From a press release shamelessly filtered through the Review-Journal website, Fresh & Easy has announced the opening of 10 more stores. Given that there’ve been recent reports that the 11 existing stores haven’t exactly been doing bust-out business, this shows that British parent company Tesco has either got some serious teabags or is just plain daft.

As a regular eater of food, I’m kinduva fan of these places, though for being all about organicness and healthfulitude and naturality and all that, they do have this weird robo-vibe to the physical stores themselves. It’s like you get the feeling you aren’t so much grocery shopping as, like, cat-burglaring food from your neighbor’s garage at 3 a.m. It’s not the same weird vibe you get, say, from the mild-but-tolerable creepy-friendliness-due-to-such-enlightened-wage-and-benefits-packages from the workers at Trader Joe’s, nor the slightly spaced-out post-college-but-not-sure-what-I-want-do-with-my-life creepiness of Sunflower — nor the masterful, overstanding wigginess of CostCo, which I’m convinced is run by a cloned race of chirpy managerial superbeings whose running shoes aren’t shoes but actual enthusiasm-induced foot-growths or something.

And don’t get me started on the preening-dead-eyed-French-manicured-soccer-mom-with-boob-job-yet-she’s-buying-organic-

cruelty-free-watercress creepiness of Whole Foods. But still, it’s weird.

Is it just us, or has somebody at the Review-Journal gone crazy? We’re being inundated with “news” flashes today, some of a very dubious nature. Consider the latest:

The Criss Angel and Cirque du Soleil collaboration now has a name, “Criss Angel Believe,” and a date of Sept. 1 for its first ticketed preview at Luxor.

Tickets go on sale today, but they are available only to members of three fan or rewards-card groups: Criss Angel Loyals, Cirque Club and Luxor Insiders. Ticket prices range from $59 to $150 before taxes. Read more in Vegas Voice blog.

What was the thinking behind this? “Oh, my God! The Criss Angel show has a name! A name, I tell you! We’ve got to get this into print immediately! People cannot go ONE. MORE. SECOND. of their lives without knowing this! Where’s the send button!”

This isn’t news. This is an embarrassing celebrity blowjob.

And why? Have the editors at the R-J forgotten that Angel less than a week ago threatened one of their star writers in front of witnesses? A newspaper should condemn, not fellate, such people. Or at least it should if its editor actually backed up his people.

It’s that time again! And when I say “It’s that time again,” I’m saying “It’s that time again” to the grumbly army of would-be Las Vegas screenwriters holed up in their, uh, screenwriting garrets, screenwriting away at screenplays. Because the 21st annual Nevada Film Office Screenwriting Competition is about to kick off — and this year, there are some changes, mostly of the good kind, including more opportunities for budding screenwriters to make contact with industry types for critiques, analysis and expert advice. You know, like, “the explosions need more explosions!”

The best-kept-secret part of the competition, meanwhile, is that, well, not a whole hell of a lot of people actually enter, apparently, so at the very least, the laws of probability are working in favor of your Great Las Vegas Screenplay about the vigilante vampire croupier from the future who bites into Sheldon Adelson’s neck to discover Pine Sol flowing through the mogul’s veins.

Check out the full rules and specs at the official NFO site here.

Our colleague Jon Ralston just flashed the news that Charlie Waterman, the firebrand longtime former chairman of the Clark County Democratic Party, died today after suffering a heart attack. Waterman, an attorney and a dyed-in-the-wool liberal unafraid of the label, was profiled in CityLife by former staff writer Emmily Bristol back in September 2005. You can find her story here.

In a town, and a state, where a mutated libertarian conservatism is the default political philosophy, Waterman was a rare and proud breed. He will be missed.

For those of you who tried to access the blog this morning and had trouble, we apologize. Apparently, the little hamster who runs on the wheel and keeps the servers running at the secretive downtown computer center suffered an injury. He’s on the mend, however, and his little friend is filling in temporarily during the recovery process.

(For those of you who are members of PETA: The above is fictional. No actual hamsters are harmed during the production of this blog.)

Look up. A little to the right. A little more to the right … there!