Brendan Buhler

Story Archive

Remodeled office space could be a successful eBay bid away: Friday, Nov. 7, 2008; The office is small, with a desk, a bookcase and a couple of chairs — all of it new and somewhat stylish.
Pride, anger, joy as Nevadans vote: Young and old, north and south, citizens take part in democracy; Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008; Election Day in Las Vegas dawned cool and clear, a day when the mountains ringing the valley looked blue, just like on the license plates. But while the rest of the nation awoke to jammed polling places, Nevada voters rarely had to wait long and usually could walk right in.
Gaming prognosticators: They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?; Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008; At the end of last year, Las Vegans wanted to know the same thing they want to know every year.
Citing downturn, R-J offers workers buyouts: Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008; The Las Vegas Review-Journal, citing the bad economy, is offering buyouts to between 50 and 100 employees to reduce payroll costs.
Lessons of life learned from a pot of chili: Friday, Oct. 24, 2008; Chili, Fred Wieland said, would make me humble.
GOP picks stylin' over dialin': Clothing tab enough for house and duds in Vegas; Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008; The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 on clothes and accessories for vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family. What would that get you in Las Vegas?
The woman suing the governor: They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?; Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008; Two years ago, Chrissy Mazzeo accused Jim Gibbons, then the Republican candidate for governor, of sexually assaulting her in a parking garage after a night of drinking in Las Vegas.
She’s back, lawsuit in hand: Chrissy Mazzeo returns as Gov. Gibbons’ public image has plummeted; Friday, Oct. 17, 2008; The lawyer’s office looked different this time, but there was a familiar face: Chrissy Mazzeo.
The O.J. Simpson robbery trial: Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008; They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?
It’s gory. It’s scary. It’s camp. Just don’t call it trash.: Ted V. Mikel’s 60-year career as low-budget filmmaker has its own rewards; Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008; What makes for a 60-year career in the movies?
Up in the sky, a (moving) sign of suddenly desperate times: Developer uses blimp to promote $1 billion suburban resort; Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008; Anthony A. Marnell III, scion of a Las Vegas construction empire, is standing on the top floor of the $1 billion resort he is building and of which he is chairman and chief executive, and it is hard not to feel a little sorry for him.
Now, how about the stock market?: They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?; Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008; When the economy zags down and financial companies drop like moths from a bug zapper, the odds are that no one knows what is going on.
Too eager to see an upswing?: Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2008; Making predictions is one thing, making them with consequences is another. How have policy setters and opinion makers done on the recession?
Checking Back: Economic predictions: Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008; They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?
Don’t blame the healer if you’re not a feeler: Friday, Sept. 19, 2008; Michael Stellitano is a faith healer (nondenominational). He says he can heal you or your pet — over the phone.
The final indignity: O.J., nobody cares: Much-anticipated Vegas trial going out with a whimper; Friday, Sept. 19, 2008; Look around these days and you have to ask yourself: Has the whole world gone sane?
Secondhand graves, never used, a real bargain: Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008; You cannot, famously, take it with you, but there has always been one exception to that rule, one piece of property that can be yours forever.
Democratic presidential caucus: Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2008; They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot? A look back at the predictions of a few who were caught up in election fever as the Democratic Party presidential caucus approached.
Downtown has more misses than hits so far: Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2008; They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?
Too old for Halloween, but just right for anime: More than 3,000 youths, most of them local, many of them female, turn out for party; Friday, Sept. 5, 2008; Sometimes you can tell how much fun a party is by taking a look at what is prohibited because, presumably, without the rules, these things would happen.
Theme park visionaries are in over their heads: Wet Las Vegas plans afflicted by credit crunch, grandiosity; Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008; A year ago, the $10 billion combination indoor water park, ski slope, casino and hotel known as Wet Las Vegas was chugging along, hypewise. And then the news releases stopped.
Gibbons on the economy, partisanship: Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008; They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?
Never spoil a good party with talk of a recession: Friday, Aug. 29, 2008; The Henderson Chamber of Commerce recently held its annual State of the Chamber banquet at the usual place, Lake Las Vegas. But unlike earlier banquets, Henderson is no longer a “modern-day boomtown.”
Checking Back: They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?; Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008; At the close of 2007, the Sun asked experts to predict Nevada’s role in the 2008 campaign. How did they do?
The fall and rise of the campaign button: Friday, Aug. 15, 2008; The political button was once the king of political campaigns, but in recent decades it has been more like a constitutional monarch — respected but quaint.
Sure, the gas cost is horrendous, but ...: ‘Explore America’ family stops in Vegas to boost RV vacationing; Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008; Nearly at the end of his summer vacation and parked in the Circus Circus KOA RV campground, author Brad Herzog reflected Friday on the many important cultural locations he and his family have visited.
A reading of Las Vegas’ intellect: Libraries’ most-popular list leans to the low-brow; Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008; Las Vegas, the old truism and sometime political talking point says, is at the bottom of every good list and at the top of every bad one.
Checking back: Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2008; They looked ahead. Did they hit the jackpot?
Inventor’s tour ends with a thud: Friday, Aug. 8, 2008; When we last saw Scott Bonge, he was heading out of town to further promote his GoateeSaver, the device that promises perfectly trimmed front-and-center facial hair.
In search of goatee symmetry: Arkansas man tours West to bring beard-trimming aid to masses; Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008; Scott Bonge, of Little Rock, Ark., is on a 45-day road trip to shake as many people’s hands in 30 states as he can, and to encourage them to follow their dreams.
Why own a lavish auto? Rent from a fleet of them: Las Vegas club sells access to $3 million cache of street toys; Saturday, Aug. 2, 2008; Maybe you would like to drive around town in a Porsche 997 Turbo or an Aston Martin Vanquish S, but you don’t actually own one. For you, my friend, there is Fantasy Car Share, a Las Vegas club that sells access to its $3 million fleet of torque-turgid beasts.
