Columnist Susan Snyder: Activists suffering burnout

Tuesday, June 29, 2004 | 8:04 a.m.

Last week proponents of a measure to make recreational pot possession legal in Nevada forgot to, um, they forgot ...

Whoa, Dude, look at my shoes. They're really funny.

Oh, right. Anyway, the pot people forgot to submit 6,000 of the signatures they'd gathered in order to get the measure placed ...

Hey, you got any Doritos?

How about brownies. Yeah! Let's make some brownies. We'll have a bake sale. We can put some petitions out to get people to support ... um, shoot.

Forgot.

Got any Doritos?

The U.S. Mint's 50-State Quarter Program is designing a Nevada coin, so Nevada State Treasurer Brian Krolicki is asking residents to submit themes.

Mint officials used to solicit actual coin deigns, but they now accept only themes or possible topics for the coins.

Nevadans who want to enter the Great Nevada Commemorative Quarter Program must submit a theme, a possible design element to illustrate it and a brief description as to how it is significant in Nevada.

Entry details can be found at www.nevadatreasurer.com.

Three to five different coin designs will be created and submitted to state officials, who will issue their final decision in 2005.

This could be fun.

We could be the "state of brothel-ly love." We could put a big trash can on one side to commemorate being the nation's nuclear waste dump. We could put Las Vegas on every state's quarter, since so many of them end up in our machines anyway.

Or we could just slap a developer's name on one side and a casino on the other and be done with it.

A New York City actor who is writing a book about rumors and so-called facts that are passed around the Internet contacted me last week about some Las Vegas tidbits he'd collected.

He wanted to know whether they were true or how to find sources for finding out whether they are true.

And not to steal the guy's thunder -- research is what they pay me to do around here -- but I have no idea what the slot machine-to-resident ratio is for Las Vegas.

There are none for this one.

There are no clocks in casinos, to the best of my knowledge (but consider comment above).

Still, just for grins, Nevada Gaming Control Board figures show quarter slots accounted for 20 percent of the slot machine wins in 2003, while blackjack accounted for 11 percent of table game wins.

Of the $721,834,741 in state gaming taxes collected in 2003, Clark County paid 81.5 percent of them, or $587,987,810.

Evidently, the visitor-to-slot ratio is working quite well for us. Bring on those state quarters.

The Stratosphere Tower is indeed 1,149 feet tall, but I do not know whether that makes it the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. However, it is probably the tallest building west of the Mississippi River with no apparent function.

And Las Vegas didn't exist in 1901, Nevada State Demographer Jeff Hardcastle said. But about 30 people lived in this area at that time.

And in case the author wondered the current population figure: Too many.