Fires in the Desert

Red Rock Fires

I completely missed the last Red Rock hiking season (September through April or May), so I was shocked when I drove through the Loop last Friday. Last year’s fires burned over 800 acres, and much of the damage is visible from the road. The land is scorched barren, littered with blackened Yucca stumps. You can see from this picture a clear dividing line between the damaged and intact area.

Wildfires are a growing problem in the desert, and one of the major reasons is the invasion of non-native weeds and grasses. When our triple-digit heat dries out these intruders, they turn into plentiful, highly combustible tinder. One lightening strike or stray cigarette butt can spark a devastating fire that destroys the native plants and animals. Unlike forests, deserts are not designed to rebound from fire – they’ve not been historically prone to fire because in their natural state, they aren’t full of dried grass and weeds. Chris Clarke wrote an excellent article on this danger to all Southwestern states that can be found at his Creek Running North web site.

If you haven’t been keeping up on invasive species, you might want to bone up. It’s now being linked to global warming – although I think everything but JonBonet Ramsey’s murder has been linked to global warming these days – but I predict it will emerge as an ecological threat in its own right.

What Happens in Vegas Must Happen Before Midnight

The County has decided to close the Marriage License Bureau from midnight to 8 a.m., a move sure to cut the number of Vegas-related annulments in half. I have to say that this move is long overdue, as anyone who has been downtown between the hours of midnight to 8 a.m. can attest. I worked the graveyard shift for Metro for over two years in the early 80’s and can assure you that the majority of people out looking to get married at 3 a.m. should be arrested, not encouraged to wed. Years ago Metro’s Records Bureau decided to close to the public on the graveyard shift, although staff still works inside. When I was working there, we had to keep the Marriage License Bureau’s address handy for the lost love birds who wandered into our offices.

Price of a Vegas marriage license:
$55.00

Estimated amount saved by closing the Las Vegas Marriage License Bureau between midnight and 8 a.m.:
$200,000.00

Preventing drunken couples from saying “I do” before Elvis in the middle of the night: Priceless

Sheriff’s Race

Jerry Airola and Doug Gillespie squared off in a debate at the Clark County library (check date). Airola continues to present himself as the “change” candidate, insisting that Metro’s budget and personnel are mismanaged. Local news described Gillespie as the “traditional” candidate. I thought “qualified” was the word they were looking for.

One Big Trash Dump

Why aren’t Las Vegans more concerned about recycling? Republic continually cites opposition from citizens as its main reason to stick to its twice monthly recycles pickup. We’ve heard proposals about pilot programs for once-a-week pickup of both regular trash and recyclables, but supposedly people are concerned about the smell of the trash during the summer heat. What are people disposing of in the trash? Road kill carcasses? I think the real reason is that the average Las Vegan looks out across the miles of desert surrounding us and sees nothing but miles of potential trash dumps. (Obviously our government shares this view, since they’re trying to saddle us with Yucca Mountain.) I’ve always been surprised at the number of people who refuse to recycle because they think it generates money for Republic. Hogwash. I think Republic generates a profit by doing as little as possible for its customers. Have you encountered their Soviet-style customer service? Go ahead and try to find out what your recycling pickup days are. Or what the hours are at the transfer stations. Haven’t these people heard of the Internet?

The Season for Politicians and Art

Calling All Registered Voters

Yesterday 27% of us showed up at the polls. Where were the rest of you folks? The democratic process misses you! Click here to read the primary results.

Fall Calls

Clark County students will be returning to class on August 30, 2006, a Wednesday. What’s up with starting school on a Wednesday? Haven’t they confused us enough by starting school before Labor Day?

Now that the summer is almost over we can look forward to cooler temperatures and festivals! Start watching billboards and reading events calendars because before you know it, we’ll be kicking off the season in late September with San Gennaro and the Greek Food Festival. This year the Henderson Car Show is in September also, as is Red Rock's Harvest Festival (September 2, right around the corner). Boulder City’s Art in the Park is the first weekend in October (they don’t advertise, so put a note on the fridge). Also in October, the Age of Chivalry Renaissance Festival invades Sunset Park and Spring Mountain State Park generally holds Pioneer Days, where you can see how the pioneers lived. Note that they also have a Civil War re-enactment scheduled for the end of October.

For more ideas on fun stuff to do when we reach sub-Hades temps, check:

Clark County’s Event List:

http://www.co.clark.nv.us/Parks/Events_Calendar.htm

Boulder’s City Calendar:

http://www.bcnv.org/calendars/events/bc092006.htm

Henderson’s Calendar:

http://ecalendar.cityofhenderson.com/.

Naturally, this is also a great time of year to check out First Friday or any other outdoor events. If events aren't your style, October's a great time to get in a hike at Mt. Charleston before the first snow fall.

A Few Things to Ponder

So Long Stardust

Last Saturday my son participated in a Karate Tournament held at the Stardust. It’s hard not to feel sad about the Stardust’s impending demise; so few of the hotels I grew up with are still around. The Stardust is a place where you can still figure out where to go without a map or a security guard’s directions. Try that at any other Strip hotel.

