Staff List > Stacy J. Willis > Stories

Contact

  • Photo of Stacy J. Willis

Stacy J. Willis

Story Archive

  • Music

    Thursday, July 2, 2009

    Isn’t it time we gave up those noisy, environmentally unfriendly fireworks, anyway?

  • Crime

    Thursday, June 25, 2009

    Crimes against children are on the rise, but let’s not be so quick to blame the recession.

  • As We See It

    Thursday, June 18, 2009

    When Midas, a 10-year-old lion, got very sick, and there was a chewed-up half of a toy football in his cage, the first thing zoo director Pat Dingle thought was that the Roman Catholics killed his lion.

  • Literature

    Thursday, June 11, 2009

    What kind of pop-culture machinators would we be if someone didn’t immediately publish a small gag book about what might appear on Obama’s BlackBerry?

  • Lawsuits

    Thursday, June 11, 2009

    Retired judges probably ought to be relaxing at a pool party, cosmopolitans in hand, the voices of angry litigants a thing of history. But instead, they are holing up in District Court hearing rooms in the Regional Justice Center, trying to resolve piles of medical-malpractice lawsuits (sans martinis).

  • Federal Goverment

    Thursday, June 4, 2009

    Nevada off-roaders have avoided meaningful regulation for years; it’s the last Western state not to have off-road vehicle titling and registration. But that’s about to change.

  • Dining

    Thursday, June 4, 2009

    Coffee offered by a redheaded clown in a yellow jumpsuit should be extremely confident. Indeed, McDonald’s coffee used to make the waifiest of us feel like longshoremen.

  • Dining

    Thursday, June 4, 2009

    Contestants will battle it out in Red Chili, Chili Verde and Salsa categories, which require that chefs add no beans or pasta or other carbs that purists consider a distraction from meat and hot peppers.

  • Technology

    Thursday, May 7, 2009

    Along with the joy of twittering comes the pleasure of rearranging real tweets into conversations that did not take place.

  • Entertainment

    Thursday, April 30, 2009

    This is something never to be taken for granted about our city: that wandering a distance of about 100 feet can be like falling down the rabbit hole. A wonderful thing, this.

  • Entertainment

    Thursday, April 23, 2009

    So there’s this story about a showbiz guy who finds the Lord and renames himself John 3:16 Cook and starts preaching the Word, not just to quietly aching suburbanites with dependable tithes, but also to drunks and homeless guys and drug addicts and prostitutes.

  • Economy

    Thursday, April 23, 2009

    Diamond earrings and gold pendant? $35. HP copier/scanner? $5. Finding out your treasure belongs are virtual crap? Priceless.

  • Economy

    Thursday, April 23, 2009

    Eerie similarities between the sunken ship and the sinking city. Will there be enough lifeboats?

  • Art

    Thursday, April 9, 2009

    Five posts gathered from art discussion site artbabble.org—“no art degree required”—which went live to nonmembers on April 7.

  • Economy

    Thursday, April 9, 2009

    In case anyone’s keeping track, the signs of the Apocalypse—killer bees, vacation-villa CEOs, bankrupt casinos—are upon us.

  • Entertainment

    Thursday, March 26, 2009

    As if one weren’t enough. As if he needed the ego boost. As if wax Don Corleone and wax Bugsy Siegel weren’t enough to fill the genre! And as if we’re not going to end up with a mob museum that is bound to feature him prominently, anyway ...

  • Nevada

    Thursday, March 5, 2009

    Wad up the state constitution and whip out a fresh sheet of paper, something’s not right about Nevada.

  • Transportation

    Thursday, March 5, 2009

    When it’s finished, the 1,900-foot-long, 88-foot-wide bridge will hold four lanes of traffic—17,000 cars a day—and one pedestrian walkway. It will be the United States’ first concrete-steel composite arch bridge.

  • Economy

    Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009

    Through it all, there is math. He’s good at math. Five is the number of months since his dad lost his job as a warehouse worker. Three is the number of places his family has stayed since then.

  • Entertainment

    Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009

    So the movie at a packed Green Valley Ranch theater is about to start when three elderly ladies come in, looking for last-minute seats together and the drama really starts.

  • Environment

    Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009

    Saturday. A beautiful, clear, crisp day. The kind that used to become magically more so the further out West Charleston you got. Today it’s not like that. It’s trafficky.

  • Nightlife

    Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009

    Crappy economic times call for an underdog success story to lift our spirits. Conveniently, our neighbors to the south have one brewing: The Arizona Cardinals made it to the second round of the NFL playoffs.

  • Energy

    Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009

    Can we fail at being sustainable and yet lead an economic recovery by developing a renewable-resource industry? It’s a question that Vegas and, more broadly, Nevada faces.

  • Las Vegas

    Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008

    Say what you will about Las Vegas being fake. Under that, or maybe because of that, is a city of everyday people whose lives create contradictions that make this place, especially at this moment, a masterpiece of art.

  • television

    Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008

    When Margaret Rudin was on trial for killing her husband, Ron Rudin, in 2001, she wrote a poem. It begins with what she prayed for most: to have the legal proceedings move forward in “days of unclouded truth.”

