Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe it was just something I ate. (If so, I’m placing the blame squarely on that deep-fried Hot Pocket.) But John McCain is starting to make sense.
Entertainment Columns
Following Interstate 15 and U.S. 3 north from Las Vegas into Lincoln County, travelers take a trip back in time. The sparsely populated region still relies upon agriculture, ranching, a bit of mining, some railroading and federal and state agency employment. Increasingly, the county aims for tourist income, but just a few of the millions who annually visit Nevada ever get there. Their loss, for Lincoln County offers varied recreational opportunities, wonderful Great Basin scenery and historic towns like little Panaca.
The new Criss Angel show pins a lot of ticket-sale hopes on younger fans who spend more time in nightclubs than other shows on the Strip.
Paul Rodriguez figures, “The hardest thing to be right now is a white comedian from Iowa. You’ve got nothing. Everybody can talk about you, but you can’t talk about them.”
Terry Fator’s got talent, and America loves him. There’s no arguing that.
Talking with a chef about food trends recently, he confirmed what I’ve been seeing: exponential growth toward the casual-but-upscale in restaurants across the board, whether they’re celebrity-chef-driven, chain links or mom-and-pop ethnics.
Las Vegas has put everything onstage from the sinking of the Titanic to an aerial view of a samurai battle. So it probably could field an adaptation of the movie “Point Break,” complete with surfing and a skydiving battle.
No barbecue is complete without baked beans, and with our nearly year-round barbecue season in the valley, it’s fortunate there’s a ready source of Heinz Vegetarian Baked Beans for Sandra Gersh.
Hidden away in remote locations across the Silver State stand beehive-shaped monuments to Nevada’s mining past. These conical stone or brick structures were ovens that reduced firewood to charcoal used in smelters to remove precious metals from ore. At the height of their use in the late 1800s, the charcoal ovens contributed to the denuding of forests on mountain ranges in Central and Eastern Nevada.
Throw the collected works of Anne Rice into a blender, mix in an old Chris Isaak album and a couple of hours of Skinemax, garnish with a tiny Confederate flag and serve it to David Lynch on a Louisiana front porch on a sweltering afternoon.
The producers of “Shear Madness” might be living up to their show title by challenging the very definition of Las Vegas entertainment.
Criss Angel is one busy guy, what with a multimillion-dollar show at Luxor just around the corner.
Here’s the thing that surprises me most about Brio Tuscan Grille: People are so impressed by the scale of the building, the very grandeur of the place — soaring ceilings and vaults, cozy passages — that they tend to assume it’s a one-off, a stand-alone restaurant raised in Town Square by the scion of a Tuscan winemaking family.
Alice Cooper turned 60 this year. He is playing The Orleans this weekend, not sitting at home yelling at the neighborhood kids to get out of his yard — though wouldn’t you love to see just how he would scare them away?