Why? Because we care. Here we go!

• University Chancellor Jim Rogers still wants Gov. Jim Gibbons to call a special session to deal with the state’s ever-worsening budget crisis. Rogers is so adorable when he pretends Gibbons actually cares about anything other than not raising taxes, isn’t he?
• Oh, snap! Keith Olbermann and Rachael Maddow beat us to it on Countdown, because we were totally going to note that U.S. Sen. John McCain’s first TV ad was voiced by Powers Boothe, a wonderful actor whose most recent roles were brothel owner Cy Tolliver (HBO’s Deadwood) and corrupt Vice President Noah Daniels, who steals the presidency from the righteous black President Wayne Palmer (Fox’s 24). What, nobody at McCain HQ knows how to use IMDB? They have it on computers now, you know.
• Hey, maybe those 31 people laid off from their jobs at the city can help build the brand new City Hall?
• Starbuck’s CEO Howard Schultz is every bit as greedy, self-deluded and stubborn as our very own Steve Wynn. Hey, can we get a venti half-caf, soy milk, double shot of fuck you?
• Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and Flight of the Creative Class, says Las Vegas ranks low for quality of life. And since the creative class can live anywhere it wants, that’s not good for us. Where’s the best place to live? Probably anywhere near Richard Florida, who labels himself “one of the world’s leading public intellectuals.”

We hate to write about Yucca Mountain, because it makes people lapse deep into alpha-wave sleep and dream of winged unicorns, which might actually happen when wild horses drink Yucca-contaminated groundwater years from now. But we couldn’t let U.S. Sen. John McCain’s visit pass without a little jab.

McCain, in town to lunch with fellow war enthusiast Sheldon Adelson, tried to imply that his enthusiastic support for Yucca had fallen behind, say, his enthusiastic support for war with Iran. “I will respect scientific opinion. The scientific opinion that I had up until recently was that Yucca Mountain was a suitable storage place,” he said.

So, did he get new info? Of course he didn’t! This is just a variation on the same political theme that all presidents use, from the president who signed off on Yucca Mountain in the first place — Ronald Reagan — to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, who famously opined that “science, not politics” should decide the fate of the dump. That was right before he got elected and signed off on Yucca Mountain almost immediately.

So, if you believe that McCain actually has new information and will be the first Republican in living memory to seriously evaluate the science behind the dump and make a really informed decision on it, you’re:

A.) Former Gov. Bob List

B.) An employee of former Gov. Bob List

C.) Former Gov. Bob List’s secretary

D.) Insane

E.) All of the above

It shouldn’t be surprising, since Gov. Jim Gibbons often reverses himself, but on Friday the governor decided to abandon his quest to unseat three members of the Board of Medical Examiners. Clearly, somebody told Gibbons that getting rid of the Medical Board Three — and Executive Director Tony Clark — would be a long, costly and ultimately futile process that would do nothing whatever to resolve the health care crisis.

So, Gibbons will do what he should have done from the start: Appoint three temporary members to hear cases related to Dr. Dipak Desai’s Little Shop of Hepatitis.  If only he hadn’t wasted two weeks on a fruitless and unnecessary battle in the meantime.

But we couldn’t wrap this one up without noting one final irony. Check out what Gibbons said on March 17 when he first called on the board members and Clark to resign: “What we have is a public health care crisis and what we need is public health care confidence. That is why I am taking decisive action to restore public trust.”

And check out what he said the following day:  “They would do the right thing by resigning. I want members who can participate and vote on the issues. I want action from the Board of Medical Examiners to restore public confidence in the health care system.”

Now, check out what Gibbons’s spokesman Ben Kieckhefer said when the governor decided to abandon his push to get them to resign:  “The decision was made that in the best interests of restoring public faith in the health care system, we shouldn’t let this drag on.”

Sound familiar? That’s right, both forcing the Medical Board Three to quit and allowing them to remain — diametrically opposed actions — were ostensibly done for the exact same reason.

How’s your faith in the health care system, people. Restored yet?

Reader Peter Magliocco writes in regards to my, ahem, incendiary piece on the lack of a Great Vegas Novel:

There are no great American Vegas novels because there are no great writers tackling the subject, OK?!

