The Week in Review

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 16: Cue the pink strobes, Lucite heels and "Pour Some Sugar on Me": Treasures strip club reopened Wednesday after the City Council voted to give the club back it liquor license, that magic talisman that allows a patron, with the aid of 17 Bud Lights, to vacate sanity and spend $1,300 on Sapphire Skye's silicon jigglers. The decision followed a five-month closure, brought on when council members yanked Treasures' license after a dancer was convicted of trying to be a ho. Council members Wolfson and Tarkanian voted against reinstating the license, Reese, Brown and Weekly voted for, Goodman abstained and Michael Mack, in a state of high, delicious excitement, merely stained.

THURSDAY, FEB. 17: Coming soon to your local cineplex: 1,900 square feet of gayness. Yeah, George Michael is hitting the big screen. The pop singer is the subject of a documentary that premiered in Berlin, Reuters reported Thursday, and in it the star dishes out straight talk about his not-so-straight lifestyle, which he was forced to acknowledge publicly after a 1988 scandal in which he was charged with lewd behavior in a Beverly Hills bathroom. "I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm a massive star and I think I may be a poof,'" he says in the film. Um, George, we already knew that. Not even the fruitiest metrosexual grooms his stubble with the painstaking, surgical fastidiousness that you do.

FRIDAY, FEB. 18: Hunting with dogs became illegal in England and Wales Friday. Oh, sure, deliver a "so what?" shrug from your couch between bites of Manwich; but understand, dear reader, that would be like outlawing "Monday Night Football" in Duhmerica. The much-contested ban ends 300 years of tradition in which British fops on horses would watch their hunting dogs shred fox, deer and rabbits like so many royal wedding vows--and, even more satisfying, make PETA activists cry.

SATURDAY, FEB. 19: Did you ever want to get George W. Bush in a room and find out what he's really like? Okay, neither did we. Yucky! But Doug Wead, former aide to Bush Sr., did just that, and he came up with 12 secretly recorded tapes that reveal the real Bush: a scheming evangelical who enjoys an occasional puff of sweet Mary Jane. Indeed, on one tape, Bush seems to acknowledge having smoked marijuana, saying he'd refuse to answer questions about it because "I don't want some little kid doing what I tried." The 17 minutes of tape that follow reveal Bush eating a bag of Bugles with methodical intensity while watching reruns of "Mr. Belvedere."

SUNDAY, FEB. 20: Some guys have all the luck. Take Scott Gragson. Why, he's so flooded with luck he needs a pair of luck-proof water wings to stay afloat. It seems every time the real estate whiz buys land, the Clark County Commission ratchets up its value astronomically by--ta-da!--just happening to rezone it to his liking. A Sunday story in R-J suggests that it miiiight have something to do with Gragson's connections to former County Commissioner Erin Kenny, who pushed for many of the zoning changes, despite the vocal protests of residents and even other commissioners. When asked for comment, Kenny cackled from her subterranean throne of kitten skulls.

MONDAY, FEB. 21: In the old days, it took a mere night-vision camcorder and a six-pack of Seagram's wine coolers to get inside Paris Hilton; but today's kids know it requires much more than that. It requires hacking skills. Indeed, some enterprising cyber-ninja hacked into Paris Hilton's electronic address book and posted her information on the Internet--including celebrity phone numbers and personal notes. Yet since the incident, strangely, Nicole Richie still waits by her phone, begging it to ring as her face shines with stinging tears of dejection...

TUESDAY, FEB. 22: Bugs Bunny, meet Buzz Bunny--he's your carrot-munchin' ass in the year 2772, as imagined by WB executives after a three-hour martini-and-crack cocaine lunch. The updated rabbit--as well as his longtime pals, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote--will be unveiled as futuristic, ultra-slick superhero action figures this fall in the new Saturday morning series "Loonatics." "We just said, 'Wow, what a great way to take the classic Looney Tunes franchise that has been huge with audiences for decades and bring it into the new millennium," said Kids WB exec David Janollari. Cartoon anvil of harsh reality incoming!

--ANDREW KIRALY