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• Back when I was just out of college and working for the News Messenger, I worked Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. In those pre-World Wide Web days, that mostly meant sitting in a dark newsroom, hitting the Refresh button on the AP wire feed and seeing nothing new coming across. This was all because “there was a fire” 20-odd years before, and if someone wasn’t there minding the shop, there would be a fire again.

  Naturally, when I go to Vegas, there were, metaphorically speaking, fires at Ranchero Middle School and Sultana High School. That’ll teach me to take a vacation day.