Those who have are very talented & have written good novels, but apparently that’s not enough for tippling acolytes praying for “the holy grail” of greatness in a city-of-crime where nothing’s holy but the sinking dollar; where its intellectual pundits are too self-consciously obsessed by this “novel” absence in a desert culture still suspect in more seriously accomplished big cities of cultural renown; and where “the entertainment capital of the world” thrives on a movie industry the mass-asses love escaping into while in-flight to their hotel rooms.

That Vegas has an image problem is an understatement. Its Unreality covers its innate criminal machinery and rules over its Reality, creating a pop-mythology for tourists & an ongoing tribulation of deceit for its residents.

You’d be better off writing the great American Vegas screenplay than spouting dweeby abstract notions about what you really hope to someday novelize: the dearth of local indigenous greatness, period.

Our coming war for survival against the murderous cyborg legions inched ever closer Saturday as the next generation of robot warriors invaded UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center.

Yet two teams of budding engineers from defending national champion Cimarron-Memorial and upstart Valley high schools proved that — even in the barren hell of a state whose wanna-be neocon governor refuses to spare a sputtering public education system from the budgetary carving knife — the human spirit can endure. The two-day competition pitted high-speed, remote-controlled robots designed by 42 high school teams from across America and eight other countries.

After the two-day FIRST Robotics Regional Competition and endless rounds of quarter-finals, semi-finals and a championship match, the Cimmaron-Memorial Highrollers continued their roll to a second national championship, taking both the Regional Championship and the Chairman’s Award, the highest honor a team can earn. The Valley Robotics 9000 squad, fielding a robot warrior in its first-ever competition, advanced to the quarter-finals and snagged the Highest Rookie Seed Award.

Surprisingly, the scores of geek squads seem to have evolved into a new nerdic species, which, as it turns out, is a helluva lot cooler than you remember from your days playing grab-ass at So-and-So-High. These little radsters mash techno music with light shows, screaming, salivating fans in a subculture that is both surreal and cute.

Look for the full story in the April 3 edition of CityLife, along with some crazy pix from our photo editor, Bill Hughes. Pix like these:

Going through life without a sense of irony is a terrible thing. As proof, we offer Review-Journal Editor Thomas Mitchell’s Sunday column. (Laugh at our reading habits if you will, but it was still more entertaining than Brian Greenspun’s piece in the Las Vegas Sun.)

A few observations based on Mitchell’s text. Our comments are in italics, as if you readers needed help distinguishing our thoughts from his.

Journalism may be on the brink of coming full cycle.

At the dawn of the nation, newspapers were a far cry from our modern editions. Staying in business on the strength of subscription and advertising revenue alone was rare. Many managed to achieve profitability by capturing government printing jobs, which were doled out on a patronage basis.

Thank goodness those days are over! And by “over,” we mean, “still here, baby!” It turns out, the R-J benefits from all sorts of “government printing jobs,” everything from state-required legal notices to bid invitations to notices of public meetings. And that doesn’t even count the publishing of the county’s property tax rolls or a state list of unclaimed property. And let’s not even get into the fact that newspapers don’t pay sales tax! 

Actually, the government-hating libertarians can be excused for vigorously defending their opposition to paying sales tax. After all, they hate ALL taxes, so why not get out of them if you can? But there is no philosophically sound basis to defend legal requirements that government publish things in newspapers, spending taxpayer dollars to do it, when the same information can be published far more cheaply online. Unless, of course, your real philosophy is, “whatever most enhances my bottom line!” Carrying on…

To curry favor with the politicians and political parties, the newspapers were blatantly and unabashedly partisan, slathering their patrons with praise and the opposition with scurrilous accusations and criticisms.

The objectivity that is now a touchstone of modern journalism was then no virtue, but a vice.

…

There were no editorial pages. Opinion was woven into the news reports.

Well, thank God things have changed! Or have they? Because it seems to us that the R-J slathers its favorite people — Republicans all — pretty regularly in the news columns. A good-looking state senator by the name of Beers springs to mind. Hell, in one recent case, the R-J actually turned over its news columns to a Republican lawmaker serving a tour of duty in Iraq, failing to mention the little detail that he’s running for re-election this year! Whoops! Must have slipped by somebody girding himself with “objectivity.”

Eventually, as governments started to cut out the middleman and do the printing themselves, newspapers had to find another profit source.

