Stories by Brendan Buhler

• If it smells like Northern Italy, it must be Bellagio

  Jan 6, 2010 (6:35 p.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Why do casinos smell like they do? No, not the smell of menthols, sticky drinks and desperation. That's everywhere. Rather, why does the Bellagio smell like the Bellagio and why does the Venetian smell like an old man who has been wearing the same cologne for 40 years and steadily adding more as his tolerance grows?

• If it smells like Northern Italy, it must be Bellagio

  Jan 5, 2010 (6:33 p.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  The very real—and carefully researched—world of casino aromas

  

• Airport worker a human diary for Vegas visitors

  Nov 26, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Rodderick Gray pushes wheelchairs through McCarran International Airport’s terminal D, following a loop that takes him from airplane gates to taxi stands to ticketing and around and around again, pushing for about 10 miles a day. He sweats through his uniform’s baseball caps until they shine, until he can’t wash his sweat out of the caps and he has to throw them out.

  

• Michael Jackson's doctor gets red-carpet treatment at courthouse

  Nov 20, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Showing an unprecedented level of creative initiative, the bailiffs at Clark County Family Court have launched a new tourism and job creation initiative: VIP justice.

  

• Taxidermist says every customer has a story to tell

  Nov 18, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Do not say that Rick Smith stuffs dead animals. He mounts them. That’s what taxidermists do.

  

• Google Maps glitch renames Henderson

  Nov 9, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Welcome to fabulous Rochester, Nev. No, not the ghost town outside of Reno. And no, we didn’t mean Rochester, N.Y.

  

• Barber on a mission to cut red tape, change state's licensing rules

  Oct 30, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  All Vernon Williamson wanted to do was what he’s done, off and on, for the past 46 years. He wanted to be a barber.

  

• Pigeons are his mark, the city his foe

  Oct 29, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Nephi S. Oliva is a man of many passions. Chief among them, at the moment, are pigeons.

  

• Timothy O'Grady, freelance journalist and author

  Oct 23, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Timothy O’Grady is a freelance journalist and the author of six books.

  

• Firefighters glad to train in shell of Fontainebleau

  Oct 19, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  During the next month, the wrecked economy is going to deliver an important public safety benefit: Las Vegas Valley fire fighters are getting a chance to train for one of the city’s worst nightmares, a high-rise hotel fire. And they’ll be doing in it in a real but unfinished high rise, the stalled Fontainebleau.

  

• Even in recession, those with extravagant tastes are spending

  Oct 16, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Every week, even in the midst of the recession, patrons of high-end Las Vegas restaurants indulge in one of the world’s most expensive and evanescent ingredients: truffles. Like so much about Las Vegas, truffles are an audacious triumph of decadence over geography. Truffles are the most regional of regional foods. Found primarily in Northern Italy, Croatia and France (and cultivated in Australia), truffles grow underground amid trees and must be hunted with hogs or dogs, animals whose powerful noses can locate the pungent fungi.

  

• Scientist builds something like Google for the bricks of life

  Oct 12, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Martin Schiller, UNLV’s newest trophy hire, is primed to run research projects that will identify the targets for the next generation of HIV/AIDS drugs.

  

• UNLV researcher studies infidelity on the Web

  Oct 5, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  You would think Katherine Hertlein has an easy job. She’s studies infidelity and she’s in Las Vegas, two things that go together like threadbare sheets in a cheap motel room rented under a fake name.

  

• Ailing retailers gear up early for holidays

  Oct 3, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  The plastic Christmas trees appeared in Costco and Lowe’s just after Labor Day, when the daily high temperatures in Las Vegas still topped 100. If there’s such a thing as a “war on Christmas,” it’s time to surrender.

  

• It isn’t marriage, but partners now have rights they’ve long sought

  Oct 1, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  They’ve been together for over nine years. Most of their time revolves around the kids: dropping off, picking up, going to games and recitals, meeting with teachers, reminding about chores and nursing colds. In the evenings, their family has dinner together and yet they still find time for just the two of them, to laugh and tease and flirt and say, “I love you.” And today, Carline Banegas and Jodie Dearborn will be one of nearly 700 couples receiving Nevada’s first domestic partnership certificates.

