Jose Davalos distilled family heritage and do-it-yourself drive into a new tequila brand “I want my tequila to speak for itself,” Jose Davalos says. He says this after he talks for a couple of hours about the history of his family and how they came to be creators and purveyors of the liquor that bears their name.

You love drinking it, so why not collect it? Budding wine-lovers, take note You dip the tip of your nose just inside the rim of your glass. Mm… a slight whiff of pomegranate shot through lush notes of cocoa.

Born in Spokane and raised in Texas, Ted Hartwell came to Vegas in 1991 for all the unusual reasons — scouring Yucca Mountain for archeological sites as a member of the research faculty of the Desert Research Institute and playing cello in the Las Vegas Philharmonic. However, living in this city excavated something destructive in his personality.

An intrepid tippler takes on some of the toughest drinks in town The Durian Smoothie at Lee’s Sandwiches You can tell yourself all day long that you’re open-minded about trying foreign cuisine, but appreciating durian clearly takes more than mere cultural goodwill. At a glance, Durian strikes you as a natural dessert fruit.

Conversations with the Vegas Valley Book Festival’s two keynote authors, Max Brooks and Jane Smiley Max Brooks: Don of the dead If it seems you can’t swing an (un)dead cat without hitting a zombie novel, zombie TV series, zombie movie, zombie comic book or zombie videogame, well, it’s because you can’t. But the writer most responsible for the current trend of apocalyptic horror doesn’t deal in straightforward B-movie clichés.

NPR’s Linda Wertheimer on Tea Parties, missing Tip O’Neill and why we can’t all just get along NPR senior national correspondent Linda Wertheimer discusses political polarization and civility in political dialogue in her talk “Cooling the Partisan Fires,” 1 p.m.

Low pay. No benefits.

There’s nothing I like more than commandeering a table at The Beat downtown for an epic rot — that is, a long, caffeine-fueled hangout session that is only incidentally (and therefore happily) productive. Surely you do this too at your fave coffee spot, unloading books, magazines, pens, notepads and laptop for a bout of aimless creative ferment or a little restorative catch-up.

Dear County Commissioners, County Clerks, Judges, ex-lovers who accuse me of lacking vision or ambition, et al.: Kindly let the record show that I’m opposed to the approved plans for a development overlooking scenic Red Rock Canyon.

1900s Caribbean queens The Golden Gate Casino (1 Fremont St., 385-1906) is Las Vegas’ oldest hotel.