Yes, governments do the printing themselves these days. Except for the above, wherein government has passed laws requiring the publication of material in newspapers, paid for with your tax dollars or the compelled dollars of people involved in legal cases. 

With the advent of the penny press and its appeal to the masses with sensational and, yes, yellow journalism, publishers in this highly competitive endeavor could hardly afford to alienate half the readership with partisan political pandering. In such ignominious circumstances, the concept of objectivity was born.

But objectivity is not a basic, innate human trait. Frankly, fair and balanced and properly sourced can be, and often is, bland and boring.

And that’s why Fox News Channel is so exciting!

…

The financial incentive to be objective, accurate, fair, complete and authoritative is outweighed by the rewards for outlandish, opinionated, reckless, raucous and over-the-top rhetoric delivered before the competition can post its own version.

If you can put it to music and add video of near-naked women, you can take it to the bank. It’s all about the traffic. It’s all about the hits. And the course of a civil and civic-minded society be damned.

“Why, back in my day, we had no Internet! We had no blogs! There were no little blue underlined things on computer screens, because there were no computers! If you wanted news, you had to read the newspaper and you liked it! Now pardon me while I take my daily constitutional out to Bonanza Road to shake my fist at those damn horseless carriages. Tarnation!”

An unsigned editorial in the current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review addresses some of the problems that arise from the digital world of “titillation and scoops.” It noted that a California reporter was trying to cover a major murder and also send out blogs every 10 minutes. The pace resulted in grammatical, spelling and factual errors that undercut the newspaper’s credibility.

The editorial concluded that saying something first might not be as valuable as first having something to say.

So grammatical, spelling and factual errors undercut a newspaper’s credibility, huh? Have you read the corrections box lately? We’re not judging: Everybody makes mistakes, in print and online. We sure do. We’re just saying it’s kind of ironic to read this.

In fact, it’s doubly ironic, since it seems the author isn’t in on the joke. Gee, now we feel badly for having made fun. We’re going to go now…

Behold the two faces (one hip, one not, both dreamy) of seminal silent cinema sex symbol Clara Bow, whose 1927 romantic comedy It screens at Clark County Library early next week.

Bow was one of the earliest casualties of something like child star syndrome, though technically an adult by the time the Hollywood machine’s grease was up to her calves. The following is excerpted from Clara Bow: My Life Story, originally published in the magazine Photoplay in 1928. Finally, some long-lost insight as to why perpetually cheery people are so unnerving…

“There is only one thing you can do when you are very young and not a philosopher, if life has frightened you by its cruelty and made you distrust its most glittering promises. You must make living a sort of gay curtain to throw across the abyss into which you have looked and where lie dread memories. I think that wildly gay people are usually hiding from something in themselves. They dare not be quiet, for there is no peace nor serenity in their souls. The best life has taught them is to snatch at every moment of fun and excitement, because they feel sure that fate is going to hit them over the head with a club at the first opportunity. I don’t want to feel that way. But I do. When I have told you about my short life, maybe you will understand why, in spite of its incongruity, I am a madcap, the spirit of the jazz age, the premier flapper, as they call me. No one wanted me to be born in the first place.”

OK folks, it’s not a very inspiring weekend, so here’s my lone recommendation… short ‘n’ sweet-like.

Blast off with the psychedelic drone of Austin’s The Black Angels Saturday night at the Beauty Bar (517 Fremont St.). For fans of the Velvet Underground (the moniker comes from the influences’ “The Black Angel’s Death Song”), 13th Floor Elevators and The Warlocks.

Beauty Bar’s newly remodeled interior will be dominated by the “Say What? Stunna Shades” party featuring DJs Hyphy Crunk and Score (both of L.A.’s “The Heist”) along with Score, Grimehaus, ABOM, Noel and Va Jay Jay spinning dirty electro, nu-rave and indie-rock. Meanwhile, the Angels will spread their wings outside with L.A.’s The Start, Atlanta’s City Sleepers and locals Hello Astro.

Doors open at 10 p.m.; must be 21; Free admission for the DJs, $10 for the bands; $3 well drinks until 12 a.m. (if you wanna rot your liver!)

From those who brought you Mess-o-Potamia: the Clusterfuck Chronicles comes the thriller that will change your life … forever. You can run, you can hide, but nothing will spare your bourgeois butts from Recession: the Movie.

