LOOKING IN ON: CITY HALL

Sunday, Sept. 9, 2007 | 1:24 a.m.

Short tempers, disgust or maybe it's simply heat exhaustion - all will calm down once daily temperatures finally dip below 100.

Whatever it was, the week seemed long and rancor ruled the Vegas landscape.

It began Wednesday, as the mayor bucked back at the weak threat posed to him by a representative of the Neonopolis debacle.

And this was from a mayor who just two weeks ago jokingly portrayed himself as something of a mind-over-matter guru .

It occurred during the City Council meeting, when attorney Michael Matkins, representing the company that owns Neonopolis - except for the parking structure beneath it, which is owned by the city - warned that grousing about Neonopolis' failures and asking for more investigation into who exactly owns the unsightly concrete block wouldn't send the right "signal" to possible future tenants.

Of course, the promise of future "major, internationally recognized name-brand" tenants for Neonopolis seems to come every few months. To date, the hulking 250,000-square-foot mass has three businesses and more than 200 empty spaces to lease.

You know where they can go, Goodman all but said, forgetting to breathe in through his nose, out through his mouth. He ordered city attorneys to look once again at Neonopolis' ownership, hoping against hope that the city might get out of its deal with whoever runs the thing.

During the mayor's weekly news conference, he was thrown another chance to maintain a preternatural calm when asked about the New York Times columnist who all but called him a misogynistic pig.

Bob Herbert, who has read an online book about prostitution in Nevada, ridiculed Goodman for positing the idea of getting prostitution off the streets and into legalized brothels in Las Vegas.

"The furthest thing from the way I do business is to demean a woman," Goodman said. "When he wrote that about me I was hot, and I'm still hot. And I'm not through with him."

As for the woman who wrote the book, Goodman said people might look into her background.

"I believe there may be some question about the woman who's trying to use me to promote her book now ... and I resent that as well. "

When asked whether he knew whether Metro's vice squad - many of whom attended a seminar this week by that author - was supporting the book, he shot back: "They better not!"

Then, of course, there was the parting of the Fremont Street Experience by a sea of red.

That's the color of thousands of T-shirts - the clothing of choice worn by thousands of cheeseheads drinking yard longs and throwing pennies into slot machines Thursday downtown.

When the Wisconsin Badgers play UNLV's football team, the Wisconsin fans come early and drink longer.

When the Badgers played here in 1996, the fans reportedly drank all the casinos on Fremont Street dry of brandy and a certain brand of beer. Taxis were put into service to locate brandy and cases of beer and get them down to the street pronto.

True story.

And one that, in this week of turmoil, Las Vegas' mayor might find comforting.