Monday and the year is about to end, and I think that the year to come will produce so many challenges that we are going to have many obstacles but we are more ready and battle hardened from all of the grief we have faced in our National Psyche over the last year and a half. We are a great nation, and when you look around at your family and your friends I know you are like me and you ask yourself how so much wrong could consistently go down, when you and everyone you know are right on, decent honorable people who you love and cherish and feel blessed to have in your life. That is the greatest overwhelming majority of our United States. Only a small group of possesed creeps are trying to work us into the bind and we will not allow it to work. God Bless One and All and Happy New Year.
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 2:29 PM

 
As we now stand our fair city is slowly but incessantly filling up with those early revelers who are getting a head start on the New Year's celebration. This is something of the feeling I would imagine that permeates the atmosphere in many places just before the onslaught of a hurricane, or huge snowstorm. There is a certain calmness amoungst the local residents because they know that there is always an ede to the celebrants and the mayhem that just a small number of them may cause, deliberately or simply by accidental overexuberance. Two years ago a young man fell to his death on live TV while he was climbing up on a structure which was meant for lighting and signals. Crowd control becomes an issue, and todays local paper is full of the warnings and missgivings about crowd control because the VENETIAN HOTEL has just announced some last minute show which will bring crowds to the public thoroughfares directly in front of the STRIP property. Oh well, don't anyone be discouraged, in my view it is METRO POLICE DEPT. hedging their bets against the outside chance they might be caught out of the essential preparedness loop. Come to Las Vegas now and you will have a blast, Neil Diamond tonight at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. Is he 110 or so, see him tonight, his show is fab, and he is a real throwback to an older more cherished period in our city's history. I will keep you up to the minute as the excitement and tension build right into the New Year and afterwards.Don't forget that we are also considered prime targets as terrorist know that Las Vegas reserves a unique worldwide recognition as a dateline. Stay Tuned.
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 2:06 PM