Every time I read one of those newspaper best-of polls and find that the readers have chosen Olive Garden for Best Mexican Food, I want to eat my own angrily flailing hands. That said, there is a place for a little populist crowdsourcing when it comes to ferreting out the finest that Las Vegas has to offer, right? In this age of Yelp and Urban Spoon, word-of-mouth still means something.

And we want YOUR word-of-mouth for our upcoming Best of the City issue -- in judicious and selective fashion. Are you a Desert Companion reader who has a favorite restaurant, bar, shop, service, amenity or even person whose excellence you want to shout from the rooftops or, er, the pages of Desert Companion? You can be featured in our Reader's Choice section! You'll get a byline, a tiny but addictive dose of microfame and possibly a few bucks!

It's fun and easy. Simply email your nominations to me at andrew@desertcompanion.com, or just post it on the wall of our Facebook page, or just leave it in the comments section below. Hurry! The deadline is Friday, January 6.

Make your nominations fun, vivid, engaging and lively. Show us how well you know Vegas; share a hidden gem that truly deserves praise. After you email me or post on our Facebook wall or in the comments below, I'll follow up with you one-on-one to make sure you're not a secret ballot-stuffer shilling for Joe's House of Pimento Loaf or whatever you nominated.

Don't miss out. Deadline is Friday, January 6. Help make this year's Best of the City the best Best of the City in the city ever!

A blackjack jaunt with a professed card-counter who, uh, doesn't really count cards, but has no end of enthusiasm.

Card counting isn’t mathematically very complicated. You keep a running tally in your head of the high cards versus the low cards. Low cards add to the tally, high cards subtract from it. The higher the number the more favorable the conditions for betting; the idea being that a shoe with a high concentration of high cards in it will deal out more winning hands than a shoe with low cards. There’s more complexity to it than this, but that’s the basic gist. I went to the bookstore and bought a book on counting called “Blackjack for Blood.” I practiced on decks of cards at home. I thought I had it down. I felt like I was ready. Once again my overconfidence was not only unfounded but about to get me in to trouble.

A blackjack jaunt with a professed card-counter who, uh, doesn't really count cards, but has no end of enthusiasm.

Card counting isn’t mathematically very complicated. You keep a running tally in your head of the high cards versus the low cards. Low cards add to the tally, high cards subtract from it. The higher the number the more favorable the conditions for betting; the idea being that a shoe with a high concentration of high cards in it will deal out more winning hands than a shoe with low cards. There’s more complexity to it than this, but that’s the basic gist. I went to the bookstore and bought a book on counting called “Blackjack for Blood.” I practiced on decks of cards at home. I thought I had it down. I felt like I was ready. Once again my overconfidence was not only unfounded but about to get me in to trouble.

Over at The Atlantic Cities blog, a post on the importance of maximizing water resources leads, of course, to our own obsessive water tracking -- a good thing. They even say we created "one of the best water systems in the U.S." Aw, shucks!

Ground zero for this type of thinking is Las Vegas. "Water is so scarce and precious that they can’t afford to have leaks," Curtis says. "They’ve been very aggressive at the efficiency of water delivery."

Las Vegas began building its current water infrastructure system in the 1950s. It grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, and now encompasses some 4,000 square miles of pipes. According to Kevin Fisher, director of operations at the Las Vegas Valley Water District, the system protects against leaks in several ways.

Over at The Atlantic Cities blog, a post on the importance of maximizing water resources leads, of course, to our own obsessive water tracking -- a good thing. They even say we created "one of the best water systems in the U.S." Aw, shucks!

Ground zero for this type of thinking is Las Vegas. "Water is so scarce and precious that they can’t afford to have leaks," Curtis says. "They’ve been very aggressive at the efficiency of water delivery."

Las Vegas began building its current water infrastructure system in the 1950s. It grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, and now encompasses some 4,000 square miles of pipes. According to Kevin Fisher, director of operations at the Las Vegas Valley Water District, the system protects against leaks in several ways.