Even amid a hundred dancers, gymnasts and acrobats, giant screens, blinding lights and all the other eye-popping stage sensations, you cannot miss the shredding warrior princess with the skyscraping up-do and eight-inch platforms wielding a bullion-hued six-string. If you’ve had the electric pleasure of seeing Michael Jackson ONE at Mandalay Bay, you know what I’m talking about.

Hispanic sabor livens up this part of the avenueJust before it enters North Las Vegas and becomes Civic Center Drive, North Eastern Avenue has drowned tortas, simmering molcajetes and locally made cheesy ice cream. Also: piñatas!1.

The large-scale architecture that ought to engage the community too often doesn’t. Some of the blame falls on usSouthern Nevada’s real estate collapse was ugly and embarrassing — but it may also have been the best thing that could have happened to local architecture.

I have to confess a bit of queasy ambivalence when I see the bulldozers, block walls and banners signaling the start of a new suburban housing subdivision in the valley these days. On the one hand, sure, I’ll grab the pom poms and cheerlead any hopeful green shoot signaling economic comeback squeezing up out of the cracks.

Crime lords, illegal whiskey, federal stings and mysterious fires — par for the course in this tale of two historic Vegas nightclubs Someone should put up a historic plaque next to the volcano at the Mirage hotel-casino. Not to commemorate the volcano but, rather, to mark a different kind of historic eruption: That spot is the site of the Red Rooster, the first nightclub on what would eventually become the Las Vegas Strip.

For 33 years, the murder of Jamey Walker has haunted her family — and one journalist who covered it. “I feel like I’m letting my daughter down if I don’t find out what happened,” Eleanor Walker told me back in 2004, her voice cracking, sobs working up into her throat.

Daniel Boulud returns to town with a modern brasserie. French fries? Of course — and so much moreLike every other celebrity chef these days, Daniel Boulud makes a signature burger with fries — three kinds, in fact.

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