Stacy J. Willis
Story Archive
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Music
Red, white and green!
Thursday, July 2, 2009 Isn’t it time we gave up those noisy, environmentally unfriendly fireworks, anyway?
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Crime
A tragic statistic
Thursday, June 25, 2009 Crimes against children are on the rise, but let’s not be so quick to blame the recession.
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As We See It
Death of a big cat
Thursday, June 18, 2009 When Midas, a 10-year-old lion, got very sick, and there was a chewed-up half of a toy football in his cage, the first thing zoo director Pat Dingle thought was that the Roman Catholics killed his lion.
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Literature
Fruit from the Blackberry bush
Thursday, June 11, 2009 What kind of pop-culture machinators would we be if someone didn’t immediately publish a small gag book about what might appear on Obama’s BlackBerry?
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Lawsuits
Settlement blitz!
Thursday, June 11, 2009 Retired judges probably ought to be relaxing at a pool party, cosmopolitans in hand, the voices of angry litigants a thing of history. But instead, they are holing up in District Court hearing rooms in the Regional Justice Center, trying to resolve piles of medical-malpractice lawsuits (sans martinis).
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Federal Goverment
When the dust settles
Thursday, June 4, 2009 Nevada off-roaders have avoided meaningful regulation for years; it’s the last Western state not to have off-road vehicle titling and registration. But that’s about to change.
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Dining
Original is still best
Thursday, June 4, 2009 Coffee offered by a redheaded clown in a yellow jumpsuit should be extremely confident. Indeed, McDonald’s coffee used to make the waifiest of us feel like longshoremen.
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Dining
It’s chili out there
Thursday, June 4, 2009 Contestants will battle it out in Red Chili, Chili Verde and Salsa categories, which require that chefs add no beans or pasta or other carbs that purists consider a distraction from meat and hot peppers.
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Technology
What they really meant to say ...
Thursday, May 7, 2009 Along with the joy of twittering comes the pleasure of rearranging real tweets into conversations that did not take place.
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Entertainment
Foreclosures, horses and Patrick Swayze—oh, my!
Thursday, April 30, 2009 This is something never to be taken for granted about our city: that wandering a distance of about 100 feet can be like falling down the rabbit hole. A wonderful thing, this.
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Entertainment
God's showman
Thursday, April 23, 2009 So there’s this story about a showbiz guy who finds the Lord and renames himself John 3:16 Cook and starts preaching the Word, not just to quietly aching suburbanites with dependable tithes, but also to drunks and homeless guys and drug addicts and prostitutes.
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Economy
Only a pawn
Thursday, April 23, 2009 Diamond earrings and gold pendant? $35. HP copier/scanner? $5. Finding out your treasure belongs are virtual crap? Priceless.
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Economy
Was Gov. Gibbons aboard the Titanic?
Thursday, April 23, 2009 Eerie similarities between the sunken ship and the sinking city. Will there be enough lifeboats?
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Art
Get the arts education you always wanted
Thursday, April 9, 2009 Five posts gathered from art discussion site artbabble.org—“no art degree required”—which went live to nonmembers on April 7.
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Economy
Let’s fix this thing!
Thursday, April 9, 2009 In case anyone’s keeping track, the signs of the Apocalypse—killer bees, vacation-villa CEOs, bankrupt casinos—are upon us.
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Entertainment
Waxy Goodman
Thursday, March 26, 2009 As if one weren’t enough. As if he needed the ego boost. As if wax Don Corleone and wax Bugsy Siegel weren’t enough to fill the genre! And as if we’re not going to end up with a mob museum that is bound to feature him prominently, anyway ...
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Nevada
Do-over
Thursday, March 5, 2009 Wad up the state constitution and whip out a fresh sheet of paper, something’s not right about Nevada.
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Transportation
Bridge over troubled times
Thursday, March 5, 2009 When it’s finished, the 1,900-foot-long, 88-foot-wide bridge will hold four lanes of traffic—17,000 cars a day—and one pedestrian walkway. It will be the United States’ first concrete-steel composite arch bridge.
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Economy
Learning with less
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009 Through it all, there is math. He’s good at math. Five is the number of months since his dad lost his job as a warehouse worker. Three is the number of places his family has stayed since then.
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Entertainment
Old ladies, please!
Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009 So the movie at a packed Green Valley Ranch theater is about to start when three elderly ladies come in, looking for last-minute seats together and the drama really starts.
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Environment
Stop driving on Red Rock
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009 Saturday. A beautiful, clear, crisp day. The kind that used to become magically more so the further out West Charleston you got. Today it’s not like that. It’s trafficky.
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Nightlife
Cards and beers
Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009 Crappy economic times call for an underdog success story to lift our spirits. Conveniently, our neighbors to the south have one brewing: The Arizona Cardinals made it to the second round of the NFL playoffs.
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Energy
Renewable Nevada
Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009 Can we fail at being sustainable and yet lead an economic recovery by developing a renewable-resource industry? It’s a question that Vegas and, more broadly, Nevada faces.
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Las Vegas
It all connects somehow
Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008 Say what you will about Las Vegas being fake. Under that, or maybe because of that, is a city of everyday people whose lives create contradictions that make this place, especially at this moment, a masterpiece of art.
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television
From courtroom to bookshelf
Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008 When Margaret Rudin was on trial for killing her husband, Ron Rudin, in 2001, she wrote a poem. It begins with what she prayed for most: to have the legal proceedings move forward in “days of unclouded truth.”
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Sports
Of frozen butts and Hasselhoff
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008 International recording and TV star and onetime Vegas resident ... wait for it ... David Hasselhoff, looking every bit as Hasselhoffy as in your dreams in a black leather jacket and combed curls, sang the national anthem; his appearance alone was worth $30.
