Sue Silver of Hawthorne, Nev., writes:

With regard to the recent article by Andrew Kiraly regarding Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties rejecting wilderness area proposals as part of federal lands bills, those of us who reside here have far more knowledge of the impacts these designations will impose on our counties.

In Mineral County, our economy is based on three main influences — Military, Mining and Tourism. This fact is posted on US. Sen. Ensign’s website. The areas proposed for Mineral County would have interfered with MILITARY operations, MINING operations and development and TOURISM trade when people found they could not come and go through the playground they’ve always enjoyed.

Regardless of what the wilderness proponents say, they ARE driven to lock up land as part of a master plan called The Wildlands Project. Ask Shaaron Netherton of the Friends of Nevada Wilderness. She should know - her old buddy Dave Foreman (remember him from Earth First! and spiking trees that injured loggers?) is the mastermind behind it. That plan calls for 50% of all of America’s public lands to be locked into wilderness area designations — locked away from ordinary, working class Americans who just want to get out of the city for a drive in the country.

The wilderness proponents had no idea of what was in Mineral County and asked to be given a tour last fall. Afterward, they devised their “wish list” that is based on NOTHING at all. They have done no environmental or ecological studies and they have NOTHING to counter the U.S. Forest Service assessments of these areas that do not recommend them for wilderness designation as they do not meet the definition of wilderness. These areas have been mined and prospected for over 140 years. This was the area of the second biggest rush in Nevada’s early mining history next to the Comstock. Where do you think those 10,000 miners were mining, just in Aurora? Give us a break.

Nevada has always been dedicated to mining and mineral development. Nevada has always been about open space and freedom to roam. Nevada has always been about local control because most places are so remote few others have any concept of what life is like for us.

The Nevada Wilderness Project overplayed its hand and underestimated the will of the ordinary Nevadan. They offer us NOTHING and want only to TAKE. If they thought we’d lie down and let them hike all over us, they have another thing coming.

Sue Silver is the Mineral County Liaison for the Coalition for Public Access.

As you well-informed, tasteful and intelligent readers learned late Friday, cell phone company Sprint has told the Las Vegas Monorail it is pulling out of the convention center station at Paradise and Desert Inn roads. After a couple days of wrangling, we got this Official Statement from the monorail:

“Sprint recently notified the Las Vegas Monorail Company of its decision to terminate its lease agreement for space at the Las Vegas Convention Center Monorail Station effective June 30, 2008.  The Sprint Central facility at the Las Vegas Convention Center station has been an asset to the system and our riders, and there is already interest for the multimillion-dollar facility. Ridership at the Convention Center station has shown steady increases over the past year, and we look forward to offering this opportunity to a new partner that will benefit from the exposure to the Monorail’s millions of riders annually.”

That’s their story and they’re sticking to it. But a source told us at Various Things & Stuff that Sprint decided to bail on the convention center station because they never saw enough foot traffic, not because “…ridership at the Convention Center station has shown steady increases over the past year.”

Hmmm, that’s a mystery. We wonder who could be more right? We’re going to go with Sprint, only because if they had the traffic they wanted, they probably wouldn’t be leaving, right?

Oh, and a wag objected Friday to our coverage because we failed to note that the monorail had experienced an uptick in ridership recently. We’re guessing that has something to do with the big concrete expo over at the convention center that saps a bunch of parking spaces and thus forces people to consider alternative means of transportation, but, there you go, Mr. Wag.

OK, so maybe the strategy for U.S. Sen. Harry Reid’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night was to intentionally act like a dead fish and make Stewart work for it. Reid did tell us in an earlier interview about his new book — The Good Fight: Hard Lessons for Searchlight to Washington — that he wasn’t going to try to out-Stewart the longtime host of the show.

Hey, senator: Mission accomplished! We’ve seen dining room tables that exhibited more personality than Reid did in his star turn on last night’s program. (Granted, we may have been drinking before engaging in conversation with the aforementioned dinner tables. Oh, sweet knotty pine: How we love your mellifluous voice.)

It started out harmlessly enough: Stewart seemed to have been truly impressed with the chapters on Reid’s roots in tiny Searchlight, and told the senator so. “You’ve had a remarkable journey, sir,” Stewart said, as Reid sat impassively, saying nothing. “Or am I mistaken?”

Reid only really had the crowd with one line, in which he said his journey was a quintessential American success tale. “In America, if I can make it, anyone can,” he said to applause.

“I think right now they [the audience] are taken aback with your soft spoken, and I’m going to go with humility,” Stewart said, the gravity of his task now dawning on him. This was going to be a long six minutes!

