WEEK IN REVIEW: Reporters’ notebook

Travel + Leisure magazine's recent reader survey of the world's best new landmarks included a mention of Arizona's Grand Canyon Skywalk, 120 miles east of Las Vegas.

The U-shaped, glass-bottomed walkway that juts out over the edge of the canyon, but doesn't actually go anywhere, topped the list of "best new bridges."

It just goes to show you that Travel + Leisure readers know something spectacular when they see it. But they apparently don't grasp what a bridge is.

HENRY BREAN

TWEET OF THE WEEK: @mollyesque (Molly Ball, politics writer for The Atlantic and former R-J scribe) Iowa: Stuck in traffic behind tractor. Vegas: Stuck in traffic behind "LIVE GIRLS DIRECT TO YOU" billboard truck. America!

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum started his Nevada campaign tour by speaking in an alley behind a strip mall at the headquarters of a local tea party group.

Answering a question about illegal immigration, Santorum explained that he was very much against it, but that legal immigration was important because America would lose population without immigrants.

Then the former Pennsylvania senator, who has seven children, quipped: "I'm doing my part; I just want to say that."

LAWRENCE MOWER

As Punxsutawney Phil prepared to make his 126th prognostication on the arrival of spring, Clark County issued a news release proclaiming that its own Mojave Max, a desert tortoise who has awakened when spring has arrived the last 11 years, is a better predictor than that groundhog back East.

Could be true, but isn't this similar to John Lennon's wildly unpopular claim that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus?

ADRIENNE PACKER

TRUE BUT STILL CLICHE-RIDDEN HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: "Now it's on to Nevada, the state of gamblers, brothels and lots of libertarians."

-- From "Texas on the Potomac," a political blog from the Houston Chronicle newspaper