Notes and letters

“Just finished your piece in Desert Companion about changing your name,” Erin Timrawi of Las Vegas recently Facebooked to staff writer Heidi Kyser. It was a reference to Kyser’s October “Open Topic” piece detailing her struggle to reclaim her maiden name after getting married.

Let’s open with some random burbles of feedback: In response to Launce Rake’s September report on the school district’s new bullying policy, former teacher Wendy Goldstein Gelbart took to Facebook to remind us that teachers aren’t ignoring the issue. “It is not that teachers have not wanted to act,” she insists.

We're stuffed (!) with responses to our taxidermy story! Also, what we learned over the course of an epic 24-hour journalism project.

Even as it slumbers in the Desert Companion archives, our big July 2014 report on the late Dr. Ralph Conti — a beloved local pediatrician whose career was ruined by a stem-cell scam — continues to touch readers.

Scrumptious as it was, July’s DEALicious Meals package didn’t taste right to everyone. First Last, a commenter on desertcompanion.vegas, for instance. “I’m getting so sick of every single restaurant/meal article/review full of dead animal meals,” he or she wrote furiously.

Ugh, July heat, amiright?! Perhaps the only thing preventing us from lapsing into our annual Independence Day sweat-coma is the cool praise of our readers.

Wielding hashtags like throwing stars, the social-media ninjas at the Nevada National Security Site showed us some love for Alan Gegax’s account of touring the former Test Site, which ran in our May issue: “Great #article by Desert Companion magazine about the many #cultural resources at the #Nevada National Security Site,” they posted.

There must be something in the air, because this month’s mailbag is rife with anxiety about it — whether it’s floating cat germs, airborne asbestos or rogue, munchie-inducing pot clouds coming to turn your children into li’l stoners.

Let’s think water: In a March story headlined “ Real thirst,” Heidi Kyser reported on companies that bottle treated, alkalized Vegas tap water and sell it as a healthful drink, in particular the brand Real Water.

1. Reader Brent Parrish is leaving Las Vegas, and we’re sorry to see him go.