The graduate

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

My son graduated from eighth grade today. He told me last night there would be a graduation ceremony at 10 a.m. that would last two hours. Since he was in the eighth grade, he said, his class would go last so I didn’t have to show up until 11:30. He’s thoughtful that way. Knowing Hunter’s mutable sense of time and disregard for formalities, I figured I’d show up a little after 11.

The two-hour ceremony was completed in an hour.

Sigh.

•••

On the bright side, I got to go to the gym at lunchtime.

•••

In case you missed the announcement, we launched our annual Biggest Little Best of Northern Nevada readers’ poll last week. We’re doing it earlier because every other year it collides with elections, which, as I interpret our mission, is one of our most important areas of coverage.

At any rate, I look forward to this thing. I know it’s our most popular issue, and every year, our party is the party of the year. I don’t feel any real need to go into the changes we’ve instituted this year—basically the idea is to hike participation and cut ballot box stuffing.

Let me be specific. Ballot box stuffing does not include using every social media at your disposal to get all your friends and fans to vote for you. It’s a popularity contest. Feel free to campaign. We have a variety of technological methods to catch people who cross the line. We don’t tell people we caught them. We just reserve the right to ensure the results are as unbiased and uncontaminated as possible. We’ll still get some results we frankly think are weird, but if someone legitimately wins, they legitimately win.

Anyway, you can find a direct link to the ballot on our Facebook site: www.facebook .com/RenoNewsReview. You can also get there from the upper right hand corner of our regular internet home page.