Reid’s second good line — and what seemed like the only natural moment in the entire interview — came after Stewart joked that Reid’s reputation for toughness belied his slight appearance. “And yet as I look across from you I feel like, I could filibuster this man,” he said. Retorted Reid: “Everyone else has, you might as well.”

Stewart tried — like the rest of us — to get Reid to say who he likes for president, with the same result: No dice.

Another natural question: If you have both houses of Congress, why haven’t the Democrats been able to “run roughshod” the way the Republicans always seemed to? “They have the president. We don’t,” Reid explained.

Ah, but don’t think Reid left without using the sound bite de jour: We’re spending $5,000 per second in Iraq. That rightly stunned Stewart, and the audience, too.

Reaction? Not much on the Daily Show site, linked above, save for this, written by somebody called “fede”:

“i am 70% sure, based on the way he talks in this interview, that Harry Reid is a serial killer.”

Ouch, baby! But seriously, can you see Reid with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in his basement dungeon? We can: “It agrees to unanimous consent on this Iraq resolution, or it gets the hose again.”

How do I sum up my Las Vegas Pride 2008 experience? On the afternoon of May 3 at the Clark County Government Center Amphitheater, I sat down with thousands of other people watching some guy belt out Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open.” As if the song wasn’t awful enough — I would have gladly accepted Robbie Williams over Scott Fucking Stapp — the vocalist, dressed for his big moment in no better than American Eagle Outfitters, sung no better than anyone you’d find at Goodtimes’ karaoke night.

OK, I feel bad tearing Daughtry 2.0 apart, even if I wasn’t the only one doing it, and if people weren’t verbally scratching their heads as to why Pride organizers gave this guy his own slot on the entertainment roster, they were ignoring him completely.

To participate in Las Vegas Pride is to be resigned to a certain kind of, um, modesty. I don’t mean that LGBT Vegans are more reserved and less outlandish than those of bigger cities, where twinky bois dance on alcohol-sponsored floats with their freshly waxed asses hanging out of their jockstraps — though we Sin City suburbanites are more reserved and less outlandish than our more homo-politan peers. What I’m actually referring to is the quaintness of our celebration, which is to say, despite the weeklong sprawl of events that comprise Las Vegas Pride, it looks and feels all so low-budget. (Note to Southern Nevada Association of Pride, Inc.: Start your Pride 2009 fundraising now … if only to upgrade from Cece Peniston to Fantasia Barrino. Baby steps.)

It wasn’t bad enough I gave Saturday’s Pride festival three hours before the bleeding in my ears forced my early exit. I almost felt embarrassed as I tried to explain to my Chicago-born friends attending their first Vegas Pride event our community’s particular situation, especially while homeboy was belting out songs from Now That’s What I Call Butt Rock, Vol. 3! Gay pride events in general have limited entertainer options with which to plan their festivals, parades and parties — you know, aging divas, queer popsters, American Idol losers, all represented in Vegas last weekend. But we seem to cull from the bottom of that F-list pile. They also complained there weren’t very many good-looking guys. No need in telling them Cirque du Soleil doesn’t get Pride weekend off.

So, why do we bother? We’re clearly not coming for the performers (who, by the way, weren’t revealed until a week or so ago). For some of us, it’s obligatory. Hey look, we’re here, we’re queer, blah blah blah. We stand and are counted, in a perverse and perhaps disingenuous way. In fact, it’s a lot like voting — if we didn’t attend, how could we complain? Or maybe we know we’ll see our friends there … though, frankly, I didn’t see a whole lot of my fellow fag-pals out. (Then again, the sun was still out and I’m sure many of my friends had partied late the night before — though I had, too. Bitches.)

I know I keep going for those reasons, and because I like seeing us all out at once. The gay Vegas community, such that it is, represents such a diverse, integrated, self-interested (for better or worse) group, Pride is the one time of the year you can survey it and get a close-to-accurate representation of its breadth and size.

For instance, if this late-night gay-bar patron didn’t go, I’d never know Vegas had lesbians, who seem to hibernate the other 51 weeks of the year. And yet there they were, out in full force, of all age groups and mullet lengths. (Just kidding — mullets seem to be going out in the land of Sappho, now that they’ve been co-opted by the electro-twerps at the Beauty Bar). Many of them even brought kids — and, boy, were there a ton of them, too. If there was any demographic eating up all the rainbow-flag paraphernalia, it was children, completely nonplussed the guys picnicking on their right were adorned in leather kilts and the nuns on their left were men inked to the hilt with tats.

Take all that in with the trannies in their Saturday afternoon best, the strippers with their asses hanging out of their Daisy Duke cutoffs, and everyone else parading around like there hadn’t been a big ol’ parade the night before, and who needed stage entertainment?