  

• Scientist works in her field, out of her element

  Sep 25, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Christine Bergman is an established laboratory scientist specializing in rice and considers herself part of the slow food movement, an advocate for environmentally responsible food that is local, sustainable and healthy.

  

• Recession cuisine brings celebs deeper down food chain

  Sep 22, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  The celebrities strolled the red carpet, the cameras flashed, television reporters waited with their microphones and the crowd shrieked, holding cell phone cameras aloft and straining against the barrier. And thus a hot dog stand opened on the Las Vegas Strip. Oh, how the glamorous have fallen. Three years ago it seemed you couldn’t throw a $300 bottle of table service vodka on the Strip without hitting some castaway from Planet Fame.

  

• At Monte Carlo, an experiment in pop culture fun: Anime-attired waitresses

  Sep 21, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  It sounded like an odd fit for Vegas. The fact is the waitresses in the new lounge at the Dragon Noodle Co. inside the Monte Carlo aren’t wearing uniforms. They’re wearing costumes.

  

• Workers at Goodwill warehouse sort through the good, bad, weird

  Sep 8, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  At the Goodwill warehouse, racks of broken-in bluejeans are grouped by store destinations, excess stuffed animals are compressed and baled into cubes, and the enterprise has the must-and-dust smell of disturbed closets, thousands of them.

  

• Smoke from California fires isn’t particularly dangerous

  Sep 2, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  In many ways, Las Vegas is the easternmost city of Southern California. It’s where we get the largest chunk of our tourists and new residents. When Southern California’s economy catches a cold, Las Vegas gets pneumonia. And when Southern California burns, we choke. For three days (and maybe a fourth today), Las Vegas has been blanketed in a London-lite fog — and just like the famous clouds of long-ago London, it’s not fog but smoke. For us, the smoke comes from the burning of the hills above Pasadena and Glendale.

  

• Unflattering Time magazine story puts agent in hot water

  Aug 26, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  A Las Vegas real estate agent who landed a prominent role in a Time magazine cover story is being scrutinized by state licensing officials because of her comments, has left her employer and is lying low. The story by Joel Stein in the Aug. 24 issue, “Less Vegas,” is a high-spirited and high-altitude view of the troubles facing Las Vegas, which he calls both “our most American city” and “an entire city of John Dillingers.” In the story, Brooke Boemio — “a bouncy, sweet, recently remarried 31-year-old mom” — is cast as one of the Dillingers.

  

• Right, left, Nevada politicians support gun rights

  Aug 26, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  When Nevada’s politicians gathered Tuesday to dedicate Clark County’s 2,900-acre shooting park, they all said pretty much the same thing: Guns are a constitutional right and shooting is an American pastime. Far more revealing was the body language of the politicians.

  

• Politicians mark dedication of county shooting park

  Aug 25, 2009 (3:42 p.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Politicians and a couple of hundred spectators gathered to dedicate the Clark County Shooting Park this morning. Speakers at the dedication included Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign, Gov. Jim Gibbons, Rep. Shelly Berkley, County Manager Virginia Valentine and Clark County commissioners Tom Collins and Rory Reid. Sen. Reid brandished a family rifle, told of eating his mother's rabbit stew as a child and introduced NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. LaPierre praised Reid's voting record on gun rights.

  

• Energy research wins prestige, but no payoff

  Aug 25, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Yi-Tung Chen’s problem was how to build a box with a hole that nothing can fall into or out of except for light.

  

• Antique collector had museum hopes dashed by economy

  Aug 21, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Among the many victims of the recession are the arts and museums. Especially vulnerable are proposed museums, including one that would be built around 500 tractors. The tractors belong to Ron Dahl and many of them are a century old. Dahl has lots and lots of them, plus some tugboat motors, fire trucks, castoff amphibious military vehicles, an ancient milk truck, pneumatic mining jackhammers, an ore tower and several guard shacks from the Nevada Test Site. How does such a collection happen? “I had no limits and no boundaries," Dahl says.

  

• Check written in boom times bought ticket for space flight

  Aug 17, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Back in the boom days of real estate, Ken Baxter was the king of selling condo conversions, a real hot shot.

