Number of the best

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

Regular readers might recall that RN&R editor D. Brian Burghart is on vacation this month, which means that news editor Dennis Myers, staff writer Sage Leehey and I will cover his duties the next few weeks. That means, among other things, that I get to be the guy to meet you here at the door.

So, hey, come on in and make yourself comfortable.

Here's something I'm excited about: Voting is now live for our annual Biggest Little Best of Northern Nevada contest. You can log in and vote here: www.newsreview.com/reno/ballot/bestofreno14.

This is a chance to commend your favorite local restaurants, bars, casinos, stores, artists, events, teachers and scandals. A lot of local people and businesses take this contest very seriously and campaign hard for votes and recognition. And we love that. So feel free to rally your friends on social media. However, if we catch you ballot-stuffing—and it seems like every year we catch somebody—we will hunt down and destroy whatever ballot-stuffing robot monstrosities you have created.

There's an autocomplete list that will pop up whenever you start typing. That's drawn from past winners and is there to help you, and to help us when it comes time to tally votes by eliminating some of the erratic misspellings—which really slows vote counting—but please don't feel inhibited by it. We're not trying to coax you into a vote. Feel free to vote for names that don't appear in the autocomplete list. And if you don't use autocomplete, please try to provide a correct spelling.

Also, feel free to suggest categories for future contests using the freestyle feature in the ballot. We add and subtract categories annually, and we take those suggestions very seriously.

Finally, every year we choose a different aspect of Northern Nevada to focus on with a special section of categories. This year, it's women. It's an opportunity for all of us to honor the women leaders in the arts, business and politics of our community.