The Mercury's greatest hits 2002: Keeping it real

After we separated the satirical news from the real stuff, the Mercury truly hit its stride. You want funny? Flip to the weirdly peach-hued World Report section and laugh your shoes off. You want hard-hitting journalism, incisive opinion, top-notch arts and entertainment writing and a full calendar of events? We've got that covered too.

Green days

The government wants to dump 77,000 tons of nuclear waste in Nevada. Booo! The Mercury wouldn't let it happen. Yay! Arming readers with tools to fight the proposed Yucca Mountain dump site, our April 25 "Stop Yucca!" edition was a classic example of issue-minded journalism.

Desert silence

Geoff Schumacher's April 25 column, "Quietude," was a reflection on the silence and solitude only a desert locale can offer. A defense of the open spaces that much of the nation considers a "wasteland" suitable for a nuclear dump, Schumacher's editorial was reprinted by the Los Angeles Times and a dozen other newspapers.

Pet peeves

People love puppies. Dead puppies, not so much. Our Sept. 26 story exposed one local pet store's practice of selling sick animals to pet-lovers. Talk about flying fur.

Tribal wars

When the tribal council of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe began "disenrolling" longtime members--thus depriving them of their annual individual stipends of nearly $100,000--it sparked a storm of lawsuits and accusations that tore the tribe apart. In our June 13 issue, George Knapp revealed a Native American tribe divided against itself.

Weird science

Strange lights. UFO sightings. Cattle mutilations. Poltergeist events. A monster the Native American tribes in the area call the Skinwalker. They're just a few of the things people claimed to have seen on this 480-acre ranch in northeastern Utah--things so strange that scientists converged on the area to study the phenomena, George Knapp reported in this Nov. 21 story. The story soon became a cause celebre in the "paranormal community."

`A weird thing happened to me last week...'

Tod Goldberg's humorous column on life as a smart-alecky Gen Xer quickly became an institution in the Mercury, covering everything from Tod stalking Rick Springfield to the time he was teaching class when he realized his wiener was sticking out of his open fly (really, ask him) to bad haircuts delivered by mean beauty school teachers:

The teacher, a woman always named Bonnie, Connie or Gayle, would comb through my hair like she was trying to fleece a sheep, all while smoking a cigarette and conducting a running dialogue.

"You've got a lot of cowlicks."

"Yes," I'd say.

"You should wash your hair more often."

"My father doesn't send enough child support."

"What are these strange bumps?"

"I have a soft head."

--"Beauty School Dropout," April 11