Airola is Bad News for Voters

The local news media has been all over Sheriff’s candidate Jerry Airola, but amazingly people are still voting for him. Both the Review Journal and The Sun carried front page spreads that detailed the way he’s misled voters into thinking he’s a cop. (Big hint, folks – if both the RJ and The Sun concur on something, PAY ATTENTION.) He’s not a cop and hasn’t been in over ten years. (George Knapp is doing a great job uncovering the real Airola – read his column at CityLife.) Airola countered with claims that he’s qualified to be Sheriff on the basis of his business acumen. Both publications responded with stories on Airola’s checkered history owning a water purifier company and his current helicopter company. Airola answered that by saying that at least he didn’t have as many law suits filed against him as Metro. His latest clever retort after current Sheriff Bill Young and union representatives held a joint news conference denouncing his specious claims? They’re just the “good old boy” network. No, Jerry, they’re actual law enforcement officers.

Airola has plastered himself all over town with media buys in every area – he’s got more billboards than a new Strip show and more TV ads than Glen Lerner. Sadly, with an electorate that votes more on name recognition than anything else, he’s likely to be Doug Gillespie’s opponent.

Clooney in Town

George Clooney and friends were in town this week to film scenes for the upcoming Ocean’s 13. Until earlier this year, Clooney was signed onto Las Ramblas, one of the many failed high-rise condo projects in town. I thought his proposed dress code in the casino was a fabulously retro idea. (Although probably unnecessary, at least for female visitors, most of who would have been dressed to the nines in the event George walked by). I keep hoping that he’ll buy a place in town because, frankly, we need some good press and this man oozes good PR in equal doses with sex appeal. Now that Las Vegas is known as the second city in the nation to make it illegal to feed homeless people, we need all the help we can get. I tried to find a negative story about Rosemary’s nephew and except for a little dust up with Arianna Huffington over some posts on her blog, you can’t find anything bad written about him. He’s traveling to Darfur, winning Academy Awards, or making Anne Coulter mad, but I never see him on the National Inquirer with “Clooney meltdown! Rehab imminent!” splattered across an unflattering photo of him. Doesn’t he have any exes willing to dish? You know no man can be that nice all the time.

Bad Doctors Nothing New

In case you missed it, the doctor shot by a distraught patient is recovered and back at work. I’m sorry to say this, but I’m just surprised that more doctors in this town don’t get shot by angry patients. I could write an entire book about my bad experiences with doctors in Las Vegas – rude, condescending jerks who were also uncaring and incompetent. During the 60’s and 70’s, everyone knew that if you got anything worse that the flu, you’d better hightail it out of town for proper treatment. The 7,000 people who move here each month, however, don’t know your odds of finding a good doctor are about the same as hitting a royal flush on a poker machine by the front door of the casino. If you find a good doctor, count yourself lucky. If he or she also has an office staff that speaks English and knows what they’re doing, follow that doctor wherever she goes.

The Forgotten

This afternoon I’m heading down to visit my mom, who lives easy walking distance from Circle Park, ground zero for the Homeless Wars here in Las Vegas. By now everyone has heard about our new ordinance that bans feeding homeless people in the park. The ordinance is ludicrous, unconstitutional, and mean.

Some important voices are being left out of this debate. The residents around Circle Park – or around any area that the homeless favor – get an occasional letter to the editor published , but for the most part, no one is paying much attention to these folks. Have you ever had a homeless person encamped on the side of your house, using your lawn as a toilet? My mom has. How about had a homeless person relief himself on your living room floor? A friend of mine trying to sell her vacant house on 7th Street did.

We have allowed the debate about the homeless to exclude the people most affected by the action (or inaction) of politicians – and I’m not just talking about the residents who can’t use the park they renovated. When was the last time you read an interview with the homeless? They serve as a backdrop to news stories, but is anyone asking them why waiting for free food in Circle Park is so much more appealing than taking advantage of the services (however few they may be) offered by the city?

Less than a month ago, the city shut down Family Promise, a local agency that helps homeless families. Despite being located in the same neighborhood for a decade, bureaucratic baloney mandated that they get a business license. Suddenly, their work was no longer appropriate for their neighborhood. So, let me see if I have this right…. The homeless aren’t allowed to sleep in a park or be fed in a park, and they don’t want to travel downtown to receive services, but the City doesn’t want neighborhood-based shelters offering assistance to the homeless, either. Over the past few years we’ve seen services to the homeless decrease, but now we want to cite people who feed them. The people most affected by these idiotic strategies – the homeless and the residents of the affected areas – are nothing but cardboard backdrops. Does this make sense to anyone?

