media
Site to See
Bust-A-Gut Historical
(HarkAVagrant.com)
September 13th, 2012
Whenever my life seems indistinguishable from shit, I pay a visit to Kate Beaton’s website, Hark! A Vagrant. I wouldn’t say the Canadian comic artist has a surefire way of cheering me up—many times, our encounters result in a draw—but her nuanced, simply-drawn cartoons, strongly reminiscent of the work of Jules Feiffer, do remind me that my forebears had it worse than I did. Read more »
Vegas Tech
Bucking the Odds
September 6th, 2012
The monolithic structures that tickle the clouds on both sides of Las Vegas Boulevard are there for a bunch of reasons. The most obvious: confident gamblers who waltz into town with “a system” that’s guaranteed to make them instant millionaires. Inevitably, they limp out of town broke and wondering what went wrong. Read more »
Found Material
Rebels Among the Rankings
(ESPN.com)
September 6th, 2012
Using a point system devised by its Stats & Information department, ESPN counted down the 50 most successful college basketball programs of the past 50 years. Read more »
Site to See
Eff Yeah Rocket Science
(WTFnasa.com)
September 6th, 2012
A little while back it landed a staggeringly advanced robot on another planet, captivated the notoriously fickle Internet and brought back the Mohawk haircut—but being a fast-forward culture that forgets things almost as quickly as they happen, it’s only natural that we should ask, “What the fuck has NASA done to make your life awesome?” Read more »
Politics
Printing, Pressed
August 30th, 2012
None of this means the print versions of the R-J or Sun will disappear. But it does mean our news sources are changing, and reminds us of how often we in Las Vegas really don’t know what we need to know about what goes on in this community. Sometimes that’s because our newspapers lack either the wherewithal or the will to tell us. But just as often it’s because we don’t want to know. The industry follows the consumer; if our city’s dailies further atrophy, the fault may lie in ourselves. Read more »
Vegas Tech
Time for Not-Quite Online Gaming!
August 30th, 2012
It seems like nearly everyone wants to start gambling on the Internet. Except, of course, for those pesky legislators keeping it illegal. Players want it, and go to overseas sites for what they can’t get domestically. Game-makers also want it, and create pseudo-gambling games that test how close to the real thing the law will permit. And in the future, those sites will allow players to bet real money as soon as it becomes legal. Read more »
Site to See
The Writing On The Wall
(WordPainting.tumblr.com)
August 30th, 2012
Tumblr is not a place of quiet introspection. Most of the sites I’ve seen on the blogging service are picture-based and infantile. The superior Tumblr blogs, the ones I mention in this column, are still picture-based but clever, or infantile in an agreeable way. Read more »
Media
Touchscreen Textbooks
Can smartphones replace the printing press in our public schools?
August 23rd, 2012
Hang around the education community long enough, and you’re sure to hear a rhetorical refrain that goes something like this: Why are we still using a 19th-century model of education predicated on getting kids ready for early 20th-century industry using technology Gutenberg invented in the 15th century? Read more »
Media
The Battle Against Perceived Reality
August 16th, 2012
No college basketball coach has ever been vilified more by the national media for perceived wrongdoing than Jerry Tarkanian when he was at UNLV, and now a post on a popular sports website has attached the “cheater” label to one of Tark’s protegés, second-year Rebel coach Dave Rice. Read more »
Site to See
Serious Fluff
(MatadorNetwork.com/bnt/60-insane-cloud-formations-from-around-the-world-pics)
August 16th, 2012
Clouds are awesome, both in terms of scale and in the meaning that they’re, well, awesome. When the skies are filled with them—as they have been, spectacularly so, these past few monsoon-season weeks—nearly every one of us takes the time to look up and consider them. Read more »
