious that you get a lot more dealt quads in this game than you do in regular video poker. I decided to figure out how frequently this happens, and to use this as an excuse to review the math of how to figure these things out. Most video poker math is fairly simple once it’s explained, but many players have no idea of how to attack the problem.