All three of Las Vegas’s alternative weeklies like my book. For the most part.

If I had to put grades on the reviews, I’d say that Las Vegas Weekly gave me an A, CityLife gave me a B+, and Vegas Seven gave me a B.

Here are the highlights:

CityLife: "It's an oddly addicting read."

Las Vegas Weekly: “Lax has a purpose—he is using Vegas to research a book on the art of deceit—and what he seems to find is that this city may actually be more honest than most because it can be so crass and harsh. Fool Me Once marks real growth for Lax..."*

Seven: "He has a good sense of humor, and no trouble putting together readable sentences. For those reasons, Fool Me Once will most likely resonate with Vegas locals more than anybody else. Lax, a Chicago transplant, seemed right at home before he even unpacked his suitcase."

*Also from the LVW Review: “Before you claim I’m sucking up to Lax because he is a Weekly colleague, I urge you to revisit the lambasting I gave Weekly writer John Curtas’ ‘guidebook’ in November.”

I went Hanukkah shopping at CRYSTALS MALL in CITYCENTER last week. Didn't find much within my price range, but I did find a $440 paperclip. I mean, technically it was a paperclip shaped money clip...but doesn't that just make it a paperclip? The mall was very pretty, though, and the space was unlike anything I've ever seen. Kinda reminded me of an MC Escher picture. Anyway, you can read my REVIEW OF CRYSTALS MALL by clicking RIGHT HERE. 

Okay, look, I don't know anything about anything, so I'm sorry, but tell me this truck that was sitting outside the bookstore doesn't look like an explosion waiting to happen. Sure, I get all my knowledge about explosions from movies like Terminator 2, but still, this this is one cigarette away from destroying a city block, yeah?

These photos were taken just two hours apart, and have not been digitally retouched in any way. They're for a story I wrote that exposes how Before & After photos can be faked. You can read the whole Las Vegas Weekly story by CLICKING RIGHT HERE, ON THESE VERY WORDS--YEP, ANY OF 'EM.

...but here's a preview:

Trick No. 1: Suck in your stomach

If you exhale and suck in your stomach, you’re going to look thinner. This is particularly true for men, who store a lot of their body fat around their bellies. Remember to inhale and push out your stomach when you take your “before” photo.

Trick No. 2: Flex your muscles

Take a page from the professional bodybuilders’ competition-pose playbook; you’ll look stronger and more muscular if you flex your muscles. Be careful not to flex your muscles in your “before” shot, though.

Trick No. 3: Pump it up

Lift some weights immediately before you snap your “after” photo. Like flexing, anaerobic exercise will temporarily increase the size of your muscles.

Trick No. 4: Fix your posture

If you stand up straight and roll back your shoulders, your chest will stick out more, and your waist will look smaller by comparison. So find a mirror, and align your ears, shoulders and hips.

Trick No. 5: Fix your face

A smile is your best bet. A smile won’t make you look thinner or more muscular, but it will imply that you’re enjoying your new healthy lifestyle (your Sunday afternoons playing flag football at the park, your six-pack-bearing weekends on exotic ports of call …). And don’t grimace in your “before” photo—that’d be too obvious. Instead, go for a blank expression or one indicating slight depression.

Trick No. 6: Shave and bronze

Removing your body hair and tanning will better showcase your muscle definition.

Trick No. 7: Get a mini-makeover

Put on some better-fitting clothes, fix your hair and slap on some foundation.

If you don’t believe that simple tricks like these can be used to simulate weight loss, take another look at the “before and after” photos on this page. They were taken just two hours apart, and they have not been digitally altered in any way.

I did an expose on pee mats. It's easily the finest magazine piece I've ever written.  Hard-hitting journalism combined with urine puns.  What more could you ask for?  You can read the whole story by clicking right HERE. 

This week I reviewed Russell Brand's My Booky Wook in Las Vegas Weekly. Check out LasVegasWeekly.com for the full review....but here's a tease:

Russell Brand is huge in Europe, but you probably just know him as the hypersexual rock star Aldous Snow in Forgetting Sarah Marshall or the skinny British guy who hosted the 2008 MTV Movie Awards. Well, there’s something else you should know about Russell Brand: The man can write.

His new memoir, My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up, leaves no doubt about why he was cast as Aldous Snow; Brand has a serious sex addiction. If that sounds silly to you—the idea that someone can be addicted to sex—listen to the way the author describes a family vacation to Thailand: “I fucked loads more prostitutes; always got a hard-on, never wore a condom, and never fell in love.”

The first half of Brand’s booky wook details how he developed this addiction. As you can imagine, it began early on: “Another dubious attention-seeking device that I invented at school was the game ‘genital-grabbing,’ which is very simple and easy to play but fraught with dreadful connotations for its participants and severe vilification for its unwitting inventor.”

Brand describes so many sexual trysts that when he mentions getting a dog with whom he shared his bed, he feels the need to make clear that the two never had sex: “I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of that relationship—not platonic in the purist sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn’t fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.”