[HEAR MORE: A Cold War pilot recalls his favorite spy planes on "KNPR’s State of Nevada."]

Freezing water. Barbed wire.

Meatball Spot's Beef meatballs Town Square’s new temple to meatballs reimagines the red-sauce restaurant staple in myriad forms: pork, lamb, turkey and even lentil. But the basic beef version — seasoned with Italian spices and made feather-light with ricotta — is comfort fare at its finest.

In this episode, we compare two takes on that most famous plate in pub grub: fish and chips. In one corner, we have a popular, no-frills Irish joint; in the other, a gastropub taking a few liberties with their interpretation.

The Vegas wedding is a knotty oxymoron: It’s an institution built on a sometimes-loony legacy of impulsive, implausible and ill-advised matrimonial unions — whether it was Mickey Rooney and Ava Gardner hitching up in 1942 or Britney Spears marrying, uh, whoever that one guy was in 2004. You might think it would follow that our wedding chapels are tenuous tenants in our cityscape — particularly on the Strip, that restless vein of implosion and reinvention.

Nevada’s lax marriage and divorce laws have made for memorable hookups, breakups and romantic shake-ups In 1931, in the throes of the Great Depression, the Nevada Legislature staked our state’s future on sin — divorce, gambling, easy marriage — as a way to draw tourists and their dollars. It was a bold move.

The votes are in! Nearly 400 readers took our online Best of the City Readers' Poll! Here are select results for the most voted-on categories.

So let me get this straight: It’s legal to possess medical marijuana — but illegal to actually buy it? Lobbyists must tell the public what gifts they’re lavishing on lawmakers — but only during certain months of the year? And in many cases, unelected bureaucrats are deciding how much public employees earn? We need to fix this. We need to pass some laws.

Whether it’s a sandwich or spa, bookstore or Bloody Mary, hiking trail or tailor, you’ll find the best of it all in the pages ahead. But we wouldn’t be doing our best if we didn’t make a few upgrades.

We Las Vegans sure love us some superlatives — biggest, baddest, brightest, brashest. There’s not an adjective out there we won’t stamp an -est suffix on and then plaster onto a marquee or stir into an overheated press release.