This and that

As usual, either March and/or February pissed away what promised to be a decent snowpack season. This year, it was March that dropped the ball big time. Usually is. March is getting less and less helpful when it comes to the heavy lifting involved with reservoir-filling. If you didn’t hear, as of April 1, the end of the official snow season, the Tahoe basin snowpack finished with 87 percent of average. The Truckee, Carson, and Walker basins were all in that same neighborhood. Ho-hum. Seriously so.

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Just for the record, this newly revamped Spring Mountain development in the Winnemucca Ranch road area about 25 miles north of Reno—you know, the one that got shot down in its previous incarnation, so its creators gave it a name change, the one that proposes to build what would be a new Fernley with 10-12,000 new homes out there over the next few years, the one that must be a part of Reno because the county can’t deal with the undeniable urbanity of such an “insta-town.” Well, after following this whole story for the last year and being extremely open-minded about the whole thing, I just can’t seem to shake the nagging, creepy little notion that this particular development is in reality one of the larger pieces of poop the city of Reno has ever tried to sugarcoat and shove down our gullets.

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Chris Rock made a good call on his new HBO special. In talking about Barack Obama’s chances of getting elected, and America’s attitude towards electing a black man, Rock cracked, “Of course America’s ready to elect its first black president. Why wouldn’t it be? After all, it just elected its first retarded president.”

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From the “Doh!” desk: One could not help but catch the ultra-bold headline recently in the Gazette—“$880 Million Shortfall.” Meaning that the state of Nevada is due to get spattered in red ink in much the same way all the evil kids at Carrie’s prom got spattered. I saw that headline, and immediately flashed back to 2005, when Kenny Guinn cleared out the Nevada treasury to the tune of $300 million by way of that transparently panderific “driver’s license rebate” package. Nice move, Kenny. And let’s not forget the legislature that lacked the chutzpah and savvy to tell him to shut up, buzz off, and stash that money in a money market account so there might be a little cushion the next time the state runs into lean years. Like now, all of three years later. Sure, hindsight is 20-20. At times, savagely so. But still, I knew that thing had a bad odor back then. As a pal put it, “It’s like the kid in second grade who says, ‘Vote for me and I’ll give you a stick of gum’.” In the last seven years, have the Republicans had anything else in their holsters besides the occasional stick of gum?