After being media-toured through Borders’ new “concept store” in Town Square today; after oohing over the burn-your-own-CD stations and ahhing over the book-you-own-flights computer in the travel books section; after agreeing that the mural in the children’s section is pretty cool and that the graphic-novels section is pretty mangalicious – here’s our takeaway:

It’s a pretty good bookstore.

Set to grand-open April 4-6 but softly open now, the 22,000-square-foot tome depot does several necessary things: serves a part of town direly in need of the books and events the store will bring; integrates ancillary services (music downloading, travel planning) in ways that make sense for a bookstore; and provides CityLifers with a refreshingly nearby supply of book, music and magazine shopping.

This concept store — which also has reconfigured display areas and “destination” sections (travel, cooking, wellness) geeked up with extra services — is the second of an eventual 14 such stores. (The first is in Ann Arbor, Mich.) At the music stations, you can download music, whole albums or a mix of songs, as mp3s or discs. Also ready for download: 15,000 audiobooks. At the geneology station, you can run down the particulars of your family name or your relatives, complete with access to official documents. A screen in the travel section allows you to research a destination, then book a flight. You can even buy entry-level personal electronics — GPS naviation devices, small camcorders, point-and-shoot cameras. All very snazzy; it’s the company’s way of anticipating the role of bookstores in a digital age.

And yet, as long as the future of bookstores still involves books, it can only be so evolutionary. Underneath all the cool amenities, which are cool, it’s basically another Borders, perhaps better designed but still a high-volume store in a mall, courting a large middlebrow audience. That’s mostly fine with us; middlebrow still covers a lot of fine territory. But we wonder if, like other Borderses, it will be relatively short on small and university press books, the kind of volumes not readily found in Las Vegas.

On top of that, thanks to its size (8,000 square feet smaller than the first concept store) and certain design and presentation demands, the new place will stock fewer books than normal for a Borders — an estimated 85,000-90,000 unique titles instead of the 100,000 that’s more standard, said Jill Lyon, vice president of store planning, visual presentation and construction. “Lit and mystery will go down in the mix,” she said, “but we’ll sell more ancillary titles [art, gardening and so on].” She added: “If you walk through, you certainly don’t get the idea we have a lot less.”

Perhaps; it will take us many extra-long lunch hours to determine if those 10,000 fewer titles leave the store with fewer of the surprising, peripheral finds that make bookstore meandering — past, present and future — such a joy. Clock us out, boss, we’re going to research this.

Ugly side effect of the Las Vegas housing market crash No. 3,491: The pundit parade of shills for developers respected real estate analysts stopping in town to publicly gaze into their rosy crystal balls over rubber-chicken luncheons.

If you follow the Review-Journal’s business section coverage of the crash — or is it a slump? a lull? a dip? a crisis? — you might soon form the impression from the whiplash predictions from one week to the next that no one knows what the hell he’s talking about. The latest “expert”: Recovery in 2009! But, you know, it’s a U-shaped slump instead of a V-shaped slump this time.

In other words, don’t start socking away your XBox 360 money into that down payment fund just yet. Who knows what might happen when next week’s expert rolls into town? Could be a continuation of a tightened credit market pushes rebound to 2011! Or maybe Bush’s tax relief checks will spark an early bounce-back!

What will happen? You’ll just have to tune into next week’s edition of Myopic Blow-by-Blow Blip Coverage of a Frighteningly Complex Issue!

We were meaning to get around to writing about the potential candidacy of our friend Chuck Muth against Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, the way our colleagues have done. (Read Anjeanette Damon’s take here and again here.) We weren’t totally sure, however, that this wasn’t one of Ashton Kutcher’s non-hilarious douche pranks, so we held off.

Well, Chuck swears it’s real on his website, where he’s done the serious math about his chances of moving from his home in Carson City to Buckley’s District 8 here in Las Vegas. And he’s definitely not all talk: He once ran against Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus. If anybody would challenge the state’s first female speaker, it’s Muth.

As far as we’re concerned, we don’t think he should do it. First, as Chuck explains in the link above, the math is not with him. He’d need more than 1,100 Democrats to abandon the speaker in a year when Republicans are as popular as Dr. Dipak Desai sipping from the punchbowl with a hepatitis-infected syringe.