  • Sports

    Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008

    International recording and TV star and onetime Vegas resident ... wait for it ... David Hasselhoff, looking every bit as Hasselhoffy as in your dreams in a black leather jacket and combed curls, sang the national anthem; his appearance alone was worth $30.

  • Poverty

    Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008

    In 2005, 75 people died on the streets here; in 2006, 78; in 2007, 51; and this year, 48. On Thursday evening, volunteers gathered at the Homeless Memorial Candlelight Vigil to remember those who were lost this year.

  • Politics

    Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008

    Having cannon-balled into the vat of Kool-Aid and washed themselves free of irony and shruggishness, Obama’s fans and volunteers aren’t ready to quit. In fact, they’re exhilarated.

  • Entertainment

    Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

    Just as you’re getting your pure Christmas love on, you lean back and look at the Review-Journal’s tree, and there, on a high branch, is an ornament made of a shrunken R-J page with the headline “Serial rapist gets life in prison.” Hmm.

  • Budget

    Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

    ’Tis the season to cringe at our collective budgets. But who knows how it will all break down?

  • Environment

    Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008

    Green is such a loaded word now. Do you mean green good, like ecologically sound and sustainable? Or green bad, like rolling hills of lush turf watered by sprinklers that suck from Lake Mead?

  • Politics

    Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008

    If Dina Titus and Jon Porter never run against each other again it will be a pleasant hereafter.

  • Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008

    On an otherwise glorious election night: California, Arizona and Florida passed constitutional amendments against gay marriage. How's that for a night of civil rights history?

  • Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008

    The sun is setting and the doorbell rings. "We voted," I say. No time for chitchat, there's only a couple of hours left.

  • Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008

    What else is America, if not ballot casting and media overkill? That sums it up. And it's a nutshell kind of day. By the end of it, we should have the future of the American experiment worked out.

  • Literature

    Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008

    Darkness is so many things: It’s where the imagination is free, it’s where mysteries hide, where dreams rule, it’s what allows us to see the stars.

  • 2008 Presidential Election

    Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008

    If you don’t think about it at all, it makes perfect sense. One minute you’re eating Kettle Korn outside the Henderson Pavilion, waiting for Sarah Palin with a couple of racist suburbanites (“Those people don’t vote anyway,” says one).

  • A&E

    Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008

    “Don’t you want someone smarter than me to be president?” the Divine Miss M asked a crowd at Krave Monday evening.

  • Intersection

    Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008

    Having tried the Bush Administration, credit-card kiting, Wall Street, war, vitriolic campaigning, God, art, aliens, naked pool parties, construction projects, bankruptcy, lap dances, alcohol, prescription pills, sleeping excessively or not at all and TV—lots and lots of TV—and still come up empty, we’re sitting in UNLV’s Barrick Museum auditorium on a Thursday night to hear from a philosopher.

  • Economy

    Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

    It’s a rice-and-beans season—or, as The Colbert Report summarizes it, there’s a “clusterfuck at the poor house.”

  • Religion

    Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

    Mark your calendars. In February of 2009, religious people who dare explore the (missing) link between science and God will participate in a worldwide event: Evolution Weekend.

  • Nevada

    Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

    Congressman Jon Porter’s ad on his energy policies starts off with the bespectacled candidate for re-election standing in front of long rows of solar panels at Nevada Solar One: “Solar energy: inexpensive, and safe for the environment. And best of all, there’s plenty of it. I’m Jon Porter, and we need a balanced approach to solve our energy crisis. That’s why I helped build the world’s third-largest solar facility right here in Nevada.”

  • Art

    Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

    When poet Rosa Mendoza took the mic, the place went wild. It was time to build bridges, connect the community, express feelings. The kind of thing Vegas has needed forever, the story goes.

  • Features

    Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008

    It’s not about you or me, thank God, and keep that in mind. It’s not about the cost of staying alive or the dashing Mr. Manilow or spiders with fangs.

  • Intersection

    Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008

    A familiar Nevada voice reaches out from a TV ad and grabs you by the throat: “People ask me why, after 30 years in Las Vegas, I still have an accent,” says Sen. Dina Titus in a thick Georgia drawl.

  • Literature

    Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008

    Maybe there’s something unseemly about admiring, first and foremost, the colorful prose in a book whose subject matter is 9/11.

  • Intersection

    Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008

    The scene: A new eco-adventure attraction, Bootleg Canyon Flightlines. Cable strung over hills in Boulder City. Foolish reporter in a harness, preparing to fly down a vertical drop of 1,000 feet at 40 mph, without a helmet.

  • Issues

    Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008

    This whole planes-falling-out-of-the-sky thing turns out to be about a benevolent God, you know. Driving toward the scene of the second airplane accident last week, I have the instinctive reaction to duck when a twin-engine buzzes in over me toward that airport, that airport—God!

  • Intersection

    Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008

    I am not a Trekkie or a Star Wars buff, and this is an important disclaimer, because I don’t totally get it. But I love the memorabilia—it speaks to the consumer in anybody, the toy-lover.

  • Intersection

    Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008

    The speed at which traffic buzzes by these three acres of grass and shade is mesmerizing. Huntridge Circle Park is an island between north- and southbound traffic on Maryland Parkway, just south of Charleston—a problem spot lingering in the middle of the city’s rapid growth. Reports of area break-ins are up, and nearby shop-owners complain that homeless people have been routinely defecating on their properties.