Damon Hodge offers a lesson: Before heading off to chaperone a teenage party on Friday in North Las Vegas, I joked with a friend that I perhaps the inclement weather would keep the thugs inside. The rain that'd pelted the Valley for most of the week made roads slippery and prompted the Clark County School District to cancel all athletic events. This, I thought, could be either a blessing (a smaller, more manageable crowd) or a curse (with nothing else to do, all of teenage Vegas might show up).
The former proved partly true. Only 50 or so teenagers showed up, paying their fee to mostly hold up the walls in the otherwise empty room. Occasionally, they danced when the DJ bumped their favorite song.
But smaller doesn't always mean more manageable. Rival thugs—kids who show up at every teen party from Sunrise Manner to Summerlin—traded hot glares. Until they traded something more dangerous.
Around 11 p.m., a mini-skirmish broke out—six guys against one. The victim fled, smashing into glass doors and promising to come back and "shoot everybody up." Seconds later, from outside: pop, pop, pop, pop, followed by four louder shots, likely from a higher-caliber gun. At the sound of the shots, a young man sitting on the bench inside the facility pulled what looked like a Glock from his waist, then walked outside, firing. Inside, we ducked for cover and waited for the cavalry.
Amazingly, no one was hit, though several cars sported bullet holes. As police told us that guns were planted in nearby bushes, marked nearly a dozen shell casings and questioned the handcuffed suspects (all were let go), I couldn't help but think: Me and my big mouth.
The cover story of the January-February edition of The Atlantic Monthly is an "imagined history" of the war on terror between now and 2011. Fiction, in other words. But fiction, as the many footnotes make clear, that's extrapolated from current realities. By way of highlighting America's security shortcomings, Richard A. Clarke, ex-counterterrorism czar and author of Against All Enemies, presents a carefully thought-out set of hypothetical scenarios of the nation being rocked by terrorist attacks. He begins in Vegas, where, on June 30 of this year, an Asian couple perpetrate a pair of suicide bombings—one at the mythical Florentine casino, the other at the Lion's Grand—killing many and wrecking the city's economy.
Clarke builds his chillingly plausible scenario by drawing connections between America's porous borders, the necessarily loose security at casinos (you can't pat down all 35 million annual visitors for hidden explosives) and the caginess of Valley officials and casino moguls about raising public alarms.
As fiction, it has plenty of plot but lousy character development; as speculation, it's scary and thought-provoking. As cautionary tale, it'll probably be ignored. Even by terrorists. "For those who may say that this has given the terrorists recipes and road maps for how to attack us," he concludes, "here's a bit of bad news: the terrorists already know in much greater detail how best to attack us again."
Steve Bornfeld watched a little TV the other night: See a side of Las Vegas that no one else has ever not seen before!
As we chug along toward the cherished goal of giving every casino its own television series, A&E unveiled Caesars 24/7 (Mondays at 10 p.m.), and as cinema verite explorations of our devolving Western Civilization as filtered through Sin City go ... it ain't bad. The debut episode offered a varied, fast-paced peek inside the Palace, with even a touch of pathos: a man dying of cancer wins a million bucks on the slots. Offsetting that was hilarious footage of four walking penises—uh, guys—on a chick mission down by the pool. "That guy tried to interrupt our game," one of them bitches about a rival walking one-eyed wonder worm trying to cut in on their action, "but he can't. Our game is airtight." Additional segments on the "Grape Goddess," the adventures of pit boss Joe Comastro, a girl-on-girl catfight and security personnel who won't allow a drunken woman access to her car are woven in nicely. All in all, an amusing hour of human flotsam floating on by.
Summerlin residents released a charming 2005 calendar called "Home is Summerlin" that sports pictures of themselves each month: real smiley, happy, unbearably clean suburban people who say things like "Home is great shopping!" and "Home is tree-lined streets" and "Home is a breathtaking sunrise!" And while it's uplifting to know that they're all doing so well, we propose the North Las Vegas Boulevard neighborhood calendar, where residents, dressed in tattered T-shirts and dirty jeans, say, "Home is a cardboard box!" and "Home is a shelter full of smelly men in cots!" and "Home is Right Here Despite Oscar Goodman." Why should Summerlin residents be the only ones to gloat?