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Poverty
Naming the dead
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008 In 2005, 75 people died on the streets here; in 2006, 78; in 2007, 51; and this year, 48. On Thursday evening, volunteers gathered at the Homeless Memorial Candlelight Vigil to remember those who were lost this year.
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Politics
What do we change now?
Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008 Having cannon-balled into the vat of Kool-Aid and washed themselves free of irony and shruggishness, Obama’s fans and volunteers aren’t ready to quit. In fact, they’re exhilarated.
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Entertainment
Forest for a cause
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008 Just as you’re getting your pure Christmas love on, you lean back and look at the Review-Journal’s tree, and there, on a high branch, is an ornament made of a shrunken R-J page with the headline “Serial rapist gets life in prison.” Hmm.
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Budget
Leaping into the abyss
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008 ’Tis the season to cringe at our collective budgets. But who knows how it will all break down?
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Environment
How Green is our Valley?
Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008 Green is such a loaded word now. Do you mean green good, like ecologically sound and sustainable? Or green bad, like rolling hills of lush turf watered by sprinklers that suck from Lake Mead?
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Politics
They said WHAT?
Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 If Dina Titus and Jon Porter never run against each other again it will be a pleasant hereafter.
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A night of civil rights history? Not for gay Americans
Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008 On an otherwise glorious election night: California, Arizona and Florida passed constitutional amendments against gay marriage. How's that for a night of civil rights history?
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A few hours left
Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008 The sun is setting and the doorbell rings. "We voted," I say. No time for chitchat, there's only a couple of hours left.
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Just what the doctor ordered: The end of the election
Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008 What else is America, if not ballot casting and media overkill? That sums it up. And it's a nutshell kind of day. By the end of it, we should have the future of the American experiment worked out.
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Literature
Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark
Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008 Darkness is so many things: It’s where the imagination is free, it’s where mysteries hide, where dreams rule, it’s what allows us to see the stars.
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2008 Presidential Election
Sarah smiles in Henderson—in a sea of American absurdism
Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008 If you don’t think about it at all, it makes perfect sense. One minute you’re eating Kettle Korn outside the Henderson Pavilion, waiting for Sarah Palin with a couple of racist suburbanites (“Those people don’t vote anyway,” says one).
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A&E
Divine intervention (and nuts!)
Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008 “Don’t you want someone smarter than me to be president?” the Divine Miss M asked a crowd at Krave Monday evening.
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Intersection
‘The human condition may end in discord’
Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008 Having tried the Bush Administration, credit-card kiting, Wall Street, war, vitriolic campaigning, God, art, aliens, naked pool parties, construction projects, bankruptcy, lap dances, alcohol, prescription pills, sleeping excessively or not at all and TV—lots and lots of TV—and still come up empty, we’re sitting in UNLV’s Barrick Museum auditorium on a Thursday night to hear from a philosopher.
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Economy
Free groceries, empty stores, waiting in line
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 It’s a rice-and-beans season—or, as The Colbert Report summarizes it, there’s a “clusterfuck at the poor house.”
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Religion
Oil and (holy) water
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 Mark your calendars. In February of 2009, religious people who dare explore the (missing) link between science and God will participate in a worldwide event: Evolution Weekend.
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Nevada
The fine art of political ads
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 Congressman Jon Porter’s ad on his energy policies starts off with the bespectacled candidate for re-election standing in front of long rows of solar panels at Nevada Solar One: “Solar energy: inexpensive, and safe for the environment. And best of all, there’s plenty of it. I’m Jon Porter, and we need a balanced approach to solve our energy crisis. That’s why I helped build the world’s third-largest solar facility right here in Nevada.”
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Art
Bringing back poetry
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 When poet Rosa Mendoza took the mic, the place went wild. It was time to build bridges, connect the community, express feelings. The kind of thing Vegas has needed forever, the story goes.
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Features
Can't smile without you
Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008 It’s not about you or me, thank God, and keep that in mind. It’s not about the cost of staying alive or the dashing Mr. Manilow or spiders with fangs.
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Intersection
Luck of the drawl
Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 A familiar Nevada voice reaches out from a TV ad and grabs you by the throat: “People ask me why, after 30 years in Las Vegas, I still have an accent,” says Sen. Dina Titus in a thick Georgia drawl.
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Literature
Flights of fancy
Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 Maybe there’s something unseemly about admiring, first and foremost, the colorful prose in a book whose subject matter is 9/11.
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Intersection
What I'm thinking as I zip-line over the desert
Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 The scene: A new eco-adventure attraction, Bootleg Canyon Flightlines. Cable strung over hills in Boulder City. Foolish reporter in a harness, preparing to fly down a vertical drop of 1,000 feet at 40 mph, without a helmet.
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Issues
Mysterious Ways
Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 This whole planes-falling-out-of-the-sky thing turns out to be about a benevolent God, you know. Driving toward the scene of the second airplane accident last week, I have the instinctive reaction to duck when a twin-engine buzzes in over me toward that airport, that airport—God!
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Intersection
The (next) final frontier
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 I am not a Trekkie or a Star Wars buff, and this is an important disclaimer, because I don’t totally get it. But I love the memorabilia—it speaks to the consumer in anybody, the toy-lover.
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Intersection
UNLV students try to fix what pols haven't
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 The speed at which traffic buzzes by these three acres of grass and shade is mesmerizing. Huntridge Circle Park is an island between north- and southbound traffic on Maryland Parkway, just south of Charleston—a problem spot lingering in the middle of the city’s rapid growth. Reports of area break-ins are up, and nearby shop-owners complain that homeless people have been routinely defecating on their properties.