Second, we like Buckley. She’s done a good job as an Assembly member, and her tenure as speaker was a good one. Unlike somebody else who we won’t name (hint: it rhymes with Phil Maggio), she actually had the Assembly finished on time during the 2007 session, with a few minutes to spare! So, she deserves another term.

Third, we also like Chuck, and we don’t want him to die. We’re not saying Buckley would intentionally kill Muth just for running against her. Not at all. But let’s be honest: Sometimes, madam speaker doesn’t know the power of the Buckley Stare of Death. You know how the emperor in Star Wars shot lightening out of his hands? That would be like an Asian massage with happy ending compared to being on the other end of the Buckley Stare of Death. (Trust us. We’ve seen in once or twice ourselves.)

But why do we have to choose? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to have both Buckley as speaker and Chuck in the Assembly? (Can you picture that? People would pay money to attend those floor sessions! MUTH: Madam Speaker! May we consider Assembly Bill 432, the Barbara Buckley Loves Taxes Like Eliot Spitzer Loves Whores Act of 2009? BUCKLEY: The chair will entertain a motion for the gentleman from Southern Nevada to blow it out his ass!)

Instead of running in a tough, numbers-adverse district, why not do a cakewalk in a GOP-held seat where the incumbent is, shall we say, lametastic? Let’s see, where’s that Assembly roster? Oh, here is is. Yes, let’s see here. Here you go! District 13, where incumbent Chad Christensen has racked up way more campaign-finance violations than he’ll ever see in bills passed. Why not run for that seat? Or stay up north and run in District 26, home of uber-dick Ty Cobb.

Hell, there’s even an open seat down here, since Assemblywoman Valerie Weber has decided to commit political seppuku and run for the Clark County Commission against heavily anointed Las Vegas Councilman Larry Brown. District 5 is in a nice area, or so we hear.

Our point? Don’t waste the kids’s college fund, Chuck! Save yourself: Move to Southern Nevada, for sure, since it’s way better than Carson City. But don’t run against Buckley!

Is this even the same band? Local superstar act Panic at the Disco emerged in 2005 and was barely distinguishable from its emo-pop peers. For its second album, the quartet has arguably overcompensated with songs that not only sound nothing like their predecessors, but rarely sound anything like each other, either.

Pretty. Odd (oy, more extraneous punctuation) is an ambitious 13-song collection of throwback pop-rock, with seemingly every genre and musical instrument thrown in — and not always in service of the songs on which they appear. Some songs have strings. Some have horns. And some, like “The Piano Knows Something I Don’t Know” (oy, more overlong titles), have horns and strings and bells, Panic stuffing itself with sounds like it had the Rio Carnival Buffet of instruments at its disposal.

Which is to say a lot of Pretty is the work of its producer, Rob Mathes, who conducts orchestras on top of producing pop albums. He took the boys over to Abbey Road studios in England — after some recording at the Palms hotel-casino studio — and the inspiration of that locale comes through several songs. But it’s not just The Beatles who are the obvious sonic touchstones here; The Kinks and The Beach Boys have also sprinkled their kaleidoscopic pop dust over these tracks. Sometimes it’s nearly overwhelming, and other times you marvel at the simultaneous complexity and breeziness of the compositions. The only recognizable Panic element in “Do You Know What I’m Seeing” is Brendon Urie’s (albeit improved) voice.

Amid all that clatter is songwriting that improves upon 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. Single “Nine in the Afternoon” is a knockout tune that blends Britpop with Ben Folds. “That Green Gentleman” also bears that irresistible Blighty bounce, a sonic truce between Oasis (by which we mean The Beatles) and Blur (The Kinks). And lyrically, the band is considerably less arch or breathless (though there’s some cheek to “I Have Friends in Holy Spaces”). It’s just one of several improvements that makes Pretty. Odd pretty interesting.

Clearly, a love of literature will draw bibliophiles to the new Bauman Rare Books in the Palazzo. What compels these book addicts to old tomes? The inviting mustiness of the pages? The sense of palpable connection to the past? The plain, comforting physicality of a well-bound book that seems to calm a mind addled by the Information Age?

Well, you know, like, totally all of the above! From today’s Review-Journal piece:

“I love, love, love old books,” said Jennifer Whitehair, online editor for the Las Vegas tourism Web site Vegas.com and book collector. “It is a great store, I’m happy to see it has come to Vegas.”