  

• David Stone: President of Nevada Association Services

  Aug 17, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  David Stone is president of Nevada Association Services, the state’s largest debt collection service for homeowners associations.

  

• No real town hall, no problem; local radio talker hosts her own

  Aug 16, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Denied the opportunity to embarrass themselves at any official health care town hall, about 900 angry Nevadans gathered at Stoney’s Rockin’ Country bar Friday evening. Several of them expressed thoughtful concerns about the proper role and size of government. And many, many more of them blamed the nation’s woes on illegal immigrants, a stealthy Marxist coup, a missing birth certificate or a conspiracy of international bankers. The gathering was hosted by Heidi Harris, who does the angry thing on AM radio in the mornings.

  

• Man’s eye-catching van like a diary on wheels

  Aug 8, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  What can you say about a man who works on the same Chevy van for 34 years? Or rather, what can the van say about the man? Because for 34 years, Paul Tunnecliff of Pahrump has been a vanner, converting and reconverting his van ’70s style. Every 10 years or so he has torn his van to pieces, stripping it down to nothing and rebuilding it in his own image.

  

• Old biplane bought on eBay turns out to have historical meaning

  Aug 5, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Matt Quy wanted a certain biplane, a Boeing PT-13 Stearman, since he was about 10 years old and growing up beside a grass runway in Minnesota. His neighbor had a Stearman, and when he’d take off, he’d do it real low, sweeping over the Quy house like he was going to rake the tiles off the roof. Young Matt Quy would draw pictures of himself flying the Stearman. He grew up to fly commercial jet liners and then, after 9/11, he joined the Air Force. He fell in love with a woman named Tina and married her. They decided to have a biplane together.

  

• Outlet sells books as they should be: Used, cheap and plenty

  Aug 3, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  The best bookstore in Southern Nevada is four trailers nailed together off Highway 372 in Pahrump.

  

• What a cranky swamp cooler can teach you about life

  Aug 2, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  It first spoke to us on a bright spring morning, saying the same thing it always says: Drip, drip, drip. It was coming from inside the bedroom. Water was sheeting down the windows and more water still was pooling in the walls, bulging the paint like a hernia. It was the drops of water falling on our pillows and faces that woke my wife. She shook me awake after realizing it was raining inside.

  

• Police ask — gasp — that we be neighborly

  Jul 30, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Tuesday night, Metro Police invited the public to its training facility in the northwest to be briefed on the latest crime problem: home foreclosures. This was Metro’s message: We think of foreclosures as an economic problem, but like other economic problems they can lead to social problems. Like crime. As in, financial stress might lead to drug or alcohol abuse and domestic violence. As in, squatters and drug dealers move into abandoned homes. As in, a rundown neighborhood is a target for criminals.

  

• Company solves problem of getting people motivated to conserve

  Jul 27, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  If someday Las Vegas should die, not burned like Troy or buried like Pompeii, but abandoned like Angkor, just left like an old Plymouth by the side of the road, well, if that should happen, someday some archaeology grad students are going to wind up in the gutters of Canyon Gate.

  

• Nellis team behaves like the enemy

  Jul 22, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Meet Lt. Col. Robin Williams, a former B-52 bombardier. “I go by Montana,” he says (and who can blame him?). He’s the director of operations for the 57th Information Aggressor Squadron, based at Nellis Air Force Base, which is bringing the Air Force’s war games into the age of, well, “WarGames.”

  

• Nellis air traffic controller barely feels the heat

  Jul 20, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Staff Sgt. Steven Williams is a local air traffic controller at Nellis Air Force Base, which means he is in charge of the busiest bit of airspace at one of the service’s three busiest bases, airspace that is crowded with an unusual variety of planes and pilots.

  

• A look inside CityCenter’s application mill

  Jul 17, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  In a sense, CityCenter is a series of giant math problems. Here’s one: how do you divide 12,000 by 145,000? A calculator won’t help, because that’s 12,000 jobs and 145,000 people applying for them.

