A good year for beer

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Man, exciting week. I don’t even know where to begin. I actually had to sit down and have a couple mellow Diet Buds—on a Monday night!—with columnist Bruce Van Dyke to discuss all the developments. We wet our whistles at an exceedingly fine little bar called the Foxy Olive and chewed the fat, so to speak. Bartender Jacob Carnahan took fine care of us, so as long as I’m on the topic of cool new things, I figured I should pass along the intriguing stuff first. I don’t know if these cool little neighborhood bars are the way the country’s going, but somehow their presence gives me hope.

Did I tell you I’m teaching our new kitten to go to the bathroom in the toilet? So far so good, he’s been going in the litter on the toilet for a week without an accident.

Good things are coming this year. I had a couple of goals set that I was absolutely going to accomplish before the end of the year. I didn’t get any of it done—mostly administrative stuff truth be told—so I took half of Thursday and all of Friday off, and I got it all done. I think you readers are going to notice some fun stuff going on around here.

I saw three DVDs and an in-theater movie this weekend—count ’em, four: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, three episodes of Deadwood and El Cantante. I caught Johnny Depp’s new one, Sweeney Todd, over the site that was formerly known as Park Lane Mall.

Got an email from my friend from Uruguay, Borko Markovic. Jeez, it’s nice to know that as weird as things have gotten, there are still a few places in this world where I can drink a beer with my 6-feet-5- inch friends—like the Foxy Olive on Mill Street or Living in Montevideo.

Our new columnist, Cory Farley, is pretty tall, too. I wonder if he drinks an occasional beer. Maybe he’ll talk about that sometime in his column “Left in the Lurch,” which appears this week on page 7.

Yep, 2008’s going to be quite a year.