At least Vegas architecture isn't this bad: Discussing a hotel known as the world’s worst building, a critic disses the Vegas Strip; Tuesday, July 29, 2008; The architecture expert who said buildings in Vegas and Shanghai were the runners-up to the Ryugyong, a hotel in North Korea called "the worst building in the history of mankind," clarifies, saying he meant mostly the Strip which “has no authentic sense of place and is thus more than a little soulless.”
Once aired, AC claim’s a stretch: Saturday, July 26, 2008; The ad in Monday’s paper makes an intriguing claim that you can cool your house “with less electricity than a hand held hair dryer uses.” Wow, can you?
Cicadas’ bountiful buzzing is back: Thursday, July 24, 2008; Cicadas are perfectly harmless. This may be hard to accept when walnut-sized insects surround your house and hiss like a thousand weed whackers.
Weird, yes, this coffin compulsion: Pahrump couple thrive on ghoulish theme — and pure love for each other; Monday, July 14, 2008; Near the north edge of Pahrump, on the road to Death Valley, stands a rusty scythe, upside down, its handle buried in the ground.
Where some may squabble, analysts go on about business: Column flap doesn’t ripple waters in small pool of real estate pundits; Monday, July 7, 2008; Two weeks ago, a column ran under the byline of John Restrepo, a column purporting to peer into the future of commercial real estate in Las Vegas through 2008. The vast majority of the forecast was either a word-for-word ripoff or light rephrasing of a two-month-old report by Jeremy Aguero, a competing real estate analyst.
It’s fun, it’s for Wii, just don’t call it ‘beer pong’: Saturday, July 5, 2008; It started innocently enough. A couple of Las Vegas guys wanted to make a video game out of a simple college sport. You know, beer pong.
Not quite A/C, and one big, hot mess: Fickle rooftop swamp cooler is writer’s bane; Friday, July 4, 2008; Drip drip drip. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of laughter.
Is Pahrump pop king’s refuge?: After The Wall Street Journal reports that Michael Jackson is there, rumors are flying and the local populace is, for the most part ... laughing; Monday, June 23, 2008; Is Michael Jackson in Pahrump? Has it, at long last, come to this? Has the Howard Hughes of Pop moved to the great weird magnet in the desert? Who knows? Officially, no one. So we went to Pahrump to look for ourselves.
Poetic justice doesn’t get much more literal than this: Plaque with poem about desperate character stolen by — guess who; Wednesday, June 18, 2008; You’ve heard of poetic justice. Well, this was poetic crime, a perfect unity of medium, message and action.
Turning away business?: Merchants say strip mall owners letting property wither, but plans are a mystery; Friday, June 13, 2008; The owners of the Tropicana Center strip mall have either $61 million to burn or a secret plan.
At least somebody’s cleaning up in the foreclosure debacle: Thursday, June 12, 2008; Sometimes foreclosed homes are trashed by evicted occupants out of anger or despair. Other times, the occupants are slobs of the highest order. Either way, the foreclosure cleanup business is booming.
Slowdown not sparing many Vegas locales: Housing crash. Credit crisis. Foreclosure fiasco. Fallout evident all over town at merchants struggling or shuttered.; Monday, June 2, 2008; If this were a simpler place, you could go to Main Street, see shuttered general stores and dried-up soda fountains, ask people there how they were doing. But not here. To take the pulse of Las Vegas, you have to find a lot of Main Streets.
Political activism amid bacchanalia: Fremont Street is Vegas’ public commons by default, but revelers are tuned out; Friday, May 30, 2008; It’s one of those Las Vegas problems: Where do you hold a demonstration? There no public space dedicated by tradition to hollering your fellow citizens into enlightenment. So you settle on holding your demonstration on Fremont Street. And nobody notices.
A shoulder, or two, to lean on: Small-business owners get together to share ideas, referrals; Friday, May 16, 2008; A mortgage broker, an electrician, a chiropractor and a funeral planner walk into a bar, but it’s not what you think. For one thing, the occasion is breakfast. For another thing, they came to talk about business, along with 14 other small-business people, no two of them in the same line of work.
The academics of party planning: The young man in this picture is in class. Really. A UNLV class on nightclub management. This was his final exam.; Saturday, May 10, 2008; Some final exams are different. Here’s one for a UNLV class. Throw a giant, adults-only pool party behind the MGM Grand featuring $5 mojitos, topless dancers from Scores-Las Vegas, a volleyball tournament and more.
True sign of the times: Vegas tips are slipping: Service workers report business is down, customers are less generous; Thursday, May 8, 2008; First-quarter room occupancy is down 1 percentage point, Boyd Gaming’s Las Vegas revenue is down 5 or 6 percent, MGM Mirage’s revenue is down 30 percent, and Stacy Taylor’s income is down 40 percent. And as part of the 10 percent of the Las Vegas labor force that earns tip income, she might be considered a barometer of the Las Vegas economy.
Search for suave turns up shorts, T’s: Good news for contestants: Clothes that make the man don’t have to be his; Tuesday, April 29, 2008; Sure, many of them looked snazzy in the multithousand-dollar loaner suits and some guys even posed in their own clothes, but did any of them have what it takes to succeed Frank Kelly, Esquire magazine’s Best Dressed Real Man in America (2007)?
Musical boomers: Who is, who's not: Saturday, April 26, 2008
‘Some are born great ... some have greatness thrust upon them’: Less than a second into 1946, she became the first Baby Boomer; Saturday, April 26, 2008; Kathleen Casey-Kirschling has a press agent because she was born. Or, more accurately, because of the importance of her birth moment.