  

• 145,000 have applied so far for 12,000 CityCenter jobs

  Jul 16, 2009 (5:50 p.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  The work of staffing CityCenter continued Thursday when MGM Mirage hosted a job fair for food and beverage workers. So far, more than 145,000 people have applied for CityCenter's 12,000 jobs. MGM Mirage processes all of these applications at a 29,000-square-foot career center. The first applicants pass through the electronic application. Meet the computers' standards and applicants are off to human resources. Human resources is interviewing about 500 people every day. So far, between 42,000 and 43,000 people have been through departmental interviews.

  

• What our outcry over defaced sign says about us

  Jul 15, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Someone used a red Sharpie to scribble a few letters on a sign and the town went nuts. This was not just any sign. This one said, “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas.” Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman demanded decapitation. The reader comments on the Sun’s Web site seethed with anger.

  

• Six questions for Glen Parshall, pawn shop manager

  Jul 14, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Glen Parshall has been the manager of the gun and coin section of the locally owned Bargain Pawn, at 1901 Las Vegas Blvd. North, for the past 4 1/2 years and in the pawn business for 28 years. It’s his second career, he says, his first being aerospace research, where he worked on the MX missile and the space shuttle. Parshall left the industry, he says, because he couldn’t stand living in California, surrounded by Californians.

  

• Up for award, Venetian restroom came from Italy — mostly

  Jul 13, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  As notable achievements go, this one doesn’t rank with the Nobel, the Oscar or even the Daytime Emmy. But if Zeffirino Ristorante in the Venetian wins the title of America’s Best Restroom, it will be no mean feat. Consider the competition: The Zeffirino edifice is up against such big city toilet cathedrals as New York’s Radio City Music Hall and the Macy’s in San Francisco’s Union Square. Past winners of this prestigious prize include Wendell’s Restaurant and the Fort Smith Regional Airport.

  

• Goodman warmly received at tattoo academy's grand opening

  Jul 13, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Having finished taping a red carpet to the chewing-gum-pimpled stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard that defines the no man’s land between the Strip and downtown, Brian Perkins leads a tour into the classroom of Nevada’s newest institution of higher learning.

  

• Couple struggles to find work in Vegas at Pink's Hot Dogs

  Jul 2, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Steven Maples and his fiancee, Jennifer Rogers, are sitting in the back of a ballroom at Red Rock Resort, each waiting to be called for a brief job interview. Jennifer is holding their 2-year-old son, Kevin, on her hip, his blond head resting on her chest. Steven is rocking their 9-month-old son, Peter, in a car seat.

  

• For UNLV professor, groundbreaking work in soil, water field

  Jun 30, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Dale Devitt is, as the joke goes, out standing in his field.

  

• Sahara's 6-pound burrito a heavy favorite with eaters

  Jun 26, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  When the burrito leaves the kitchen, it’s announced over a public address system like a train arriving at a station or a boxer entering a ring.

  

• Fighting expansion on Henderson's rural edge, inch at a time

  Jun 23, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Toxic waste dumps, hog farms, sex shops — these are the kinds of businesses that, when they announce they’re moving in, make neighborhoods rise up in revolt.

  

• Zappos’ shy CEO has the company running on happiness

  Jun 16, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos, an online shoe store that employs 1,300 people, half of them in Henderson. Last year Zappos had sales worth $1 billion. Hsieh regularly appears on the cover of business magazines. He’s been on Oprah.

  

• Business success for dummies: Woman grows Las Vegas Mannequins

  Jun 9, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Alison Wainwright says children who look like mannequins are creepy in a horror-movie way, like the two little girls from “The Shining.” And likewise, she says, mannequins that look like children can make your flesh crawl like an electrified centipede.

  

• TV weathermen lectured on misused term

  Jun 5, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Let’s get it right this year. A monsoon is not a storm. It’s a season.

  

• For Three Square co-founder, goal is no hunger in Vegas

  Jun 2, 2009 (2 a.m.)

  By Brendan Buhler

  Julie Murray has in two years helped launch a centralized food bank for the Las Vegas Valley, taken it from her living room into a large warehouse and, in the middle of the fiercest recession in a generation, raised nearly $18 million to expand the food bank.

  
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