Red Rock Fires

Today I drove to the Red Rock Overlook to see if any of the Loop fires were visible from that vantage point. At the overlook, the smell of fire filled the air. Thunder boomed and lightening flashed nearby. As I was getting out of my car, a park ranger walked up to me and told me I’d need to stay on the west side of the parking lot. The helicopter was scheduled to arrive on the east side of the parking lot in five minutes; it wasn’t landing, but instead was scooping up water to drop on a distant fire. “He’s just coming over to give us some help with this small fire,” Marty the park ranger told me. The big fire is in Lovell Canyon. Everyone in the parking lot snapped away as the helicopter roared in, dipped a bucket of water, and then choppered off to douse a small blaze.

In My Neighborhood

During the school year I see the Arabic women in my neighborhood walking their children to school, talking to each other in a language that, unlike Spanish, is completely unfamiliar to me. One of the ladies wears a headscarf every day, always a vibrant print and a rich-looking fabric. While the rest of the morning moms (myself included) are decked out in sweats, hiding behind dark glasses, and carrying our morning Starbucks, these women wear heels and pressed slacks. One of the moms is a Lebanese lady who lives up the street from me – her husband is a professional gambler – and I’ve often wondered if they’ve thought about a nickname for their son, Osama. “It’s a very common name in that part of the world,” the mother explained when we met them.

David and I both worried about our son playing at their house. When we first met them, September 11th wasn’t that far in the past, and even for an open-minded gal like myself, I was having a tough time with, “Mom, Osama wants to know if I can play at his house.”

“As long as he doesn’t come home shouting ‘Death to the infidels!’, I think we’re okay,” I told my husband.

They frequently vacation in Lebanon over the summer, and I haven’t seen them in weeks.

An Iranian dentist lives next door to us, a quiet man who travels a great deal and who just married a much younger woman. His family fled Iran when the Shah was overthrown. A few years ago, he took a trip back to his homeland. “There were people with guns everywhere,” he told us when he got back. I got the impression he was both shocked and disappointed by what he saw.

Two years ago when my son started kindergarten, I met a Palestinian lady. She and I were about the same age, and we walked the same way to drop off and pick up our kids. She didn’t speak much English, and I don’t speak any Arabic, but we managed to talk about housework, husbands, and kids. I’m sure we looked like we were playing charades half the time. “You know Palestine?” she asked me once.

“Yes, I do. Do you ever get to go home?” I asked her. I figured if my dentist friend could go to Iran, anything was possible.

“I would like. But it’s hard to go there,” she said, shrugging and sighing, giving me the hands-up signal that meant “I can’t explain it in this language.” I wished she spoke better English, because I wanted to hear what had happened to her, why she was in the United States, and how she and her husband and daughter came to Las Vegas.

One day we were waiting outside the kindergarten gates when a Jewish woman joined the group. I knew she was from Israel and taught pre-school at a synagogue – one of many details I had absorbed about the other parents as we waited by the gate each day. Somehow she and the Palestinian lady started talking, which I watched in open amazement. “Do you speak Arabic?” the Palestinian lady asked her.

“No. Only Hebrew.”

“You are from Israel? I am from Palestine.”

“They’re kind of the same place now.”

They both smiled and stepped away from each other, and I wondered if the Palestinian lady wanted to punch the Jewish lady in the nose. If she did, she didn’t show it. Interestingly, not only does my neighborhood seem to have a large number of Arabs and Persians, we also have a large population of Jewish people. Every Saturday I see families walking to temple. Mezuzh scrolls adorn doors all over my neighborhood.

As I watch the Middle East erupting on television each night, these are the people I think about.

The Orange Moon

Smoke from the fires in California turned our moon orange.

Metro Under The Microscope

Las Vegas’ recent rash of officers fatally shooting suspects has many people concerned, including Sheriff Bill Young, who recently appeared on Jon Ralston’s show, Face to Face.

For years the ACLU and other organizations have complained that Metro officers were always cleared of wrong doing in the shooting deaths of suspects. The standard argument has always been that the IAB investigations and Coroner’s Inquest were stacked in favor of cops. The assumption seemed to be that unless the suspect was armed with a machine gun and rampaging through a Station Casino bingo room, something else should have been done – something non-lethal.

Like a large percentage of the population, I’ve never had to face the decision on whether or not to take someone’s life. I have known several officers and soldiers who did have to make that decision, and I can tell you that it was not a decision they took lightly. It was also not a decision that left them unscarred; just the opposite. Each man and woman at Metro goes out on patrol knowing that they might not come home at the end of the shift. They also know that they might be the reason some family looses its father, brother or son. Neither thought is an easy one.

For everyone involved, I can only hope that the inevitable (and needed) scrutiny of these shootings will offer answers, but in these cases – as in so many that went before – I imagine the questions will always outnumber the answers.

New Blog Site

Welcome to my new Vegas Girl Blog! While I can't say I had any complaints about AOL's blog service -- it's much more user friendly than this one, I think -- AOL makes it too dang difficult for non-AOLers to post comments, so here I am. My regular post will appear later today.

This is my cat, Gray. He would welcome you to the blog, but he requires upfront milk and catnip. He's running for a seat on the Clark County Commission.