I often wonder why a huge market like Las Vegas doesn’t have a pro sports team in the area. If franchises can thrive (or at least survive) in places like Kansas City, Milwaukee, Jacksonville, and Buffalo, then surely Vegas could support an MLB, NFL, NBA, or even NHL team, right? I mean, Vegas does get its fair share of major sporting events, such as last year’s NBA All-Star Game or all the big prizefights, and those events sell out, so there’s no question that the demand exists.

One of the reasons against establishing a franchise in Vegas (so I’ve heard) is that it would be far too tempting for athletes, administrators, and refs to bet on games since sports betting is allowed in that state. But this seems like a rather specious argument because people would be able to find ways to gamble no matter what. Just look at Tim Donaghy, Rick Tocchet, and of course Pete Rose. None of those guys were based out of Vegas, and they managed to gamble on games in their respective leagues anyway.

The reason this question is so important to me is that my husband and I have often talked about relocating to Vegas someday. We know that we’re not going to stay in Chicago forever, and we want to go someplace warm, so Sin City has been on our radar for years. We even check out the Las Vegas Real Estate market from time to time to see how it compares with Illinois, and to help us decide when to make our move.

However, the lack of a pro sports team would be a deal-breaker for us at this point. We both love baseball and football, and we attend numerous games every season. There’s no way we’d be able to get behind a college team or minor league squad; it’s the pros or nothing for us.

Hopefully we’ll see some positive development in this area soon!

I somehow managed to nuke my entire blog earlier this evening. I then went to restore it from the backup in my Dreamhost CP, and that at least got the blog to show again, but then there were other problems with it.

Since things were screwy anyway, I figured this would be as good a time as any to upgrade to the newest stable WP release, so I did that too. But now I can’t seem to go back in and edit any of my old posts. I’m getting some strange database error that I’ve never seen before.

This means I’m going to probably have to spend most of the night trying to figure out what I did wrong, uninstalling and re-installing WP, etc.

Ugh…. not what I needed right now!

I have been waiting for Atonement, the latest Keira Knightley/James McAvoy film, to arrive stateside for months now. It opened in the UK back in September, and the buzz around this movie has just been incredible. I loved the book, and heard that this rendition is pretty faithful to the original, so I can’t wait to see it! Plus, Roger Ebert gave it four stars in his review this morning, saying that it’s a shoe-in as a Best Picture nominee.

BUT — Atonement is just in limited release this weekend!!! Only two theaters in the area are showing it (River East and Landmark Century), both in the city. There’s no way I can make it all the way downtown (45-minute drive if there’s no traffic) just for a movie, so I’m stuck waiting until the film trickles out to the ‘burbs.

Man, I hope it’s sometime soon!