Memory dissipates. Especially in a forgettable place like this stretch of Boulder Highway, sliding north through the last sputter of old Henderson before heading toward Las Vegas.
A part of me — a tiny part — wants to feel a jigger of sympathy for Brian Sandoval. Not too much, but a little. You simply can’t get elected governor in Nevada, or maybe anywhere in America now, by telling the truth.
“I should know these by heart,” Father Albert says, referring to the six principles that are supposed to guide priests who minister to college students. He’s lived them long enough — for 43 of his 50 ordained years he’s worked on various campuses in California, Oregon, Arizona and, for the past seven years, here — that their exact wording escapes him when a nosy columnist presses him for details.
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” the poet Emily Dickinson once wrote. She probably meant that to be inspirational, but then, she didn’t spend much time in Nevada.
Good crowd tonight. It’s Thursday, and 50, 60 or more pack into the recently expanded Trifecta Gallery for the opening of the “Minumental” exhibit — more than 100 small, generally low-cost works. It can be tough to see the art through the milling art lovers — lotta stylish eyewear here, and scarves worn for the effect, not the weather. The work is a fairly standard mix of the good, the cute, the too-clever, the trying-too-hard. Most of it’s fun, though. The mayor was just here to cut a ribbon, there are door prizes and small candies, and the whole place ...
The Hair is not relieved. Of course, the man upon whom the Hair resides, the disgraced senator recently let off the hook by the Justice Department, is — as befits a person of small vision and empty pieties — perfectly pleased. “It’s a pretty nice early Christmas present,” John Ensign said when news broke that he is no longer under criminal investigation.
When news broke Tuesday that Las Vegas ranks 146th out of 150 cities worldwide in terms of economic strength — ahead of Dublin, Dubai, Barcelona and someplace in Greece — the obvious question arose: What can those lagging cities learn from us?
When talk of reforming the coroner’s inquest — the process of looking into the death of someone at the hands of a police officer — heated up (again) after the Erik Scott case, one aspect of the ensuing conversation brought me up short.
Pop quiz: Did you know California once banned homework in schools? True. Following a campaign by the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal — which argued that the practice was not, in fact, good for kids — the state briefly halted it in 1901.
Two weeks ago, Nevadans voted Brian Sandoval into the Governor’s Mansion, deeply impressed by his non-Reidness and let’s-work-out-the-details-later approach to our budget crisis. Finally! A politician who tells it like it is.
In 2004, two years before I bought my house, a website urged real estate investors thusly: “It is important that investors make their investments as soon as possible. This is because Las Vegas is growing and expanding at a scorching pace.”
